Edwardian Lives
Although the Edwardian era officially ended over a century ago, a great deal of evidence of Edwardian life remains, including that of the Edwardian child.
The Edwardian era is the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, commencing in 1901 - after the death of Queen Victoria - and ending with the King's death in 1910. The first two years of the Edwardian era included two national events of great contrast: a Royal funeral and a coronation. When Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901 after a reign of 60 years, there was a genuine outbreak of grief and also of doubt and anxiety about what the future held at many levels in society. Children were not the only ones who could remember no other ruler, and many adults responded to Queen Victoria's death as children whose mother had died: '...at the end of the Victorian Era, who is not conscious of a great blank? Death has taken from us the Sovereign who, in a sense that has no precedent, mothered not only her own subjects, but even other nations...'
Convention demanded that the nation mourn her passing. An observer noted '...it was the most extraordinary thing. Everybody - the children as well - wore black... All the shops had black shutters up and everyone felt as if they'd lost somebody.' For the children, of course, life did go on, even if they had been dressed in mourning clothes: '...it seemed as if the world stood still and could never continue without the Queen. However, the following day King Edward was proclaimed King and life went on as usual.'
The Coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra took place on 9 August 1902. Despite the cool damp weather of that summer, the country was very much in a mood to celebrate, with the recent end of the Boer Wars and the King's near-miraculous recovery from acute appendicitis, which had originally delayed the coronation. Many of the celebrations were aimed at children, including fêtes, organised sports and games, picnics, pageants, tea parties, and fancy dress competitions. There were holidays from school, lasting a week for some children, and many local authorities gave every one of their child residents a souvenir, usually a mug or medallion, from the vast range of commemorative items produced.
The Edwardian Baby
From His Majesty the King to 'his majesty the baby'. Even in the poorest homes and largest families the Edwardian baby was often the centre of attention, and Ada Ballin, author of the childcare manual 'From Cradle to School' declared in the opening paragraph: 'No household is complete without children, or at any rate one little toddler, or baby lying asleep in its cot, but ruling the household with an autocratic if unconscious sway'. The above line is a fair indication of just how widespread this attitude towards the baby was in Edwardian society: Ada Ballin was a writer, feminist and reformer who seldom pulled her punches, let alone made sentimental remarks. Indeed, an earlier remark, made in 1885, was much more typical:
'In England more than half of all the children die under twelve years of age, and they die chiefly from insufficient clothing... From one point of view only can anything be said in its favour, and that is, allowing there are already too many people in the world, it will be an advantage to get rid of as many of the weakest of the newcomers as possible.'
The Edwardian baby benefited from a considerable upsurge in the manufacture of baby products, as well as an increase in new research on how best to care for infants. Hammock baby baths of rubber on a rigid frame, for instance, were felt to be much safer for the child and easier for the adult carer to use; wicker nursery furniture was lighter in weight and allegedly easier to clean; and devices such as safety harnesses, cat nets to put over prams and cots, and walking aids, were being produced in greater numbers, with widening price ranges making them easier to acquire. There was even a thriving second-hand market in prams.
Although Frederic Truby King's bestselling childcare book Feeding and Care of Baby was yet to be written, much of its content - to apply scientific principles to the nutrition of babies, notably the absolute regularity of feeding, sleeping and bowel movements - was based on his founding of the Plunket Society in New Zealand in 1907.
Baby clothes made during the Edwardian period also started to show evidence of modern thought, although Victorian baby clothes were still very much in use. Victorian baby clothes were invariably made of heavy and durable fabrics to withstand much boiling, bleaching and scrubbing, and to keep the baby warm. This in turn meant that they lasted practically forever, and many are still in existence. However, by the early 1900s, lighter weight fabrics, pastel colours, and a delicate approach to decorative elements such as figured ribbons, embroidery and swansdown were now preferred by anyone who could afford them - and that was increasingly more of the population.
One fine example from the Museum's collection, includes a Christening cape from about 1904, made of an elegant pale grey wool, embroidered in silks in China, and finished with a grey silk lining and satin edgings; the yoked gown beneath of cream silk with lavish amounts of embroidered insertion. All this would have been assembled by the family dressmaker, who could buy the component parts at very reasonable prices at a good draper's shop or department store.
