Tommy: "Do you believe in fairies, Mrs. Hardacre?"
Mrs. H.: "No, certainly not."
Tommy: "I'm so glad you're candid about it. There's such a pose among grown-ups nowadays to pretend they do."
The War on Wonderland
The attempt to teach gardening at certain schools in the 'nineties was "guyed" in the account of a disastrous imaginary experiment—the encouragement of Small Holdings for Small Boys at a fashionable Preparatory School. Here Punch is irresponsible and reactionary; but there is point in his criticism of the new-fangled cult of "nature study," on the ground that even playtime was now made a burden and toil for children by object lessons. In the same year (1900) the doctrine of self-expression was proclaimed in strident tones by Mr. Bernard Shaw in a lecture to the members of the Teachers' Guild of Great Britain. "Any grown-up person," said the prophet, "guilty of the crime of trying to form the character of children ought to be drowned. If there is to be any progress at all, it must be recognized that the children know better than their teachers." This was almost beyond the reach of comment or parody, but Punch did his best. Cranks, whether official or unofficial, he treated with impartial disrespect, and shortly before falling upon Mr. Shaw he had gibbeted a school inspector who had been alleged in his report to have penned this immortal sentence:—
The lower babies' mental arithmetic leaves much to be desired.
In the verses on "Spoilt Parents" in 1901 Punch expresses an obviously ironical approval of filial insubordination as encouraged in America, and a year later took for his text a passage quoted from an essay written by an Australian girl of thirteen, in which she had referred to "The Lady of Shalott" as "a fairy tale I remember in my childhood." In 1903 the activities of the "Pædologist" furnished Punch with abundant material. He celebrates, again with ironical applause, the expulsion of Euclid; he refers to an American lady who, in discussing suitable literature for children, had found a "moral squint" in Jack and the Beanstalk and Bluebeard; and he founds an excellent set of verses on an article in the Contemporary by Dr. Woods Hutchinson. The child, according to this eminent writer, passes through all the stages of evolution; "he is born not an Anglo-Saxon, but a Cave-dweller," and Punch proceeds to expound the "recapitulation theory" as follows:—
When Edward, crawling on the floor,
Invades the eight-day clock,
Pray do not spank him any more