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 Page 1

Early childhood and

primary education
Readings and Reflections

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Early childhood and

primary education
Readings and reflections

Jane Johnston and John Halocha

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Open University Press

McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill House
Shoppenhangers Road
Maidenhead
Berkshire
England
SL6 2QL

email: [email protected]
world wide web: www.openup.co.uk

and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121-2289, USA

First published 2010

Copyright © Jane Johnston & John Halocha 2010

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of
criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency
Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained
from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London
EC1N 8TS.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-0-33-523656-5 (pb) 978-0-33-523657-2 (hb)

ISBN-10: 0-33-523656-1 (pb) 0-33-523657-X (hb)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CIP data applied for

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed in the UK by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow.

Fictitious names of companies, products, people, characters and/or data that may
be used herein (in case studies or in examples) are not intended to represent any
real individual, company, product or event.

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Contents

List of figures vii

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1

PART 1
Understanding child development 5

1 Social development 7

2 Emotional development 28

3 Physical and spatial development 48

4 Cognitive development 65

5 Language development 84

PART 2
The changing world of childhood 101

6 The family 103

7 Play 120

8 Globalization 140

9 Multicultural 156

10 The digital world 172

PART 3
Changing practice and professionalism 187

11 Working together 189

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vi CONTENTS

12 Professionals 204

13 Policy 220

14 The curriculum 236

15 Creativity 250

16 The individual child 264

17 Learning places 281

Index 295

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Figures

1.1 The ecological systems theory 8

2.1 Maslow’s (1968) theory of hierarchical needs 41
3.1 Visual spatial problems 53
3.2 Make 5 54
3.3 Results for the UK from the Unicef report on child well-being 61
16.1 Action plan 271
16.2 An example of a concept map 279

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank: Emma Jordan for her persistent and efficient
efforts in arranging the necessary permissions for the book; Fiona Richman for
her patience and support in the writing process and for not badgering us;
colleagues in school and the University College who have inspired us with
their thoughtful discussions; Alan Stacey who helped us with IT solutions; and
Vanessa Richards, the North East Representative for the National Association
of Music Educators and Curriculum Support Teacher in Music in the Scottish
Borders, who contributed to, and advised on aspects of the book.

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 Page 1

Introduction

In this book the authors hope to support educational professionals in the early
years and primary education to understand historical and current educational
practice and their theoretical underpinnings and support them in developing
their personal and professional practice. The rationale for this is that early years
and primary are often seen as very separate stages of development, although
children are expected to progress from one key stage to another in a seamless
way and the historical and philosophical ideas underpinning practice at the
different stages are often the same or similar. We believe that to be fully effect-
ive, professionals need to understand and reflect on children’s experiences
both before and after the stage they are currently working in and understand
historical and current ideas and practice.

The theorists used in this book

The current drive is to equip professionals working with young children

with higher-level understandings and skills and this involves consideration
of the key historical and current theories and the development of the con-
ceptual and philosophical frameworks that positively impact on current prac-
tice. In this book the main theorists we use are listed below in alphabetical
order. We believe that it is important to read and understand their original
work as often our understanding of the theories is based on knowledge passed
down by word of mouth or read in more recent texts. Both these methods
of dissemination of ideas is problematic, as the meaning of the theories
become modified over time and are often assigned new meanings, which can
distort the important ideas. It is also important for professionals to explore
the origins of ideas currently used in practice so that the implications for
current practice can be effectively critiqued and problems of application can
be fully explored.

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2 INTRODUCTION

Albert Bandura (1925–) is a Canadian psychologist whose ideas about

the development of personality and the effect of imitation and modelling
behaviour are important in understanding social development (see Chapter 1).

John Bowlby (1907–1990) studied developmental psychology, through

psychiatry and psychoanalysis, from a medical background. His ideas on emo-
tional development and the affects of maternal deprivation and poor bonding
in the early years are important in our understanding of emotional develop-
ment (see Chapter 2).

Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917–2005) was a Russian-born developmental

psychologist whose ecological systems theory helps us to understand the
interrelationships between individuals, groups and their environment and is
thus important in understanding social development (see Chapter 1).

Jerome Bruner (1915–) is an American cognitive psychologist, whose ideas

are relevant to cognitive development (see Chapter 4), language development
(see Chapter 5) and theories on play (see Chapter 7).

Noam Chomsky’s (1928–) nativist theories on language development chal-

lenged theories on language acquisition (see Chapter 5).

John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and

educator, who was interested in the reform of educational theory and practice.
He followed Rousseau’s belief in child-centred childcare and began a shift from
school-centred education towards more child-centred education with his work
and writings (see Chapter 17).

Erik Erikson’s (1902–1994) contributions concerned the development of self-

identity and arose out of his personal concerns about his own identity. They
have an influence on emotional development (see Chapter 2).

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist whose work

with monkeys and humans led him to consider social, physiological and
emotional needs and identified a hierarchy of basic needs, which links the
three areas. It has relevance to emotional development (see Chapter 2),
physical development (see Chapter 3) and consideration of individuality (see
Chapter 16).

Margaret McMillan (1860–1931) was a Scottish educator who was committed

to social welfare and reform of provision for young children. With her sister
Rachel (a medical practitioner) she identified that education is more effective
when children are well fed and clothed and the physical environment protects
the child’s health and welfare (see Chapter 3).

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a Swiss developmental biologist, who became

interested in psychology and through studies of his own children developed a

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INTRODUCTION 3

theory of cognition that is still highly influential today (see Chapter 4). He also
recognized the importance of play on cognitive development (see Chapter 7).

Bridget Plowden (1910–2000) was the chair of the Central Advisory Council
on Education, whose report, often referred to as the ‘Plowden Report’ (DES,
1967) advocated a child-centred approach and recognized the importance
of play and discovery learning (see Chapter 7).

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a French philosopher, social and

political theorist, musician, botanist and writer. He stressed that young chil-
dren should be allowed to develop free of society’s constraints and that the
education system should accommodate children, rather than the other way
around. His ideas are central to consideration of the family (see Chapter 6),
and individuality (see Chapter 16).

Rudolph Steiner (1861–1925) was an Austrian philosopher and scientist,

who founded a spiritual movement called anthroposophy. Steiner’s phil-
osophy advocates the importance of spiritual growth and holistic education
for individual growth (see Chapter 16).

Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) was a Russian teacher, psychologist and phil-

osopher, whose work has greatly influenced thinking about cognition, lan-
guage development and social interaction (see Chapter 5).

Other readings used in this book

In each chapter current theories and ideas are also explored and the readings
have been chosen to help professionals to move from the original theories
(where appropriate to the issue being discussed) to more current ideas. Each
reading also provides opportunities for professionals to engage in critical
debate on current issues in professional practice and the more current readings
have been chosen to aid this.
Each chapter contains a number of tasks to guide the reader to critical
engagement with the issues and debates. Reflective tasks link the readings
where appropriate for each key stage (EYFS, KS1 and KS2) so that professionals
can consider the implications of the reading for their professional practice.
Impact tasks also follow some readings to encourage professionals to con-
sider the impact of the issues on their practice and provision. The impact
tasks are set at three levels (early career, later career and leadership) to reflect
the different stages of professional development. Subject case studies and
accompanying reflective tasks illustrate how the readings impact on teaching
and learning in the subject and again aim to engage professionals in critical
reflection of their practice.

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PART 1
Understanding child
development

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1 Social development

This chapter considers social development by focusing on a number of key

theories about social development and considering how these theories relate
to the social development in early years and primary-aged children today.
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979;
Bronfenbrenner, 1995; Bronfenbrenner and Evans, 2000) is fundamental to
understanding social development and so it forms our first reading (see
Fig. 1.1). The theory places the child firmly in the centre of their social world
and recognizes the importance of their social interactions in social develop-
ment. In the ecological systems theory the child is the centre of a series of four
interconnecting social ‘systems’. The inner system, in which the child sits, is
the ‘microsystem’, or small system. The microsystem consists of a number of
smaller social interactions, or systems, which influence the child’s social
development. The main interactions will be between the child and their fam-
ily and home environment, with interactions between the early years setting
or school environment and the individual adults and children within that
environment. The next system is the ‘mesosystem’, or middle system that
links interactions of the microsystem, so that problems in one microsystem
affect another microsystem. It is this system that is the focus of our main
reading in this chapter. For example, social problems with peers at school may
not only affect the child’s academic work, but also their home life and their
relationships both within school and at home. The third system is the ‘exosys-
tem’, or external system and involves those occurrences outside the child’s
direct world, or the microsystem, but influence it. For example, social class,
poverty and parental employment can all affect the quality of childhood
experiences and social development. The fourth system is the ‘macrosystem’,
which is the larger system or wider societal influences, such as recession, gov-
ernment policies, legislation, societal rules and conventions that affect social
interaction and development.

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8 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Figure 1.1 The ecological systems theory.

