Nineteenth Century Childhoods in Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives

By Jane Eva Baxter

The nineteenth century was a time when the world was becoming increasingly connected through global forces and networks. Colonial and capitalist expansion was bringing the world into closer contact while nationalism and forms of indigenous resistance were shaping and moulding the world on more local and regional scales. This dynamic environment was the backdrop for a time when childhood was becoming significantly elaborated as a cultural category of identity. Institutions, objects, and places specifically designed for children were multiplying at an unprecedented rate; writing about children in fiction and non-fiction became increasingly prolific; and the concern for children’s health and well-being in life and death was paramount in many communities. Scholarship on the nineteenth century spans many disciplines and areas of interest and utilizes diverse and abundant source material to study a period recognized as foundational for our modern, globalized world. This volume brings together scholars from archaeology, art history, bioarchaeology, educational history, history, literary studies, and theater history to present studies of nineteenth century children and childhood in Australia, the Bahamas, Canada, England, Ireland, Native North America, Romania, Russia, and the United States. The interdisciplinary focus of this volume illustrates the wealth of sources, methods, and perspectives that can be used to develop our understandings of childhood in the nineteenth century, and the international scope of the studies offers a platform to engage commonalities in an increasingly globalized world alongside an appreciation for local, regional, and national variations in the cultural creation and experiences of childhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Mar 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785708442

Book preview

Introduction: 19th century childhoods in interdisciplinary and international perspectives

Jane Eva Baxter and Meredith Ellis

The 19th century was a time when the world was becoming increasingly connected through global forces and networks. Colonial and capitalist expansion was bringing the world into closer contact, while nationalism and forms of indigenous resistance were shaping and molding the world on more local and regional scales. This dynamic environment was the backdrop for a time when childhood was becoming significantly elaborated as a cultural category of identity. Institutions, objects and places specifically designed for children were multiplying at an unprecedented rate, writing about children in fiction and non-fiction became increasingly prolific, and the concern for children’s health and well-being in life and death was of paramount concern in many communities.

Scholarship on the 19th century spans many disciplines and areas of interest and utilizes diverse and abundant source material to study a period recognized as foundational for our modern, globalized world. The popularity of 19th century studies is precisely because of its causal connections to the contemporary world, as we try to understand our collective circumstances in late modernity by looking back to figure out how we got here. Looking back to the 19th century, in many ways, is familiar and comfortable as it is possible to recognize many of the same cultural institutions, languages, nations and objects, as well as organizations, brands and products that we use in our world today. Simultaneously, many aspects of 19th century life are as foreign to us today as any part of the much deeper past. Economic development and change were pursued enthusiastically as it was believed that resources were inexhaustible and opportunities endless. Nineteenth century standards for health and safety, concerns for human rights and appreciations of cultural diversity are virtually unrecognizable by contemporary, international standards.

The 19th century also was a time of transformation unlike any other in history. Changes in global economic organization because of the industrial revolution occurred at a pace and scale previously unknown. Increasing demands for innovations in raw materials, sources of new labour, and fresh and eager markets for mass produced goods brought the world closer together through a singular capitalist economy and increased colonial expansion and control. The implications of these global economic forces trickled down into the daily lives of people everywhere through profound transformations in how time, labour, and social structures were organized. Even the familiar, personal interactions of family and community life were altered as people became a part of this capitalist system. Changing demands for labor accelerated population movements both across national borders and into urban centers. These population movements brought groups of people into contact previously unknown to one another, and issues of identity and heritage were significant in such interactions. New forms of material culture became available that enabled particular expressions of class, ethnicity and other cultural affiliations. The influx of diverse populations into certain nations or the decision to stem the tide of immigration into others inspired deliberate projects in nationalism. Changes in labour and family structure, demands from unregulated employers, and government attempts to assimilate diverse populations often brought about resistance on multiple scales and through a variety of means.

Children were not shielded from the changing world around them, but rather they were deeply engaged in the broad cultural forces in operation and the intimate, interpersonal responses that characterized 19th century life. Simultaneously, 19th century children often became symbols of adult longings and concerns, and childhood was seen as an escape and an alternative from the realities of a changing world. Cultural ideals were shifting about who children were, the practices appropriate for child care and child-rearing, and the place of children in society. Many of these changes in thinking about children and childhood were connected directly to the disruption of traditional family and community structures, and children became a source of potential continuity and comfort for societies and families experiencing upheaval.

