Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [57]
In this photograph, Granville Stanley Hall is all beard and authority, the epitome of an eminent late-nineteenth-century American.
Born in 1844 in a small Massachusetts village where sheep outnumbered people by a ratio of eight to one, he could trace his family back to the Mayflower on both sides, and he had a particular passion for climbing hills. His father was a broom-maker by trade, and Granville took obvious pride in being perhaps one of the few people able to say in the early years of the twentieth century that he himself had made, ‘and can still make, a broom’. He is also credited with founding the discipline of educational psychology.
At first glance, Granville Stanley Hall seems like precisely my kind of man—class poet on graduation, pursuer of a polymathic career that bounced around divinity, literature and philosophy and let him settle, briefly, in a Chair of English before he travelled to Germany in 1875 to study the new science of experimental psychology. He was the man who invited Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to visit America in 1909. He was the man who undertook a formal and academic study of tickling, during which he coined two seductive and lamentably under-utilised words: knismesis, for a light, feathery kind of a tickle; and gargalesis, for the ‘harder, laughter-inducing’ kind. Who wouldn’t warm to someone whose scientific surveys asked about the way laughter spread across a child’s face, about which features were ‘first and what last involved’? Who could help but be drawn to someone whose published work declared that ‘in 107 cases laughter or tickling results from merely seeing a finger pointed with movements suggesting tickling; slow circular movements of the index finger, then stopping these and thrusting it toward some ticklish point, especially if with a buzzing sound, make many young children half-hysterical with laughter’? Or that ‘adult men more often laugh in o and a, while children and women laugh in e and i’? Surely anyone whose contributions to human knowledge include a taxonomy of tickling, an anatomy of laughter, must be a force for good.
Which is why it’s such a shame that Granville Stanley Hall is the villain in this story, given that it was just one statement of his that did all the damage to the Anglophone world’s perception of only children.
According to Hall—a man with two siblings of his own, a man who’d spent all his childhood summers in the company of a large and exuberant country family—‘being an only child is a disease in itself’. He wrote that as part of a study undertaken in the late 1890s, and given that it stood as the sole study of only children for several decades, it simply kept being cited, giving it the patina of currency, accuracy, inviolability. In a 1928 paper that drew on Hall’s work, the writer declared that ‘it would be best for the individual and the race if there were no only children’.
Even now, more than a century after Granville Stanley Hall wrote those nine fateful words, most stories about only children—and even the positive ones—at least nod to it. It’s a singular sentence that allows us to see what someone described as an event as rare as the birth of a star: the birth of a prejudice.
I am five years old and dressed as a frog. My outfit comprises a kind of romper suit made of yellow (for tummy) and green (back) taffeta lining with hand-sewn sequins (the water droplets of a frog recently emerged from a pond); green tights; green felt flippers tied onto my hands and my feet (more sequins; more water drops); and the headdress. This is a green taffeta skullcap with two modified ping-pong balls decorated and sewn on for eyes. There are possibly also more sequins.
It is bespoke, it is a miracle of amphibianity, and it is the last word in under-six elegance. In 1976, I wear it to the Austinmer Public