Legend has it that the Rev Sabine Baring-Gould, the author of Onward, Christian Soldiers and father of 16, patted the head of a passing child at a village fete, booming, “And whose little girl are you?” To which the suddenly tearful tot replied: “Yours, Papa.”

This is perhaps too good to be true, but it does thriftily encapsulate the enduring image of the Victorian paterfamilias. In contrast to this broadbrush caricature, Anthony Fletcher uses a deft, pointillist technique, placing extracts from diaries, letters and memoirs side-by-side to create a gloriously detailed picture of three centuries of childhood.

The idea of childhood as a separate place from adulthood has begun to be explored by historians comparatively recently. It was only in 1960 that the still-too-frequently cited book, Centuries of Childhood by Philippe Ariès, set out the notion that childhood was a creation of the modern world, stating flatly that “in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist”. Much of Ariès's thesis was predicated by an extreme right-wing yearning for a hierarchical world of certainty, of freer, happier children living idyllic lives. Fletcher now offers a useful - and vastly entertaining - corrective.

Fletcher, as befits an emeritus professor of English social history at the University of London, begins with theory, examining early how-to manuals for creating the perfect child. The Puritans in the 16th century knew children were imbued with original sin, which had to be driven out. (One divine wrote that buttocks were designed by God specifically to be beaten without harm.) By the 18th-century, John Locke's ground-breaking idea that the child was a “blank slate” made childhood a gentler place, leading directly to the Victorian idea of childhood as a state of innocence.

In the core central section, Fletcher uses the words of children and their parents to show how those theories played out in reality. Should boys be taught at home, which risked them becoming effeminate, or should they go away to school, where vices all-too-imaginable lurked? How should girls be taught their maidenly duty of subjection, first to their parents, ultimately to their husbands? Mothers, although the weaker sex, were expected to be master of both. The wife of Admiral Boscawen assured him that in his absence their boy was being adequately disciplined: “The rod and I,” she wrote ominously, “went to breakfast with him.” Absentee husbands sent their own versions of parenting manuals: “Let the girls be taught a grave, modest, reserved carriage,” instructed Philip Francis, from India. “I dislike hoydens...if you take them to a play, which not above once a winter, let it be...nothing sentimental or that borders upon indecorous.” (His wife followed orders, but with little reward: after 20 years of raising six children alone, she was abandoned by her husband.)

Both parents and children expected boys and girls to be treated differently, with rambunctious behaviour in boys rewarded as early sign of “manliness”. Boys' schools, in Fletcher's vivid descriptions, were bearpits of violence, where schoolboys more or less ruled themselves, and adult-child corporal punishment was simply a ritualised version of the pain larger boys inflicted on smaller.

The brutal fact of child mortality is a constant. Ralph Verney attempted to comfort his wife when Peg, their eight-year-old, died in 1647: “Had you but seen with what unparalleled patience poor Peg bore all her pains and with what discretion and affection she disposed of her wearing clothes, unto her maid that tended her.” By contrast, Matthew Flinders, a surgeon, reflected pragmatically on his baby's death in 1775 that, “as we have nought in a natural sense but my industry in business to depend on, we ought to welcome the non increase of our family as a blessing.” Three years later, when his twins died, he was thankful that once more divine providence had not saddled him “with the additional care of more children”.

It is statements such as these that pull the reader up short when Fletcher suggests that in the 300 years he surveys there is little or no fundamental change to the experience of childhood. For much of his material shows precisely the opposite: that “childhood” is not a single idea, but a fluid construct. Everything changed. At the beginning of his period, the material world of the child consisted of a cradle and perhaps a teething-ring and, for the very lucky, a rag poppet; by the 19th century, there were shops filled with books, magazines, dolls-houses, drums, rocking-horses, jigsaws, board-games, puppets magic-lanterns, kaleidoscopes and more. In Hanoverian times, children were physically much in evidence in the daily life of the house, playing and eating in adult company, while at the same time there was a rigid social hierarchy in place. At Nostell Priory in the 1730s, even the dolls' house was hierarchical, with the dolls representing the family made of wax, while the servants were only of wood. Within families, too, hierarchy was the rule. Lady Anne Cust called her first-born “Jacky” until his late adolescence, when he became “my dear”; after he came of age she wrote “Dear Sir John”. By contrast, in the Victorian period, pet names abounded, but where space and finances allowed, physical segregation was the norm, by gender as well as age: women in the boudoir, men in the smoking-room, children in the nursery.

This is not the only place where theory and evidence part company. While the book's remit is wider than its title (a handful of families from Ireland, Wales and Scotland are included), Fletcher's subject is narrower than its subtitle, which should perhaps read, “The Experience of Childhood Among the Landed Gentry and Above”. Neville Lyttelton, one of the many children who scamper across his pages, wrote, “We dwelt among our own people.” By this he meant not just his 11 siblings, but the vast number of servants, and the villagers whom the Lyttelton family considered “theirs”. An urban upper-class child would not think in the same way; and it would be an unimaginable statement for the middle classes.

Fletcher takes on some of Lyttelton's sweeping grandeur himself. In his excellent discussion of the schoolroom he takes governesses for granted. But the 1871 census lists only 55,000 governesses shared among 200,000 upper-class and upper-middle-class families. Likewise, almost all his diarists and letter writers are devout; yet the 1851 Religious Census reports that on census day only 17% of the population attended an Anglican service, and another 17% a Dissenting service - say 40%. The other 60% are notable by their absence in this work.

But these caveats arise only because of the value of Fletcher's work. Childhood is an experience we all undergo, lasting on historical average nearly a third of a lifetime; that Fletcher has managed to explore in depth its myriad variations over three centuries is an extraordinary achievement. To want more is to be as greedy as John Ramsden, aged 11, who in 1842 wrote to his mother from school, asking for big marbles, biscuits, a brown bread loaf with currants, raisins and citron, and adding: “Are you not delighted: you will soon have the pleasure of seeing me again very very soon.” Growing Up in England is a huge currant, raisin and citron loaf, bursting with good things, which I shall return to very, very often.

Growing up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600-1914 by Anthony Fletcher
Yale £25 pp434

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