This “pony boy” is an example of the sort of bench that reform school boys would lie across to receive their birching.
By “brutalize” the author does not mean “hurt all who participate” but rather “reduce participants to a less civilized manner of behavior.” Public justice, he explains, will make the boy receiving the punishment more likely to “assume a tone of bravado,” forcing the teacher to “engage in an unseemly contest with him.”
People in authority know that punishments given in secret are much scarier. And, let’s be honest, it’s just tidier not to have witnesses.
One Edwin J. Toye, M.D., wrote the Lancet editors in October 1901, giving a succinct list of how punishments should be doled out according to offense. It was quite an enlightened view over the previous century’s. First, he declares that the habit of beating a scholar’s hands with a cane (usually a thin stick of bamboo or other light wood) should be abolished, since it poses a true threat to the bones of the hands and makes the scholar unable to do the work demanded of him. Caning is fine, of course, but only on the back, buttocks, or thighs, and only when inflicted for a sufficient moral reason, not as a penalty for inferior schoolwork.
On the other hand, “Birching [spanking exposed buttocks with a bundle of twigs] is reserved for punishment where some idea of special disgrace is to be attended.”
Not all school punishment was the whacking sort, at least not as the Victorian age ebbed into the enlightenment and compassion of the Edwardian age. Simple humiliation was also considered a very useful tool.
Toye is a fan of the Bart Simpson–style punishment of copying out a sentence over and over, as long as what the punishee is writing is relevant to the case, whether it be an apology, reflection of his sins, or simply a proper redo of his homework. Of course, “All written punishments have to pass inspection by the headmaster or his delegate and bear stamp as passed for decent writing and general neatness.” He also recommended special paper with a conspicuous pattern or color be used for these written punishments. Employing shame paper made the humiliation public, but discreet.
Speaking of shame paper, it could all be used to fashion the “dunce cap” you’ve heard so much about. Did you know there was usually a dunce stool, as well? Sometimes a whole regatta of dunce accessories! As William B. Smith remembered in an article entitled “Life in Old Virginia ‘Befo’ de Wah,’” published in a 1910 edition of The Railway Conductor, “The old ‘dunce cap’ was made of paper in the shape of a cone, upon which the word ‘dunce’ was written. This cap was placed upon the head of the stupid or negligent scholar. The ‘dunce stool’ was small and three-legged, sometimes called the ‘creepy stool.’”
Many writers of the era recall their school’s dunce cap as more festive in appearance, trimmed with ribbons and feathers, meant to really drive home how absolutely, clownishly stupid its occupant was. Other schools kept a variety of shame hats, in various sizes, declaring the small head underneath to belong to a “story-teller” (liar), a layabout, or whatever epithet the teacher chose.
Q: Who ever came up with a “dunce cap”? Actually, what in the world is a “dunce,” anyway?
A: A fourteenth-century Catholic scholar. You should have known that; come get your “ignorant of Medieval philosophy” cap, young lady.
The dunce cap came into being because society goes through periods of hating Catholics. One such Catholic lived in the 1300s and was named John Duns Scotus. He had some very intelligent and, at the time, popular theories about God and… stuff. He wrote a lot about a theory called Univocity, which considered that the goodness of God was the same goodness found in all things, but it was on a continuum that… ehh… Honestly, I don’t entirely understand it. It’s pretty deep and would take a bit of study to fully comprehend. And I’ll understand if you want to take a moment to appreciate the irony of not being smart enough to understand a Dun(ce).
The dunce cap could be quickly modified to highlight whatever flaw was most prominent in a child.
Duns Scotus’s writings were widely read and taught in universities for a while. But eventually Catholics became unpopular again, as did their philosophers. This was the Renaissance, and the philosophy du jour was a new kind of humanism modeled on classical Greek and Roman philosophy, which followers of Duns Scotus (known as Scotists, Dunses, or Dunsmen) categorically rejected. And so, as an 1855 article entitled “The Geology of Words” explains, “The Duns disciples were villainized as violent opponents of learning, so that a Duns-ist, or Dunse, became the name of contempt for an ‘ignorant booby.’”
And since the Renaissance marked a shift toward educating young men, and since Catholics and Protestants were much snippier than they are now, a professor berating a young man refusing to get with the program with “Oh, I believe we have a follower of Duns in our midst!” would have been reasonable. The accompanying hat was possibly reminiscent of Duns’s monk’s cap.
John Duns Scotus doesn’t so much mind the appropriation of his name to mean “stupid” but would prefer you refrain from using the word “booby.”
Q: This is really queasy stuff. I understand it was a different world, but I don’t know if I have the stomach for Victorian discipline.
A: Then I tell you, with deadly seriousness, you’re going to want to skip the next few pages. But I implore you not to. What I have to tell you isn’t nice. But it’s the truth, and people who want to understand their world don’t ignore truth.
The punishments I’ve described above were among the gentler of their time. They are incomplete, not representing a full picture of child discipline in the Victorian age.
Children were beaten to bruises and welts by even good parents in this era, and that is a fact. Children were killed by bad parents.
