No one would consciously blame a child for sexual abuse, but it would make it a very different story. Would the adults feel it so important to save this Forlorn Innocent if she’d already lost that innocence? Her story would go from scandalous to debauched. From scintillating to disgusting. It wasn’t fair. It just was.
Instead, Mary Ellen had bruises and cuts made from scissors, right there in plain view below her tattered nightdress. A pretty, white, nonimmigrant child who spoke clearly and humbly of her trials.
Add the aforementioned ingredients of her noble champions, Wheeler, Bergh, and the dying old lady, and you had the world’s attention and outrage. Had social media existed, thousands would have stepped forward with their own #maryellen stories, inspired by the child’s bravery.
Q: And kids were safer? I could really use a happy ending here.
A: I think they were safer. Perhaps most significantly, the case led to Bergh’s creation of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
By the time of Nusse’s article, nine years after Mary Ellen’s case, the NYSPCC had “investigated 13,077 complaints, involving 53,308 children, prosecuted 4,035 cases, convicted 3,637 offenders, rescued and placed in homes or institutions 7,555 children.” That was just in New York. Other states immediately followed suit, as did other countries, creating advocacy and safety for children. It was imperfect, it remains so, but it was an incalculable improvement.
More than that, Mary Ellen triggered an avalanche of concern for child welfare that had never before existed. Child labor laws began to appear throughout America and Europe, though it would take a few decades for them to become universal in Western society.
This 1880 illustration shows the growing public intolerance of cruelty to children after Mary Ellen. Among laws passed in New York to protect kids were those forbidding them from being used in circus, theater, and gymnastic acts.
In truth there was still a long way to go. But Mary Ellen cut the path for millions of children to follow.
Q: I’m glad. I guess. Just… this is the worst chapter. In the world. The absolute worst.
A: You’re a mollycoddle, and you should be forever thankful for it. Remember, these children were born into a world of war and hunger and danger. They needed to be made of stern stuff.
Let us take a hypothetical: Say young Master Alfred is setting out at age sixteen to apprentice as a skilled laborer in a factory. Not a bad placement at all, sure to bring him a respectable middle-class life.
Imagine him raised as he would be today. Taught to try his best, but that mistakes happen and that’s okay. Taught that he’s special and deserving of gentle treatment and respect as his basic human right. Taught to take “second chances” and fail-safes for granted.
When he makes an error in measurement (because the birch and the dunce cap hadn’t fostered a bone-deep anxiety that causes him to thrice-check his work), a whole shipment’s worth of wood is cut wrong and rendered useless. If he’s not fired immediately with no recommendation (and no prospects without one), his fellow employees will hate him, as all their wages have been docked due to lost revenue. Since he has no familiarity with physical pain, or the importance of keeping your dignity while enduring it, when they grab him after work to take their anger out on him, he’ll be unprepared to either fight back or spring back emotionally once he’s defeated.
Will he go to Human Resources and file a complaint of harassment? File a personal assault charge that will do nothing more than amuse the police, who spend every day knee-deep in putrid human misery? Will he demand audience with his employer and explain that he tried his best? No. Not here, not now.
We can afford mistakes in the twenty-first century, because our world is well padded. We can indulge a level of sensitivity that used to be allowed only the smallest of children.
However harsh it seems to us today, many of the Victorians’ disciplinary methods did help prepare children for the pitiless place that was to be their home.
Q: This chapter makes me feel like someone birched my heart. I’m… not going to use anything I learned here in disciplining my twenty-first-century child. Unless you can tell me something nice?
Guidance as discipline. “And so you see, Tabitha, putting morphine in Mrs. Walling’s tea is only fun until we have to figure out how to get her off the floor before Father comes home.”
A: Of course! Remember, times were changing!
An article from an 1886 edition of Good Housekeeping shows the sway of the new thought, reminding readers that “over-discipline is as harmful as the lack of discipline.”
“Many a time by forbidding we create a desire,” writes the author, Rose Dalton, “often the thing forbidden is of little consequence compared with the train of evils its prohibition introduces. When the child has disobeyed it is punished; the next time it disobeys it naturally tells a falsehood to avoid punishment.”
Most of the bad things a very small child does are done innocently out of excitement or because they have the IQ of a two-year-old. (And are simply teeming with Original Sin, of course.) That sort of misbehaving should be gently corrected, the child neither beaten with footwear nor mildly waterboarded.
Instead, says Dalton, “To make our discipline effectual we must walk beside them, and guide and help them, sympathizing with them in their failures, not-constantly holding their faults before them.”
The goal in the late nineteenth century was to have a self-governing child. One who, as Dalton puts it, “obeys from a sense of honor, rather than from fear of the consequences.”
Q: Wait… Rose Dalton was a real person? From Titanic? I’m not listening to anything that woman says. There was SO room for both her and Jack on that door.