Characterizations of children as innocent and untainted by the worldly world of adults was common, and children often were idealized as figures of purity connected to the home and to heaven. Child-rearing was geared towards prolonging this period of childhood innocence, and clothing, toys, child-rearing devices, and spaces in the home were developed to delay the inevitable transition into adulthood. Children became symbolically amplified in literature, art and mortuary imagery that expressed these cultural ideals of purity, innocence, home and family and also conveyed aspirations for the future of families, communities, and nations.

This soothing depiction of childhood innocence was certainly at odds with the realities of life for most children, as very few families could afford to shield children from the, real world. Children’s lives were often disrupted as families moved to find new opportunities. Children’s labor frequently was an essential component of the economic survival of their household, and, children’s health and well-being were regularly compromised because of the living and working conditions they endured. Even when families were not able to follow all of the ideal trends in child-rearing, however, many families and communities invested significantly in children and the promise of greater things in the next generation.

Reform movements on national and local levels as well as governmental agencies established institutions for children beyond the family such as schools and orphanages, as many reformers believed that all children deserved a basic standard of care either at home or elsewhere. Public education was central to creating a sense of national continuity and the project of strengthening national identities in a time of globalization. The investment in schools was often based in rhetoric about preparing children to be future leaders and solid citizens. Not all civic benevolence was welcome or well founded, however. Children from many indigenous and native communities were forced into institutional life as governments attempted to undermine cultural diversity and control local populations. Children in all these institutions and in families often participated in acts of resistance against adult oversight and control.

Volume organization

In this volume, the authors have wrestled with these themes across a variety of locations and from a range of perspectives. While previous works have centered on childhood from a single perspective or country, it is our intention to bring these disciplines, geographies and voices into conversation with each other to explore childhood in this pivotal moment.

In Part 1: Children, nationalism and dimensions of identity, the authors address a central question in 19th century childhood studies: what is the relationship between the idea of childhood and the idea of the state? These analyses all share a focus on broader level constructions of national identity and meaning in relationship to childhood using a variety of disciplinary perspectives and sources of evidence.

Loren Lerner, in The manipulation of indigenous imagery to represent Canadian childhood and nationhood in 19th century Canada answers this question in a novel and important way. Lerner takes the work of two artists, Charlotte Schreiber and George Agnew Reid, both of whom were English painters who focused on children, as well as other contemporary artists, and examines how English Canadian nationalist ideas influenced images of children and childhood. In particular, Lerner is interested in drawing out indigenous imagery from the more English and often romantic scenes, highlighting the contrasts and tensions between the inclusion of indigenous elements in art and the prevailing negative associations with indigeneity in the culture at large. Lerner notes that in art, constructions of a romantic Canadian childhood were being constructed, using elements of indigenous culture to create this ideal, At the same time, however, indigenous groups were being educated in systems that pushed them towards a British ideal. In fact, she notes, a wide array of cultural variation in childhood was being overlooked in the artistic creation of the new Canadian identity. She writes that this deliberately constructed image was not enough to create the sense of nationalism. Instead, a shared history was needed that both combined elements of the British and the French and necessitated the disappearance of the inferior Indian. She draws on art that depicts the common English and French goals of eradicating the dangerous Indian. In doing so, the romanticism of the indigenous peoples in these paintings disappears behind the forging of a common new Canadian identity that paints the indigenous peoples as inhabitants of a savage past. Lerner’s work in this article is remarkably broad: she draws not only on paintings, but on writings, school books, histories, and deep analyses of trends that highlight the role of constructing childhood in creating national identity.

While Lerner examines the creation of national identity in Canada, Natalia Chernyaeva looks towards remaking the place and importance of childhood within the national identity of Russia in Laying the foundation of ‘modern childhood’ in Russia: the ‘protection of motherhood and infancy’ movement, 1890–1917. She connects changes in how the death of children was perceived to a new national movement to value mothers and children. This movement situated them as, the country’s most invaluable asset, and an integral part of establishing Russia’s economic and social status (p. 36). Working through historical documents and analyses, Chernyaeva notes a change in tone surrounding the deaths of children, from the initial outcry from Zemstvo physicians to the uneasy realization that non-Russians within the country had significantly lower infant mortality rates, despite the fact that those groups were generally believed to be of a lesser physical constitution. She details arguments from the late 1800s and early 1900s that centred on the economic losses associated with childhood death and related humanitarian discourses. These arguments shifted to connect the wellbeing of the mother and the child together as a single unit, and Chernyaeva illustrates how this union emerged along with advancements and reforms in medical practice. Finally, Chernyaeva shows how these ideas crept into political and social language too, including the creation of new groups of good and bad mothers, based on physical locations and imagined social relationships within families. She argues that these changes – social, medical and political – all lay at the base of what was to come with the modernization of childhood starting in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution.

