Songs of Innocence Read Online Free Page A

reaching adulthood. Parents simply could not – or at least did not
– make the same emotional investment that they do today. ‘No jubilation sounded on this occasion,’ Alice wrote of her birth. ‘Only the dull acceptance of another hungry
mouth to feed.’
    Nor was it only the impoverished working classes who took this more relaxed attitude to child-rearing. Morrice Man was born intoa middle-class family from Kent –
his father was a barrister in Burma and the family also lived for a time in France. He described being put on a ferry alone, aged nine, to travel to school in England. A random passenger was asked
to keep an eye on him: ‘Nobody spoke to me, so far as I remember; the aforesaid passenger forgot all about me. I never saw him (or her) again. It was a rough passage. I was homesick and very
seasick. On reaching Newhaven I got ashore somehow – I had a through ticket to Lewes where I was to be met.’ 9
    While Morrice described his family life – he was one of nine children – as warm and loving, and his mother as devoted, he spent much of his time with a nurse. From the age of nine,
he was away at boarding school. Yet, despite the rather buttoned-up sensibilities of the era, the childhood he described was one into which the less respectable aspects of the adult world would
quite often intrude. ‘Uncle Bill . . . taught me the Charge of the Light Brigade and often he would take me, when he lived at Hythe, to the White Hart, and stand me on the bar . . . and make
me recite to the assembled company,’ he recalled.
    But the great incident of his childhood, long remembered, occurred during an election while the family were living at Croydon. Morrice’s father went out to support the Tory candidate:
‘The excitement was terrific and the night when the result was declared we children were as a treat allowed to be present at the town hall. I shall never forget the scene that night, the
raging crowds. Our house was put under police protection as some of the Liberal mob considered my father mainly responsible for their defeat. We boys knew this and went to bed armed to the teeth
(we slept three in a room) with sticks and toy pistols . . . The only incident that occurred that night was the temporary arrest of a great friend of father’s who came to congratulate him in
a state of some inebriation. We were allowed to speak our minds and father always enjoyed a joke.’
    While the popular imagination, fired by the works of Dickens, saw the child as a vulnerable innocent, in need of protection from the vicissitudes of adult life, parents,
it seemed, took a very different view.
    Out on the streets
    While most families seemed to accept a certain amount of rough-and-tumble in their own lives, such behaviour was a very different matter when it was happening elsewhere –
particularly in the over-crowded alleys of Britain’s industrial cities. While Morrice Man was revelling in high jinks on election night, there was growing concern about the levels of violence
in other quarters.
    In the first half of the nineteenth century, the abolition of stamp duties on newspapers had allowed the popular press to proliferate. And by the end of Victoria’s reign, there was a
plethora of publications eager to catch the mood of the times – not least, to tap into the age-old feeling that society was in a state of terminal decline. In the hot summer of 1898, the
Hooligan burst on to the pages of the national press after an exceptionally rowdy August bank holiday weekend. In the following weeks and months, a fully-formed youth culture solidified in print
form, wearing a uniform of bell-bottom trousers, peaked caps and neck scarves, heavily ornamented leather belts and a shaved tuft at the crown. The English fair play tradition of fighting with
fists and not with feet, it was reported, was in eclipse. The issue played into the hands of those who believed there had been too much romanticism about children in recent