Children, Past and Present

Children, Past and Present by Agnes Repplier

"Children, Past and Present" by Agnes Repplier is an essay examining the dramatically shifting conditions, treatment, and expectations of children across Western history, contrasting the severe disciplines of earlier centuries with the comparatively indulgent child-rearing practices of Repplier's own era. Repplier opens by noting how biography and memoir, rather than formal history, illuminate the fine-grained textures of social life, making it possible to measure the distance between past and present existence. She observes that among those who have benefited most from historical progress, children stand out as perhaps the greatest beneficiaries, though she views this transformation with a mixture of appreciation and mild irony. The essay surveys a broad range of historical examples of child-rearing, beginning with Susanna Wesley, whose household operated under a rigid disciplinary code. She required each child to learn the entire alphabet on its fifth birthday, conducted in a six-hour session with the household sealed off from interruption. Repplier notes that Wesley was neither cruel nor unloving, yet her methods were so exacting that her famous son John Wesley later reproduced similarly severe structures in his own model school, ultimately finding the results disappointing. Moving to educational theory, Repplier examines the advice of Richard and Maria Edgeworth, whose "Practical Education" counseled mothers never to leave children unsupervised, never to permit contact with servants, and to scrutinize every line of every book. Even Mrs. Barbauld's morally impeccable children's volumes fell under suspicion. Maria Edgeworth's own fiction, though more readable, consistently embedded explicit moral lessons. Repplier then turns to Thomas Day's "Sandford and Merton" and Miss Sewell's educational writings, both of which imposed humorless austerity as an ideal. Repplier surveys the severe maternal figures of France, including the Marquise de Montmirail, who sent her ten-year-old daughter to a convent for six months after a single childish lie, and Madame Quinet, who arranged for a municipal guard to visit her household twice weekly to administer corporal punishment to her children, even preemptively, against future offenses. The poet Edgar Quinet grew up under a father whose cold intellectual mockery made his son perpetually anxious. Similar dynamics appear in Chateaubriand and Mirabeau, both of whom describe being paralyzed by paternal authority. The essay then turns to schooling, tracing the harshness of monastic education through the near-destruction of the young Anselm, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who was worked and flogged nearly to death by a teacher determined to extract maximum intellectual output. Eton and Westminster are examined in comparable terms: boys from aristocratic families endured cold, hunger, inadequate lodging, and brutal flogging. Dr. Keate of Eton, who once flogged eighty boys in succession and accidentally flogged a confirmation class rather than a punishment roster, serves as a symbol of this institutional cruelty. Home education is shown to carry its own dangers through the examples of John Stuart Mill, systematically crammed by his father from earliest childhood, and Giacomo Leopardi, who crammed himself relentlessly without parental restraint. Both experienced blighted childhoods, emotional coldness toward their mothers, joyless routines, and precocious but unhealthy intellectual development. Leopardi's case Repplier finds especially poignant, his enormous gifts warped by physical frailty and the smothered despair that became the philosophical keynote of his work. The education of girls receives separate treatment. Throughout the eighteenth century, female ignorance was considered an ornament, and intellectual ambition in women was viewed as dangerous or pitiable. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Somerville, and others who achieved distinction did so largely in spite of their training rather than because of it. Repplier contrasts this with the more wholesome example of seventeenth-century Holland, where the daughters of Roemer Visscher were educated broadly in music, languages, physical skills, and the arts, growing into accomplished and celebrated women. Repplier closes by considering the children of her own time, who have swung to the opposite extreme. Freed from the old constraints, they are generally good-natured, truthful, and affectionate, but they have lost the precise manners, the cultivated stillness, and the disciplined powers of observation that came with earlier regimens. Repplier quotes critics who argue that children who are never required to be silent or to restrain themselves fail to develop genuine mental discipline. She concludes with tempered ambivalence, acknowledging that the old hardships were genuine and their abolition welcome, while suggesting that something of real value has quietly disappeared alongside them.

By Agnes Repplier · First published 1853 · Genre: Essays, Social Commentary, History · 6,894 words

First lines

As a result of the modern tendency to desert the broad beaten roads of history for the bridle-paths of biography and memoir, we find a great many side lights thrown upon matters that the historian was wont to treat as altogether beneath his consideration. It is by their help that we study the minute changes of social life that little by little alter the whole aspect of a people, and it is by their help that we look straight into the ordinary every-day workings of the past, and measure the space between its existence and our own. When we read, for instance, of Lady Cathcart being kept a close prisoner by her husband for over twenty years, we look with some complacency on the roving wives of the nineteenth century. When we reflect on the dismal fate of Uriel Freudenberger, condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt alive in 1760, for rashly proclaiming his disbelief in the legend of William Tell's apple, we realize the inconveniences attendant on a too early development of the critical faculty. We listen entranced while the learned pastor Dr. Johann Geiler von Keyersperg gravely enlightens his congregation as to the nature and properties of were-wolves; and we turn aside to see the half-starved boys at Westminster boiling their own batter-pudding in a stocking foot, or to hear the little John Wesley crying softly when he is whipped, not being permitted even then the luxury of a hearty bellow.

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children · childhood · parenting · education · social commentary · cultural history · Victorian society · family life · juvenile literature · child development · historical perspectives · literary essays

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