Source: reproduced with permission from Johnston and Nahmad-Williams (2008)

❝ The Mesosystem and Human Development

In analyzing the forces that affect processes of socialization and develop-
ment at the level of the mesosystem, we shall find ourselves using most of
the same concepts employed to delineate the structure and operation of
microsystems. Thus the basic building blocks will be the familiar elements
of the setting: molar activities, roles, and interpersonal structures in the
form of dyads and N + 2 systems varying in the degree of reciprocity,
balance of power, and affective relations. What is more, many of the
hypotheses derived will be analogous to prototypes previously formulated
for the microsystem. The difference lies in the nature of the interconnec-
tions involved. At the microsystem level, the dyads and N + 2 systems,
the role transactions, and the molar activities all occur within one setting,
whereas in the mesosystem these processes take place across setting
boundaries. As a result of this isomorphism, it is possible to formulate

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 9

most of our hypotheses in advance and then examine relevant research

evidence.
I have defined the mesosystem as a set of interrelations between
two or more settings in which the developing person becomes an active
participant. What kinds of interconnections are possible, for example,
between home and school? I propose four general types.
1. Multisetting participation. This is the most basic form of intercon-
nection between two settings, since at least one manifestation of it is
required for a mesosystem. It occurs when the same person engages in
activities in more than one setting, for example, when a child spends time
both at home and at the day care center. Since such participation neces-
sarily occurs sequentially, multisetting participation can also be defined
as the existence of a direct or first-order social network across settings
in which the developing person is a participant. The existence of such a
network, and therefore of a mesosystem, is established at the point when
the developing person first enters a new setting. When this occurs, we
also have an instance of what I have called an ecological transition, in this
instance a transition from one setting to another.
When the developing person participates in more than one setting
of a mesosystem, she is referred to as a primary link, as when Mary enters
school. Other persons who participate in the same two settings are
referred to as supplementary links; for instance, Mary’s mother attends a
PTA meeting, her teacher pays a visit to the home, or Mary brings home
a classmate to play. As these examples indicate, direct links can operate
in the direction of either setting.
A dyad in either setting that involves a linking person as a member
is referred to as a linking dyad.
2. Indirect linkage. When the same person does not actively partici-
pate in both settings, a connection between the two may still be estab-
lished through a third party who serves as an intermediate link between
persons in the two settings. In this case, participants in the two settings
are no longer meeting face-to-face so that we speak of them as members
of a second-order network between settings. Such second-order connec-
tions can also be more remote, involving two or more intermediate links
in the network chain.
3. Intersetting communications. These are messages transmitted from
one setting to the other with the express intent of providing specific
information to persons in the other setting. The communication can occur
in a variety of ways: directly through face-to-face interaction, telephone
conversations, correspondence and other written messages, notices or
announcements, or indirectly via chains in the social network. The com-
munication may be one-sided or may occur in both directions.
4. Intersetting knowledge refers to information or experience that

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10 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

exists in one setting about the other. Such knowledge may be obtained
through intersetting communication or from sources external to the par-
ticular settings involved, for example, from library books. The most critical
direct link between two settings is the one that establishes the existence of
a mesosystem in the first instance – the setting transition that occurs when
the person enters a new environment. If the child goes to school on the
first day unaccompanied, and no one else from his home enters the
school setting, there exists only a single direct link between the two micro-
systems. Under these circumstances, the transition and the resulting link
that is established are referred to as solitary. Should the child be accom-
panied by his mother or an older brother who enters the school with him
and introduces him to the teacher or to the other children, the transition
and the resultant link are described as dual. Of course the mother may not
come to the school until a later point, or the teacher may visit the home,
in which case the connection becomes dual at that time. A mesosystem
in which there is more than one person who is active in both settings is
referred to as multiply linked. A mesosystem in which the only links, apart
from the original link involving the person, are indirect or in which there
are no additional links whatsoever is described as weakly linked.
I make these distinctions not merely because they are logically pos-
sible but because I believe them to be of significance for the way in which
the developing person is able to function in new settings. A dual transition
permits the formation of a three-person system immediately upon entry
into the new setting, with all its potential for second-order effects; the
third party can serve as a source of security, provide a model of social
interaction, reinforce the developing person’s initiative, and so on. The
extent of this catalytic power of the intermediary depends on his relation
with the developing person as well as on the nature of the dyads estab-
lished in the new setting, that is, whether they are only observational
(the mother acts purely as a visitor), involve joint activity (the mother
converses with the teacher), or develop into a primary dyad (the mother
and teacher become good friends).
These considerations are made explicit in two sets of hypotheses. The
first set focuses on the experience of the developing person in the meso-
system; these hypotheses deal with the structure of primary links and
their developmental consequences. The second series is concerned with
analogous considerations pertaining to supplementary links. We begin
with hypotheses that specify optimal conditions for the establishment
and maintenance of the primary link.

HYPOTHESIS 27
The developmental potential of a setting in a mesosystem is enhanced if
the person’s initial transition into that setting is not made alone, that is, if

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 11

he enters the new setting in the company of one or more persons with
whom he has participated in prior settings (for example, the mother
accompanies the child to school).

HYPOTHESIS 28
The developmental potential of settings in a mesosystem is enhanced if
the role demands in the different settings are compatible and if the roles,
activities, and dyads in which the developing person engages encourage
the development of mutual trust, a positive orientation, goal consensus
between settings, and an evolving balance of power in favor of the devel-
oping person.
To consider a negative example: as indicated by the results of a pilot
study conducted by me and my colleagues (Avgar, Bronfenbrenner, and
Henderson, 1977; Cochran and Bronfenbrenner, 1978), mothers from
two-parent families who hold part time jobs find themselves in a difficult
role conflict; the husbands continue to act as if their wives were still func-
tioning as full time mothers, while employers often treat them as if they
were full time employees. The mothers experience the resulting frustra-
tion as impairing their effectiveness as parents, their performance on the
job, and their development as human beings.
Thus participation in more than one setting has developmental con-
sequences. From infancy onward, the number of settings in which the
growing person becomes active gradually increases. This evolving par-
ticipation in multiple settings is not only a result of development – under
certain conditions, it is also a cause. This thought is developed in a series
of hypotheses.

HYPOTHESIS 29
Development is enhanced as a direct function of the number of structur-
ally different settings in which the developing person participates in a
variety of joint activities and primary dyads with others, particularly when
these others are more mature or experienced.
Based on this hypothesis one could make the following prediction:
holding age and socioeconomic factors constant, a young person enter-
ing college who has been closely associated with adults outside the fam-
ily, has lived away from home, and held a number of jobs will be able
to profit more from a college education than one whose experience has
been more limited.
The hypothesis is based on the assumption that involvement in joint
activity in a range of settings requires the developing person to adapt to
a variety of people, tasks, and situations, thus increasing the scope and
flexibility of his cognitive competence and social skills. Moreover, as indi-
cated earlier, joint activities tend to develop a motivational momentum of

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12 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

their own that persists when the participants are no longer together.
When such activities occur in a variety of settings, this motivational
momentum tends to generalize across situations. These effects are further
enhanced if the participants are emotionally significant in each other’s
lives, that is, if they are members of primary dyads. The hypothesis has a
corollary at the sociological level.

HYPOTHESIS 30
The positive developmental effects of participation in multiple settings
are enhanced when the settings occur in cultural or subcultural contexts
that are different from each other, in terms of ethnicity, social class,
religion, age group, or other background factors. Underlying this hypoth-
esis is the assumption that differences in activities, roles, and relations are
maximized when settings occur in culturally diverse environments.
A critical case for the two foregoing hypotheses would be repre-
sented by a person who had grown up in two cultures, had participated
actively and widely in each society, and had developed close friendships
with people in both. If the two hypotheses are valid, such a person, when
compared with someone of the same age and status who had grown up
in only one country and subculture, should exhibit higher levels of cogni-
tive function and social skill and be able to profit more from experience in
an educational setting. I know of no research on this phenomenon, but it
is certainly susceptible to empirical investigation by, for example, compar-
ing the development of children with and without extensive experience
of other cultures or ethnic groups, holding other aspects of family back-
ground constant. The hypotheses could also be tested by, for instance,
assigning youngsters to work projects involving participation in sub-
cultures within the community.
This line of reasoning is applicable not only at the level of the indi-
vidual but also at that of the dyad. Just as it is possible for a person to
engage in activity in more than one setting, so can the dyad do this. Such
a migrating two-person system is referred to as a transcontextual dyad.
From an ecological perspective, there is reason to expect this type of
structure have special significance for development. It is probably even
more conducive to the formation of primary dyads than a joint activity
limited to a single setting. But more important, I suggest that the occur-
rence of transcontextual dyads in the life of the person may operate to
enhance the person’s capacity and motivation to learn. This possibility is
based on the assumption that when a variety of joint activities are carried
out in a range of situations but in the context of an enduring interpersonal
relationship, the latter both encourages the development of higher levels
of skill and tends to generate especially strong and persistent levels of
motivation. This thinking leads to the following three hypotheses.

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 13

HYPOTHESIS 31
The capacity of the person to profit from a developmental experience
will vary directly as a function of the number of transcontextual dyads,
across a variety of settings, in which she has participated prior to that
experience.

HYPOTHESIS 32
Children from cultural backgrounds that encourage the formation and
maintenance of transcontextual dyads are more likely to profit from new
developmental experiences.

HYPOTHESIS 33
Development is enhanced by providing experiences that allow for the
formation and maintenance of transcontextual dyads across a variety of
settings.
Several hypotheses pertain to the optimal structure of additional
links between settings beyond the primary connection established by
the developing person. The first one is merely an extension of an earlier
hypothesis (28) now expanded to encompass any additional persons
who participate in the different settings under consideration.

HYPOTHESIS 34
The developmental potential of settings in a mesosystem is enhanced
if the roles, activities, and dyads in which the linking person engages
in the two settings encourage the growth of mutual trust, positive orien-
tation, goal consensus between settings and an evolving balance of
power responsive to action on behalf of the developing person. A
supplementary link that meets these conditions is referred to as a support-
ive link.
An example in which the conditions stipulated in this hypothesis
were violated is found in the previously cited (chapter 8) account by
Karnes of the unforeseen effects of combining home visits with a pre-
school program. The change in the staff’s treatment of mothers as a result
of the new arrangement decreased the mother’s sense of her own
importance and efficacy and her active involvement as a key figure in her
child’s development.

HYPOTHESIS 35
The developmental potential of a setting is increased as a function of the
number of supportive links existing between that setting and other set-
tings (such as home and family). Thus the least favorable condition for
development is one in which supplementary links are either nonsupportive
or completely absent – when the mesosystem is weakly linked.

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14 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

HYPOTHESIS 36
The developmental potential of a setting is enhanced when the supportive
links consist of others with whom the developing person has developed
a primary dyad (the child’s father visits the day care center) and who
engage in joint activity and primary dyads with members of the new
setting (the child’s mother and teacher are bridge partners).
The examples in hypothesis 36 assume that parents behave, as
indeed they usually do, in a manner consistent with the requirements for
a supportive link as stipulated in hypothesis 34.

Our next hypothesis in effect sets a boundary condition to the relation-

ships posited in the three preceding ones.

