Ungovernable

by Therese Oneill

  Q: I want to know more about lawn tennis and croquet. It seems far preferable to this violent blood-fest.

  A: No. Men only played those “gender-inclusive” games for social and courtship reasons, because there were so few options to see ladies bend over or break a nonfatal sweat. These are the games truly meant for healthy young boys. “Violent” is a word used by fretful women who make their sons sit down to pee. There was absolutely no advantage in raising a boy to be gentle in the nineteenth century. He was not born into a gentle world, no matter his wealth or standing. Even the loftiest priest or prince would be loved and respected more if he could hold his own amid violence and terror. These games reminded a boy, ever so subconsciously, that pain was inevitable, whether it came in the form of disease, war, or hankies loaded with broken glass in the name of good times!

  Q: Let’s move on to toys. What are my options? And what are my child’s average survival rates should she use them?

  A: I’m sensing a decline in your morale. Fight it, darling. Show the fortitude your child deserves in a mother. Now, most children had blocks, a slate to draw on, and sundry simple homemade toys, from rag dolls to fishing poles. For babies, mothers could choose from a wide variety of choking hazards. In the eighth edition of The Mother’s Book, first published in 1831, Lydia Maria Child tells us that the best thing for teething is “a large ivory ring, or a dollar worn smooth” for them to gnaw on. Also fun for babies is “a string of very large wooden beads, or shining buttons… no buttons but steel, wood, or ivory, are safe; if they have any portion of brass about them, they are injurious.” And she reminds mothers never to use green string from which the color might be sucked off. “Painted toys are not wholesome at this age, when children are so prone to convey everything to the mouth.”

  Nursery toys of a wealthy family, circa 1900.

  Q: I’m not giving my babies buttons and coins to suck, no matter what color the string. But incidentally, why was green especially bad?

  A: Oh. You know. Arsenic. It’s really a marvelous chemical and ever so versatile. Which makes it so frustrating that humans keep expiring when overexposed to it. It was arsenic that gave the green dye of that era its richness of color. They used it in everything from fake flower petals to wallpaper. Historians think the prevalence of it in domestic objects, especially bedroom wallpaper, which would be commonly touched and constantly inhaled, accounts for some of the mystery illnesses Victorians suffered. They didn’t have a problem with arsenic green in general. Just… babies best not swallow a lot of it.

  Q: Agreed. But what about educational toys? The Victorian age paralleled the Industrial Revolution, so it was packed with developments in science, technology, engineering, and math. I’d like to introduce STEM toys as soon as possible. Particularly to my daughters.

  A: Of course! Well, the interesting thing is, the way nineteenth-century life was lived, a young man was exposed to basic STEM principles constantly. All but the poshest of boys would be helping with repairs around the home and family business, learning everything from well excavation to wheelwrighting, just as a matter of keeping the household running. Toys were often made by the child himself, using college-level geometry and engineering, whether it be kites or toy boats. And keeping your first gun clean and functioning would teach a boy a great deal about science.

  Clarence and Alonzo behind the Wright Cycle Company. Picture by Orville and Wilbur Wright. Some kids had better STEM teachers than others.

  Q: If I’m not giving my child buttons, I’m not giving him guns. Seriously, don’t joke about kids and guns.

  A: I’m not. And neither were they.

  In 1891 our old friend Reverend Wood files “shooting” as a boy’s sport between “sea-fishing” and a chapter containing instructions for using dandelion extract to fight liver complaints in your pet dog. He allows that a boy’s first shotgun should be a single barrel, which, really, by 1891 was mostly manufactured for children anyway. He emphasized (as did every other piece of literature on the subject) that the most important thing about guns was not marksmanship but learning care and respect of the instrument. According to Wood, the best way to match a boy to a properly sized gun for his growing frame was to “take up several guns in succession in the maker’s shop, and rapidly bringing them to the shoulder, aim them at the eye of the attendant, who will at once see when the aim is correct.”

  Q: Just… just… no.

  A: I know. But remember, it’s impossible for us to see guns the way the parents of the 1800s saw them. Guns provided food, and protection from very real threats in an untamed world. Guns prepared a boy for the constant cavalcade of war and conquest most Western nations were embroiled in throughout the century.

  Sure, accidents happened and horrible choices were made, even back then. That’s why, except in cases of unfortunate sporting goods clerks, safety and training were indispensable. An anonymous letter to the editor of an 1890 edition of Forest and Stream titled “Shall the Boy Have a Gun?” explained how mastering a gun kept children from more dangerous pursuits and set them on the path to power.

  Because when the birds come to reclaim their feathers from your hat, you must be ready.

  Boys will have amusements. They ordinarily prefer amusements of a robust character. Their disposition for such sports ought to be cultivated. Such a hobby will attract them from vicious pastimes: such sports will develop their physical and mental powers. To deprive them of vigorous amusement is to dwarf their energies, to make them simply “hewers of wood and drawers of water”—underlings.

  If it’s any consolation, lawmakers were trying to differentiate between the weapon and the toy.

