Dr Hatfield recently launched her book Growing up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland at the Trinity Long Room Hub, where she was also a resident early career researcher for two years. Following completion of her PhD with the School of Histories and Humanities, she was the Government of Ireland Senior Scholar at Hertford College, University of Oxford where she completed her monograph which is now published with Oxford University Press.
Dr Mary Hatfield with Dr Ciaran O'Neill, Trinity College Dublin, at the launch of Growing up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
The book gives an intriguing insight into how ideas towards childhood began to be formulated by the middle classes during this period, but according to Dr Hatfield, it reveals more about the cultural values and cultural ideals that a society holds at a certain given time and how these values are projected onto children.
“When you look at education systems or youth clubs or any sort of youth-oriented activities, you get a distilled vision of what people are anxious about during a specific period”, Dr Hatfield commented.
While completing her masters in Queen’s University Belfast, Dr Hatfield—who was looking at childhood around the formation of the Irish Free State—recognised a gap in scholarship which would allow her to compare the childhood experience of the 20th century to that of the 19th century. This led her to a PhD in exploring 19th century childhood and particularly the construction of bourgeois, middle class childhood in Ireland.
From 1800 to 1860, Dr Hatfield explores how parents in the middle classes begin to devise what we now understand as the most basic principles of what a child should and should not be doing, from schooling to child labour. “For the middle-classes, there’s a long list of things that children shouldn’t be doing, which is probably equally as interesting as what they should be doing”, Dr Hatfield explains. “Ideally, children shouldn’t be involved in the adult sphere, and they shouldn’t be in the work place.”
However according to Dr Hatfield, the way the middle classes begin to understand childhood and subsequently treat children, becomes a defining factor in how they distinguish themselves from the working classes, and project themselves as “more humane and enlightened.” The legislation that emerges in the latter half of the 19th century and early 20th century as it pertains to children’s rights and limiting children’s labour, is also a reflection of how the middle classes sought to universalise their ideas about childhood, Dr Hatfield says.
Her book also explores the role of education, the emergence of elite boarding schools and more particularly, the origins of female education in Ireland. After the Penal Laws were officially rescinded in 1829, we see the growth of Catholic female religious orders which are firmly established in the middle class milieu by the 1860s.
Dr Hatfield visited many of these boys and girls boarding schools as part of her research to find out what they had in their archives that could tell her more about children during that time. In Trinity, she says she was fortunate to have a number of rich resources in the library in terms of children’s literature and pamphlets, relying heavily on the Pollard Collection of Children’s Books.
She says her research also benefited from the interdisciplinary environment of the Trinity Long Room Hub and she made research links not only within her own discipline of history but also with the School of English and the School of Education in Trinity.
Dr Hatfield covers a number of different areas of cultural change in her book, including medical ideas about childhood and paediatrics, the ‘wild Irish child’ and how outsiders viewed Irish children, the material ideas around childhood including children’s dress and manners, and finally boys and girls’ schooling in the period.
The emergence of Paediatrics and Children’s health as a separate medical field is now also the subject of Dr Hatfield’s current Postdoctoral project funded by the Irish Research Council at University College Dublin. The Birth of the Professional: Child-Care and Medical Expertise in Nineteenth-century Ireland focuses on the period from 1780 up to 1900, looking at how the medical profession increasingly inserts itself into family life and formulates ideas around childhood health, which subsequently inform governmental positions.
Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Cultural History of Middle-Class Childhood and Gender is published by Oxford University Press.