Growing up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Cultural History of Middle-Class Childhood and Gender by Mary Hatfield (review)

The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish childhood has emerged as a major field of Irish historical and educational studies over the last ten years. Some of the interest in Irish childhood has been driven by a need to understand the ways in which poor children and their families were understood economically, politically, and socially within an Irish society that saw many poor children institutionalized and suffering the abuse of predators within not just the nineteenth-century workhouses but, more significantly, the industrial and reformatory schools of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More especially, the abuse and neglect suffered by children within these institutions will remain forever the shame of Irish society.

Mary Hatfield has produced a book that moves away from this history to explore the worlds of middle-class children in Irish society. Hatfield moves from an analysis of the fluid concept and understanding of childhood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to explore how childhood was professionalized and regulated by adults. She argues that the treatment and care of children, particularly where it related to education, helped define the boundaries of middle-class respectability and was central to the formation of social identity. In the five chapters that follow, the author uses her sources to mark, over time, the consolidation of middle-class sets of ideas, practices, and behaviors about children and childhood. In each chapter, the author utilizes a particular age range to explore specific themes and topics. To that end, she examines the medicalization of pregnancy and infanthood and explores how doctors intervened on issues relating to children's education and clothing. Given the religious and indeed sectarian nature of Irish society, particularly in the nineteenth century, the author offers an assessment of the prescriptive literature on child-rearing in the period, much of it written by upper-class women. Certainly, in the early nineteenth century, a central tenet of this literature was directed at improving the Irish Catholic peasants' rearing of their children. Remodeling such training was a means to reform the Irish peasantry more generally. Chapter 3 examines Irish childhood as a material construction. Here the author looks at how clothing and toys, for example, shaped adults' social and gendered expectations of their children. The final two chapters investigate, in detail, the boarding-school education of the middle classes in Ireland in the period. Here there is a close analysis of the worlds of these schools, which had their own beliefs and assumptions about the needs of children, revealing how and why boys and girls were educated as they were and how education shaped the gendered expectations of men and women.

The author has used an impressive array of primary sources, including manuals and prescriptive literature of the period, autobiographies, school archives, family papers, and objects relating to the material culture of middle-class childhood, including children's clothing from the National Museum in Ireland. There is, for instance, a transcription of a most wonderful letter from a son to his father detailing a new suit of clothes he wanted. The child's voice is present in much of this book and we get a strong sense of these children's experiences of their schooling and the ways in which they partook in the rituals of their lives. There are instances when children resist their education, and through their letters home to parents and their bad behavior, manage to have themselves sent home. A chapter on how these children interacted with each other, as siblings, as friends, and across gender lines would have been very welcome. Perhaps the author will explore this aspect of childhood at some stage. Some space might also have been given to the political, social, and economic contexts of the period. The long nineteenth century was an era of social and economic upheaval, even if one just thinks of the Great Famine...