The ‘entirely fresh view’ of childhood in England presented by Anthony Fletcher in 414 pages of text and apparatus may come to some as a bit of an anti-climax. Although material conditions changed enormously, and children by the end of his period had more toys and books and birthday presents, his 12 years of research have ‘not revealed any grounds for supposing that anything of fundamental importance changed, between 1600 and 1914, in the dynamic of the relationships between English parents and their children’. Not so much ‘entirely fresh’, then, as deep-frozen.
He may well be right, at least in relation to his samples, which are made up entirely of families from the landed gentry and the upper professional classes. Even though Lawrence Stone is not mentioned in the text, this book may also be in part a response to Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, an influential work which has not, however, been without its critics already.
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