William and Edna Clarke Hall: Private and Public Childhood, "Your child for ever"

William and Edna Clarke Hall: Private and Public Childhood, "Your child for ever" Jad Adams London ON 1 SEPTEMBER 1890 twenty-three-year-old dry dock manager and poet Ernest Dowson met twenty-four-year-old barrister and poet William Clarke Hall; they talked about girls. Dowson described Clarke Hall in a letter to a librarian friend as "a charming person and properly a worshipper and devout follower of the most excellent cult of La Fillette ."1 The year before that meeting Dowson had met for the first time (and soon fell in love with) eleven-year-old Adelaide Foltinowicz who was a Soho restaurant keeper's daughter. Two years after that conversation with Dowson, William Clarke Hall was to meet and fall for thirteen -year-old Edna Waugh. She writes of sitting on his knee while he whispered Dowson's poems in her ear.2 He described her as "the child for whom of all things in the world I care most."3 The emphasis on the child takes on added significance. Not only was Clarke Hall one of the greatest exponents of the welfare of the child (author of six books on children including the standard text, still known in its modern editions as Clarke Hall and Morrison on Children4·) but after a courtship of six years he married Waugh. She was nineteen, he thirty-two. The wealth of material on the Clarke Halls, largely previously unpublished , now allows a detailed examination of the dynamics of their personal relationship and how Clarke Hall's attitude to girls played out in his relationship with his wife and reflected in his work. Of keen interest, too, is the effect of this relationship on the life and work of Edna Clarke Hall, one of the great British women artists of the early twentieth century. A developing awareness of the sexuality of girls created a tension between the adoration of girl-children, a frequent motif in Victorian 398 Adams : Clarke halls life, and a new definition of girlhood in explicitly sexual terms. Louise Jackson in Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England comments on the changes which took place: "A girl of 12, considered a mature sexual agent in 1870 was, by 1885, labelled in terms of vulnerability, as unable to defend herself from sexual advances."5 James Kincaid has described in his book Child-Loving the emergence of a definition of childhood in the late-Victorian period specifically as that time in which sex with the person is forbidden, naturally attracting attention to that forbidden act, and the emergence of what would later be called paedophilia.6 However, other scholars have demonstrated how girlhood represented much more in the psyches of sensitive gentlemen than a cutoff point before which sex was forbidden. Catherine Robson in Men in Wonderland has attracted attention to the way in which an idealised girlhood represented a lost world for some Victorian gentlemen who saw the female child as the embodiment of their own lost innocence.7 While both Dowson and Clarke Hall considered their feelings towards young girls perfectly natural, their meeting in 1890 took place five years after the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act had increased the age of consent for girls. The model of innocent girlhood (as being one continuous phase of sexless life until marriage) existed untainted , at least as regards the middle class, until the 1870s and 1880s when it was battered by arguments about the age of consent. There had not, since 1285 in the time of Edward I, been any legal doubt that sex with girls under twelve was wrong and was therefore subject to statutory penalties. The late-Victorian period, however, saw the extension of prohibition to sixteen and thus the extension of what would later be called paedophilia (here taken to mean sex with underage girls) into what would also later be called the teenage years. Obviously both these phrases are anachronisms, used here for clarity and ease. What was happening to the girl-child and adult relationships with her at the time and how was it reflected in the lives of those who made a point of their interest in children? There was certainly fantasy that...