HYPOTHESIS 37
The relationships posited in hypotheses 34 through 36 vary inversely with
the developing person’s prior experience and sense of competence in the
settings involved. Thus the positive impact of linkage would be maximal
for young children, minorities (especially in a majority milieu), the sick,
the aged, and so on. Conversely, as experience and self-confidence
increase, the postulated relationships would decrease in magnitude to a
point at which they reverse direction, such that for a maturing person
who is at home in her own culture, development may be further
enhanced by entry into new settings that have no prior links with the
setting of origin or in which the balance of power is weighted against
the developing person and those operating on her behalf.
In other words, the hypothesized relationships are curvilinear with a
turning point that depends on the person’s stage of development and
social status in the society. For a young teenager leaving home for the
first time – or a minority member visiting city hall – going with a friend or
knowing someone in the new location can make a difference. For a suc-
cessful college graduate, looking for a job in a new environment might
be more conducive to development than staying at home to work in the
family business.
Second-order social networks involving intermediate links can per-
form at least three important functions. They provide an indirect channel
for desired communication in situations where no direct link is available.
(For example, a working mother who cannot attend parents’ meetings at
the day care center can find out what happened from a friend). Second-
order networks can also be used for identifying human or material
resources from one setting needed for use in the other. (For instance, a
parent turns to friends for help in finding a job.) Perhaps the most import-
ant mesosystem function of social networks is unintended: they serve as
channels for transmitting information or attitudes about one setting to

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 15

the other. (From third parties, parents can be told a different story about
what happened at school from the version brought home by the child, or
the teacher can learn “via the grapevine” that parents are prejudiced
against her because of her ethnic or religious background).
Our hypothesis specifying the structure of indirect links most con-
ducive to development follows a familiar pattern, one that defines a
supportive function for interconnections between settings.

HYPOTHESIS 38
The developmental potential of a mesosystem is enhanced to the extent
that there exist indirect linkages between settings that encourage the
growth of mutual trust, positive orientation, goal consensus, and a balance
of power responsive to action on behalf of the developing person.
We have already noted that intended communication between set-
tings can take a variety of forms and can vary in the direction of flow.
These are parameters that have been extensively investigated in com-
munication research. I have drawn on this literature to derive three general
hypotheses addressing the influence of communication between settings
on their potential as contexts for development.

HYPOTHESIS 39
The developmental potential of participation in multiple settings will vary
directly with the ease and extent of twoway communication between
those settings. Of key importance in this regard is the inclusion of the
family in the communications network (for example, the child’s devel-
opment in both family and school is facilitated by the existence of open
channels of communication in both directions).

HYPOTHESIS 40
The developmental potential of settings is enhanced to the extent that
the mode of communication between them is personal (thus in descend-
ing order: face-to-face, personal letter or note, phone, business letter,
announcement).
Information available in one setting about another can come from a
variety of sources. Besides direct oral and written communication between
settings these can include traditional knowledge handed from one gener-
ation to the next, one’s own childhood experience, books, television, and
so on (Lüscher and Fisch, 1977). Especially important are discussions that
take place in one setting about the other. For example, parents of a young
child can describe to him what school will be like, or the school can offer
courses in family life. Thus intersetting knowledge also takes a variety of
forms. In addition to oral or written information, advice, and opinion, it
may involve objects from or representing the other setting (as when a

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16 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

child takes a favorite toy to show at school or a school banner hangs in

the child’s bedroom) as well as experiences, both imaginary (such as role
playing) and real (such as introductory visits). ❞
Source: Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979) The Ecology of
Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 209–17

Reflection

The reading (Bronfenbrenner, 1979: 209–13) indicates the importance of

‘ecological transition’ (transition from one system to another) and intersetting
communication. Transitions occur regularly in our lives and at any stage of
development. Having a new sibling, starting school, moving house and moving
class are examples of potentially big transitions, but smaller ones occur each
day, such as moving from one activity, or lesson to another, going to a friend’s
house for tea, or even beginning a new reading book. In many ways it is not
the transition itself that can cause social discomfort and stress, but the social
skills we have that support us in these transitions. Transition is a process
rather than an event (Johnston et al., 2007) and is made easier with good inter-
setting communication, so that children may not even realize, let alone be
unsettled by the transition. Some early years settings and schools go further
than effective communication and encourage full involvement from parents,
carers and the wider family, or provide extended services that are almost exten-
sions of the home. The importance of good interactions between early years
settings and home are well recognized (Sylva et al., 2004) and the extended
school initiative (DCFS, 2007) has made some transitions between mesosystems
more effective at later stages of development. This may have an effect, not only
on social development, but also on other aspects of development, such as
socialization (see EPPE, 2003, who indicate benefits of early transition) and
emotional development (see Bowlby, 2007, who indicates the problems of early
transitions).

Reflective tasks

EYFS:
• How do the interactions of the mesosystem relate to your own practice
in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)?
• How can you improve home to setting transition and communication
to support the children in your care?
• What factors could inhibit developments in home to setting transition
and communication? How can you ameliorate these?

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 17

KS1:
• How can you facilitate the interactions of the mesosystem to support
home–school liaison and communication at Key Stage 1 (KS1)?
• What can you do in your own class or school to improve children’s
transition from the EYFS and to KS2?
• What factors are likely to support or challenge improved home–school
communication? How can you build on the supportive factors and
overcome the challenges?

KS2:
• What relevance do the interactions of the mesosystem have to your
own practice in Key Stage 2 (KS2)?
• What can you do in your own class or school to improve children’s
transition from class to class and from KS1 and to KS3?
• How can improved home–school communication help these
transitions?

How children develop socially

A popular theory of how children develop socially is the social learning theory
embodied by Bandura (1977) who is famous for his extensive laboratory
research known as the ‘Bobo doll’ experiment. This study illustrated that young
children’s behaviour involved modelling behaviour seen and was reinforced
extrinsically or intrinsically. He observed three groups of nursery children to
see how they would respond to a short film in which a plastic doll (Bobo doll)
was hit with a mallet and kicked and with three different endings:

1 one where this behaviour was rewarded

2 one where the behaviour was punished
3 one where there was no adult response to the behaviour.

Subsequently, the children were observed playing with the doll and the result-
ing behaviour noted. The results were that children who saw aggression being
rewarded or ignored were more likely to be aggressive to the doll.

Distinctions are frequently made between extrinsic and intrinsic

sources of reinforcement as though they were anti-thetical.
In extrinsic reinforcement, the consequences are externally pro-
duced and their relationship to the behavior is arbitrary. It is not in
the natural course of things that work should produce paychecks, that

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18 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

good performance should evoke praise, or that reprehensible conduct

should bring censure. Approval, money, privileges, penalties, and
the like are socially arranged rather than natural consequences of
behavior. When these outcomes are no longer forthcoming, the
behavior declines unless it acquires other functions.
Intrinsic reinforcement, as the concept is commonly used, com-
prises three types of arrangements between behavior and its con-
sequences. In one form, the consequences originate externally, but
are naturally related to the behavior.
In the second intrinsic form, behavior produces naturally occur-
ring consequences that are internal to the organism. Responses that
generate physiological effects directly rather than through the action
of external stimuli typify this contingency arrangement.
The self-reinforcement process . . . represents the third form of
intrinsic reinforcement. The evaluative consequences are internally
generated, but the contingencies are arbitrary in that any activity
can become invested with self-evaluative significance. What is a source
of self-satisfaction for one person may be devalued or of no self con-
sequence for another.
(Bandura, 1977: 114–16)

Bandura (1977: 116) believes that intrinsic motivation is a ‘highly appealing

but elusive construct’ and is hard to recognize in practice, if for no other
reason than there are few situations that do not have some element of
extrinsic motivation. He also believes that observed extrinsic rewards have a
number of functions that affect behaviour, as well as attitudes and cognition,
so that what you see affects what you do, feel and think. These functions are:

• Informative Function, by informing children who observe others as

to the behaviours that lead to rewards or sanctions,
• Motivational Function, by encouraging children that they will benefit
from behaviours in similar ways,
• Emotional Learning Function, by providing children with an emo-
tional response to reward and sanctions,
• Valuation Function, by helping them to develop a liking to behaviours
that may have been disfavoured in the past, if they see these
behaviours rewarded,
• Influenceability Function, by influencing children further, in their
response to behaviour, if they have previously observed reinforcement
or resistance to these behaviours.

Reinforcement conveys information to performers about the types

of responses that are appropriate; selective reinforcement directs

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 19

performers’ attention to environmental cues that signify the probable

consequences of various behaviours; previously experienced out-
comes create expectations that motivate actions designed to secure
desired rewards and to avoid painful outcomes; punishing experi-
ences can render persons, places and things threatening and inhibit
responsiveness; repeated successes and failures can alter people’s
self-evaluations in ways that affect their determination and willing-
ness to engage in conduct that is discrepant with their self-attitudes;
and finally, the treatment one receives can alter the effectiveness
of those who exercise influence by creating attraction or antipathy
toward them.
(Bandura, 1977: 128)

Impact tasks

Early career professional:

Consider your current practice with children and how you reinforce good
behaviours and sanction behaviours you do not want. Model some good
behaviours and reward children who exhibit these. Observe the behaviour of
children over a period of time and identify examples of:

• informative functions
• motivational functions
• emotional learning functions
• valuation functions
• influenceability functions.

Reflection

• How successful is the reinforcement in developing and supporting

children’s behaviours?
• Do the reinforcements have a greater influence on one type of func-
tion? If so why do you think this is?
• How can you change your practice to support the development of
children socially?

Later career professional:

Plan some activities that provide opportunities to explore different social
behaviours. This may be some role play, use a story as a starting point, or involve
watching a video. For example, the story of the Giant Turnip (Barkow, 2001) can
be a starting point to a discussion on co-operative and collaborative behaviours

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20 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

or in studying the First World War, the focus can be on the altruistic behaviours
of people during air raids. Discuss the behaviour of individuals within the
example you have chosen and afterwards observe the behaviour of children
over a period of time and identify any behaviours that they exhibit that could
have been reinforced by the activity.

Reflection

• How successful was the activity in reinforcing, developing or support-

ing children’s behaviours?
• Does the reinforcement of the activity have a greater effect on one
type of function? If so why do you think this is?
• How could you use this type of activity to reinforce other behaviour or
to provide resistance to behaviour?

Professional leader:
With your staff audit the behaviour that you want to reinforce and those that
you wish to diminish. Prioritize the lists and choose the two positive behaviours
that you consider the most important to reinforce and the two negative
behaviours that you want to avoid. Identify the main factors that encourage and
prevent the positive and negative behaviours. Develop an action plan for the
medium (term) and long (year) term to reinforce and resist the behaviours that
you have prioritized. This may include activities as part of the curriculum or
modelling of behaviour, rewards and sanctions.
Try this out for one term and evaluate the success. You may then adjust the
action plan and reassess after another term or at the end of the year.

