Period Piece by Gwen Raverat

Author:Gwen Raverat [Raverat, Gwen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780472064755
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 1976-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

There cannot have been many well-to-do gentlemen of that time who actually themselves superintended the putting to bed of their three-year-old sons. He tells a rather pathetic story of how little Jos cried at being washed and how, acting on the correct principles, he told the nursemaid not to scold him, but to go away and leave him all wet. I believe little Jos would far rather have been scolded! Some of the children's conversations are recorded: there is something very odd about overhearing one's baby ancestors talking in bed at night, a hundred and fifty years ago. Their talk is so like that of modern children, that one can feel quite certain that Josiah wrote down the actual words they used, as he stood listening behind the door.

They do not seem to have been taught anything about religion till a little cousin came to stay, from whom 'they learnt much about God'. 'They applied to Marianne to know why God would not let Adam and Eve eat the apple of that tree? Their instructress replied: "I suppose God wanted it himself."' This little Jos, Josiah Wedgwood III, was my grandmother's eldest brother; he married Caroline Darwin, my grandfather's sister; and they were the grandparents of Ralph Vaughan Williams, the composer.

Of course, Josiah's theories wore off in time; but a very free humane system of education grew out of them, in which children were treated as human beings from the first; and the upbringing at Down must have been much the same.

Sometimes it almost seems as if life at Down must have been too happy, the relations between parents and children too perfect; for the uncles in all their lives never seemed quite to get away from that early Elysium, or quite to belong to the ordinary horrid world.

Uncle William told a story, in his speech at the Darwin Centenary, which showed the relationship between their father and his grown-up sons; and it also illustrates my grandfather's very rare anger, only aroused by cruelty. In 1865, Eyre, Governor of Jamaica, had repressed a rebellion of the negroes there with considerable brutality. For this he was tried, but an influential party took up his defence. Uncle William said: 'One day at Down I made some flippant and derogatory remarks about the committee which was prosecuting Eyre. My father instantly turned on me in a fury of indignation, and told me I had better go back to Southampton [from whence he had just come]. The next morning at seven o'clock he came to my bedside and said how sorry he was that he had been so angry, and that he had not been able to sleep, and with a few kind words he left me.'

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