At Home - Bill Bryson [231]
Many boys were flogged daily, some twice a day. Not being flogged at all was a cause for celebration. “This week I did much better at arithmetic and didn’t have the birch once,” one boy wrote home happily from Winchester in the early 1800s. Floggings generally consisted of three to six strokes delivered on the run with a whiplike birch, but occasionally greater violence was done. In 1682, a headmaster at Eton had to resign after killing a boy. A remarkable number of young men developed a taste for the whistle and sting of a spanking—so much so that whipping for pleasure became known as le vice anglais. At least two nineteenth-century prime ministers, Melbourne and Gladstone, were devoted flagellants, and a Mrs. Collet in Covent Garden ran a brothel that specialized in providing sex with a smack.
Above all, offspring were expected to do as they were told, and to continue doing so long after they had reached their majority. Parents reserved to themselves the right to select marriage partners, careers, modes of living, political affiliations, style of dress, and almost any other consideration that could be dictated, and frequently reacted with financial violence when their commands were disregarded. Henry Mayhew, the social reformer, was cut off when he declined to submit to his father’s instructions to become a lawyer. So, too, one after another, were six of his seven brothers. Only the seventh was keen to be a lawyer (or perhaps just keen to have the estate); he dutifully qualified and so inherited the lot. The poet Elizabeth Barrett was disinherited for marrying Robert Browning, who was not only a penniless poet but—the horror of it—the grandson of a publican. Similarly, the horrified parents of Alice Roberts disinherited her when she could not be dissuaded from marrying the indigent son of a Roman Catholic piano tuner. Fortunately for Miss Roberts, the man was the future composer Edward Elgar, and he made her rich anyway.
Sometimes disinheritance was provoked by rather more trivial considerations. The second Lord Townshend, after years of being annoyed by his son’s effeminacy, abruptly struck the hapless fellow from the will when he wandered into the room one day wearing pink ribbons on his shoes. Also much spoken of was the case of the sixth Duke of Somerset, known as “the Proud Duke,” who required his daughters always to stand in his presence and reportedly disinherited one of them when he awoke from a nap and caught the ungrateful wretch sitting.
What is often striking—and indeed depressing—is how freely parents withheld not funds but affections. Elizabeth Barrett and her father were intensely close, but when she declared her intention to marry Robert Browning, Mr. Barrett immediately terminated all contact. He never spoke or wrote to his daughter again, even though her marriage was to a man who was gifted and respectable, and based on the deepest bonds of love. In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.
So on the face of it, it would seem that Victorians didn’t so much invent childhood as disinvent it. In fact, however, it was more complicated than that. By withholding affection to children when they were young, but also then endeavoring to control their behavior well into adulthood, Victorians were in the very odd position of simultaneously trying to suppress childhood and make it last forever. It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.
Defying a parent was so profoundly unacceptable that most children, even in adulthood, would simply not engage in it. A perfect illustration of this is Charles Darwin. When as a young man Darwin was offered