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Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer
Feeling through Practice: Subjectivity and Emotion in Children’s Writing
Forthcoming in Journal of Social History 51:1 (2017)
Abstract
This article analyzes how children in 1930s’ Britain narrated their everyday behavior, feelings and fantasies when asked to do so by their teachers. It is based upon a study of over one thousand essays that were written by children in 1937 and 1938, which were collected by the British social investigative organization, Mass Observation, as part of its Worktown Project. The argument is situated within the history of emotions and we interrogate the utility of recent conceptual frameworks for the better understanding of children’s subjectivities. The essays show that children were able to juggle contradictory demands and expectations, learn emotional codes and match emotional style to spatial context when moving between school, home and leisure arenas. To some extent, then, children adapted and shaped their behavior to comply with specific emotional communities. However, we argue that this model offers only a partial account of children’s emotional practices. In the second part of the article we suggest a move away from thinking about emotional communities or emotional styles as pre-dominantly value-based and spatially-defined (by the school, home, street – spaces which children inhabited and might have influenced but which were conceived and built by adults) and argue instead for increased attention to be paid to the material context and,
particularly, the relationships that operated within and across these spaces. Ultimately, we argue, children’s emotional experiences were less about “learning to feel” than feeling through practice.
Introduction
“Come down, lazy bones!” shouted my mother, as the clock struck 9.30am. “I’m getting dressed,” I shouted. I was lazy in bed reading at the time. “Are you getting up?” she shouted over and over again. “I’m coming now,” I said in a rage, throwing the book into the air. It was a nice morning. My mother always opens the windows. When I threw the book into the air it must have gone through the window. I heard someone shout “Oh! My head.”^1
So began a neatly-written, one-page essay entitled “What I did on my Thursday holiday” written in May 1937. Its author was Flora Caine, a pupil in the senior girls’ department at Pike’s Lane Council School in Bolton, North-West England, and this composition was one of many that she wrote alongside her classmates that year, addressing a range of topics including “What I think of Jesus,” “When I grow up” and “Things I learn at home that I do not learn at school.” Her class teacher passed the essays on to the social research organization Mass Observation, and today these children’s essays are preserved in the Mass Observation Archive, sitting alongside hundreds of other children’s essays collected, and sometimes actively solicited, by the organization across the mid-twentieth century. This article is based on a study of over one thousand essays that were written in 1937 and 1938 by children – about three quarters of whom were girls – aged seven to fourteen.^2 They were collected from a number of schools as part of
class southerners. 9 Observers frequently thought of themselves as distanced – socially, culturally and emotionally – from their Bolton subjects of research. A casually condescending tone is undoubtedly apparent in some of the research notes compiled by one observer, Oxford- educated Frank Cawson, who made a series of pen-sketches of Flora Caine and her classmates. He noted of Flora herself: “Father lorry driver, swears a lot. Spoil v scold. Mother admits can’t manage her. Very funny looking. Father made her stick up for herself. Very pugnacious. Plausible, telltale. Very unpopular….Untidy clothes.”^10 Such judgements reflected a hierarchy of power that was accentuated by differences of gender and generation. Cawson was not only dismissive of the physical and behavioral attributes of these children and their parents, but made comment on their emotional qualities: Vera Slater had “rather a temper. Good apart from that”; Helen Harris was “often giddy”; Nella Greenwood was “good hearted, gossipy”. Annie Hilton’s mother had “a terrible temper, child rather nervous”; while in Cawson’s notes for Freda Baxter – “V. refined. Lives in flat with mother. Rather emotional type” – it is not clear whether his final statement, intended pejoratively, referred to mother or daughter.