Toys and games
The Edwardian child's toys and games were still largely made in Germany, as had been the case for their Victorian predecessors. The UK led in the production of wax dolls; the French made the most luxurious dolls; and while the US toy industry was developing strongly, it consumed most of what it produced. At this time no other country could compete with German toy production for sheer value for money, and even some of the less well-off families of the time were able to afford a toy for their children. The Edwardian child's toys were much the same as those of the Victorian child, and dolls, clockwork toys, boats, puzzles, trains, dolls' houses, toy animals and rocking horses predominated the toy box.
However, some toys did originate in this era, among them the racing-themed board game Minoru, produced by one of the leading manufacturers of the time, John Jacques, and named after King Edward's racehorse which won the Derby in 1909. Frank Hornby also patented his new metal construction and engineering toy Mechanics Made Easy in 1901, changing its name to Meccano in 1907.
Perhaps the most famous toy invented during this time was the teddy bear, arguably one of the most famous toys in the world. The first jointed soft toy bear was designed in 1902 by Richard Steiff of the Steiff company in Germany, and shown at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903. The Ideal Toy Company, the first company to make such bears in the USA, came up with the name 'teddy bear'. Its founder, Morris Michtom, is said to have been inspired by a 1902 cartoon by Clifford Berryman, 'Drawing the Line in Mississippi', which showed President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt refusing to shoot a captive bear cub on a trip to Mississippi.
Technology
Much of the Edwardian child's experience of cutting-edge technology was to be found in the field of film and photography and it was during this decade that visits to the cinema, 'electric palace' or picturedrome started to become a familiar treat. Short films and photographic illusions had been available at fairgrounds and music halls for some years, but the Edwardian era saw the rise of the purpose-built cinema: the UK's first said to have been opened in Colne, Lancashire in 1908. The cinemas showed silent films in black and white - the heyday of the great favourites such as the Keystone Cops and Charlie Chaplin still yet to come. Many of the films depicted familiar subjects: traditional stories or scenes from everyday life. But there were also some more exciting titles around, such as George Méliès's film A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) of 1902, based on the writings of Jules Verne - and by 1909, the silent movie star Mary Pickford was also a popular attraction.
The fact that films were sometimes referred to as 'living pictures' indicates the kind of impact they had on audiences. However, 'going to the pictures' was one of the many activities that divided the social classes, and most middle and upper class parents, while conceding that film could be educational in theory, decidedly disapproved of the picture palaces and the types of person - and the other activities - one might find there.
Top of the wishlist for most Edwardian children, although only a dream for many of them, was the personal camera. The Box Brownie, named after a quirky cartoon character by Palmer Cox, was introduced by Kodak in 1900. Although using a Brownie was considerably simpler than building a plate camera, as was then the custom, taking pictures and developing them yourself was still a far from easy process, and few parents today would be happy with their ten-year-old handling dishes of chemicals like the hypo (sodium hypochlorite - a fixative) as part of the process. Edith Nesbit seems to be writing from recent experience, when describing in The House of Arden how young photographers operate, and it's certainly a far cry from using a digital camera today: for example, having to assemble four pie dishes (one each for developer, rinsing water, fixative, and rinsing water) and laboriously excluding all the daylight from the room.
'Dear reader, do you recall the agitating moment when you pass the film through the hypo-and hold it up to the light-and nothing happens? Do you remember the painful wonder whether you may have forgotten to set the shutter? Or whether you have got hold of an unexposed film by mistake? Your breath comes with difficulty, your fingers feel awkward, and the film is unnaturally slippery. You dip it into the hypo-bath again, and draw it through and through with the calmness of despair. "I don't believe it's coming out at all," you say. And then comes the glorious moment when you hold it up again to the red light, and murmur rapturously, "Ah! it is beginning to show!"'
Food
Edwardian food for adults could be both elaborate and rich to the point of indigestibility. However, until more modern ideas about food and nutrition came into general use in the 1920s, children had a fairly monotonous diet, which tended to be high in carbohydrates and low in fresh fruit and meat. 'Many people seem afraid to give any fruit to their children, but have not the least hesitation in dosing them with all kinds of drugs' wrote Ada Ballin in 1902. Not for the average Edwardian child, then, the oyster patties, pressed duck, ratafia trifle or pineapple which some of the adults enjoyed: even in a wealthy family a typical child's main meal at this date would be a small portion of hot or cold meat with potatoes and gravy, and another vegetable such as cabbage; and steamed pudding and custard, or milk pudding and jam to follow - a heritage which 'school dinners' were still faithfully following some 60 years later. This is perhaps no coincidence, as the Provision of School Meals Act was passed in 1906, giving local authorities the discretion to organise free lunches for children from poorer families.
