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By Root 2103 0

had torments of their own to endure. These were torments of the sort that many of the starving poor would have been glad to get, to be sure, but they were torments nonetheless. Mostly they involved emotional adjustments and learning to live in a world that was shorn of affection. Almost from the moment of emerging from the womb, middle- and upper-class children in Victorian Britain were expected to be obedient, dutiful, honest, hardworking, stiff-upper-lipped, and emotionally self-contained. An occasional handshake was about as much physical warmth as one could expect after infancy. The typical home of the prosperous classes in Victorian Britain was, in the words of one contemporary, an outpost of “cold, harsh and emphatically inhuman reserve which cuts off anything like that friendly, considerate, sympathetic intercourse which ought to mark every family relation.”

Well-off children often had to endure the hardships of character building. Isabella Beeton’s brother-in-law, Willy Smiles, had eleven children but set out breakfast for only ten, to discourage slowness in arriving at the table. Gwen Raverat, daughter of a Cambridge academic, recalled in later life how she was required to sprinkle her daily porridge with salt, instead of the glistening heaps of sugar her parents enjoyed, and forbidden jam with her bread on the grounds that anything so flavorsome would wreak havoc upon her moral fiber. A contemporary, of similar background, recorded wistfully of the food served to her and her sister through childhood: “We had oranges at Christmas. Marmalade we never saw.”

With the crushing of taste buds came also a curious respect for the character-building powers of fearfulness and dread. Extremely popular were books that prepared young readers for the possibility that death could take them at any moment, and if it didn’t get them it would almost certainly get their momma, papa, or favorite sibling. Such books always stressed how wonderful heaven was (though it seemed also to be a place without jam). The intention ostensibly was to help children not to be frightened of dying, though the effect was almost certainly the opposite.

Other literary works were designed to make sure children understood what a foolish and unforgivable offense it was to disobey an adult. A popular poem, “The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches,” recounted the tale of a little girl who failed to heed her mother’s gentle invocation not to play with matches. As the poem put it:

But Pauline would not take advice,

She lit a match, it was so nice!

It crackled so, it burned so clear,—

Exactly like the picture here

She jumped for joy and ran about,

And was too pleased to put it out.

Now see! Oh see! What a dreadful thing

The fire has caught her apron-string;

Her apron burns, her arms, her hair;

She burns all over, everywhere.

To make sure there was no possibility of misinterpretation, the poem carried a vivid illustration showing a young girl engulfed in a ball of flame, on her face a look of profoundest consternation. The poem concludes:

So she was burnt with all her clothes

And arms and hands, and eyes and nose;

Till she had nothing more to lose

Except her little scarlet shoes;

And nothing else but these was found

Among her ashes on the ground.

“The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches” was one of a series of poems by a German doctor named Heinrich Hoffmann, who wrote them originally as a way of encouraging his own children to follow lives of rigid circumspection. Hoffmann’s books were highly popular and went through many translations (including one by Mark Twain). All followed the same pattern, which was to present children with a temptation difficult to refuse, then show them how irreversibly painful were the consequences of succumbing. Almost no childhood activity escaped the possibility of corrective brutality in Hoffmann’s hands. In another of his poems, “The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb,” a boy named Conrad is warned not to suck his thumbs because it will attract the attention of a ghoulish figure known as the great tall