Littl e Victims
English Children. By Sylvia Lynd. (Collins. 4s. 6d.)
THIS addition to the " Britain in Pictures " series is a charming, ele- gantly ironic little sketch of the history of English children down the ages, their treatment, their manners, their schooling, their amusements, and the manifold trials that have beset them. Their main trial (until lately, when parents, pastors and masters grew soft) was oppression and suppression by severe elders. As Mrs. Lynd says, " The plucking of children from the wrath of God . . . has been the preoccupation of most parents and guardians of the young throughout the ages." Probably this is over-stated; none of the Paston parents, for example, show much concern with their
children's souls or the wrath of God ; what they would appear to have been concerned with was pushing them out of the home as early, and for as long as possible, and, when they were a little older, getting them married to money. The Pastons were a worldly family; the Verneys, however, three centuries later, were not so, and there are evidences of happy parent and children relationships among this pleasant family, despite the pathetic infant quoted by Mrs. Lynd. And of happy, riotous, " hoyting " children, girls and boys, leading cheerful, sporting, outdoor lives, there are several seventeenth- century examples. Even in the darkest ages parents were not all rod, wrath and rhubarb. On the other hand, it would be difficult to paint too darkly the savage beatings of schoolmasters or the com- mercial exploitation of children, whether as ill-used apprentices, climbing sweeps or toilers in mill and mine. Mrs. Lynd does not slur the grim tale: but, as she says, it is a tale that has moved pro- gressively towards a happy ending. " The plucking of children from the wrath of parents and teachers and commercial exploiters has been one of the more satisfactory achievements of our growing civilisation." She concludes with the comment that children and their elders have never got on better than they do at present. This is probably true; and, since children remain much the same through the ages, it must be their elders who have improved, which is as it should be. Anyhow, the story is of the progressive emancipation of these little victims (whom, as the author, who knows children, points out, St. Gregory saw too precipitately as angels).
Mrs. Lynd decorates her history with attractive, amusing and instructive detail, some interesting theories, and delightfully selected pictures. Here is a good example of a small book at once imagina- tive, entertaining, graceful and informed.
ROSE MACAULAY.
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