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Traces of the Victorian Family at Plas Gwyn and Freudesheim?

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#1: Traces of the Victorian Family at Plas Gwyn and Freudesheim? Author: Sunglass, Location: Usually London

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 1:53 pm
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I originally posted this on the Etiquette thread, in response to Jennifer's link to Emily Post, but I thought it might work better as a new topic here. I was arguing in another place that we tend to overlook how gloriously informal Joey's household is meant to be, because we're not familiar with the 'proper' behaviour of the upper-middle classes in the 40s and 50s, but in fact, it's still quite rigidly traditional in places.
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I was just reading 'Joey Goes to the Oberland' for the first time in a long time with ideas of proper behaviour in the home etc in my mind from this [Etiquette] thread. This time around. what struck me was how, despite the informality of Plas Gwyn and later Freudesheim, (and Joey falling melodramatically into a packing crate in the first line), there are still strongly traditional, post-Victorian elements to the Maynard family.

For instance, no Maynard child eats any meal outside the nursery until, at the age of four, they are 'promoted' to breakfast with the family IF they can eat 'properly' - we see Mike in danger of being sent back to the nursery. (This is perfectly in line with the Emily Post etiquette manual.) Ditto the fact that when Mike and Charles turn themselves black, Jack chokes back his desire to laugh and says sternly that he'll see them in the study when they're clean. The decision to hire Beth Chester until the younger boys can go to prep school is also presented as solely Jack's decision. Distinctly Victorian paterfamilias!

The other thing is servant trustworthiness. While we often see Joey being likeably informal with her trusty servant Anna, urging her to take longer to say goodbye to her village friends as they leave Plas Gwyn etc. she doesn't appear to be allowed to have the key to the store-cupboard in which all household supplies were kept. Robin tells the triplets (who are going to wash dolls' clothes and want soap) to come to her in the store-cupboard after breakfast as she has 'promised Anna the scrubbing-soap then'. Victorian household management books always warned the mistress of the house to keep all supplies locked away, and to make the servant (always constructed as potentially dishonest) come to her daily for dry goods and cleaning products as needed, as she was likely to sell the surplus for money if given free access. But I was mildly shocked that an utterly faithful and trustworthy employee like Anna would still not be trusted with the key to the stores as a matter of course by a well-disposed mistress, but has to wait for Robin to get her soap!

This was underlined for me by the conversation Jo and Robin have later about the blacklead that Charles and Mike cover themselves with - Jo explains that she bought it in bulk as an experiment, but that Anna preferred the older paste, so it had been left unused. Robin says she wonders Anna didn't throw the tins out, and Jo says 'definitely' 'No, she would never do that... I'd bought them, and they were mine, not hers.'

OK, Joey, you are indeed mistress of the house! But try not to get too possessive about the cleaning materials! Because when you get to the Gornetz Platz, your faithful Anna is apparently going to 'insist on having her night nursery with Mike and the babies', meaning she is potentially on-call at night as well!

#2: Author: miss_maeve, Location: Buckinghamshire, UK

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 7:31 pm
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Isn't there, later on in the book, a reference to Anna not wanting to throw away things that belong to Jo? I believe this refers to the blacking that the boys used to cover themselves. Jo bought it, and Anna used it, but didn't like it as much as the old stuff she always used, so she put the bottle away. I'm sure it's Jo that says that Anna would never throw things away, as she (anna) would say that even if the stuff was awful, it belonged to Jo and it was up to Jo to dispose of it if she wished.
So i suppose, what I'm trying to say here is, that Anna would never have stepped 'above her station' as I guess she would have seen it to be.

#3: Author: Róisín, Location: Ireland

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:00 pm
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I'm not sure if this is Victorian or not but there is a definite division of thought between people (in books or in life) on whether children should be away by themselves, eating their own food, following their own pursuits; or with the parents for as much of the time as possible, eating adult food, participating in adult activities (within reason obviously). Maybe a lot of people would choose the former, except that they haven't got the resources. Joey *did* have the resources, so she kept to that model. I have no children myself - I'd be interested in seeing what CBB parents think?