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century at least one state, Indiana, passed a law saying that children’s cap guns couldn’t contain the same chemicals that real guns used, or at least not in the same amounts. You could get yourself a ten-dollar fine for that sort of shenanigan.

  Q: Did they at least teach girls the mechanics of firearms and geometry of kite-making and… so forth? (I cannot believe I’m asking this.)

  A: I’m certain many parents did. But girls had other areas of interest to tend to.

  Q: Of course. Pretending to be good little mothers and housewives.

  A: Smile when you say that, my feminist friend. Smile, because in the Victorian era, training a little girl to accomplish the work of wife and mother wasn’t much different from training her to bend the laws of Nature and Physics to her will.

  True, Victorians did not advocate gender equality past the age where both genders got to wear pretty dresses and have bouncy curls. But please don’t think this means girls were excused from science and technology. Rather, they were trained in particular disciplines of it.

  This is a pattern for a small girl to use to make doll clothes. She will of course have to measure the doll and re-size the pattern accordingly herself, requiring more applications of arithmetic than I care to consider.

  And can you tell me how to build and sustain the perfectly tempered fire inside an iron oven? How much yeast will make your bread rise, depending on proportion of flour and surface area? For that matter, what sort of soil and how much moisture is required to grow the wheat that makes that flour? Hark… do I hear the call of science?

  A growing girl was “STEMming” all over the place. Applied, real-life useful science and math.

  Q: What about the sort of play that was not simply disguised labor? Did the girls get to beat each other with hankies and dangle from ropes too?

  A: So now it’s “get to”? You are just so touchy about gender.

  Q: Well, I’m being sarcastic! I think. I… This century is just so confusing.

  A: Well, I’m proud you’re trying to untangle it. And of course girls didn’t play those kinds of violent games. Have you already forgotten Romping Polly and her hilariously severed limb?

  Playing outside and getting plenty of fresh air were fully supported in the nineteenth century, for girl and boy children alike. Just as long
as they didn’t play together or engage in the same activities. In fact, vigorous exercise in general was best done in private.

  Take it from Lydia Maria Child, author of the popular 1856 book The Moral, Intellectual, and Physical Training of the Young Explained: “When I say that skating and sliding [sledding] are proper amusements for girls, I do not, of course, mean that they should mix in a public crowd. Such sports, when girls unite in them, should be confined to the inmates of the house, and away from all possibility of contact with the rude and vicious.”

  Q: So what sorts of things did girls do outside, properly and in public, that didn’t result in dismemberment?

  A: There were all sorts of approved public girl games! At least… variations on one game. According to The Girls’ Home Book, or How to Play and How to Work, written in 1877 by Laura Valentine, recommended open-air activities included… holding hands in a circle. And singing a little.

  That’s… about it.

  These made up a class of games among Victorian girls and today’s three-year-olds called “Rounds.” Sometimes clever girls could incorporate practice for future housework, as in Mrs. Valentine’s version of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”!

  The children all take hands and dance around, singing. Then they stop and pretend to wash their dresses, singing,

  This is the way we wash our clothes,

  Wash our clothes, wash our clothes!

  This is the way we wash our clothes,

  So early in the morning!

  They then go on to wring out their clothes, then iron them. Or there is the “Swiss peasant” version where the girl gets to practice the motions of threshing wheat, sifting wheat, and resting on the ground after threshing and sifting wheat. So that’s fun.

  A particular favorite was “The Old Game of Honey-Pots.” Bonus: This one is fun for the whole family, as older brothers and “Papa and Mama” are encouraged to participate, acting as “honey merchants and purchasers.”

  In this game, each girl represents an imported pot of honey, and the goal is to swing her in the arms of the stronger players. She holds her knees up and clasps her hands under them, and the number of swings she can endure before losing her grasp determines the value of her honey. But you can’t just swing a girl. That’d be weird. There is a ceremony to it. Let us quote directly from Mrs. Valentine’s game plan:

  The purchaser approaches the merchant, and asks, Have you any good honey for sale, friend?

  HONEY MERCHANT. Yes, ma’am (or sir), first-rate. This pot is from Mount Hybla, the finest honey in the world; tastes of thyme, I assure you. This one is from Sicily, quite as good as any you would get at Fortnum and Mason’s. Taste and try before you buy.

  The purchaser then goes round, and pretends to taste the honey-pot. [I can’t imagine this involves licking the children, which is the first method that comes to mind. Perhaps chewing a braid or nibbling a finger?]

  PURCHASER (shaking his head). Not very good. I see that everything Greek is best ancient. Ah! I like this Sicilian jar. How much will you sell it for?

  HONEY MERCHANT. A shilling a pound.

  PURCHASER. What does the jar weigh?

  HONEY MERCHANT. We will see, sir, if you will be good enough to help me.

  And then they swing her. Fat little honey-pots are certainly the cheapest, and probably domestic.

  Q: Do you really have to do all that talking?

  A: First of all, females love pointless chatter, and bless this game for incorporating that natural feminine pleasure. Second, if you have a better way to teach a future housewife about the different quality variations of imported honey, I’d like to hear it.

  Q: I want to say these games are sexist, but I’m not sure which gender they’re sexist against.