Such comments belied the complexity of these children’s emotional lives. Many of the children demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of their emotional selves in their written accounts. A sense of self grounded in, but capable of transcending, spatial and relational contexts permeates their essays. Flora herself aspired to be an author when she grew up and spent her spare time “trying to make up good sensible poems.”^11 Her ability to think independently and to manipulate words to describe her feelings and express her creative imagination is evident in several of her essays, from her description of an imagined future as a farm worker: “Just think how nice the fresh cream would be. Anyone who reads this I hope it does not make your mouth water as it has made mine,” to her take on inequality and struggles of power. Writing about “Hell” she noted that “the devil will never be as rich as God. People say he burns you in a fire
but I don’t state that it’s true…He, the man who has no power, is trying all he can to take God’s.” Her emotional value-system probably differed very little, in fact, to what Cawson might have believed to be the ideal attributes of a (middle-class) child, and she declared that what she most appreciated in others was friendship, love and kindness.^12
Children and Emotion
Whilst the academic study of emotion has deep temporal and cross-disciplinary foundations, historians have of late contributed a number of methodological insights to the field. For Peter and Carol Stearns, “emotionology” – the study of emotional codes and standards – facilitated the analysis of emotional culture. 13 The study of emotional repertoires and expression – William Reddy’s “emotives” for example – and of collective feeling-systems – “emotional regimes” or “emotional communities” – has also provided a strong analytical framework for the historicity of feeling.^14 Barbara Rosenwein’s development of the latter has been particularly influential. First advanced ten years ago and reiterated several times since, she suggests that “emotional communities are groups – usually but not always social groups – that have their own particular values, modes of feeling and ways to express those feelings.”^15
Rosenwein’s work has been further developed by others, among them Benno Gammerl, for whom “emotional styles” encompass “the experience, fostering, and display of emotions, and oscillate between discursive patterns and embodied practices as well as between common scripts and specific appropriations.” According to Gammerl, “styles correspond with notions of community” but are more explicitly spatially defined: “The supermarket calls for a different emotional repertoire compared to the beach or the office. How specific emotions like grief,
emotional formation helped to secure a hierarchically ordered set of social categorizations.” 20 Despite an impressive attempt by historians to recover children’s agency in a variety of contexts, an exploration of the way in which they were able to adapt and shape their behavior to comply with specific emotional communities – or indeed, to resist and subvert them – nevertheless continues to see them as reactive. A recent collection of essays by Ute Frevert et al , for example, asks how children in the past “learnt how to feel,” offering an impressive analysis of “the changing emotional repertoire offered to children within two heterogeneous genres, children’s literature and advice manuals.” The editors are sensibly attuned to reading as an “active experience”, and prefer to talk of “learning” rather than “teaching”, but this nevertheless continues to have hierarchical connotations; the authors suggest that “children’s books…proved to be an important genre in the process of constructing and producing emotions” and had a “significant function through which children were directly shaped.”^21
As we will demonstrate in the next section of this article, children might indeed alter their behavior in different contexts. The space of the school in particular can be characterized as an emotional formation or community within which particular emotional styles were demanded and which children railed against or acquiesced in as they confronted emotional frontiers. However, our sources facilitate a second way of understanding children’s subjectivities. In the final section we suggest a move away from thinking about emotional communities or emotional styles as pre-dominantly value-based and spatially-defined (by the school, home, street – spaces which children inhabited and might have influenced but which were conceived and built by adults) and argue for increased attention to the relationships – and, to invoke Scheer’s work, the “emotional practices” – that operated within and across these spaces.