The final chapter in this section, Gina Ocasion’s Imagining futures: Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne on women, children, and history, turns to literature to address similar questions in the context of the United States. In particular, Occasion is interested in how Hawthorne and Fuller conceptualize childhood as nation building, and argues that children’s culture and children’s books were an important way of developing the new nation. Ocasion frames her argument through a reading of Hawthorne’s children’s history, The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair and Fuller’s The great lawsuit: man versus men, woman versus women. She argues that Fuller calls for a future female child that is equal in the new nation, and that Hawthorne looks to the past to construct a narrative for European-American culture in contrast to the cultures of native peoples. Ocasion argues that each authors, in their own way, creates spaces for white women and children at the expense of indigenous narratives and structures. Her close reading of these two texts in conjunction with each other shows how creating lessons in national identities for children meant recreating the past and projecting a future for children that highlights some aspects of America and deconstructs others.

Lerner, Chernyaeva, and Ocasion show us that a variety of mediums can be used to access the relationships between ideology, state and childhood in the 19th century. They draw on art, literature and historical documents to illuminate ways childhood becomes enmeshed in the project of building, developing and redefining nationalism and identity.

In Part 2: Children on the move: immigration, emigration and deportation, authors Steven Taylor and Emma Watkins explore another crucial question of 19th century childhood: What was the experience of children on the move, particularly those moved without consent? These works focus on the lives of individual children in particular contexts of movement and offer alternative histories to those focusing on larger-scale, institutional motivations and outcomes.

Steven Taylor, in Becoming Canadian adults: British childhood emigration to Canada in the late 19th century offers a fascinating look at the experiences of orphans moved from England to Canada. While ostensibly these children were abandoned children moved for their own benefit, Taylor finds that they also were relocated to relieve pressure on overcrowded systems for foundlings and orphans in England, and simultaneously benefit the colonial expansion of the Canadian landscape. Taylor examines these motivations for relocation and the tracking of children that occurred as part of this process, both by adult institutions and by the children themselves. In the second half of the chapter, Taylor introduces us to two of these child emigrants, Peter C. and Constance W., and follows their stories into adulthood. We find Peter was moved without his father’s consent, yet eventually chose to stay and have a family and business in Canada as an adult. On the other hand, Constance was surrendered as an orphan by extended family, and served her entire life as a maid, connected to and likely dependant on her host family even as an adult. These two stories offer illustrative examples of the lived experiences of children who were moved in a similar process but under different circumstances, and whose adult lives had very different outcomes. Taylor’s use of historic documents, letters and records to give us a child-focused perspective on this system is novel and insightful.

Emma Watkins also follows children who were moved by adults in, Transported beyond the seas: criminal juveniles. Watkins argues for a new approach to tracing children, and in this case focuses on linking historical texts from criminal justice systems and historical records. She uses a person-centered, life history approach and the techniques of prosopography to track children convicted in the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court in London who were then transported to Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania. She finds interesting common elements: unclear age categories, petty crimes sentenced with transportation and even patterns of re-offense. But, perhaps most interestingly, Watkins demonstrates the strength of her approach by tracking one child, Margaret Corbett, from conviction, through transportation, and to release. She links the various historic records together to show us how these children are in no way invisible if the appropriate research is done, and that the circumstances of these children are linked very much to their historical moments. She makes a strong case both for seeing particular children as they are moved, and for marshalling all possible evidence to follow them.

Taylor and Watkins demonstrate the power of the historical record to illustrate the experiences of childhood, even when those childhoods involved forced migration across vast distances. Focusing on individual children brings history to a more intimate, accessible and meaningful scale in light of broad, global transformations that so often characterize treatments of the 19th century. Individual stories remain important, worthy and traceable even at a time of upheaval and change.

In Part 3: Children, consumerism and advertising the authors turn to advertising and material culture to look at how consumer products of the industrial revolution intersected with the worlds of children. Schultz and Mumma and Baxter connect us to the physical materials that children saw, handled and were influenced by in the 19th century through advertising. While both of these cases focus on the United States, they use different forms of historical evidence applicable to other parts of the world where children also became the targets of marketers and their advertising.