The lucky few children who had more interesting food were those in liberal, middle-income families who allowed their offspring to dine with them in the evening - however this was not a typical practice. Children of poorer families were often sustained on bread and margarine or bread and jam, the only likelihood of being given something hot to eat being cooked potatoes and perhaps a kind of catch-all stew or soup. At home there might have been a large pot into which went any vaguely edible vegetable or meat that could be obtained, and which was boiled up every day. In fact, most children's food was so overcooked as to contain virtually no vitamins whatsoever.
There were some tastier elements to be had, such as fish and shellfish for those who could get it, and many of the pickles and sauces, such as ketchup, still in use today. Savoury processed meat products such as pies, sausages, haslet and brawn were also widely available from butchers and cooked meat shops.
Perhaps because food was usually so bland, sweets were one of the Edwardian child's greatest pleasures, as well as being amongst the most evocative of their memories. The writer Elizabeth Goudge, born in 1900, recalled that in her childhood 'a great many sweets could be bought for fourpence ha'penny' - unsurprising, as that's about £1 in today's money. Her own favourites as a child were satin pralines, made with a hard shell of boiled sugar, which you sucked at concentratedly until you could bite into the soft and chewy centre: 'The moment when the teeth crashed through from the outside was sheer heaven' she wrote.
The characters in her retrospective children's novel Linnets and Valerians buy 'a pennyworth of peppermint lumps... a pennyworth of boiled lemon sweets... a penny ha'penny worth of satin pralines... and a pennyworth of liquorice allsorts. And out of pure goodness of heart Emma Cobley added for nothing a packet of sherbet. They did not know what that was, and she had to show them how to put a pinch of the powder on their tongues and then stand with their tongues out enjoying the glorious refreshing fizz'.
Liquorice allsorts were still something of a novelty at this time, too: launched in 1898 and allegedly created by chance, the idea arising when a tray of liquorice and coloured paste sweets were dropped on the floor and mixed up.
Other popular sweet treats during the Edwardian era included 'Penny Everlasting' strips of toffee, cinder toffee (better known to many of us as Crunchie), Edinburgh or Scotch rock, aniseed balls, caramels, fondants and coconut ice. Of course, at this time there was no food safety legislation, so some shopkeepers made their own sweets, especially in villages, we well as their own lemonade and ice cream.
At this time, ice cream still often came as a 'Penny Lick', served as a tiny portion which was meant to be licked out of a small serving glass, and (at best) merely given a wipe between customers. This was recognised as being notoriously unhygienic even then, and because of the thickness of the glass, often gave the customer disappointingly less than it appeared to. The glasses were also liable to break or be stolen, so it is no wonder that edible ice cream cones (first patented by Italo Marciony of New York in 1903) were such a success.
Holidays
Ice cream was now firmly established as one of the pleasures of the seaside outing or holiday, along with items like cockles and mussels, whelks, fish and chips, candy floss and sugar 'rock'. During this period, many town-dwellers had never seen the country or seaside - as holidays and outings involved a lot of preparation and long, tiring journeys. The idea that everyone should have a holiday, sometimes even two or three times a year, is quite recent. For many families, wages were too low to afford the cost; taking time off work also meant no pay, and could even result in the loss of the job. Charities such as the Fresh Air Fund, founded in 1906, organised free holidays for poor children. However it was often more difficult for older impoverished children to accept. Any money they could earn might be vital to the family; they were often relied on to care for younger children; and they generally had insufficient clothing to take on holiday, particularly shoes.
Even in the health-giving surroundings of the seaside, the pessimists were in full croak: the magazine The Lady's Realm advising in 1905: '...Paddling is a most injudicious and mischievous custom, as it makes the feet cold and sends the blood to the head. Children whose lips turn blue after bathing should be given ginger wine... Should the child's eyelids become inflamed, dab them with cornflower petals soaked in brandy'.