A: Dalton. Not Dawson. Kate Winslet’s character was not real and it wasn’t a question of space on the dang door; it was a question of water displacement and the buoyancy of solid oak that… Just… never mind. That’s not an issue here.
Q: Yeah, but Jack would have been such a great dad…
A: Okay, Dear One. Shhh now. It’s all right. This was a difficult chapter, wasn’t it? It’s causing your mind to seek protection in more pleasant places. Like one of the… greatest naval tragedies in history.
Now let’s put aside this unpleasantness and talk about something fun. Like math and menstruation. Can you do both at the same time? Let’s see!
6
How Do I Raise a Menstruating Daughter Without Causing Brain Damage, Nerve Failure, or General Impudence?
And Other Thoughts on Education
Q: Okay. When they weren’t being birched or caned, what kind of education did Victorian children receive?
A: Oh, heavens. We’re going to have to break that down into smaller questions, based on which part of the century, what part of the world, social class, and what qualifies as education. For instance, “Did Victorian girls receive formal education?” is a nice tight question to start off with.
Q: Why am I not surprised to learn that girls received a different education from boys?
A: Because you’ve been paying attention and have surmised that nothing in the nineteenth century was gender neutral or gender inclusive (except certain pretty, pretty dresses which we’ll learn about later). But in this case, it’s not just about whether or not girls would get the same education as boys (which of course they wouldn’t—don’t be obtuse). Education itself was new!
In fact, the belief that all children must be “educated” is, historically, still so fresh that we’re not sure it won’t eventually be ruled a fad.
For most of history, “education” as we know it just didn’t matter. World history, literature, sensitivity training—it was all useless to the average human, of either gender. You did not collect knowledge just for the sake of clogging your mind with it. You learned the skills that would help you survive.
Before the nineteenth century, people on both sides of the Atlantic had little time for or interest in what could be learned in books. Reading simply
wasn’t necessary to a good life. Just look at documents left by successful, wealthy men—you’ll see an “X” and the words “his mark” scrawled in place of a signature. You could thrive in America and never even know how to write your own name.
Replica of 1851 “His Mark” signature of Nicolaus Allan, a successful though illiterate businessman who catered to California gold rushers.
Q: How could something as simple as reading be unimportant to successful living?
A: Simple, my Aunt Fanny! It took you years to learn to do it good.
Q: “Do it well.”
A: Don’t be cheeky. Success was possible, at least partly, because of small, immobile populations.
Contracts and businesses could be conducted on handshakes. If your grandfather had done business with the Miller family (and, yes, they were called the Millers because they had owned the town mill for generations) as his grandfather before him did, you knew the character of the man you worked with. And he knew if he cheated you, the whole town would find out and stop doing business with him.
Furthermore, Jack Miller Jr. did not need to know how to read to run the mill he’d one day inherit. But he did need an exhaustive education. He needed to learn to judge the potential knot and grain imperfection of a board just by looking at the tree it came from. How to keep a saw blade sharp, and what precautions to take to keep his machinery running should the river that powers it shrink from drought. Not to mention math for budgeting and multiple units of measurement. He had to know all of that, plus what every man was expected to know just to survive: how to care for his animals, how to repair (or even build) his home, how to judge weather conditions by looking at the horizon or monitoring the crick in his old mother’s knee.
He was highly educated by the time he came into manhood. It was just a very specific education.
Q: What about women?
A: His wife was highly educated too. She knew willow-bark tea brought fever down and where to find the maggots needed to help clear festering wounds. She knew how to feed twelve people with five ears of corn and two dead rabbits, which she could also catch, kill, and dress with a few flicks of her wrist. She could lay out the geometrical pattern pieces to create her husband’s pantaloons, join the fabric with nothing but a sharp sliver of metal and thread she spun herself from her own sheep. This was education, intensive and applicable beyond what most of us will ever encounter.
But books? Books, perhaps save the family Bible, were for dandies. For useless men who did not use their hands to earn their bread, and women who were so idle that they needed whimsical distraction from long-dead storytellers and poets. Only the wealthiest homes had libraries, filled with hand-bound books, each one a painstakingly printed work of art. A home library was a curiosity, a place an accomplished man would receive visitors and supplicants. This wasn’t a room from which you actually selected books to read—after all, the books of any moral or intellectual value were written in European languages, or ancient Greek or Latin. The home library (the only kind there was for most of history) was the equivalent of a fully equipped in-home Pilates studio: a sign of wealth and class, great for showing off… but mostly just a place you could go to be alone and get drunk.
Quick: identify, construct, and then use all these tools to keep yourself from starving. No idea? And you think you’re educated!
Q: I just can’t imagine a world without books.