We don’t know this because of recorded incidents of “child abuse.” Legally, in the parts of the world we’re focusing on, such a term did not exist until the end of the century. The best way to understand Victorian child discipline is to look at death inquests.
In Roscoe’s Digest of the Law of Evidence in Criminal Cases, volume 2, published in 1888, Henry Roscoe describes many precedent-setting cases of child death from both England and America. The cases he cites show that children were “accidentally” beaten to death with anguishing frequency. Grown-ups literally got away with murder, thanks to the basic law, applicable the world over, stating, “Parents, masters, and other persons having authority may administer reasonable correction to those under their care, and if death ensue without their fault, it will be no more than accidental death.”
Q: Parents beat kids to death and it wasn’t even considered their fault?
A: It wasn’t a question of fault, but intent. You were allowed to use whatever means necessary to get your child in line; you owned your child as surely as you owned your dog. But you weren’t allowed to intentionally kill your child. So when punishment went too far and a kid ended up dead, a judge had to decide if you’d done it on purpose or not, taking into consideration the age and physical constitution of the child, the degree of provocation the caretaker was subjected to, and, most important, what object was used to beat the child.
Roscoe describes a particular case to illustrate the extenuating circumstances that separate “child-murder” from “tragic accident.” “A father whose son had been frequently guilty of thefts, of which complaints had been made, had often corrected him,” he writes. “At length the son, being charged with another theft, and… the father in a passion beat his son, by way of chastisement, with a rope.”
The boy died from this beating. The bereft father was consumed with sorrow and guilt. He had honestly intended “only to have punished him with such severity as to have cured him of his wickedness. The learned judge who tried the prisoner, after consulting his colleague and the principal counsel on the circuit, ruled this to be manslaughter only.”
The court saw a father who was at his wits’ end with a wicked son and used an object that one wouldn’t normally think of as deadl
y (as opposed to other cases where boys were disciplined with iron rods or heavy canes, which were viable lethal weapons).
And the punishment for accidentally beating your child, student, or apprentice to death? It varied, “at the discretion of the court.” It could be life in prison… or a fine.
Q: That’s… I have no words. This is so sick. How could this be allowed?
A: There are a hundred different answers to that question, none of which satisfy. I can tell you that the idea of a child who was “self-governing,” obeying from a sense of guilt rather than shame (guilt is what we feel when we know we’ve been bad; shame is what we feel when we’re caught being bad), was relatively new. I can explain that these kids lived in a world where everyone who was strong beat up on the weak. Dad beat Mom, the landlord punched Dad, the cops knocked the landlord down in the street… it was an age of the fist. And I can remind you that your own great-great-grandchildren will be asking how you could have been so unloved that you were allowed to ride a bicycle on the same street where cars drove, or given the common poison called “refined sugar” as a treat.
None of that really makes it better, I know.
I can give you some satisfaction, though. It was here, during the Victorian era, that children began to become precious and protected.
It all started because of one little girl.
Q: How did one girl change the way children were treated?
A: Bluntly, child abuse laws, at least in America (England followed suit within decades with its own laws), finally began to change in earnest because of what you might call the perfect case of child abuse, and the public’s infatuation with reading about it.
Her name was Mary Ellen Connolly, and she was ten years old. Her story was fairy-tale caliber, complete with wicked stepmother, fairy godmother, and savior in the form of a kind and powerful man.
Mary Ellen “Connolly,” age ten.
Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night in 1874, Mrs. Etta Angell Wheeler (she even had angel in her name), a Methodist missionary, was attending a dying woman in a tenement house in New York. It was there, according to Ernest Nusse of an 1885 edition of the Bay State Monthly, the dying woman spoke the words that would change the world: “My hours are numbered, but how can I die in peace when night and day I hear the beating by her mother-in-law [foster mother] of the unhappy little girl who lives in the room next to mine?”
Mrs. Wheeler did indeed find an overworked, starved, and beaten orphan named Mary Ellen next door. But she could not find any judicial authority willing to remove her from the Connollys: the man and woman who, though they had no legal proof of it, claimed her as theirs.
Mrs. Wheeler’s attempts to save the child were thwarted at every turn by the law, according to Jacob August Riis, who wrote The Children of the Poor in 1892. Police, wrote Riis, told her that there wasn’t enough evidence that the child’s life was in danger to remove her from her “parents.” So, Mrs. Wheeler went to private children’s charities and well-known philanthropists.
They replied, Riis tells us, “It is a dangerous thing to interfere between parent and child, and you might get yourself into trouble if you did so, as parents are proverbially the best guardians of their own children.”
Ah, but beware the tenacious church lady. Mrs. Wheeler was on a mission. She knocked on one last door. “Finally, in despair, she said: ‘I will make one more effort to save this child. There is one man in this city who has never turned a deaf ear to the cry of the helpless, and who has spent his life in just this work for the benefit of unoffending animals. I will go to Henry Bergh.’”