Should the family be feeling hungry on their invariably long journey, the Army and Navy Stores' catalogues of the period offered the intrepid traveller the 'Petite Luncheon Box' which came with its own fork and tin opener and could 'be found sufficient for a light luncheon when travelling; suitable to be eaten with either bread or biscuit'. Each box contained three tins e.g. boar's head, chicken and ham and plum pudding. Fortunately there were plenty of antacids and remedies for indigestion, such as Eno's Fruit Salts, even then!
For the Edwardian child at boarding school, and rather tastier, the Army and Navy also offered a range of tuck boxes: if you could afford the £1 box from the top of the range, you could be the envy of your pals at tea by choosing from half a cooked ham, a tin of ox tongue, a large cake, a tin of mixed biscuits, a tin of ginger nuts, a jar of potted meat, three pots of jam, a piece of ginger bread, a box of chocolates and two tins of sardines.
This line is reminiscent of a similar list:
'There's cold chicken inside it,' replied the Rat briefly; 'coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkins saladfrenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater...' These are the contents of 'the fat, wicker luncheon-basket' which Ratty provides for himself and Mole early in The Wind in the Willows, the classic Edwardian children's book by Kenneth Grahame (1908).
Books
Books could be both appalling and immensely pleasurable to the Edwardian child, from intimidatingly difficult arithmetic and Latin grammar textbooks to the popular works of such writers as L. T. Meade, Beatrix Potter, Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, G. A. Henty, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of The Secret Garden.
The Secret Garden (1909), not only Frances Hodgson Burnett's masterpiece, in some ways embodies the quintessential flavour of Edwardian children's literature. Although the adults are there as enablers, and still run the world, it is the children who take the initiative, remaining ahead of the adults much of the time.
According to her biographer Julia Briggs, Edith Nesbit was 'the first modern writer for children', helping to reverse the great tradition of children's literature pioneered by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, in turning away from their secondary worlds, focusing instead on the tough truths to be won from encounters with things-as-they-are, a device, until then, having only been explored in adult novels.
Saying this, the Edwardian child's bookshelf still contained many Victorian favourites: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, the Arabian Nights, and so on.
School textbooks during this time could be frighteningly difficult, and might ask for an example of a compound-complex sentence (one which has at least two independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses) or for the names of all the kings and queens of England in chronological order.
Frightening of a different kind were the ghost and horror stories of the period - not written for children, but read and enjoyed by many in the older age group, such as W. W. Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw of 1902 and M. R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published in 1904, which includes the story The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, in which Mr Somerton finds the truth of the words 'Ten thousand pieces of gold are laid up in the well ...of the Abbot's house of Steinfeld by me, Thomas, who have set a guardian over them', and describing how Somerton found the treasure. 'I... went on pulling out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck'.
Discipline
The chastisement of children for wrongdoing was still taken very much for granted, both at school and at home, and often considered to be a matter of duty toward the child. Writers of childcare manuals would warn strongly against even baby getting the upper hand. Truby King is best known for his insistence upon feeding babies at set times, as opposed to whenever they expressed hunger. His warning that '...damaged health and absence of discipline and control in early life are the natural foundations of failure later on - failure through the lack of control which underlies all weakness of character, vice and criminality...' This view, although severe in its expression, is not untypical of the time.
Clearly law-breaking was liable to punishment by the forces of law and order, although a surprising number of children got away with things like scrumping, or stealing, apples and placing booby traps. Disobedience or defiance of authority, however, whether of parent, teacher, or any other adult, was always taken particularly seriously, and likely to lead to moral reproach as well as physical punishment. Schools continued to use the traditional birch, cane or tawse (the leather strap which could be soaked in water to make it heavier) particularly on boys; the domestic equivalent the hand, slipper or belt. Less obviously violent forms of punishment generally involved humiliation (the wearing of a dunce's cap or label, or standing in front of the class, boredom (isolation, menial tasks, lines to be copied or learned), or the withdrawal of sweets, pocket money or other privileges.
One of the movements set up to remedy wrongdoing and bad behaviour in young people was Scouting, with the Scouting Movement having its origins in the Boer War (1899-1902). During this period the British Government became concerned by the physical unfitness and 'moral decline' of working class youths - 60% of recruits having been rejected by the army for being too unhealthy. Robert Baden-Powell, who played a leading role in South Africa on the British side in the Boer War, launched the Scout Movement in 1908 in order to tackle this national problem. The Scouts recruited boys between 12 and 16 years old and the movement was modelled on the Voluntary Youth Cadet Corps formed during the military siege of Mafeking.
