The discovery of childhood in Puritan England

The English Puritans produced an unprecedented quantity and variety of writings on children. Despite this suggestion of a deep and many-sided interest in childhood, scholars have focused on only the most damning attitudes and practices of Puritan culture. The Puritans are generally regarded as a baseline for measuring progress toward a greater understanding of children. This study by C. John Sommerville is the first to confirm that Puritans were indeed preoccupied with children. In addition, it challenges long-held assumptions about the Puritans by proposing that their interest in children was unrelated to their economic situation, theological proclivities, or a shared psychological pathology. Sommerville concludes that it was the Puritans' forward-looking orientation--their existence as a religious movement--that fueled their interest in children and inspired new views on the nature of childhood. He argues that the harshest aspects of Puritan attitudes toward childhood are related not to doctrine but to the movement's suppression in 1660, after which the Puritans fell prey to a pessimistic survival mentality. Ultimately, the book is not a history of the family, nor even of children. Rather, it is a cultural history of "childhood," that self-reflective amalgamation of contemporary adult assumptions, hopes, and concerns about the young--specifically in seventeenth-century England. Drawing on primary sources, Sommerville describes the Puritan adult as revealed through children's books, child-rearing manuals, biographies, catechisms, and educational and theological treatises. The author turns finally to tensions between the period's deep and inarticulate devotion to family and the individualizing tendency of Puritanism. From there he traces a tradition of radical individualism that is carried forward to the time of Thomas Paine and William Godwin, the secular heirs of Puritanism.