#4: Author: Sunglass, Location: Usually London

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:19 pm
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Róisín wrote:

I'm not sure if this is Victorian or not but there is a definite division of thought between people (in books or in life) on whether children should be away by themselves, eating their own food, following their own pursuits; or with the parents for as much of the time as possible, eating adult food, participating in adult activities (within reason obviously). Maybe a lot of people would choose the former, except that they haven't got the resources. Joey *did* have the resources, so she kept to that model. I have no children myself - I'd be interested in seeing what CBB parents think?

It's an issue of space, and staffing and child-rearing philosophy combined, I suppose? Upper-middle and upper-class Victorian and early 20thc childcare theories generally kept children by themselves in a nursery, following their own routines with their own nurse, apart from set periods where they would come down to visit their parents in the drawing room on their best behaviour, and only graduate to eating with their parents when older and considered able to participate politely etc. There's a funny bit in one Nancy Mitford about someone planning to bring up their children without a nanny, and everyone being horrified because children without nannies turn out so badly! Which might have a grain of truth because an upper-class woman would not be well-versed in childcare...

Obviously, Joey is much more hands-on and modern - we see her bathing and praying and playing with her children, and (at least sometimes, despite Anna and the night-nursery) getting up to them in the night, but she also has Anna, and then Rosli and Beth Chester potentially intervening, and the children have a large amount of separate space at enormous Freudesheim, and appear to have to earn the right to eat breakfast at the dining table, aged four. Can anyone think of other instances where the younger Maynard offspring eat ordinary meals other than breakfast or picnics with the rest of the family? I imagine dinner might be an adults only meal - we're told in 'Joey Goes to the Oberland' that the children eat breakfast downstairs because otherwise Jack would never see them all together - depending on what time it happened, but do we ever see them all having lunch or Kaffee und Kuchen at home all together?

#5: Author: Ray, Location: Bristol, England

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 10:11 pm
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The meal thing does have a foundation in common sense, though. There's a line in either Highland Twins or Gay about how much the (then three year-old) triplets are taking in and subsequently repeating and Joey didn't want a repeat of an early Sybil episode where she repeated something she'd heard Jem say about a patient.

(Hm - think that must be in Gay, just before Josette's accident)

By the time a child's four or five, not only are they less likely to spill food everywhere, you can also (at least start!) impressing on them what can and can't be repeated.

Ray *pondering*

#6: Author: Samantha, Location: London

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 10:21 pm
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I think it's reasonable to want to wait for your child(ren) to be a little bigger before joining family meals. We didn't start having mine have dinner with us until she was close to 4, partly as it was late, partly because it is really not much fun at the end of the day to be constantly correcting manners and silliness when you want a nice relaxed meal yourself. Even now she doesn't eat dinner with us through the week (she's 6) as it is too late. She does sit up to table properly at weekends though, and generally behaves OK.

#7: Author: KatS, Location: Vancouver

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 11:00 pm
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I didn't have dinner with my parents until I was fourteen or so - not because there was anyone else to look after us or anything, just because my mum got into the habit of feeding us early as my dad came home late, and it never really changed. Then one day we all realised how ridiculous it was to have two shifts of dinner in a family of four when we ate the same thing within an hour or so of eachother, and we started eating all together. When my brother and I visit home nowadays, we still joke about being allowed to dinner. (My parents aren't British - they're Austrian and Brazilian, living in a very American part of Canada, so who knows where that came from...)

I do find the observation about Joey's house being portrayed as informal very interesting - I would never have picked up on it, but I think Sunglass is right. It's astonishing that Anna didn't have access to the supplies, although I suppose she had it better than Karen, in that she was allowed to choose her own blacking! Could anyone post that quote, please? I've never read it.

#8: Author: Lesley, Location: Allhallows, Kent

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 11:05 pm
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Ray wrote:

The meal thing does have a foundation in common sense, though. There's a line in either Highland Twins or Gay about how much the (then three year-old) triplets are taking in and subsequently repeating and Joey didn't want a repeat of an early Sybil episode where she repeated something she'd heard Jem say about a patient.

The fact that Jem shouldn't have been repeating anything about said patient in the family home of course being totally disregarded! Rolling Eyes

#9: Author: Alison H, Location: Manchester

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 12:18 am
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Jack possibly didn't finish work until late, or didn't always know what time he was going to be home, so it might just have been practical to feed the children separately. Anyway, imagine trying to get all that lot round the table at once when they were all at home: it would've taken ages just to serve everyone Laughing

.

