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Headaches, Spectacles and Suicide: Degeneration and the Nation's Youth
From: Science Museum
| By:
Sally Shuttleworth |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a popular school of thought held that education was actually harmful to working-class children. The idea that cramming or "brain forcing" was detrimental to health and often ended in suicide provoked much debate, and provides a context for many themes found in the literature of the time. In this interview, conducted during the "Locating the Victorians" conference, Sally Shuttleworth, professor of English at the University of Sheffield, explains some of the ideas of her paper "Headaches, Spectacles and Suicide: Degeneration and the Nation's Youth". |
 n 1880 a writer in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine suggested that Europe was suffering an epidemic of child suicide, and that the advance of the alphabet was bringing the advance of voluntary death. The strange figure of Little Father Time in Hardy's Jude the Obscure, the child who hangs himself and his siblings, has often been treated as a gross aberration on the part of Hardy. Sally Shuttleworth seeks to place that scene in the context of contemporary concerns about child suicide, and the whole range of nervous disorders laid at the door of 'brain forcing'. The debates on education and suicide need then, in turn, to be placed in the wider context of the threatened degeneration of the nation's youth. |
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