The Scouts had the Royal seal of approval, too: Baden-Powell recorded 'After dinner King Edward called me aside and sat me down on the sofa beside him and talked for half an hour about my Boy Scouts. He would like to review the Scouts the following year in Windsor Park' - the reference to 'review' being in the military sense - i.e. the King inspecting his troops.
Although Baden-Powell had not been at all happy about the provision of a similar movement for girls, he eventually gave in and founded the Girl Guides with his sister Agnes - officially named Guides in 1910, but absolutely not Girl Scouts, as they had at first requested. Not everyone was happy about the Guides in their practical clothes engaged in boyish activities like camping and trekking, but the Guides' effectiveness during World War I helped to ensure they were eventually very much established.
Clothing
Victorian and Edwardian children's clothing was liberating by contrast with what had gone before. Combinations and liberty bodices, sandals, jerseys, smocks, Norfolk jackets and blouses were clearly more comfortable than many older garments, and also helped to lessen the weight, tightness and constriction of clothing - however the children who experienced these first didn't always appreciate this view. For one thing the garments were still often made of heavy fabrics and worn in numerous layers: as the writer Vera Brittain (born 1893) remarked '...all girls' clothing of the period appeared to be designed by their elders on the assumption that decency consisted in leaving exposed to the sun and air no part of the human body that could possibly be covered with flannel...'
We have the witness of a good many writers who were children of the Edwardian era on this subject, often making heartfelt comments about uncomfortable clothing, with the ring of personal experience. C. S. Lewis (born 1898) writes: '...In Narnia your good clothes were never your uncomfortable ones. They knew how to make things that felt beautiful as well as looking beautiful in Narnia: and there was no such thing as starch or flannel or elastic to be found from one end of the country to the other...'
Noel Streatfield (born 1897) felt that the peculiar clothes she was made to wear as a child blighted her young life and Marguerite Steen's graphic descriptions of the discomforts of her clothing in the 1900s tell of a minimum of forty buttons on her underwear alone, a liberty bodice like a coat of mail, and starched lace on her chemise that prickled like a ring of thistles around her neck. It could certainly be '...a good hour's hard work' to get dressed.
Rudyard Kipling's Dan and Una in Rewards and Fairies were dismal about having to wear boots. '"They've put us into boots," said Una. "Look at my feet-they're all pale white, and my toes are squidged together awfully." "Yes-boots make a difference." Puck wriggled his brown, square, hairy foot, and cropped a dandelion flower between the big toe and the next. "I could do that-last year," Dan said dismally, as he tried and failed. "And boots simply ruin one's climbing." "There must be some advantage to them, I suppose," said Puck, "or folk wouldn't wear them..."'
From the beginning of the 20th century, more and more schools began to adopt complete uniforms in their own colours, often with a motto and song, mainly to promote a sense of school identity. Competition between schools at sport had popularised the wearing of identifying colours and garments by the teams, and indeed many of the uniform garments were derived from sportswear, including gymslips, caps and blazers.
Elizabeth Goudge and Vera Brittain seem to have particularly hated their school uniforms: 'The school hat was a hard sailor, tipped forward over the nose and secured with elastic. The elastic used to stretch and we tied knots in it, and somehow the knots always looked black and dirty.'
'We wore green flannel blouses in winter and white flannel blouses in the summer, with long navy blue skirts, linked to the blouses by elastic belts which continually slipped up or down, leaving exposed an unsightly hiatus of blouse-tape or safety-pinned shirt-band'.
Class
The issue of social class complicated many an Edwardian childhood, and children were actively discouraged from being influenced by the 'behaviours' of the class or classes different to their own, including not associating too closely with neighbours, encouraging good table manners - 'Any joints on the table will be carved' (a reference to not putting elbows on the table), avoiding asking vulgar remarks such as how much something cost, or enquiring into what somebody's father did for a living, and not playing with children of a lower social status, usually said to be because of infection, '"Have you been much into people's cottages?" Aunt Edith asked anxiously-with the strange fear of infection which seems a part of a grown-up's nature'. In this case, infection referred as much to undesirable manners and speech as to illness and infection!