There does seem to've been an element of not letting the children eat with their parents until they were old enough to behave though - it's the "nursery tea"/"schoolroom tea" system that'd seem quite normal in Edwardian times but seems rather outdated by the 1950s. Having said which, in some of Lorna Hill's later books, which're also set in the 1950s, the children sometimes eat in the schoolroom even when they're in their early teens, and in some of Enid Blyton's books the children never seem to eat with their parents.

By contrast, we're always being told that Mary-Lou spent most of her time with her mother and grandmother when she was a young child, and presumably Joey spent most of hers with Madge who was 12 years older than her. I can't remember which book it's in but it says somewhere that Joey and Jack wanted to keep their children young.

Jack definitely behaves like a Victorian paterfamilias - although not as much as Jem does - but Jack, Jem and Madge would all have been born in the pre First World War era and I suppose old attitudes died hard.

A lot of the attitudes seem outdated by the later books, though - attitudes towards the domestic staff, attitudes towards boyfriends, etc ... it's all part of a piece ...

#10: Author: Fiona Mc, Location: Bendigo, Australia

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:33 am
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I thought it was an English tradition as when I worked as a Nanny in England none of the families ate together which I thought was really sad. The kids always ate seperately to the parents. I grew up eating with my parents and teatime especially was a chance to catch up and talk about the day, which was the same in America. Dad worked late a lot but Mum always ate with us.

In regards to Anna not throwing out the blacking, I took that as Anna didn't buy it so she would have seen it as Joey's. I would have felt the same. If I had bought it I would feel my comfortable about getting rid of it, but not so much if my boss did.

#11: Author: jennifer, Location: Taiwan

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 4:23 am
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I remember being totally baffled at about age four or five when we were visiting relatives and the kids were served hotdogs and five and sent to bed, with the adults getting steak afterwards. Apparently, when I came out I peered over the table and said "Mmmm, meat".

We always ate with our parents and the same food as they did. It meant that a lot of the time was spent correcting table manners, and the conversation covered both adult and child topics, but we did end up with very sophisticated tastes in food from a very young age.

The CS view does tie very strongly with a Victorian ethos, where upper class kids led totally separate lives from their parents - cared for by a nanny and later a governess, having meals in the nursery or school room, going to full time boarding school at age seven or eight.

By Victorian standards, Joey's home *is* very free and easy, with the parents having a more active role in their kids lives. By mid twentieth century terms, however, it strikes me as rather old fashioned.

I suspect that a lot of this was exclusively for the upper class, as lower class families wouldn't be able to afford a nanny and separate quarters for the children.

#12: Author: Ray, Location: Bristol, England

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:43 am
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Lesley wrote:

Ray wrote:

The fact that Jem shouldn't have been repeating anything about said patient in the family home of course being totally disregarded! Rolling Eyes

Well, yes - I was disregarding it, largely because I thought it went without saying! Smile

To be fair, I don't think Joey necessarily meant the children over hearing patient details so much as just over hearing general adult conversation and not realising it shouldn't be repeated - I can think of stuff that I got to hear either at dinner or at Sunday lunch which I was very swiftly then told "Don't repeat that", which had absolutely nothing to do with doctors, patients or anything of that sort, it was just stuff that my parents didn't want me telling my little playmates.

Ray *nearly DID mention Jem's faux pas - honest!*

#13: Author: CBW, Location: Kent

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:57 am
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Quote:

I suspect that a lot of this was exclusively for the upper class, as lower class families wouldn't be able to afford a nanny and separate quarters for the children.
_________________

And this was a group of people who were happy to lose their children for the best part of the year to school.

If you are happy to send your kids away for months on end as soon as they are 7 or so then its probably as well that they don't get used to spending too much time with their parents

#14: Author: macyrose, Location: Great White North (Canada)

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 7:15 pm
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CBW wrote:

Quote:

And this was a group of people who were happy to lose their children for the best part of the year to school.

