Conclusion

In 1860, nineteen-year-old James Armour, a Presbyterian from north Antrim, wrote a letter to his friend James Megaw with his opinion of the intellectual atmosphere at Queen’s University Belfast. He criticized the lack of religious fervour among students of divinity who he felt were attracted by the social prestige rather than the spiritual vocation of a ministerial career. He stated, ‘Many choose it [the church] from a desire of show and of having a respectable position in society; others for the sake of the L. S. D., others again for the sake of being called great but the greater number from the ambition of their parents.’...

Schooling Young Gentlewomen

This chapter considers educational provision for Irish girls and the origins of Catholic female religious teaching orders in Ireland. The purpose and content of female education was based on a construction of the Irish girl as a vain and excitable creature. Her education was intended to curb the supposedly innate character flaws of girlhood. This chapter considers a selection of Loreto, Ursuline, and Dominican boarding schools to examine how institutions implemented the ideal of Catholic girlhood in practice. From academic curricula, disciplinary measures, daily schedules, and uniforms, the boarding school experience contained a variety of mechanisms for forming the behaviour of girls. Debates over female education and the convent boarding school offer an excellent example of how ideas of class, femininity, and religion interacted with evolving views of childhood.

Religion, Sectarianism, and the Wild Irish Child

This chapter examines representations of the Irish Catholic family in print, focusing on cheaply produced religious pamphlets and advice literature. Predictably, this kind of didactic material is strongly sectarian in nature and illustrates how childcare served as a barometer of civilized behaviour. Children in these narratives are objects in need of reform, serving as exemplars of all that was right and wrong with Irish character. The confessional divide in Irish society was wide and contributed to the unique quality of Irish childhood. However, it was not as simple as the mere dichotomy of Protestant and Catholic might suggest. While denominational loyalties were fundamental, there was another process of social differentiation happening alongside sectarian conflict and this chapter highlights the shifting narratives of class and childhood across the first four decades of the nineteenth century.

Medical Men, Negligent Mothers, and Malleable Children

This chapter considers the medicalization of childhood from the late eighteenth century into the 1840s. What we might now term a ‘biological’ definition of childhood is seen first in late eighteenth-century medical intervention into the care of infants. These texts are part of a wider ‘rationalization’ of childhood which emerged in scientific and child-rearing genres. The influence in Ireland of John Locke, William Buchan, and the Edgeworths’ contributed to a reformulation of childhood as a period of enormous intellectual and physical malleability. As the matter of children’s health shifted from the female domain to the business of men, medical professionals defined the child body in opposition to the adult male body. Elite women were criticized for coddling their children excessively, while the lower classes were characterized as neglectful and uncaring. By the mid-nineteenth century, objective standards of growth were deployed as mechanisms for governing parental as much as childhood behaviour.

Schooling Little Gentlemen

Based on primary source material from bourgeois and elite boarding schools, this chapter considers the debate on appropriate education for middle-class boys. Irish middle-class schools largely emulated the classical curriculum offered in British and Continental elite schools; however, there was a move towards offering a more practical course of studies for scholars bound for a mercantile future during the 1840s. An examination of the bourgeois school environment, the institutional construction of masculine success and failure, and the content of a manly education suggest a way of understanding adult projections of boyhood and children’s experience of a boarding school education.

Introduction

In James Malton’s 1790 engraved watercolour of St Stephen’s Green, all classes of Dublin’s human and animal inhabitants are depicted taking in the benefits of the open air. Various brightly coloured figures promenade through the park, greeting one another, selling flowers, or taking their dogs for an outing. A draughtsman by trade, Malton’s rendering of Dublin’s Georgian facades feature the detail he was noted for, although in this setting they are secondary to the fashionable individuals traversing the scene (...

Fashioning Childhood

Clothing was an important signifier of status and gender and became more closely associated with childhood health and well-being during the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Although the importance of appearance within fashionable society has long historical antecedents, during this period children’s costumes became part of the discourse of good parenting. Children and infants were more intensely scrutinized for their appearance, and bourgeois parents were under more cultural pressure to ensure that their children had the accoutrements of healthy childhood. Within the deeply hierarchical social world of nineteenth-century Ireland, personal image was consistently conflated with public position. Children’s fashion represents adults’ social and gendered expectations of their children, while also depicting the physical world children inhabited during early childhood. An increased emphasis on accruing artefacts of childhood became tied to middle-class identity and respectability. Purchasing the newest toy or children’s book indicated not just an anticipation of the child’s needs but was a symbol of social status.