Attitudes to children underwent a profound shift in eighteenth-century Europe. The publication in 1693 of John Locke’s treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, revolutionised prevailing ideas about the nature of childhood itself, as well as its role in the formation of character and morals. Locke saw education as a social rather than spiritual process and argued against stifling the whims and desires of children with draconian punishments. The most famous metaphor of his epistemology, according to which the human mind is a tabula rasa – a blank piece of paper, so to speak – boldly contradicted the traditional Christian belief in Original Sin. Whereas writers from the time of St Augustine onwards had argued that children are corrupt from birth, because of their inherent sinfulness, Locke argued that the mind of the child is essentially innocent, pure of evil until exposed to it. He believed that children should be allowed to play, should even be encouraged to do so, and should only gradually be taught how to think rationally and make moral judgements.

Eighteenth-century attitudes to children were further transformed by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Emile, or On Education, of 1763, was also very influential. Rousseau did not merely argue, as Locke had done, that childhood should be accepted as a necessary stage of human growth. He believed that childhood was itself the golden period of every human life. Rousseau believed that children exist in an innocent state both of naturalness and of closeness to nature. To become “civilised”, to learn the laws and codes of human behaviour, is to become a creature of habit, dead to the true wonder of the world. Rousseau’s beliefs would be reflected in many of the most celebrated works of Romantic literature – in the essays of Hazlitt, who railed...

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