That reminds me of Madge’s taking Sybil and Josette to Australia with them because as Josette says in Wins the Trick: “She knows that once I start on my job she’ll get precious little of me and she wants to have this final year.” It's a little late for Madge to be thinking of that. If she (Madge) was so concerned about spending time with her daughters why did she send them to boarding school abroad in the first place? She could have sent them to the English branch where they would have been more accessible for weekends and half-term holidays, or even to a day school. That Sybil and Josette are just expected to go with no consideration for their wishes (Josette has tried to be let off so she can spend the year as a Millie) seems like a Victorian attitude to me (especially for the times - Wins the Trick was published in 1961).

#15: Author: Mrs Redboots, Location: London, UK

Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 11:49 pm
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CBW wrote:

If you are happy to send your kids away for months on end as soon as they are 7 or so then its probably as well that they don't get used to spending too much time with their parents

To be absolutely fair, I don't think it's so much of a question of being happy to send your children away, as genuinely believing that this way they will get the best possible education. I know we were sent away when I was 10 and my brother was 7 - my parents, unwilling to be empty-nesters in their 30s, "accidentally" had another baby a year later! Although the sibling they hoped to provide for my sister never happened, so she was brought up as an only child in term time. And by the time she was old enough to go to boarding-school, the whole system was very different, and the parents could go and visit her each weekend, and they could telephone more freely than we had been able to (mind you, telephone calls were very much cheaper by then!).

With the question of not eating one's evening meal with the parents, we never did when we were at primary school, largely because we came in absolutely starving from school and needed a meal at about 5:00 pm before a 7:00 or 7:30 pm bedtime. Whereas the parents tended not to eat until about 7:30, to fit in with their lifestyle.

When my daughter was young enough to need to go to bed before her father came home she ate separately; when she was a little older, she ate with us except on Thursdays which was Girls' Brigade Explorer night, and she always had fish fingers, chips and peas before she went... until it became the fashion to stay after school for cookery club and then go on to Explorers en masse...

#16: Author: Sunglass, Location: Usually London

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 11:44 am
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I realise at for upper-middle and upper-class parents to send their offspring to boarding school was entirely the norm during the period of the CS - especially with Empire families sending their children back to Britain to be educated or away from an unhealthy climate - and pretty much the rule for boys in any case, who would be put down for their father's public school at birth. And obviously, we need to be at roughly that social level, or there would be no CS!

But what I think is interesting is that EBD never shows those families who in fact spend very little time together because their children are away at school as in any way compromised by the amount of time they spend apart - very much the bourgeois happy family as usual.

I didn't ever board, but I have quite a few male and female friends of various ages who were away at school from the age of eight or so, and never really lived at home again after that for more than a few months at a time because they went on to university and jobs. From what I can see, they do have different, possibly less dependent, relationships with parents and siblings, and their homes, just because they didn't see them every day and they learned to identify with friends/school/their peers more. Although it's hardly surprising that younger Joey regards the Chalet (rather than Die Rosen) as home, and all of the CS girls are enormously attached to their school throughout, it is never suggested that spending large amounts of time away from home in any way compromises the happy family unit. It's as though EBD wants it both ways - or is unwilling to imagine a scenario in which girls and families might have a happy, but more distant relationship, or even a dysfunctional one, just because they are only in contact by letter for a lot of the average year?

Of course, having Freudesheim next door to the school (and Cartref/Plas Gwyn etc very close to it) means that she can actually hedge her bets - Joey is a good 'traditional' upper-middle class parent in that she sends her girls to an excellent boarding school, but she is also seen as a 'warm', loving parent in the more modern sense in that the girls do not really have to leave home to go to school - just go through a gate in the wall, and in any case, Freudesheim is almost seen as part of the CS...

#17: Author: jennifer, Location: Taiwan

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 12:32 pm
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That's a good point. You have a case like Bride and Peggy, who basically don't know their parents at all until they are 12 and 13 respectively (Peggy was four when they last saw Dick and Mollie and Bride three). However, when the family is reunited, they immediately blend into a contented nuclear family, with a cheerfully cosy, friendly atmosphere. They've had letters and so on, but no day to day contact. And even after that the girls are at full time boarding school, so they only see their parents at holidays.