Henry Bergh, known as the “Friend of Beasts,” was the man who founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He reasoned that little Mary Ellen was for all legal intents an animal, owned by the Connollys, with no voice or rights of her own. So, she deserved as much kindness as any animal. He brought Mary Ellen to court to testify against her abusers, wrapped in a horse blanket to drive home the point. There, Mary Ellen gave clear and heartbreaking testimony:
Henry Bergh.
My father and mother are both dead. I don’t know how old I am… Mamma [Mrs. Connolly] has been in the habit of whipping and beating me almost every day. She used to whip me with a twisted whip—a rawhide. The whip always left a black and blue mark on my body. She struck me with the scissors and cut me; I have no recollection of ever having been kissed by anyone—have never been kissed by Mamma. I have never been taken on my Mamma’s lap and caressed or petted. I never dared to speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped… I do not know for what I was whipped—Mamma never said anything to me when she whipped me. I do not want to go back to live with Mamma, because she beats me so.
The court removed Mary Ellen from the Connollys, and, though there were a few bumps along the way, she grew up to be a contented wife and mother, living a full life and dying in 1956. And in the process, she started a revolution in children’s rights.
Q: I’m glad Mary Ellen’s story helped other kids, but how is that story “perfect”? To refer to any tale of child abuse as a fairy tale is downright ghoulish.
A: You’re right. But humans are ghoulish, hungry for lurid details, and fantastic stories that are, as Nusse described Mary Ellen’s life of torture and rescue, “both thrilling and dramatic.”
Consider, Mary Ellen Connolly was one of maybe thousands of children in New York City in 1874 subjected to severe abuse of some sort. Millions of mistreated children came before her. And stories about their suffering didn’t sell newspapers or change the world. Why was her story different?
The Victorians were short on pity. Not because they were cruel, but because when you live in a hard world you are able to traverse it better with a hardened heart. They didn’t like poor people, those dirty and desperate beggars who overran their cities. To many they were a reminder of the life that awaited them should their husband fall ill or their job be lost. There was a strongly held belief that if you found yourself in a low station, it was your own fault—perhaps your laziness or just God meting out justice for your secret sins. Homeless children, cheerfully referred to as “street-arabs” and “gutter-snipes,” were not spared this judgment.
And while Mary Ellen’s captors, the Connollys, fit the prejudiced stereotype of the poor as nasty and vile, Mary Ellen was different. She was more like the little heroines of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen works, books now translated into English and enjoying wide circulation. More like the children in the novels of Dickens and Alcott, some of the first to be narrated from a virtuous child’s point of view. The notion of children as humans, not burdens, was seeping into the collective consciousness just when Mary Ellen made headlines.
Her father had been honorable, a soldier who died in the Union Army. Her mother, though accounts vary, most likely worked herself to death trying to provide for her baby. It was supposed that this woman had either been deceived into giving her daughter over to what she believed was superior care, a baby farm, or the child had been stolen from her on her deathbed.
Q: What in the world is a “baby farm”? Do I even want to know?
A: No. But I will tell you, because, again, it is the truth. Baby farms were like foster homes or orphanages, except completely unregulated and widely considered to be fatal for their inhabitants.
In 1915, one Dr. Woodward described the much-maligned institution as follows:
The baby is left with [a woman] and the mother pays two or three dollars a week or a month, as the case may be for a while. The mother may then disappear, leaving the baby in the baby farm. Many of the babies placed in such establishments are placed there possibly with the hope that they will never come out alive. They are illegitimate children, some of them, and others are simply the children of poor women who have burdens that they cannot bear while they are going out to earn their living in kitchens and places of that sort.
In one famous case of baby-farming, the undernourished children were kept in an op
ium stupor. The proprietress of this particular baby farm, Margaret Waters, was executed in 1870, believed to be responsible for the deaths of nineteen children.
“It is unjust to say that all the keepers of baby-farms are as heartless as they are pictured,” wrote Dr. George F. Shrady in an 1884 edition of the Medical Record. “Many, undoubtedly, are even more pitiless.”
Shrady reminds his readers that a high mortality rate is to be expected based on the youth and poverty of the “inmates.” That is not what makes the institution so criminal. It’s when you add “improper food, poor sanitary arrangements, lack of care and proper inspection” that the death rate “becomes a frightful one. The whole aim of the typical baby-farmer is to make as much as possible with the least expenditure of time, labor, and money.”
Older children, who would have been of particularly hardy stock to have made it to toddler age, might be adopted out of such places. Some historians believe that was Mary Ellen’s roundabout route to belonging to the Connollys. Thankfully, one of the many positive repercussions of Mary Ellen’s case was to raise awareness about baby farms, leading to a crackdown.
Q: So the public was primed for a “princess in rags” fairy tale, and Mary Ellen had good timing. What else made her sad story “perfect”?
A: Mary Ellen further galvanized the protective spirit of the public by the lack of (reported) sexual abuse, which would have made her story unpublishable and sullied her in the minds of the public.
Q: Wait. Come on. Society would rally for a girl beaten to a pulp but not a molested one?
A: Like I said, this is rough stuff. Victorians had very deep and conflicted attitudes toward sexuality. Maybe because they lived in such a rough world, they were obliged to put so much value in purity and innocence.
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