Home and Family: English and American Ideals in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

‘But we did not think those English children had so good a time as we did;’ wrote Lucy Larcom of her Massachusetts childhood in the 1830s. ‘They had to be so prim and methodical. ‘It seemed to us that the little folks across the water never were allowed to romp and run wild; some of us may have held a vague idea that this freedom of ours was the natural inheritance of republican children only.’¹ A child in an early American travelogue,² on a visit to England commented, in much the same way, that her English contemporaries seemed to be brought up with infinitely more rigours, but ‘they cannot take care of themselves half so well as the juvenile Americans’. One also remembers the glimpse that Louisa Alcott gives us of well-born young ‘Englishers’ in chapter XII of Little Women. We pass over the way young Fred cheats at croquet; that surely was not typical, but the twenty-year-old Kate’s ‘stand-off-don’t-touch-me air, which contrasted strongly with the free-and-easy demeanour of the other [Amercian] girls’ is instantly recognisable. It was indeed the manner implicitly prescribed in books for British girlhood such as those of Charlotte Yonge, and, caricatured, can be seen in all its perfection in Trollope’s Griselda Grantley (destined to be the Marchioness of Hartletop), the nonpareil of English female decorum. Hippolyte Taine, who visited England in the 1860s, had remarked upon how the adolescent daughters of the upper classes, though they might look well-grown, were still children, ‘Not one of their ideas or gestures betray the woman’.³