Reflection

• How successful were the planned activities in reinforcing, developing

or supporting children’s behaviours over a short or long period?
• How do any changes in behaviour impact on the setting/school as a
whole and the achievements of the children?
• How can you extend the use of this type of planned action to reinforce
or resist other behaviours?

The social child today

The loss of opportunities for outdoor, loosely supervised play is also

likely to have long term effects on children’s social development.

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 21

Learning how to make friends, play as part of a group, and resolve

minor conflicts used to take place out of adult view, meaning that
children could take responsibility – and make mistakes – without
incurring immediate adult judgement. Many of children’s playmates
now are screen-based virtual friends, from whom they don’t learn
social skills. And practically all real juvenile socialising goes on under
the eagle eye of adults, who are naturally swift to intervene if things
look dicey. Some children are thus being labelled ‘naughty’ very early
in their social careers (and then going on to fulfil the prophecy), while
others are learning to call for help at the first sign of danger.
(Palmer, 2006: 60–1)

Concerns about social problems in childhood have been expressed from a

number of writers. Elkind (2001) is concerned that children today have less
time to be children and play, with the obvious detrimental effects on their
social development and in 2006, over a hundred child experts, academics,
writers, and so on led by Baroness Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal
Institution, wrote a letter that was published in the Daily Telegraph (2006: 23)
expressing concern at ‘the escalating incidence of childhood depression and child-
ren’s behavioural and developmental conditions’, with little time to play ‘in a fast-
moving, hyper-competitive culture, today’s children are expected to cope with an ever
earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curric-
ulum’ and calling for a long-overdue debate on childhood. The Cambridge
Review of Primary Education (Alexander, 2009) provided a comprehensive
review of the state of primary education, which included a clear endorsement
for peer collaboration (Howe and Mercer, 2007) and play-based learning.

Children find that their relations with parents include elements of

dependence, interdependence and independence. Over the primary
school years, they become increasingly responsible – for self-care,
organising their lives, jobs around the house and caring for family
members. Parents (especially mothers) and siblings (also in some cases
other relatives) provide children with confidants. Relations with sib-
lings and friends vary widely, but help children understand their own
identity. Siblings and friends are important for support, defence and
fun, especially in public places and at school. Studies suggest that in
times of hardship, including divorce and separation, children value
being kept informed and participating in decision-making. Relational
practices within the family are found to be crucial to children’s
well-being.
(Mayall, 2007: 3)

The United Nation’s Children’s Fund (Unicef, 2007) report on The State of the

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22 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

World’s Children 2007 has indicated that these concerns are not unfounded
and that children in the UK score low in a number of areas of social develop-
ment. For example, in relationships with their peers children in the UK find
their peers the least kind and helpful out of 21 Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and this has a significant
and detrimental effect on children’s development as, ‘those who are not
socially integrated are far more likely to exhibit difficulties with their physical
and emotional health’ (Unicef, 2007: 25).

Reflection

Children’s social development is of great importance because of the impact of

social development on all aspects of their lives and helps them to become social
adults. As such the evidence (Mayall, 2007; Unicef, 2007) and concerns (Elkind,
2001; Palmer, 2006) appear to indicate a crisis that home and school need
to consider and address. The extended schools initiative (DCSF, 2007) can be
thought to support or inhibit social development, as can homework, after-
school clubs and initiatives that keep children in formal care or formal work,
rather than in socializing within the family and with peers.

Reflective tasks

EYFS:
• Does the EYFS provision extend and support social, or inhibit social
development? How?
• How could you further promote and extend social development to
help children to become more social?

KS1:
• What factors at KS1 facilitate and inhibit social development?
• How can you support social development at KS1, building on the
foundations of the EYFS?

KS2:
• Does homework inhibit social development? How?
• How can you use homework to promote social development and
home–school liaison?

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 23

What can we do to support social development?

In young children formal pre-school experiences have been found to have a

positive effect on children’s social development (Schwienhart et al., 1993;
Sammons et al., 2002). The benefits show themselves as improved co-operation
and conformity, less antisocial or worried behaviour, greater peer sociability
and ‘a score 0.22 points higher’ for independence and concentration than
children without pre-school experiences (Sammons et al., 2002: 54).
The High/Scope Foundation has also carried out considerable research
into the effects of the High/Scope pre-school programme in both the short and
long term through a longitudinal study. This has shown that high-quality,
cognitively oriented nursery education enables children to achieve better than
their peers throughout their school lives and also to function better in society
as adults (Schwienhart et al., 1993). Key to this improved social development is
adult-guided play and good home–school liaison.
For older children in KS 1 and 2, the focus of the last 20 years on cognition
is unhelpful in supporting social development and this has been recognized by
The Cambridge Review of Primary Education (Alexander, 2009). The focus of the
National Curriculum (DfEE, 1999) was mainly on cognition and although
the programmes of study did recognize the importance of social development,
this appears to be half-hearted in a system where teachers are judged on cogni-
tive achievements in national assessments. Even the changes to the primary
curriculum (Rose, 2009) are unlikely to make significant differences unless
this cognitive emphasis is changed.
Particular challenges to the improvement of social development in chil-
dren centre around:

• Time for children to learn through play. The evidence (Elkind, 2001;
Palmer, 2006; Mayall, 2007) is that children do not have enough time
to play and learn through play and this is the main way that children
learn to socialize and develop social skills and the social norms
expected of them. The link here between social development and emo-
tional development is strong (see Bowlby, 2007). This is developed
further in Chapter 2, Emotional development and Chapter 7, Play.
• Time for children to talk to peers and adults. Again the evidence
(Unicef, 2007; Alexander, 2009) is that ‘every child does matter’
(DfES, 2004) but that the nature of childhood and the state of society
for children are great concerns. Social dialogue is an important way
in which children learn about society and enter into discussions that
help them to be citizens in society. In busy homes, with parents work-
ing and children involved in extended care and in busy early years
settings and primary schools, where the focus on cognition and

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24 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

assessment of cognition, there are fewer opportunities than in previ-

ous generations. Interaction between home and setting (see Bronfen-
brenner, 1979) also take time, if they are to be effective, and support
children in their social development.
• Opportunities for children to be independent. Concerns about the
physical safety of children have led to them having fewer opportun-
ities to be independent (Palmer, 2006) and learn to be effective
adults and citizens. Children can socialize with text messages and
through social networking sites and when their parents arrange
more formal play opportunities. However, there are fewer opportun-
ities to socialize with peers in informal situations and to meet other
peers.
• Encouragement and opportunities for children to take responsibility.
The focus on positive behaviour strategies or positive reinforcement
of behaviour (see Bandura, 1977) has created a situation where chil-
dren find it less easy to take responsibility for anti-social behaviours
and to blame others, events, or situations for things they do wrong;
‘It is not my fault, I did not mean it’, ‘He made me’, and so on etc.

Subject tasks

EYFS:
Puppets can be used in the EYFS to promote language, literacy and communica-
tion by encouraging children to speak and listen. Use a ‘naughty’ puppet to
discuss a social issue. You may do this in conjunction with a children’s book
that focuses on a social issue, such as It Wasn’t Me: Learning About Honesty,
or I’ll Do It! Learning About Responsibility: Taking Responsibility (Moses and
Gordon, 1998a, b). The children can talk to the puppet and tell them why s/he
should be honest, take responsibility, share with friends, and so on. The initial
discussion could be part of a small group or larger group circle/carpet time and
then the puppet could be left for the children to play with. Observe any sub-
sequent interactions and note the children’s dialogue with the puppet about
social issues.

Reflection

• What do the children’s interactions with the puppet tell you about
their social development and development in language, literacy and
communication?
• How could you use the puppet in the future to support social
development?

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 25

KS1:
Role play can support development in a range of curriculum areas, as well as
social development. For example, a post office can help children in English
(writing, reading and speaking and listening) and mathematics (using and
applying number, reasoning, and so on) as applied to money and also negotiat-
ing, manners, honesty, and so on in social development. Set up a role play area
in your classroom that can support a number of aspects of the curriculum and
social development. Observe the children as they play in the role play area and
note the play for evidence of social development. You may wish to discuss some
of your observations with the children to get them to consider the social inter-
actions further.

Reflection

• What do the children’s interactions with each other in the role play
area tell you about their social development as well as development in
curriculum areas?
• How could you use role play in the future to support social
development?

KS2:
Hot-seating can provide children with opportunities to explore the reasons
behind historical decisions. For example, a historical figure, such as Queen
Victoria or Winston Churchill or King Henry VIII, can be asked by the children
to explain why they chose to act in certain ways. The teacher may choose to be
the historical figure and dress up appropriately, or a child may choose to be the
historical figure and respond in a way they feel appropriate. Observation can
tell you a lot about the children’s social development and how the interactions
and reflections develop them socially.

Reflection

• What do the children’s questions, interactions and responses during

the hot-seating activity tell you about their social development and
understanding of history?
• How could you use hot-seating in the future to support social
development?