A: I’m glad you feel that way. But early books weren’t terribly fun. Novels written in modern English didn’t even show up until the 1600s, and they weren’t abundant. Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe were popular, if you were the sort to sully your mind with fictitious frippery. More acceptable were books with religious themes and historical lessons, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or the works of Milton. Well, maybe not Milton. Unless you’re willing to overlook his blasphemy that Satan’s existence was part of God’s design. And you can forget about Chaucer, popular even though it was written in Middle English. “The Miller’s Tale”? Pure pornography laced with scatological humor. By today’s standards the man of the house would have kept it in a buried file on his computer marked “Power Tool Warranties.”
Q: So why did reading suddenly become important?
A: It came creeping through the homes of the wealthy over the centuries, but it was the Victorian era, also the industrial era, when literacy pounced on the masses. Printing presses were cheaper to own and easier to operate. Ease of distribution (books were heavy and weren’t worth their weight in cargo holds) came with the trains and new roads that sprouted up all over the world. Books began to matter as industrial changes created more free time to write and read them. Engineers and scientists could learn what would have taken years of research and study under a master of the art (see, that term used to mean something) in a single tome.
Also, you could now do business with men outside your own town. Writing letters was not new, but affordable paper and ink were, and new post offices were sprouting up around the American Colonies. In 1790, there were only seventy-five post offices in the whole country, and they were not well regulated. (To be fair, at that point “America” ended at the Mississippi River, and though technically we were in possession of Wisconsin and part of what would be Minnesota, those weren’t popular destinations for mail. Or people.)
An illustration from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, wherein a man woos a woman in a fashion described as having “caughte hire by the queynte.” Poorly. Woos her poorly.
Western Europe of course had a more advanced mail system to match its millennia of established towns and travel routes. But it still was the norm, clear until the Industrial Revolution, to remain in your own town or part of your city, plying your great-grandfather’s trade, perfectly illiterate, throughout your life.
But how quickly the nineteenth century changed all that. For instance, by 1860, America had 28,498 post offices. The American postal system became one of the most important government offices, as the only way to ensure long-distance communication in a wild and growing country. By 1831, postal employees accounted for 76 percent of the civilian federal workforce. Postmasters outnumbered soldiers 8,764 to 6,332 and were the most widespread representatives of the federal government.
And all this is why you suddenly, for the first time in history, needed to know how to read and write. Why you needed “school” for your children.
There were too many people, too many machines creating idleness and books, and a damnable influx of post offices. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, if your son ever intended to use the mail, do more than menial labor, or avoid becoming some milch-cow for a no-good fobbing whisper-dubber (fall victim to fraud due to his ignorance) he had better learn to read.
Q: And daughters too, of course. People didn’t want their daughters to be milch-cow fob dubs either, right?
A. That’s not how you say it. But, true, by the nineteenth century, if you were of any position but the lowest and poorest, you would indeed want your daughter to be able to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. After all, she would one day be the mistress of a household, which would require her to be able to budget, write notes to grocers, read the Bible to children, and proffer invitations to other wives that might further her husband’s career. The question was how to best mold her fragile mind.
Q: The same way a boy’s mind was molded?
A: I don’t know what about this book has led you to believe that I’m going to answer that in the affirmative. In fact, we both know I’m probably going to say something wildly sexist. For instance, it’s impolitic to notice, but… how can one avoid seeing the connection between the breakneck decline of our society and women going to college?
Q: That’s actually even more sexist than I expected. Congratulations.
A: The female mind, it’s a tender thing. Your daughter has got enough to worry about as a developing young woman as it is. Her body is blossoming, awkwardly and painfully, into one of the only natural vessels that can create and sustai
n new life. Isn’t that a big enough job all by itself?
“Oh, Sadie! I only tear up your books to help you stay rooted in the reality of your family and home! Now don’t pout—have some laudanum.”
Please don’t mistake me: almost all experts of the Victorian era believed a young girl should have some education. But how much, and what kind? And how might we apply the finest bits of what the Victorians knew about female education to our own daughters today? There is evidence… of a sort… that overeducating girls caused them great harm, if you’re willing to look at it.
“D’ya ever get the feeling that Dad’s… kind of a dillweed?”
Q: Like I’m willing to look at a train wreck. I don’t want to… but I can’t help it.
A: Super! Some of the more devoted parents of the era, men who knew the way of the world and how inadequately women fit into it, would counsel their daughters to embrace a façade of ignorance if not the actual condition itself. Take John Gregory, who wrote A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters in 1774. His book and the advice within aged well and was reprinted liberally as a guide for young women far into the nineteenth century.
Gregory knew that most people preferred women as they existed in paintings. Remember, ladies in paintings don’t talk. They don’t even look like they’re about to talk, or ever have talked. That’s not a coincidence, said Gregory. Because when real women do, they irritate everyone in the room.
He warned against engaging in sharp or clever wordplay with men. “Wit is the most dangerous talent you can possess: it must be guarded with great discretion and good-nature, otherwise it will create you many an enemy.”
Having a sense of humor is another way to disgrace yourself.
“Humor… is often a great enemy to delicacy, and a still greater one to dignity of character. It may sometimes gain you applause, but will never procure you respect.”
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