  A: Remember, our current Western lifestyle is a historical aberration. Most of us go our whole lives, no matter our gender, without having to rely on violence or physical strength to survive. Nineteenth-century boys held out no such hope. They were prepared from the earliest age for a life of battles, small and grand. Girls were trained to inspire love, create valued children, and keep warm a hearth, all done so well that a man is willing to risk his life to keep them safe. So, regarding girls’ games, the more content you were with the prospect of doing laundry and letting someone gyrate you back and forth in the name of pleasure and health, the better off you would have been.

  Q: Gross. Fine. Let’s move on. What sorts of things were available for my children to read during this era?

  A: Reading in moderation was encouraged, of course, but you can’t just imprint any old book into a youth’s impressionable mind. In fact, most books, especially fiction, are trouble. The problem with even “good” fiction, says Lydia Maria Child, is that even as it tries to condemn sin, “vices the juvenile reader never heard of, are introduced, dressed up in alluring characters, which excite their admiration, their love, their deepest pity.”

  For example, she cites a popular novel called Charlotte Temple, in which a girl is tricked into prostitution and dies miserably. It is her belief that teen girls will read this novel and, while barely noticing the overarching moral of the story, be introduced to the vice that scuppers the heroine. Especially since they don’t quite know what “prostitution” is. “Wait… I could be paid money for dating handsome men? What am I doing hanging around this dump?” and before you know it they’ll be enthusiastically knocking on the nearest brothel door.

  Give a girl a story about a girl who goes to a dance, is abandoned by her parents, becomes a prostitute, catches plague from eating rats, and dies alone in the gutter, and all they will remember is that there was a lovely dance.

  Thus, children learn that flawed humans are deserving of compassion, and that they themselves aren’t so bad for the occasional moral misstep. This notion, of course, is utterly wrong by Victorian standards. Good and evil never blur.

  But if you insist on exposing a child to fictions, at least make sure they’ve been properly cleansed. Instead of reading the original Shakespeare, whose writing was barely disguised pornography, Mrs. Child recommends a special edition called The Family Shakespeare, “in which impure sentences are entirely omitted.”

  Bowdlerized Shakespeare, 1863.

  Q: Oh, what? There were sexy parts in Shakespeare? Well, I sure didn’t catch them during my sophomore-year English class. What does The Family Shakespeare leave out?

  A: The original edition was edited by Thomas Bowdler and his sister Henrietta, though there would be countless copycats by the end of the nineteenth century. Bowdler liked Shakespeare, he really did. He liked to read the Bard aloud to his family but found that he kept having to skip the “dirty” parts and change the endings of all the tragedies. (His name became a verb: “Bowdlerize,” meaning to cut out the saucy parts.) He expurgated all the references to sex, prostitutes, suicide… stuff that really has no place in tragedy or drama anyway, and changed them to something family-friendly.

  He changed every exclamation of “God!” to “Heavens!” He made it clear that Ophelia’s death was “accidental drowning.” And he changed Iago’s famous declaration “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs” in Othello to a very snoozy but proper “Your daughter and the Moor are now together.” Most likely playing yard tennis while chaperoned.

  “And then Juliet popped up and yelled ‘Surprise!’ and Romeo was all, ‘Ah, you totally GOT me!’ and they laughed and shared a root beer.”

  Q: Probably most young kids would find Shakespeare pretty boring.

  A: All the better! As Mrs. Child tells us, we must not feed the “necessity of fierce excitement in reading [because it] is a sort of intellectual intemperance; and, like bodily intoxication, it produces weakness and delirium.”

  Q: What about real children’s stories, like “Cinderella” and such?

  A: Yes, fairy tales are an excellent choice, if told correctly. The heroines are flawless, the villains punished in a manner more depraved than you’d find in
the darkest corners of the internet. This helps children learn that there is no gray area between good and bad.

  Q: The fairy tales I remember aren’t depraved! They’re sweet and fun.

  A: You’re reading the wrong ones, then. Or rather, I suspect, watching the wrong ones, as presented to you by Disney. If you read the versions bestowed upon Victorian children and their ancestors, you find much sharper ideas of justice and virtue. Let’s look at some familiar Disney heroines as first set forth by Jacob Grimm in the 1860 edition of his book Home Stories.

  Rapunzel

  In Grimm’s version of “Rapunzel,” the problem started with female greed. While pregnant, Rapunzel’s mother started craving this radish-thing called “rampions” that grew only in the witch’s private garden. She made her husband scale the fence and steal the radishes constantly. The witch eventually caught them and agreed to spare the thieving couple in exchange for their firstborn. Which they were completely okay with, handed her right over. The witch really wasn’t too terrible to Rapunzel, though she did lock her in a tower and use her hair as a ladder, same as always. Grimm never explains why, but I’m sure she had her reasons. Lots of parents homeschool their kids. But then when Rapunzel had become a young woman of fourteen, a prince discovered her, and they started dating in secret. Everything was fine until one day when Rapunzel was letting the witch up her hair and she announced, “Gee, you are a lot heavier than my boyfriend when I haul him up here.”