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26 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

References

Alexander, R. (ed.) (2009) Children, their World, their Education: Final Report and
Recommendations of the Cambridge Review. London: Routledge.
Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Barkow, H. (2001) The Giant Turnip. London: Mantra.
Bowlby, R. (2007) Babies and toddlers in non-parental daycare can avoid stress and
anxiety if they develop a lasting secondary attachment bond with one carer
who is consistently accessible to them, Attachment & Human Development, 9(4):
307–19.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature
and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1995) The bioecological model from a life course perspective:
reflections of a participant observer, in P. Moen, G.H. Elder, Jr. and K. Lú´scher
(eds) Examining Lives in Context. Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association, pp. 599–618.
Bronfenbrenner, U. and Evans, G.W. (2000) Developmental science in the 21st
century: emerging theoretical models, research designs and empirical findings,
Social Development 9: 115–25.
Daily Telegraph (2006) Letters to the editor – modern life leads to more depression
among children, 12 September 2006, No. 47,049, p. 23.
Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) (2007) Extended Schools: Buil-
ding on Experience – Every Child Matters, Change for Children. Nottingham: DCFS.
Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (1999) The National Curriculum:
Handbook for Teachers in England. London:DfEE/QCA.
Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2004) Every Child Matters: Change For
Children. London: DfES.
Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) (2003) Measuring the Impact of
Pre-School on Children’s Social/behavioural Development over the Pre-School
Period: The EPPE (Effective Provision of Pre-school Education) Project Technical
Paper 8b. London: Institute of Education.
Elkind, D. (2001) The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, 3rd edn. Cambridge,
MA: Da Capo Press.
Howe, C. and Mercer, N. (2007) Children’s Social Development, Peer Interaction and
Classroom Learning: Primary Review Research Survey 2/1b. Cambridge: University
of Cambridge.
Johnston, J. and Nahmad-Williams, L. (2008) Early Childhood Studies. Harlow:
Pearson.
Johnston, J., Halocha, J. and Chater, M. (2007) Developing Teaching Skills in the
Primary School. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Mayall, B. (2007) Children’s Lives Outside School and their Educational Impact: Primary
Review Research Briefings 8/1. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.

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SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 27

Moses, B. and Gordon, M. (1998a) It Wasn’t Me: Learning About Honesty. London:
Hodder Children’s Books.
Moses, B. and Gordon, M. (1998b) I’ll Do It! Learning About Responsibility: Taking
Responsibility. London: Hodder Children’s Books.
Palmer, S. (2006) Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging our Chldren and
What we can do about it. London: Orion.
Rose, J. (2009) Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum: Final Report. Not-
tingham: Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).
Sammons, P., Sylva, K., Melhuish, E.C., Siraj-Blatchford, I., Taggart, B. and Elliot, K.
(2002) The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project: Tech-
nical Paper 8b – Measuring the Impact of Pre-School on Children’s Social/behavioural
Development over the Pre-School Period. London: Department for Education and
Skills (DfES)/Institute of Education, University of London.
Schwienhart, L.J., Weikart, D.P. and Toderan, R. (1993) High Quality Preschool
Programs Found to Improve Adult Status. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Foundation.
Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I. and Taggart, B. (2004)
The Effective Provision Of Pre-School Education (Eppe) Project: Final Report. A
Longitudinal Study Funded by the DfES. Nottingham: Department for Education
and Skills (DfES).
United Nation’s Children’s Fund (Unicef) (2007) The State of the World’s Children
2007. Available online at www.unicef.org/sowc07/report/report.php.

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2 Emotional development

This chapter discusses the attachment theories of John Bowlby and Mary
Ainsworth and considers what the implications for emotional development
are for children today as they develop in an increasingly complex world.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional development has a very important biological function in young

children and problems with emotional development can seriously affect the
development of older children and the function of adults in society. Our aim
in early years and primary education is to support children to become emo-
tionally intelligent adults. Emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware,
judge and manage emotions in yourself and others. Salovey and Grewal (2005)
identify five areas of emotional intelligence:

1 Perceiving emotions, the ability to tell emotions from facial expres-

sions, voices, pictures and also to identify your own emotions.
2 Using emotions, the ability to use emotions in cognitive activities,
such as thinking and problem-solving.
3 Understanding emotions, the ability to understand emotional lan-
guage, relationships and the factors that affect emotions.
4 Managing emotions, the use of emotions to achieve goals.

Goleman (1998) identified four categories of emotional intelligence:

1 Self-awareness or the ability to understand your own emotions and

the effect they will have on others and affect decision-making.
2 Self-management, or the ability to control emotions and impulses in
changing contexts.

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EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 29

3 Social awareness, or the ability to perceive, understand, and react to

emotions shown in other people.
4 Relationship management, or the ability to use emotions to lead,
inspire, influence, and solve conflicts.

In this way the relationship between emotional and social development is

strong and problems in one may create problems in the other. Emotional
development begins in the womb and problems in early emotional develop-
ment, especially in attachments are likely to be long lasting throughout child-
hood and into adulthood.

Attachment

The attachment that babies have with their mother is the primary attachment
and has the function of providing support and care for the developing baby,
who is born unable to care for itself. The reasons for human babies being born
in this ‘needy’ state is thought to be because of the size of the head and brain,
which would inhibit longer periods in the womb. If, when a baby is born,
bonding does not occur for a variety and interrelationship of reasons, mother
ill-health, including post-natal depression, the health of the baby, or social
issues, such as single parent, or weak extended family support, then the effects
can be quite severe for both mother and child. Babies can and do bond with
others, such as fathers, grandparents and secondary carers and these bonds can
be close and intense too and can overcome the problems of weak maternal
attachment.
Bowlby (1958: 369) has been a major figure in the debate about young
children’s emotional development and in particular the debate about the
importance of attachment as a biological response in the early years. He iden-
tifies ‘instinctual responses’ in babies that help survival. These include, clinging,
crying, smiling and following with eyes and once mobile following in actual-
ity. Recent research (Mampe et al., 2009) has indicated that babies learn the
intonation of their mother’s voice in the womb and this is imitated in their
crying, so national and regional accents are reflected in their crying. This cry-
ing response is shown in babies between 3–5 days old and is probably learned
in the womb. It is likely to be a biological response supportive of attachment,
making the baby and mother bond more secure at an early age.

Although I have described these five responses as mother-orientated,

it is evident that at first this is only potentially. From what we know of
other species it seems probable that each one of them has the poten-
tial to become focused on some other object. The clearest examples of
this in real life are where sucking becomes directed towards a bottle
and not to the mother’s breast, and clinging is directed to a rag and

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30 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

not to the mother’s body. In principle it seems likely that an infant

could be so reared that each of his responses was directed towards a
different object. In practice this is improbable, since all or most of the
consummatory stimuli which terminate them habitually come from
the mother figure. No matter for what reason he is crying – cold,
hunger, fear, or plain loneliness – his crying is usually terminated
through the agency of the mother. Again, when he wants to cling or
follow or to find a haven of safety when he is frightened, she is the
figure who commonly provides the needed object. It is for this reason
that the mother becomes so central a figure in the infant’s life. For
in healthy development it is towards her that each of the several
responses becomes directed . . . and it is in relation to the mother that
the several responses become integrated into the complex behaviour
which I have termed ‘attachment behaviour’.
(Bowlby, 1958: 369–70)

Ten years after Bowlby (1958) wrote his thesis on ‘The nature of the child’s tie
to his mother’, he studied the effects of maternal deprivation on attachment
and future emotional development and concluded that children have a bio-
logical need for an attachment. Children are biologically adapted to form an
attachment from seven months when a child begins to be able to crawl and
move away from their carer and its importance continues until the child’s
third year. This attachment is normally with the mother, but can be with
another significant adult and is primarily with one person (monotropic).
Failure to form primary attachments has short- and long-term consequences
to health and emotional development.

In the case of human personality the integrating function of the

unique mother-figure is one of the importance of which I believe can
hardly be exaggerated; in this I am at one with Winnicott who has
constantly emphasized it. I also see the ill-effects stemming from
maternal deprivation and separation as due in large part to an inter-
ference with this function, either preventing its development or
smashing it at a critical point . . .
In my experience a mother’s acceptance of clinging and follow-
ing is consistent with favourable development even in the absence of
breast feeding, whilst rejection of clinging and following is apt to lead
to emotional disturbance even in the presence of breast feeding.
Furthermore, it is my impression that fully as many psychological
disturbances, including the most severe, can date from the second
year of life when clinging and following are at their peak as from the
early months when they are rudimentary.
(Bowlby, 1958: 370)

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EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 31

Bowlby’s research has been subject to criticism in that he did not consider
the effects of privation (never having an attachment), problems in family rela-
tionships, attachments other than maternal attachments (paternal, peers, sib-
lings, etc.) and multiple attachments on emotional development. Sir Richard
Bowlby (2007) has continued his father’s interest in attachment and has iden-
tified the problems that children face if they have insecure attachments and
are cared for in their early years. These problems are likely to be greater in a
society where children are ‘cared for’ in greater numbers and have a negative
effect on the children’s emotional development throughout their childhood
and into adulthood, thus affecting development in other areas.

Reflective tasks

It seems important that children have initially good attachments with their own
family and carers and later with peers and other adults such as the professionals
who work with them. What appears to be important for professionals working
with children in the early years and primary education are good secondary
attachments that support not just emotional development, but also social and
cognitive development. Field (1991) identified that key factors in emotional
stability, contentment in early years and later achievements are stable childcare
arrangements with a limited number of familiar carers or key workers, low staff
turnover and low adult–child ratios.

EYFS:
We have known for some time about the importance of stable secondary
attachments in the early years.

• What challenges do you face in your setting in maintaining stable key

figures in young children’s care?
• How could you improve secondary attachments in your setting?
• How do you think improving secondary attachments could support
children’s development, emotionally and in other key areas?

KS1:
Transition from the home/EYFS to KS1, from class to class in KS1 and from KS1
to KS2 can be critical times in children’s emotional development, as secondary
attachments with key workers are weakened or broken and children have to
familiarize themselves with new class teachers.

• What are the major issues you face in supporting children through these
transitions and in developing relationships with new teachers in KS1?

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32 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

• How could you improve transitions in your school?

• How do you think improving relationships within the class could sup-
port children’s development?

KS2:
Relationships can be problematic for children at KS2 as they ‘fall out’ with
friends and experience emotional problems because of peer relationships.

• How do peer relationships and the emotional challenges of relation-

ships affect the children in your school?
• How could you improve peer relationships in your school?
• How do you think improving relationships within the class could
support children’s development?