To do this, we need to pay more attention to subjectivity: how children themselves understood their emotional experiences and relationships with others. Most histories of childhood are explored through sources created by adults.^22 In the inaugural issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth , launched in 2008, Peter Stearns outlined what he saw as the key challenges for the history of childhood. The first, his “granddaddy issue,” was “the virtually unprecedented problems of getting information from children themselves, as opposed to adult perceptions and recommendations and adult-created artefacts.” 23 Accessing children’s subjective understandings is no easy task. In his important history of the place of the child in the post-1945 settlement, Mathew Thomson explores how a top-down sense of “the child’s view of the world” increasingly framed social policy, but acknowledges his own inattention to the narratives of children themselves.^24 Frevert’s collection “does not explore what children actually learnt from children’s books or advice manuals,” noting that it “would be very difficult to historically reconstruct the reception of the practical knowledge that was offered.”^25
Such challenges have not deterred all efforts by historians to explore the self-representations of children; some have made children’s writings a central part of their work. The Tidy House , first published in 1982, is described by its author Carolyn Steedman as being “about little girls and their mediation and manipulation of a culture in written words…extraordinary in what it demonstrates of children’s involvement in the process of their own socialization.”^26 Here the problem of source availability was not an issue – Steedman was a primary school teacher in the 1970s and could access the writings of her pupils. More recently, there has been a growing focus upon the ways in which children self-fashioned through their literary output. Emily Bruce has argued that middle-class children’s writing in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany provided an important training in sociability and class cultures; Saheed Aderinto uses letters written by Nigerian boys to colonial administrators to illuminate children’s contribution to
twice and kiss Barbara Francis. We had a happy time we had ice cream and all sorts of things. We sometimes play at house and we have a doll for our baby. Sometimes we go on the swings and have a lot of fun there we play at shop sometimes and have bricks for toffee. We also have real weights and weigh the bricks on them. We play at school and write on a board and easel and we chalk all sorts of things.^29
This article uses the contemporaneous writings of Margaret and her peers to explore how they wrote about themselves and their feelings. The next section explores the way in which children traversed different emotional contexts and sought to manage their competing demands. Cawson might have dismissed these children, but their essays show that they were able to juggle contradictory expectations, learn emotional codes and match emotional style to spatial context. The children describe complex social interactions in distinct, but permeable spaces, and suggest the performance of sophisticated emotional self-management.
Moving between Emotional Spaces
The built environment of the school has been a particular focus of spatial analysis in recent years.^30 In particular, the school has often been posited as a site of control and regulation over children’s bodies, with its architecture and materiality conducive to the creation of a disciplinary space and culture. Referring to the one of the first generation of school buildings that followed the introduction of compulsory mass education – Nelson St School, built in 1876 in a poor area of Birmingham – Ian Grosvenor describes school as:
a space in which teachers developed their professional role, educating and disciplining
the young. Control was in the buildings, the space created, and in the material contents of this space – furniture and equipment. Under the influence of school architecture the child was transformed into a school child, into a subject of school culture, a culture which stood for ideas about learning, discipline and authority relations quite at variance with the local culture.^31
The school has also been recognized as a powerful emotional space. Joakim Landahl uses the framework of emotional communities in his work on Swedish schools in the second half of the nineteenth century. “The advent of mass schooling,” he argues, “can be described as a potential emotional revolution. The emergence of schools meant that a new institution was created which was able to disseminate emotional ideals to a completely new degree.”^32 In Britain, too, the “civilizing mission” with which elementary schools were often tasked, particularly in urban working-class areas, was motivated by a drive to shape children’s emotions as well as their behavior. Examining late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century practice and pedagogy, Peter Yeandle has shown how the history stories in English elementary school readers were explicitly designed to provoke a particular emotional reaction in their young readers and thereby encourage an emotional attachment to the nation.^33 Perhaps even keener to elicit national (imperial) loyalties were the English managers of Irish schools. Paddy Dolan refers to nineteenth-century Irish education “as a state instrument of emotional integration”, arguing that the teaching could increasingly be characterized as “the emotionally controlled efforts of adults to control the emotions of children.”^34
Of course, humanities scholars have long approached space as “dynamic, constructed, and contested,”^35 and the above authors acknowledge that studying the intent of the adults who designed, managed or taught in these spaces provides no guarantee that children complied.
the number of children who referred to helping people cross the road (the old, the blind, the young and even, in one case, “the poor”) as “good”, probably a direct influence of school lessons in a year in which road safety training was being pushed in classrooms across the country.^40 Elsewhere the teacher’s influence was even more obvious. “You’ll notice that a number of girls have mentioned cafes and museums,” wrote a teacher to accompany a set of essays on “What I like best,” explaining that this “may or may not” have been due to the fact that she had been asked how to spell these two words and had written them on the board.^41
The children’s essays reveal an awareness of their place in a generational hierarchy that privileged the emotions and values of adults. Money is “more useful to grown up people than children because they buy food and clothing and other useful objects, while children spend it on sweets and other things which are of no use,” admitted one boy.^42 Even the youngest children nevertheless demonstrated their strategic compliance with the dominant emotional expectations of the classroom. A week after the 1937 Armistice service, for example, one class of children was asked to write down what they had been thinking about during the two minutes’ silence. “I thought about the soldiers that was in the war. I thought about them who were killed in the war,” wrote eight-year-old Billy Bishop. A note added by his teacher stated: “He laughed all the time so I don’t think this is true.”^43 The apparent contradiction between this boy’s behavior in class (and by implication his emotional response) and his self-fashioning on paper, reminds us of long-established approaches to retrospectively-constructed life histories. As Alessandro Portelli put it in an early defense of oral history interviews: “They tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, what they now think they did.” 44 Billy was sufficiently alert to the emotional socialization of the classroom to know what he should have been thinking about. He was wise enough to express
this in his essay. He was also sufficiently resistant to dominant emotional codes to perform a different set of embodied emotional responses on the day.