In ‘He knows a good thing when he sees it!’ Advertising to children in the U.S., 1850–1900, Jaclyn Schultz shows how printed advertising books and trading cards created a new class of consumer. She refocuses the arguments around advertising to children away from the idea that it was a by-product of the rise of consumer capitalism and instead shows it as its own, explicit force. Schultz shows how advertisers took advantage of imagery, rhymes and story formats that appealed to children, and in particular painted a picture of a future that included their products, thus encouraging children to become future adult consumers. Schultz follows the strategies of particular brands, and shows how even though their messages may appear to be directed at adults, they work equally well on children. Many of the techniques she highlights she argues were directly targeting children, while others accidentally became sensations among children, like advertising trading cards. Schultz’s close reading of texts and images offers an insightful analysis of a series of products designed to influence behaviour in and beyond childhood, thus extending the life of a product, or company, through the life span of an individual.

Mumma and Baxter use a different approach to understand the rise of the child consumer in the latter half of the 19th century. Newspaper advertising, surprisingly, is a rarely used source to understand the material culture of childhood, and the authors use this source to look at constructions of race and gender through the advertising of dolls in the time around and immediately after the American Civil War. By contrasting advertising in the Chicago Tribune with a variety of African-American newspapers, aspects of intersectionality between race and gender emerge as well as the establishment of children as arbiters of family purchasing around their wants and needs as children. Trends in newspaper advertising parallel other sources in illustrating the burgeoning empowerment of children to influence parental spending, and the changing goals of the advertising industry by creating desirous consumers at a young age.

Arguably the root of the changes that characterize the 19th century lie in the emergence of global capitalism, and children were an integral part of this new economic system both as producers and consumers. Rather than looking at children as a source of labour, as is common in 19th century childhood studies, Schultz and Mumma and Baxter intersect the lives of children to other parts of the capitalist system, particularly marketing and consumption, and illustrate how material culture was an integral part of creating identities in childhood and in future adulthoods.

Part 4: Institutions for children and children in institutions turns to the relationship between children and educational institutions of various kinds. Institutions offer insights into the dynamics of control and resistance operating on many different levels during the 19th century including daily interpersonal interactions, colonial attempts to assimilate and incorporate local populations, and projects in nationalism and national identity formation. The authors in this section present examples of institutional design, rhetoric and programming and discuss how they reveal broader agendas and interests on the part of those seeking to reform childhood through private or governmental institutions.

In Education, race and nation-building in an archipelago: 19th century Bahamian Out Island schools John Burton examines the education system that emerged in the Bahamas following emancipation. He notes that the general aims of education were practical and utilitarian, and without strict segregation laws. However, practices kept racial segregation in place even without legal barriers, including direct measures like school fees and indirect circumstances like geography and school location. Burton explores this topic by looking at two cases studies: schools in Nassau, the capital city on the island of New Providence, and on the Out Island of San Salvador. He tracks common problems of attendance and resource availability, and argues that emancipation offered little improvement in economic circumstances for most of the population making regular schooling impossible for the first emancipated generation of children. He expands his analysis to include all of the schools in the Bahamas, and finds similar trends, with the best and most extensive education available exclusively to white families. Burton writes that for many children, childhood was likely about working and helping adults and their households, not education. Later in the 19th century that would begin to change. Burton’s work illustrates the diachronic evolution of education showing that the pace of change in childhood education was place-specific, and oriented to local goals and regional geography rather than a general trend across the country.

Ana Fumurescu, in It takes a village: raising patriots in 19th century Romania, continues this exploration of education by examining the education system in rural Romania and its responsiveness to the local needs of the community. She writes that while scholarship has largely defined the system as a top-down nationalist program, the system actually included flexibility and cooperation in rural communities that allowed for a great deal of substance and success. She highlights specific features of the system, including school canteens, a calendar adapted to the agricultural cycle, dormitories, community and parental meetings and even school gardens to teach agriculture skills. Many of these programs, while created at the top, were administered locally with considerable flexibility for implementation. Fumurescu notes that while the education system was concerned with uplift and nationalism, it recognized the need to meet the rural communities where they were, and work with them to ensure the success of students. This cooperation, the state argued, would lead to more productive citizens, and the state was able to make that argument to families and communities in ways that made sense to them and that achieved their approval. In this chapter, Furmurescu shows us that the relationship between the state and the child is not simple and cannot be seen through a single ideological lens. Rather, Furmurescu opens up the complexity of the relationship by encouraging us to see multiple parties at work together.

