‘Imperfect Children’ in Historical Perspective

Abstract

The health, well-being and welfare of children are pressing modern issues. Whether the vehicle is ballooning figures linked to childhood obesity, the intractable decline in British educational standards in comparison to the rest of the world, unaccompanied child migration, historic child abuse allegations or (and most prominently) the mental health of the young, it is clear that children and young people occupy a unique place in the public psyche and are never far from the social and media spotlights. We have come to realise, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, that ‘Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.’1 Historians do not agree on when this ‘modern’ sense of childhood as a distinct phase in the socio-cultural, economic and demographic life cycle emerges, nor about how far parents invested emotional capital into the lives of their children in the past. For some, it was the breaking of the link between work and associated practices such as apprenticeship that led to a definable and discretionary period of childhood. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt suggested that child labour was the byproduct of industrialisation and that youngsters were ubiquitous in the early factory system, even more so than had been the case in agricultural communities before the emergence of widespread proto-industrialisation.2 In this sense, children were assets either to aspirational households or those just about managing, compromising any defined age bracket of childhood and certainly any sense of children as innocents. Peter Kirby has extended this view, demonstrating that child workers could be found across industries in the broadest sense, and were most likely found in traditional occupations such as domestic labour, workshop production, messenger work and agricultural labouring.3 Similarly, Katrina Honeyman has reconsidered the apprenticeship system, demonstrating that they were better organised and managed, and more extensive quantitatively, geographically and chronologically, than had previously been thought.4 Indeed, it might be argued that apprentice children were central to the developing industrial economy in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Certainly the contributors to Nigel Goose and Honeyman’s edited collection on childhood and child labour range over a multitude of child employment opportunities, as well as suggesting that children were not just unwitting participants in adult schemes but active participants and protagonists in the industrial workplace.5