Ainsworth et al. (1978) measured the strength of attachments using a tech-

nique called A Strange Situation, involving eight episodes. In episode one,
the experimenter introduces a parent and baby to a playroom and then
leaves. In episode two the parent is seated while the baby plays with toys
and the way the child uses the parent as a secure base is noted. In episode
three a stranger enters the room and sits down and talks to the parent,
while the child’s reaction to the unfamiliar adult is noted. In episode four the
parent leaves the room and the stranger responds to the baby and offers com-
fort if the baby gets upset. Any separation anxiety is noted. Episode five
involves the return of the parent who greets the baby and offers comfort if
necessary, while the stranger leaves the room. The child’s reaction to the
reunion is noted. In episode six the parent leaves the room again and any
separation anxiety is noted. The stranger enters the room again in episode
seven and offers comfort to the child and the child’s ability to be soothed by
the stranger is noted. Finally, in episode eight the parent returns, greets the
baby, offers comfort if necessary, and tries to re-interest the baby in toys. The
reaction to the reunion is noted.
The research identified four different types of attachment (Ainsworth
et al., 1978):

1 Secure attachment, where the parent is used as a secure base and the
child shows preference to the parent over a stranger, seeking them out
when they return after a period of absence.
2 Avoidance attachment, where the child is unresponsive to the parent
when they are in the room, are not distressed when they leave and are
slow to greet the parent on their return.
3 Resistant attachment, where the child seeks to be close to the parent

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EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 33

and does not explore on their own, showing anger and resistant
behaviours when the parent returns and are not easily comforted.
4 Disorganized disoriented attachment, where the child shows confu-
sion and contradictory behaviour when reunited with their parent,
such as looking away, or dazed facial expressions.

The reading below from Ainsworth et al. (1978) is important as it helped to

clarify Bowlby’s (1958, 1969) theory and identifies the importance of attach-
ments other than the maternal.

❝ Implicit in the aforementioned view is the notion that there are individual
differences in the intraorganismic structure that constitutes attachment –
differences attributable to differences in long-term interaction with the
attachment figure. It is to such differences that we refer when speaking of
differences in the quality of attachment.
To assert the theoretical distinction between attachment behavior
and attachment, we have often used the term “attachment relationship”
when referring to the bond. Hinde (1976a, 1976b) views a “relationship”
between two individuals as an abstraction from a multiplicity of inter-
actions between them. It is anchored in neither of the individuals con-
cerned but is a convenient construct for characterizing the nature of the
interactions between them. Ordinarily, an attachment relationship would
be a relationship between two individuals who are attached to each other.
It is conceivable, however, that an infant might be attached to his
mother but that the mother might not be bonded in a complementary
way to her infant – as perhaps in the case of Harlow’s (1963) “motherless
mothers.” It is also conceivable that a mother might be attached to her
infant but the infant not bonded to her; indeed this is likely before he has
become attached to his mother. Further, an infant may behave with refer-
ence to his mother figure in certain ways consonant with the nature of his
attachment to her during certain periods when he is not in interaction
with her – as, for example, when he is exploring away from her, using her
as a secure base, or when he is separated from her but attempting to
regain proximity to her. Likewise a mother may behave with reference to
her baby in certain ways consonant with the nature of her attachment
to him when they are separated.
As a consequence of her relationship to her baby, a mother has an
inner representation of him that is not contingent upon his actual pres-
ence; and in the course of his development, an infant comes to have an
inner representation of his mother. The inner representation that each
member of the dyad has of the other is a consequence of the relationship
which each has with the other, and these are plainly not identical. Simi-
larly, and underlying the inner representation of the partner, each has

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34 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

built up some kind of intraorganismic structure that we have hypoth-

esized as attachment. Although such a structure can be conceived to be
influenced also by the interactions that constitute the relationship, it
is obviously different for each partner. On these grounds we hold that
the attachment of child to mother is by no means identical to the attach-
ment of mother to child, even though they both share an attachment
relationship.

Attachment In Older Preschoolers

As we pointed out in Chapter 1, it is a misconception to believe that
Bowlby was not concerned with the development of child–mother
attachment beyond toddlerhood. To be sure, there had been very little
research relevant to the later stages of development of child–mother
attachment; thus, his formulations (1969, 1972) of such development
were necessarily sketchy and programatic. He acknowledged that
proximity-seeking behavior becomes less conspicuous in the child’s inter-
action with his mother as development proceeds. He did not equate this,
however, with an attenuation of attachment itself. He emphasized the
significance of the development of “working models” – inner represen-
tations – that the child builds up both of himself and of his attachment
figure, and the development of the capacity for making plans, both of
which developments begin no later than the second year of life. In the
final phase of development, in which a “goal-corrected partnership” is
formed and sustained, the partners develop “a much more complex rela-
tionship with each other” than is characteristic of a 1-year-old (Bowlby,
1969). In this phase the development of the capacity to take the perspec-
tive of another is crucial. As this capacity develops, a child gains insight
into his mother’s plans, set-goals, and motivations, so that he can form
increasingly complex plans that include influencing his mother to fit in
with his plan. Indeed Bowlby’s notion of “partnership” implies that
both partners can negotiate mutual plans that comprehend the set-goals
of each.
Obviously a child’s cognitive development profoundly changes the
specifics of the behaviors that mediate attachment in the older pre-
schooler, as well as in still older children and in adults. Nevertheless,
Bowlby (1973) conceived of the attachment of a child to his mother as
enduring through a substantial part of life, even though it undoubtedly
becomes attenuated, especially in adolescence, and supplemented with
other relationships, including a number (a limited number) of other
attachments. Furthermore, the fundamentally proximity-promoting
nature of attachment behavior does not altogether disappear with
increasing sophistication. Bowlby (1973) makes clear that even in infancy,
proximity to the mother figure may come to be conceived in terms of her

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EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 35

apparent availability – the degree to which she is believed by the child to

be accessible to him and responsive to his signals and communications.
Increasingly, therefore, proximity becomes less a matter of literal distance
and more a matter of symbolic availability. Nevertheless, even in adult
life, when the attachment system is activated at a high level of intensity –
for example, by severe illness or disaster – the person seeks literal close-
ness to an attachment figure as an entirely appropriate reaction to
severe stress.
To our knowledge, the only body of research that has picked up the
threads of Bowlby’s discussion of the development of attachment beyond
the first year or two of life is that conducted by Marvin and his associates
(Marvin, 1972, 1977; Marvin, Greenberg, & Mossier, 1976; Mossier,
Marvin, & Greenberg, 1976), discussed in Chapter 10. They have shown
that shifts in strange-situation behavior from one age level to another are
associated with certain cognitive acquisitions. In particular, they have
shown that the ability to take the perspective of another – at least in
simple conceptual tasks – generally emerges between the third and fourth
birthday. In recent, as-yet-unpublished research, Marvin (personal com-
munication) has been investigating the way in which a child and his
mother may negotiate a mutual plan – specifically, one in which the
mother’s plan (suggested by instructions) is to leave the child alone in a
laboratory playroom for a few minutes. He demonstrated that when a
mutual plan is negotiated, a 4-year-old shows no separation distress,
although if (again according to instructions) the mother does not negoti-
ate in response to the child’s attempts to do so, the child is upset. The
distress seems more likely to be angry distress, as a result of the mother’s
arbitrary unresponsiveness to his attempts to communicate his plan to her
and to influence her plan, than attributable to mere separation. Further-
more, in the case of dyads who do successfully negotiate a mutual plan, a
common compromise is the mother’s acceding to the child’s request to
leave the door open, if only by “just a crack.” The implication is that the
child does not require his mother’s actual presence as long as he feels that
she would be accessible to him if he wanted to go to her. All of this is
clearly in line with Bowlby’s hypothesis about developments in the later
preschool years.
As we have already pointed out, the strange situation does not acti-
vate attachment behavior at the same high level of intensity in 3- and
4-year-olds as in 1-year-olds. Consequently the patterning of behavior
reflected in our classificatory system, dependent as it is on high-intensity
activation of the attachment behavioral system (and also upon associated
avoidant and resistant behavior), does not occur in older preschoolers in
the same way that it does in 1-year-olds. In Chapter 10 we suggested
several solutions to this problem. One solution is to use our categorical

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36 PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CHILD DEVELOPMENT

measures of interactive behavior, as Blehar (1974) did instead of employ-

ing our classificatory system – although this implies some loss of the
patterning highlighted in classification. Another solution is to modify
the classificatory system to make it more applicable to the behavior of the
older preschoolers, as Marvin (1972) did. The other possible solutions
considered in Chapter 10 involved devising new ways of assessing the
attachment of older preschoolers to their attachment figure(s). Clues that
might be useful might be found in the results of investigators such as
Main, Bell, Connell, and Matas (reported in Chapter 9), who examined
individual differences in later behavior of children who had been assessed
in the strange situation at the end of the first year. Similarly, Lieberman’s
study (see Chapter 10) might give leads to variables relating to mother–
child interaction at home that might substitute for strange-situation vari-
ables in the older preschooler. Marvin’s current unpublished work seems
likely to yield suggestions for ways in which laboratory assessments might
be made more appropriate for the older child.
All of the foregoing implies that the situation-specific behaviors that
reflect important qualitative differences in attachment in 1-year-olds may
be replaced by a number of equally situation-specific behaviors in older
preschoolers. Such a suggestion is akin to the concept of “transform-
ation,” proposed by both Maccoby and Feldman (1972) and Lewis and
his associates (Lewis & Ban, 1971; Weinraub, Brooks, & Lewis, 1977); but
it demands something less simplistic than their assumption that “prox-
imal” behaviors become transformed into “distal” behaviors in the course
of development. Both proximal and distal behaviors are involved in
mother–infant interaction throughout the first year of life, and both may
be viewed as contributing to the formation and later mediation of the
attachment bond. Even though the relative balance between proximal
and distal behaviors shifts with increasing age, the distal behaviors remain
those that emerge only intermittently and for the most part under condi-
tions of low-level activation of the attachment system, and hence less
useful as indices of qualitative differences in attachment, even in the older
preschool child. A more important consideration is that the most crucial
differences in patterning, even in the 1-year-old child, pertain neither to
proximal nor to distal attachment behaviors but to the way in which such
behaviors are organized together with key nonattachment behaviors –
specifically those that reflect avoidance of or resistance to the attachment
figure. Our prediction is that those patterns of behavior in the older pre-
schooler that will be found to link up with earlier strange-situation-based
differences in attachment quality are patterns that include negative
nonattachment behavior related to avoidance and resistance – and thus
to anxiety and anger.

