Originally published in 1958, this reconstruction of the lives of young children of nursery age is an excursion into the past, from the Middle Ages to the opening years of the twentieth century. It tells of the methods, often extraordinary to our ideas, by which they were brought up from babyhood to about seven years old, their clothes, diet, the fearsome remedies that were inflicted on them in illness, their toys, games, books and first steps in education. It shows how the pristine simplicity of the child’s nature, which hardly alters throughout the centuries, was moulded by the pressure of the adult society around them into some semblance of the accepted contemporary type.
This story of the nursery is not only about young children, but about their parents too. There are parents in it who are stern, harsh, even cruel, and many more loving and careful ones; but one thing strikes us in these parents of former times: there is an air of unassailable confidence and certainty about them that the modern parent, versed in child psychology, would find it hard to achieve. As one seventeenth-century worthy put it, ‘For that which always happens in a concerne so universall as breeding children must needs be provided for by a traditionell method of proceeding.’