Poverty
Poverty cast a deep shadow on the childhood of many a young Edwardian, just as it had for the Victorians. The harsh system of the workhouse was still the only provision for those who could not cope, and some families preferred instead to starve or turn to crime.
Often a family of 10 or more children ended up on or below the breadline when the father died or was too ill or injured to work. The responsibility would then lie with the mother to provide by scraping a living washing or charring (when she was not incapacitated by continual pregnancies) or on eldest children who were often forced to start work. The Employment of Children Act 1903 did guarantee a child a certain standard of education before being allowed to leave school, yet ironically this only served to penalise the bright children as it meant that attaining a certain standard in their work, and gaining their certificate, enabled them to leave school earlier. While the official school leaving age throughout the Edwardian period was 13, attendance by children of poorer families was often highly irregular anyway, due to many being at work helping to provide for the family.
Illness and Death
Illness and death were always a threat, especially the seriously contagious diseases such as diphtheria and pertussis, or whooping cough. Inevitably these diseases took their greatest toll in urban areas of poor housing and many families in towns still lived in one or two rented rooms, with shared washing and toilet facilities.
There was no National Health Service at this time, of course, so a visit to or by the doctor had to be paid for, as well as any treatment prescribed, and many homes contained a range of remedies in an effort to prevent this unless really needed. Among the typical contents of the medicine chest would be:
Castor oil (to help digestion, avoid constipation, and stave off colds)
Camphorated oil (to ease coughs and chest complaints, mainly for rubbing on the chest or even the child's vest)
Eucalyptus oil (taken internally, sometimes on sugar cubes, to ease muscle or joint pains, also as a decongestant and to help coughs and also used to kill bacteria in sickrooms)
An Inhaler, to ease chest coughs and blocked noses / breathing difficulties (or if you were a really up-to-date family, a Wright's coal tar vaporiser)
Even in the better-off families, the typically bland diet of the average child sometimes caused constipation, which would be promptly treated with a laxative. Popular naturally occurring laxatives for children and adults were castor oil, prunes, senna and rhubarb. Chemical potions in popular use included Gregory's Powder (rhubarb, ginger and magnesia); brimstone (sulphur) mixed with treacle; and calomel (which sounds misleadingly like caramel but was a potentially lethal compound of mercury and chloride).
Chloral (chlorine plus alcohol) was a well-known sleep-inducer, and various all-purpose remedies, the so-called 'patent medicines' could easily be bought without prescription at the chemist's - some including laxatives or diuretics to give some obvious medical after-effects, and many containing opium, alcohol or cocaine derivatives. These undoubtedly made the patient feel better, even if they were addictive substances, and of course, this counted as a cure.
Of course, for many there was no cure, a dark undercurrent of death running right the way through Edwardian childhood. It would be a rare child at this time who had no first-hand experience of bereavement, and many children lost friends, siblings and other contemporaries as well as older relatives and neighbours. Diphtheria and tuberculosis were still rife and probably accounted for the two major causes of childhood death from illness; there was also a high rate of accidental death, and poor nutrition was often an underlying factor in death even for children from better-off families.
One much-discussed line from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (which first appeared as a play in 1904) is 'To die will be an awfully big adventure' as Peter faces possible death by drowning. It has been suggested that Barrie deliberately included this episode to give his child audience and readers a strategy to cope with the bereavements which they would inevitably experience, possibly preparing them for the possibility of their own premature deaths. Barrie was speaking from experience: his own brother died at 13 and their mother never recovered. Barrie's mother longed for Barrie to take his brother's place but of course, he was never able to do so.
King Edward VII himself died on 6 May 1910, prompting another round of national mourning. Even in the 19th century there had been a move away from full black mourning for the younger children, but of course this did not apply to those families who had connections with the Royal court: their children were put into full mourning, with even black trimming on their underclothes, writing paper and handkerchiefs as well as the black garments and accessories.
Whatever their pleasures and discomforts, many Edwardian children felt secure in their childhood, and were comfortable in where they stood in relation to adults. This is perhaps just as well, as they would have to cope with changes on an unprecedented scale throughout their adult lives: World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the social and cultural changes of the 1920s, the Depression, World War II, and the social and cultural changes of the 1960s. Yet, even in the early years of the 20th century, no doubt some grandparents may have grumbled: 'You're not children these days - not like we were - with your cinemas and teddy bears and flimsy clothing'.
