In the Best Interests of the Parent: Children, Material Culture, and the Law

Fourteen-year-old Andy Hall’s family lived in unspeakable poverty. His drunken father brutalized his worn-down wife and regularly threatened little Roxy, Andy’s crippled sister who found refuge under ragged blankets in a dark corner. The family barely survived on scraps of begged-for food. Andy associated with other “idle and profane” boys, “seeking mischief and delighting in it as all idlers do.” His saving grace: the biscuits or snacks he occasionally brought home for his inexplicably cheerful younger sister. ¹

Into this familial cesspool steps — gingerly at first — the Kents, a comfortably middle-class family who undertakes to salvage these wrecked lives through kindness and religious conversion. Mrs. Kent brings food and, later, Christmas presents to Roxy, whose father sells the latter for beer money and forces his daughter to beg at the Kents’ door. They take her in, but Roxy soon succumbs to a vague illness, gladly joining her Savior in heaven. In the meantime, Mr. Hall dies “the dreadful death of a drunkard” and Mrs. Hall, released from her husband’s intoxicated tyranny, finds a job as a servant in a good home. Although Andy occasionally attends a neighborhood mission school, he doggedly resists the straight and narrow path offered by his new friends until Roxy’s pious death, his mother’s new life, and his father’s ugly demise finally spark in him a sudden and violent conversion. ²

All of this occurs a few years before the Civil War. After Fort Sumter, Andy joins Mr. Kent’s company and serves loyally and bravely in the Union army. He converts fellow soldiers left and right, is wounded severely, receives a discharge, and returns home, where he continued his godly and compassionate life. Although Andy Hall: The Mission Scholar in the Army appeared in 1863, its wartime denouement is really just an extension of the moral redemption that nineteenth-century reformers thought possible, even in such wholly “dysfunctional” families as the Halls.

Andy Hall takes place over the course of half a decade, yet the story illustrates a number of the factors examined for much longer periods of time in Children in the House and From Father’s Property to Children’s Rights. For instance, the Halls were buffeted by economic forces beyond their control that were only made worse by Mr. Hall’s moral bankruptcy. The Kents’ middle-class status equipped them with certain class assumptions and responsibilities that led them to intervene in the Halls’ ghastly lives. Finally, the evangelical tone of the book provides a clue to the ideological context of reform — for children as well as other needy members of society.

These and other forces are also analyzed by Calvert and Mason. Although they tackle highly divergent subjects, they both approach childhood not from the point of view of children, but from the ways that the interests and actions of parents have affected the lives of their progeny. Calvert examines everyday objects such as toys, clothes, and furniture, and argues that the attitudes and ideas that determined the evolution of the material culture of very young children passed through three stages before 1900. The first, from 1600 to 1750, was a period in which parents viewed their children as subhuman beings who had to be hurried through childhood to rational and useful adulthood. Stage two, from 1750 to 1830, saw an “across-the-board rejection of traditional childrearing methods” (p. 56), and the creation of “natural” childhood. Stage three, from 1830 to 1900, revealed childhood as innocent and joyful, a set of images shaped at least partly by the nostalgic memories of middle-class parents. Mason also divides her study of the history...