Mary-Lou is one of the few cases where the bond is shown as weak. She doesn't really miss her father much, or grieve over his death, because he is a stranger to her. Her mother and grandmother's deaths affect her much more strongly.

If you early childhood experience is spending most of your time with your nanny, and spending brief, well scrubbed, rather formal interludes with your family, and then spend most of the rest of the time with your school mates and teachers, then there has to be a difference in the relationship.

#18: Author: macyrose, Location: Great White North (Canada)

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 9:29 pm
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There's a passage in Shocks where there's a mention of Maeve having had trouble settling down in her new integrated family and having "the old feelings" come up again four years later:

Quote:

‘Isn’t your kid sister Maeve in with that lot?’ Lala asked.
‘She is—which is just why I want to leave Peg out of it. She’ll feel bound to sit on Maeve harder than the rest, because she’s Head Girl and Maeve’s her sister, you see. Peg’s always terrified of showing any favouritism, so she leans over backwards in the other direction. Maeve’s getting to the age when she resents being ticked off by her eldest sister. You leave it to me.’
What Bride was feeling after was the fact that Maeve and her twin brother Maurice, who had been born in India, had never seen their elder brothers and sisters until they were eight. Just at first, they had found it difficult to settle in as the youngest members of a big family, Maeve especially. They had settled down finally, but now that Maeve was nearly twelve, the old feeling that Peggy was ‘coming the eldest sister’ over her was returning and there had been two or three unpleasant spats during the holidays.
Peggy was a conscientious girl and tried to help their mother, who was by no means strong, during the holidays. She had taken complete charge of the twins and Maeve had raged at being expected to do as Peggy told her.
Bride knew all this and was anxious not to have anything happen that would deepen this feeling. Therefore, she decided to deal with Wallflower herself.

But two books later in Bride all is well again and Maeve is looking at Peggy adoringly when Peggy compliments her on her flower arranging.

#19: Author: Joan the Dwarf, Location: Er, where am I?

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 1:08 am
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I think the Bettany problems are put very well, in as much detail as they could be without becoming a major plot. I can't remember which book it's in, but the description of the first meeting is utterly heartbreaking with two sets of children who are strangers to each other calling the same woman "mummy".

Personally, I think shoving one's kids off to boarding school young is obscene. I boarded in 6th form out of choice, but I felt so sorry for the 11-year-olds we had. Sometimes they really just needed a parent - and they were only weekly boarders. I've also seen a supposedly "good" product of a famous school who I met at university, who had been a termly boarder since her mother died when she was six. She had been head girl, had lots of friends, boyfriend, got on well with her dad, good A-levels etc etc. It was only after being friendly with her for a while that I noticed what was wrong: she had no attachment to anyone. She was nice and friendly, but she was as nice and friendly to people she'd know for two weeks as people she'd known for ten years. It was really quite scary to see.

#20: Author: Sunglass, Location: Usually London

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 2:08 am
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Just reading 'Rosalie' - we're told the summer term is 11 weeks long, but that 'there were only some sixty or seventy girls whose people were hard-hearted enough to insist that they go home. The rest had leave to stay and share the joys of half term.' It's a weird way of putting it, isn't? OK, expeditions etc are fun, and EBD is being slightly ironic, but it seems odd to assume on the one hand that parents are being 'hard-hearted' to want their daughters to come home, and also that the girls themselves would rather stay at school.

The Maeve/Peggy thing interesting in itself, but it's as though we're only getting a minor 'acceptable' detail about the schism in the Bettany family. It's much less damning to talk about how a younger child resents suddenly getting an older sister foisted on her, than for Peggy or Bride to, say, show resentment towards parents they hardly know until their teens, or to resent Maeve and Maurice for being the only ones who actually got brought up by their biological parents. (Are we told why M and M aren't sent home to England?)

#21: Author: Lesley, Location: Allhallows, Kent

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 6:19 am
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I think WWII intervened there - or at least the implication was that they couldn't get home becasue of the war.

#22: Author: Mrs Redboots, Location: London, UK

Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 11:33 pm
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And the War, too, meant that many girls stayed at school for the entire term without seeing their parents at all. Certainly my mother did - travel was discouraged, so you only went to and from school at the beginning an end of each term. Exeats such as were allowed even when I was at school 20 years later were more or less unknown.

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