The most significant “emotional frontier” for children might be thought to be that between home and school. Learning happened at home as well as in the classroom.^45 “We learn to bear pain at home but not at school”, wrote one nine year old, although there is no explanation of the context for this assertion.^46 Again, however, the provision of instruction did not guarantee acquiescence. In some instances, the children expressed overt contempt for the emotional tools brought to bear on them. Writing on “Heaven”, one essayist recorded that “A little boy had told his mother a lie and his mother said ‘you will never go to heaven’, so he told his mother the truth because he took it all in his head because he was a bit soft.”^47
The journey between school and home undoubtedly necessitated emotional work for children as they learnt to traverse the linguistic, behavioral and emotional codes upon which relationships within each space were founded. As we will demonstrate in the final section of this article, the boundaries between these spheres were remarkably permeable: children’s understandings of space were, on the whole, driven by their experiences of relationships within and across them. Nonetheless the essays reveal children working hard to mediate between often-contradictory expectations. One particular set of essays, “Things I learn at home that I do not learn at school,” demonstrates the children’s mindfulness of the need to present different versions of the self within each sphere.
“I learn plenty of things at home, and they are very useful,” began Jane Norris’s essay. She continued by describing the distinctions between home and school, and finished with an analysis of her own contradictory emotions, demonstrating an acute self-awareness:
Nonetheless Betsy wrote about making stews and dinners at school and “revising” them at home, demonstrating her understanding of the inter-relation of home and school.^49
Home and school were not, of course, the only spaces that offered lessons in feeling and doing. Nor were they the only spaces between which children journeyed. The new consumerism aimed at children and their parents that Peter Stearns has identified as a driver of the interwar turn towards childhood happiness in the United States, was also apparent (if to a lesser extent) within the British context. 50 Certainly the 1930s’ child had greater access to the commercialized world than any previous generation of working-class children. “We went to Woolworths, afterwards we went to Marks and Spencer and afterwards I got some new shoes and two new frocks,” wrote one child of an afternoon spent with her mother.^51 Asked to write about their understanding of happiness, material factors loomed large in the children’s accounts. “I feel happy when it is my birthday because I get plenty of birthday cards and presents,” wrote one.^52 Another recorded that:
A part of happiness is at the midsummer where we can go away on our holidays to the sea-side places. There when the sun is shining, we can go in the sea. There is another part of happiness at Christmas, we can have parties, and give presents, and get some back. I would be very happy if I had a swing, and a seesaw. Next I would like a big garden. Really happiness is a wonderful thing, because there is no sorrow.^53
The essays demonstrate the impact of consumerism on children in very precise ways. New, or seasonal, products were rapidly incorporated into the rhythms of everyday childhood play. Eight-year-old Joe Walker was not the only child to imply that his play was to some extent
determined by commercial interests. Asked what games he played and when, he explained, “we play top and whip in summer when it is warm. We play marbles in March and April. The shopkeeper sometimes tells us when it is marble time.”^54 But the latest leisure goods and entertainments also informed children’s emotional practices. Social commentators of both left and right increasingly warned of the impact of “modern” leisure forms on those they deemed to be emotionally vulnerable – chiefly women and the young.^55 If school was expected to provide a disciplinary context for the proper molding (and restraint) of children’s emotions, then commercial leisure was increasingly held to endanger the unformed mind; stimulating the sensations and promoting unrealistic fantasies of the future.^56 Cawson’s negative description of Freda Baxter (or her mother) as a “rather emotional type” speaks to classed, gendered and age specific assessments of the capacity of individuals to feel appropriately and to withstand emotional manipulation. Film-going was posited as particularly dangerous for those held to be emotionally vulnerable, capable of influencing patrons both within and beyond the cinema building itself.
