Management and Children Life in Sickness and in Health

Popular discussion of children in America and Britain in the nineteenth century reflected the growing notion that childhood was a time to be savored, protected, and sheltered, and included a burgeoning discourse on how to manage children at home and abroad. From medical professionals such as Pye Henry Chavasse, whose influential books in the latter decades of the nineteenth century told generations of mothers what to expect during their children’s youth, to novelists whose characters expounded their views on mothering, to the rise in patent foods advertised for the very young, everyone seemed to have an opinion about the proper management of children. This volume will include the rearing of children, especially establishing Western tenets for children in colonial settings. For example, Christina Bremner’s accounts of Anglo-Indian children in the Punjab not only examine images of English children in India, but present a skewed portrait of English children at home. Excerpts from Pandita Ramabai and others discuss the tragic plight of child brides and child widows in India. The texts included in this volume outline customs surrounding childhood, whether exotic or distasteful, and reflect the distress at inappropriate feeding and clothing of native children encountered by travelers, as well as discussions of infanticide and the problems colonial settlers encountered when adapting their fragile children to unfamiliar climates (for example Thurston). Yet discussion also centered on domestic pastimes for children and debated how to combat disease as well as how to rear and discipline children.