Holmes and ‘Typical Victorian upbringing’

[mightymads]

Continuing to read The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed by Judith Flanders. The chapter about nursery touches upon child-rearing, and it’s pointed out that society and, as a consequence, family were adult-oriented, so children were to be out of the way. It seems that a vast distance between the parents and the children was the norm across the classes:

There is no question that, however much the Victorians loved their children, they spoke of them, and thought of them, in a very different way than we have come to expect today. How much was manner, how much representative of actual distance, needs to be considered. For it appears that some parents might have been not merely ignorant of their children’s daily routines and needs, but proud of such ignorance. Initially this might be thought of as a purely upper-class trait, fostered by large numbers of servants, yet it occurred across the social spectrum. Molly Hughes was the child of a London stockbroker who died in a road accident in 1879, at the age of forty, leaving his family perilously near to tipping down into the lower middle class. As a young woman, Molly had to go out to work as a schoolteacher. However, when she was married and able to leave paid employment, she was careful to note in her autobiography that she knew little about children, and relied for information on her servant. [...]

The higher up the social scale, the more open about this distance from their children the parents were. Ursula Bloom’s grandmother, at least in family legend, forgot to take her baby when leaving its grandparents’ in the country: ‘She had never cared too much for children,’ said her granddaughter, perhaps unnecessarily. Those lower down the ladder reflected the same views in smaller ways. Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of the then-struggling Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, referred to their first child as ‘the small stranger within our gates’.

It very much coincides with Jeremy Brett’s headcanon about the way Holmes was raised:
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