Katherine Fennelly picks up the theme of creating children through institutional life, with a particular emphasis on the idea of a productive child in her chapter, The Bedford Asylum: building for the ‘Industrious Child’ in early 19th century Dublin. Fennelly uses historic records and surveys of remaining physical structures to take an archaeological approach to the architecture of the asylum. She discusses how the structure embodied and enacted the mission of the institution: education, and improvement of children through industrious labor. She considers the shape of the building, the separation of girls and boys, and the types of spaces within the building and compares these variables to other similar institutions and other institutional buildings built by the same architect. In this space, girls were trained in sewing and other industrious women’s work and boys were likely apprenticed out or trained for military or industrial service. And yet, she notes that the construction was general, not aimed specifically at accommodating these tasks. This, she writes, is likely why it was so easily repurposed only 12 years later when economic circumstances changed and the Bedford Asylum project was no longer workable. Fennelly draws on historical sources to enliven the architectural spaces she describes, and in doing so provides a snapshot of an ideological project made physical in a building space.

Paulina Przystupa also takes examines the physical space of an institution as a way of accessing the ideological interactions with children and childhood in Nineteenth century institutional ‘education’: a spatial approach to assimilation and resistance at Hoopa Valley Indian School. In this case, the primary intent of the institution was not to create industrious children, but rather to assimilate Native American children by isolating them from their families and replacing their understandings of traditional culture with mainstream, white American values and customs. Przystupa situates the Hoopa Valley Boarding School within the broader history of Native American boarding schools in the United States and within the theoretical models that can be used to understand their functions. She then offers a new approach to considering these spaces, the space syntax approach, which quantifies accessibility and movement in various spaces and rooms. She finds that gender seems to be one of the clear, determining factors in the structure of the school, which she argues is not surprising given both the ideology of the school and of the Native population. She advocates for approaching spaces such as this one from this new methodological perspective because it problematizes the relationship of ideology to architecture and the tensions between adult designs and intentions and children’s experiences and manipulations of institutional spaces.

Burton, Fumurescu, Fennelly and Przystupa remind us in this section that much of childhood in the 19th century was shaped by new efforts to educate and train children in the ideologies and practices of their respective countries. These institutions reflect concerns about new populations coming into contact through immigration, struggles for power through politics of identity, and disruptions to family and community structures. The authors in this section offer a variety of ways of thinking about relationships between children and educational and institutional spaces, and note that while the evolution of institutions was a widespread phenomenon in the 19th century, practices and programs were local and varied.

In Part 5: Children’s bodies and children’s lives our authors turn the bodies of children to examine their lives and how children were connected in very pragmatic and also symbolic ways to the world around them. Studying children in death through skeletal evidence, mortuary evidence and historical records provides additional perspectives on how childhood can be studied in the past, and how the death of children tells us both about their lives and about those who cared for them in life, death, and burial.

Hunt-Watts, Cade and Hadley in ‘The lowness of stature, the leanness and the paleness’: childhood nutritional health in 19th century England examines nutritional health and growth in the 19th century in Britain, utilising prisoner intake records and osteological data on metabolic conditions and nutritional deficiencies. They combine these sources of evidence in order to see how nutritional health and height was affected across class lines, and to understand the complicated role of the environment and family behavior implicated in these health outcomes. Their findings illustrate that nutritional health was precarious for children across class groupings, and that the singular role of the environment is not enough to explain such widespread deficiencies. In fact, consistencies across the data give the authors the opportunity to explore contextually why children living in such disparate conditions would have experienced similar challenges, for instance nutrient poor diets for the rich, and factory conditions for the poor. This broad look at skeletal data adds a welcome dimension to the wealth of sources employed in this volume to explore these questions.

Shauna Vey continues to broaden both the types of evidence examined and the focus on the bodies of children in A tool for moral uplift: the sacralization and commemoration of a 19th century child actress by examining two fascinating trends alongside each other: the rural cemetery movement and the changing nature of childhood as depicted in theatre. Specifically, Vey looks at the case of Little Mary Marsh, a child actress who gained fame in productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and who, after her tragic death while performing, was buried in a rural cemetery. Vey highlights through this case how an idealized