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EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 37

Attachments To Figures Other Than The Mother

One of the reasons that the concept of attachment has captured so much
of the interest of developmental researchers and clinicians regardless of
their initial theoretical starting-points is the implicit hypothesis that the
nature of a child’s attachment relationship to his mother figure has a
profound effect on his subsequent development. (We, as well as Bowlby,
emphasize the term “mother figure” to assert our belief that the child’s
principal caregiver in infancy and early childhood is most likely to become
the principal attachment figure – and thus the most important initial
influence on subsequent development – whether such a figure be his
natural mother, a foster or adoptive mother, a grandmother, a “nanny,”
or father.) In the beginning stages of research into attachment, it made
good sense to focus on attachment to the mother figure, without thereby
implying that attachments to other figures were of no consequence, or
that other later relationships, whether or not they could be classified
as attachments, had little significance in influencing a child’s develop-
ment. It ought to be possible to assert the importance of research into
other attachments and other relationships without thereby impugning
the value or validity of the attachment theory. Thus it seems naive of
Willemsen and associates (1974) to have concluded that their finding
that the father serves as an attachment figure in the strange situation
essentially as the mother does demonstrates the invalidity of attachment
theory. It is undeniable that the young child, and indeed also the young
infant, develops within the framework of a “social network,” as Weinraub,
Brooks, and Lewis (1977) have eloquently described. Undoubtedly it
is important to trace through the characteristics and effects of relation-
ships other than the child’s attachment to his mother figure. It is clearly
important to investigate children’s relationships with siblings, playmates,
teachers, and so on. But this does not mean that attachment theory is of
no value.
It seems to us to be of more urgent importance, however, to investi-
gate relationships an infant has with those figures who share the caregiv-
ing role with the principal caregiver (usually the mother) – whether these
figures include the father, other adults resident in the household, or sup-
plementary or substitute figures such as day-care personnel, long-term
“baby sitters,” and the like. We need to take advantage of cross-cultural
studies and “experiments of opportunity” within our own culture in order
to investigate how different patterns of infant care affect the attachments
of the infant to those involved in a caregiving role, and how variations
on the theme of principal caregiver with supplementary and secondary
figures show support and reinforcement for each other, compensatory
function, or conflict; and we need to show how at least the more com-
mon of the many possible variations affect the development of the child.

11:49:29:09:10 Page 37
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
power of his personality and the narrowness of his vision. But the
differences are vast. As we read Jude the Obscure we are not rushed
to a finish; we brood and ponder and drift away from the text in
plethoric trains of thought which build up round the characters an
atmosphere of question and suggestion of which they are
themselves, as often as not, unconscious. Simple peasants as they
are, we are forced to confront them with destinies and questionings
of the hugest import, so that often it seems as if the most important
characters in a Hardy novel are those which have no names. Of this
power, of this speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no trace.
She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is
even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the
more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, "I
love", "I hate", "I suffer".
For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the
more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed
and strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues
from their minds which has not been marked with their own impress.
They learn little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot
assimilate. Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded
their styles upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their
prose is awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most
obstinate integrity by thinking every thought until it has subdued
words to itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the
mould of their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a
power, a swiftness of its own. Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed
nothing to the reading of many books. She never learnt the
smoothness of the professional writer, or acquired his ability to stuff
and sway his language as he chooses. "I could never rest in
communication with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether
male or female," she writes, as any leader-writer in a provincial
journal might have written; but gathering fire and speed goes on in
her own authentic voice "till I had passed the outworks of
conventional reserve and crossed the threshold of confidence, and
won a place by their hearts' very hearthstone". It is there that she
takes her seat; it is the red and fitful glow of the heart's fire which
illumines her page. In other words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for
exquisite observation of character—her characters are vigorous and
elementary; not for comedy—hers is grim and crude; not for a
philosophic view of life—hers is that of a country parson's daughter;
but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as
she has, an overpowering personality, who, as we should say in real
life, have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in
them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted
order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather
than to observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting half shades and
other minor impediments, wings its way past the daily conduct of
ordinary people and allies itself with their more inarticulate passions.
It makes them poets, or, if they choose to write in prose, intolerant
of its restrictions. Hence it is that both Emily and Charlotte are
always invoking the help of nature. They both feel the need of some
more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human
nature than words or actions can convey. It is with a description of a
storm that Charlotte ends her finest novel Villette. "The skies hang
full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast
themselves into strange forms." So she calls in nature to describe a
state of mind which could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of
the sisters observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth
observed it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson painted it. They
seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they
themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms,
their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not
ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer's
powers of observation—they carry on the emotion and light up the
meaning of the book.
The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens
and what is said and consists rather in some connection which
things in themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily
hard to grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer
is poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself
rather a mood than a particular observation. Wuthering Heights is a
more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was
a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with
eloquence and splendour and passion "I love", "I hate", "I suffer".
Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But
there is no "I" in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses.
There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men
and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception.
The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or
her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic
disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That
gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel—a struggle, half
thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the
mouths of her characters which is not merely "I love" or "I hate",
but "we, the whole human race" and "you, the eternal powers . . ."
the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be
so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it
in her to say at all. It surges up in the half-articulate words of
Catherine Earnshaw, "If all else perished and he remained, I should
still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were annihilated,
the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem part
of it". It breaks out again in the presence of the dead. "I see a
repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance
of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the eternity they have
entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its
sympathy and joy in its fulness." It is this suggestion of power
underlying the apparitions of human nature, and lifting them up into
the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature
among other novels. But it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write
a few lyrics, to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did
this once and for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel.
But she was novelist as well as poet. She must take upon herself a
more laborious and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact
of other existences, grapple with the mechanism of external things,
build up, in recognisable shape, farms and houses and report the
speeches of men and women who existed independently of herself.
And so we reach these summits of emotion not by rant or rhapsody
but by hearing a girl sing old songs to herself as she rocks in the
branches of a tree; by watching the moor sheep crop the turf; by
listening to the soft wind breathing through the grass. The life at the
farm with all its absurdities and its improbability is laid open to us.
We are given every opportunity of comparing Wuthering Heights
with a real farm and Heathcliff with a real man. How, we are allowed
to ask, can there be truth or insight or the finer shades of emotion in
men and women who so little resemble what we have seen
ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the brother
that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible we say, but
nevertheless no boy in literature has so vivid an existence as his. So
it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do or
act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable
women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we
know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparences
with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the
rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts;
with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no
body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder
roar.

[11]Written in 1916.
[12]Charlotte and Emily Brontë had much the same sense of
colour. ". . . we saw—ah! it was beautiful—a splendid place
carpeted with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables,
and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass
drops hanging in silver chains from the centre, and shimmering
with little soft tapers" (Wuthering Heights). Yet it was merely a
very pretty drawing-room, and within it a boudoir, both spread
with white carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of
flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of white grapes and
vine leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast crimson
couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian
mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and
between the windows large mirrors repeated the general blending
of snow and fire.
 George Eliot
To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one
knows about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not
very creditable to one's insight, with which, half consciously and
partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a
deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more
deluded than herself. At what moment, and by what means her spell
was broken it is difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the
publication of her Life. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase
about the "mercurial little showman" and the "errant woman" on the
daïs, gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of
aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one
of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group
of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could
be dismissed with the same scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was
greater than Dante; Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they
were not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London Library.
She was the pride and paragon of her sex. Moreover, her private
record was not more alluring than her public. Asked to describe an
afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller always intimated that the
memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had come to tickle his
sense of humour. He had been so much alarmed by the grave lady in
her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the intelligent thing.
Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note in the fine clear
hand of the great novelist bore witness. It was dated on the Monday
morning, and she accused herself of having spoken without due
forethought of Marivaux when she meant another; but no doubt, she
said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Still, the
memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a Sunday
afternoon was not a romantic memory. It had faded with the
passage of the years. It had not become picturesque.
Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that the long, heavy face
with its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power
has stamped itself depressingly upon the minds of people who
remember George Eliot, so that it looks out upon them from her
pages. Mr. Gosse has lately described her as he saw her driving
through London in a victoria—

a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive

features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were
incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of Paris
fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense
ostrich feather.

Lady Ritchie, with equal skill, has left a more intimate indoor
portrait:

She sat by the fire in a beautiful black satin gown, with a green
shaded lamp on the table beside her, where I saw German
books lying and pamphlets and ivory paper-cutters. She was
very quiet and noble, with two steady little eyes and a sweet
voice. As I looked I felt her to be a friend, not exactly a
personal friend, but a good and benevolent impulse.

A scrap of her talk is preserved. "We ought to respect our influence,"

