ABSTRACT
We all have a picture in our minds of the late Victorian and Edwardian upper middle-class family. In fact, our view of home, school and socialisation – and the relationship between them – is so powerful and so deeply entrenched that it can border on caricature. One of the family’s crucial features, we are led to believe, is the way in which it brought up its children. Upper middle-class parents, it is said, avoided intimacy, farmed out childcare as much as they could, and organised their households on strictly gendered lines. They had staff to look after their children when they were young; they kept their daughters at home to learn the genteel accomplishments expected of them and sent their sons away, at an absurdly young age, to be toughened up in the boarding establishments designed specifically for the purpose. We have in mind a process whereby prep school was followed by public
school, culminating in a place at one of the two ancient universities. Concentrating on sport, the classics and the cultivation of character, private schools knew exactly what was expected of them. The boys who started out along this educational conveyor belt at the age of eight or nine metamorphosed ten or fifteen years later into young gentlemen, strong, confident and conventional, albeit intellectually rigid and supposedly sexually maladroit. They were expected, claims Tim Travers, to display ‘Group loyalty, deference, obedience to the accepted hierarchy, an aversion to political and intellectual discussion, and an emphasis on self-assurance and character’.1 F.M.L. Thompson agrees. Upper middle-class parents, he argues, regarded the public schools to which they sent their sons as a vital element in the process of socialisation:
they were instruments for conditioning their boys into becoming upright, manly characters who did not cheat, sneak, or whine, and who could lead without being needlessly cruel to animals or servants. That was largely successful, and the public-school type was pretty easily recognized by speech, manner, dress, and behaviour.2
