Outside my window there is a long, straggling street of old cottages which have altered very little since the fourteenth century, and in those little old houses dwell many children who play in the street, games that were doubtless popular “in Thebes’s streets three thousand years ago.”
The adult attitude towards children has changed even during the last fifty years, and largely for the better. Yet the child’s attitude towards his playmate, and even towards the omniscient grown-up, is fundamentally what it has been throughout the ages.
The early nineteenth century is often quoted by deprecators of the twentieth as a time when the attitude of youth towards age was particularly praiseworthy in its modesty and reverence. Such people, who are perhaps a little prone to forget their own youthful viewpoint, tell us that in those golden days children accepted without question the opinions of those who were set in authority over them, and were almost invariably obedient, contented and unenterprising. Yet, researches in the literature published especially for children by that “friend of youth,” John Newbery, at “the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard,” in his little “gilt books”—most of them published between 1745 and 1802—prove that badly-behaved children were by no means uncommon, and that over-indulgent parents were not unknown. In the “Histories of More Children than One; or, Goodness Better than Beauty,” Master John and Miss Mary Strictum, who, as their names imply, are models of deportment, are unfavorably contrasted with Master Thomas and Miss Kitty Bloomer.
Thomas insists upon his papa’s horse being brought into the parlour for him to ride round the room. His mamma tried “to persuade him not to want it, but he would have his own way.”
“Thomas was much pleased to have it, but Kitty was afraid of it and did not like that it should stay. She therefore began to scream and beg it might go out. ‘Pray take it out!’ said she. ‘It shall go out; it shan’t stay.’
“‘It shan’t go out. It shall stay!’ said her brother.
“They made such a noise that they frightened the horse, and he began to kick and prance,” and all manner of disasters followed. Not even the most weak-minded modern parent could go further than this in the way of indulgence.
Even in so didactic a work as “The First Principles of Religion and the Existence of a Deity Explained in a Series of Dialogues Adapted to the Capacity of the Infant Mind,” you will find a child as human and engaging as any infant born since the Armistice. In this work the particular infant selected for enlightenment is one Maria, made after no formal pattern. Throughout the long and deadly dialogues her nimble mind outpaces mamma’s ponderous aphorisms. As, when that lady discourses on the awful consequences of taking God’s name in vain, Maria demands demurely: “But would it not be politer and prettier to say either Mr. or Mrs., and not plain God?”
Again, when her mother, as an example of the evils of slyness, relates how “the two Misses Quick had pincushions of the same make, but Miss Betty’s was larger than Miss Sally’s,” and Miss Sally by a subterfuge manages to exchange her own for her sister’s, Maria says thoughtfully: “Do you think then, Mamma, that it signifies to God which of the Miss Quicks had the larger pincushion?”
Could the most recent Realist ask a more searching question?