The essays do show children responding powerfully to the messages coming from leisure. Popular culture provided an increasingly diverse set of scripts from which boys and girls – as well as adults – could self-fashion.^57 Attention to the play, stories and imagined worlds of children reveal their spatial horizons and emotional registers, and it is in the imaginative spaces that open up in the essays that the most obvious evidence of cultural scripts can be seen. Some used a language that would have been familiar to their parents from their own childhoods. The imagined adventure of one young pupil, for example, reflected the populist civilizing narrative of Empire taught in schools since the late nineteenth century: “I went to America and Africa. In Africa I was nearly killed. But a black man saved me but he was killed. I took his other children home and I soon learned them how to speak English.”^58 His classmate Celia Roberts
imagined having gone to live in America: “Some gangsters were staying the hotel not far away. One day the gangsters stole my money. Seeing that I had no money I thought it is no use I pulled my revolver out and committed suicide.”^65
Commercial leisure clearly influenced the everyday behavior, fantasies and feelings of children. It was, on the whole, written about approvingly by the Bolton children, who enthusiastically absorbed, and re-purposed, its dominant messages. But the essays show that they were also able to step back and offer critical commentary about the impact and influence of particular leisure practices, as Andrew Davies has documented with regard to older working-class youths in the same period.^66 An awareness that film-going might be an unwholesome occupation, as some adult critics believed it to be, was hinted at by Amy Fox in her description of Heaven as “just another world like the one we live on at present except that it might not have pictures and dance halls.” She provided this implicit criticism even though she noted elsewhere that she went to the cinema three times a week.^67 In a set of essays on “what is good and what is bad,” written by boys and girls aged twelve and thirteen, children took great care in weighing the value of scientific and technological innovations: the motor car for example was regarded as both good and bad, sometimes within the same essay. What is particularly striking is the analytical work the children did in order to explain their answers and their tendency to harness their everyday experiences and feelings in crafting a response. When asked to write about his summer holidays George Turner, for example, confessed that “My worst thing in Blackpool is shopping for you do nothing but look at things and buy them.”^68 In an admirably direct piece of film criticism, Morag Reed showed that she was capable of maintaining a critical distance from the cinematic spell, asserting simply that, “Pictures are bad things when they are rubbish.”^69
Relationships, Emotions and Space
In many ways our discussion so far of children’s movement between their school, home and leisure lives fits within Rosenwein’s notion of emotional communities and Gammerl’s idea of spatially-defined emotional styles. Billy Bishop, the boy who was asked to explain what he was thinking during the commemorative silence, identified “fundamental assumptions, values, goals, feeling rules, and accepted modes of expression” and responded accordingly – subverting, contesting and then acquiescing in those norms.^70 But, as Jan Plamper suggests, the emotional communities model has its limitations: “…the conception of emotional community itself suffers from the problems of any theory of societization…it is insufficiently open and radical: for are not the boundaries of an emotional community so porous and transient that one should rather be compelled to move away from the terminology of ‘boundary’, and hence of ‘community’?”^71
We suggest that there are two further limitations. The first, as discussed above, is that this model presents children as responsive to a set of emotional codes devised by adults. The second is that charting movement across different emotional frontiers may suggest a hierarchy between a supposedly “authentic” feeling and a learnt, “inauthentic”, expression of emotion, even though historians have long been wary of this dualism.^72 It is clearly an assumption to suggest that Ronnie Rudd’s laugher – or, rather, the teacher’s observation of his laugher – was somehow more “authentic” than his more solemn written account. Perhaps he was ashamed of laughing. Perhaps he was ashamed of his laugher (maybe he was nervous or provoked by another child) even at the time. It may be the case that he did indeed manipulate his writing to