she said. "We know by our own experience how very much others
affect our lives, and we must remember that we in turn must have
the same effect upon others." Jealously treasured, committed to
memory, one can imagine recalling the scene, repeating the words,
thirty years later and suddenly, for the first time, bursting into
laughter.
In all these records one feels that the recorder, even when he was in
the actual presence, kept his distance and kept his head, and never
read the novels in later years with the light of a vivid, or puzzling, or
beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In fiction, where so much
of personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and
her critics, who have been, of course, mostly of the opposite sex,
have resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality
which is held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was
not charming; she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those
eccentricities and inequalities of temper which give to so many
artists the endearing simplicity of children. One feels that to most
people, as to Lady Ritchie, she was "not exactly a personal friend,
but a good and benevolent impulse". But if we consider these
portraits more closely we shall find that they are all the portraits of
an elderly celebrated woman, dressed in black satin, driving in her
victoria, a woman who has been through her struggle and issued
from it with a profound desire to be of use to others, but with no
wish for intimacy, save with the little circle who had known her in
the days of her youth. We know very little about the days of her
youth; but we do know that the culture, the philosophy, the fame,
and the influence were all built upon a very humble foundation—she
was the grand-daughter of a carpenter.
The first volume of her life is a singularly depressing record. In it we
see her raising herself with groans and struggles from the intolerable
boredom of petty provincial society (her father had risen in the world
and become more middle class, but less picturesque) to be the
assistant editor of a highly intellectual London review, and the
esteemed companion of Herbert Spencer. The stages are painful as
she reveals them in the sad soliloquy in which Mr. Cross condemned
her to tell the story of her life. Marked in early youth as one "sure to
get something up very soon in the way of a clothing club", she
proceeded to raise funds for restoring a church by making a chart of
ecclesiastical history; and that was followed by a loss of faith which
so disturbed her father that he refused to live with her. Next came
the struggle with the translation of Strauss, which, dismal and "soul-
stupefying" in itself, can scarcely have been made less so by the
usual feminine tasks of ordering a household and nursing a dying
father, and the distressing conviction, to one so dependent upon
affection, that by becoming a blue-stocking she was forfeiting her
brother's respect. "I used to go about like an owl," she said, "to the
great disgust of my brother." "Poor thing," wrote a friend who saw
her toiling through Strauss with a statue of the risen Christ in front
of her, "I do pity her sometimes, with her pale sickly face and
dreadful headaches, and anxiety, too, about her father." Yet, though
we cannot read the story without a strong desire that the stages of
her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least
more beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon
the citadel of culture which raises it above our pity. Her development
was very slow and very awkward, but it had the irresistible impetus
behind it of a deep-seated and noble ambition. Every obstacle at
length was thrust from her path. She knew every one. She read
everything. Her astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed. Youth
was over, but youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the age of
thirty-five, at the height of her powers, and in the fullness of her
freedom, she made the decision which was of such profound
moment to her and still matters even to us, and went to Weimar,
alone with George Henry Lewes.
The books which followed so soon after her union testify in the
fullest manner to the great liberation which had come to her with
personal happiness. In themselves they provide us with a plentiful
feast. Yet at the threshold of her literary career one may find in
some of the circumstances of her life influences that turned her
mind to the past, to the country village, to the quiet and beauty and
simplicity of childish memories and away from herself and the
present. We understand how it was that her first book was Scenes of
Clerical Life, and not Middlemarch. Her union with Lewes had
surrounded her with affection, but in view of the circumstances and
of the conventions it had also isolated her. "I wish it to be
understood," she wrote in 1857, "that I should never invite any one
to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation." She had
been "cut off from what is called the world", she said later, but she
did not regret it. By becoming thus marked, first by circumstances
and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the power to move on
equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss for a novelist was
serious. Still, basking in the light and sunshine of Scenes of Clerical
Life, feeling the large mature mind spreading itself with a luxurious
sense of freedom in the world of her "remotest past", to speak of
loss seems inappropriate. Everything to such a mind was gain. All
experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and
reflection, enriching and nourishing. The utmost we can say, in
qualifying her attitude towards fiction by what little we know of her
life, is that she had taken to heart certain lessons not usually learnt
early, if learnt at all, among which, perhaps, the most branded upon
her was the melancholy virtue of tolerance; her sympathies are with
the everyday lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the
homespun of ordinary joys and sorrows. She has none of that
romantic intensity which is connected with a sense of one's own
individuality, unsated and unsubdued, cutting its shape sharply upon
the background of the world. What were the loves and sorrows of a
snuffy old clergyman, dreaming over his whisky, to the fiery egotism
of Jane Eyre? The beauty of those first books, Scenes of Clerical Life,
Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, is very great. It is impossible to
estimate the merit of the Poysers, the Dodsons, the Gilfils, the
Bartons, and the rest with all their surroundings and dependencies,
because they have put on flesh and blood and we move among
them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with that
unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do, which we
accord to the great originals only. The flood of memory and humour
which she pours so spontaneously into one figure, one scene after
another, until the whole fabric of ancient rural England is revived,
has so much in common with a natural process that it leaves us with
little consciousness that there is anything to criticise. We accept; we
feel the delicious warmth and release of spirit which the great
creative writers alone procure for us. As one comes back to the
books after years of absence they pour out, even against our
expectation, the same store of energy and heat, so that we want
more than anything to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating down
from the red orchard wall. If there is an element of unthinking
abandonment in thus submitting to the humours of Midland farmers
and their wives, that, too, is right in the circumstances. We scarcely
wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human. And
when we consider how distant in time the world of Shepperton and
Hayslope is, and how remote the minds of farmer and agricultural
labourers from those of most of George Eliot's readers, we can only
attribute the ease and pleasure with which we ramble from house to
smithy, from cottage parlour to rectory garden, to the fact that
George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of
condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no
satirist. The movement of her mind was too slow and cumbersome
to lend itself to comedy. But she gathers in her large grasp a great
bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them
loosely together with a tolerant and wholesome understanding
which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures
fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our
laughter and tears. There is the famous Mrs. Poyser. It would have
been easy to work her idiosyncrasies to death, and, as it is, perhaps,
George Eliot gets her laugh in the same place a little too often. But
memory, after the book is shut, brings out, as sometimes in real life,
the details and subtleties which some more salient characteristic has
prevented us from noticing at the time. We recollect that her health
was not good. There were occasions upon which she said nothing at
all. She was patience itself with a sick child. She doted upon Totty.
Thus one can muse and speculate about the greater number of
George Eliot's characters and find, even in the least important, a
roominess and margin where those qualities lurk which she has no
call to bring from their obscurity.
But in the midst of all this tolerance and sympathy there are, even in
the early books, moments of greater stress. Her humour has shown
itself broad enough to cover a wide range of fools and failures,
mothers and children, dogs and flourishing midland fields, farmers,
sagacious or fuddled over their ale, horse-dealers, inn-keepers,
curates, and carpenters. Over them all broods a certain romance,
the only romance that George Eliot allowed herself—the romance of
the past. The books are astonishingly readable and have no trace of
pomposity or pretence. But to the reader who holds a large stretch
of her early work in view it will become obvious that the mist of
recollection gradually withdraws. It is not that her power diminishes,
for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch,
the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the
few English novels written for grown-up people. But the world of
fields and farms no longer contents her. In real life she had sought
her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look back into the past was
calming and consoling, there are, even in the early works, traces of
that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and baffled
presence who was George Eliot herself. In Adam Bede there is a hint
of her in Dinah. She shows herself far more openly and completely
in Maggie in The Mill on the Floss. She is Janet in Janet's
Repentance, and Romola, and Dorothea seeking wisdom and finding
one scarcely knows what in marriage with Ladislaw. Those who fall
foul of George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her
heroines; and with good reason; for there is no doubt that they
bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places, make her
self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could
delete the whole sisterhood you would leave a much smaller and a
much inferior world, albeit a world of greater artistic perfection and
far superior jollity and comfort. In accounting for her failure, in so
far as it was a failure, one recollects that she never wrote a story
until she was thirty-seven, and that by the time she was thirty-seven
she had come to think of herself with a mixture of pain and
something like resentment. For long she preferred not to think of
herself at all. Then, when the first flush of creative energy was
exhausted and self-confidence had come to her, she wrote more and
more from the personal standpoint, but she did so without the
unhesitating abandonment of the young. Her self-consciousness is
always marked when her heroines say what she herself would have
said. She disguised them in every possible way. She granted them
beauty and wealth into the bargain; she invented, more improbably,
a taste for brandy. But the disconcerting and stimulating fact
remained that she was compelled by the very power of her genius to
step forth in person upon the quiet bucolic scene.
The noble and beautiful girl who insisted upon being born into the
Mill on the Floss is the most obvious example of the ruin which a
heroine can strew about her. Humour controls her and keeps her
lovable so long as she is small and can be satisfied by eloping with
the gipsies or hammering nails into her doll; but she develops; and
before George Eliot knows what has happened she has a full-grown
woman on her hands demanding what neither gipsies nor dolls, nor
St. Ogg's itself is capable of giving her. First Philip Wakem is
produced, and later Stephen Guest. The weakness of the one and
the coarseness of the other have often been pointed out; but both,
in their weakness and coarseness, illustrate not so much George
Eliot's inability to draw the portrait of a man, as the uncertainty, the
infirmity, and the fumbling which shook her hand when she had to
conceive a fit mate for a heroine. She is in the first place driven
beyond the home world she knew and loved, and forced to set foot
in middle-class drawing-rooms where young men sing all the
summer morning and young women sit embroidering smoking-caps
for bazaars. She feels herself out of her element, as her clumsy
satire of what she calls "good society" proves.

Good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner
engagements six weeks deep, its opera, and its faery ball rooms
. . . gets its science done by Faraday and its religion by the
superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses; how
should it have need of belief and emphasis?

There is no trace of humour or insight there, but only the

vindictiveness of a grudge which we feel to be personal in its origin.
But terrible as the complexity of our social system is in its demands
upon the sympathy and discernment of a novelist straying across the
boundaries, Maggie Tulliver did worse than drag George Eliot from
her natural surroundings. She insisted upon the introduction of the
great emotional scene. She must love; she must despair; she must
be drowned clasping her brother in her arms. The more one
examines the great emotional scenes the more nervously one
anticipates the brewing and gathering and thickening of the cloud
which will burst upon our heads at the moment of crisis in a shower
of disillusionment and verbosity. It is partly that her hold upon
dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack; and partly that she seems
to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue from the effort of
emotional concentration. She allows her heroines to talk too much.
She has little verbal felicity. She lacks the unerring taste which
chooses one sentence and compresses the heart of the scene within
that. "Whom are you going to dance with?" asked Mr. Knightley, at
the Westons' ball. "With you, if you will ask me," said Emma; and
she has said enough. Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour
and we should have looked out of the window.
Yet, dismiss the heroines without sympathy, confine George Eliot to
the agricultural world of her "remotest past", and you not only
diminish her greatness but lose her true flavour. That greatness is
here we can have no doubt. The width of the prospect, the large
strong outlines of the principal features, the ruddy light of the early
books, the searching power and reflective richness of the later tempt
us to linger and expatiate beyond our limits. But it is upon the
heroines that we would cast a final glance. "I have always been
finding out my religion since I was a little girl," says Dorothea
Casaubon. "I used to pray so much—now I hardly ever pray. I try
not to have desires merely for myself. . . ." She is speaking for them
all. That is their problem. They cannot live without religion, and they
start out on the search for one when they are little girls. Each has
the deep feminine passion for goodness, which makes the place
where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart of the book—still
and cloistered like a place of worship, but that she no longer knows
to whom to pray. In learning they seek their goal; in the ordinary
tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do not
find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient
consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and
for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and
overflowed and uttered a demand for something—they scarcely
know what—for something that is perhaps incompatible with the
facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too strong an
intelligence to tamper with those facts, and too broad a humour to
mitigate the truth because it was a stern one. Save for the supreme
courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her heroines, in
tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more melancholy. But their
story is the incomplete version of the story of George Eliot herself.
For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not
enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself
the strange bright fruits of art and knowledge. Clasping them as few
women have ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own
inheritance—the difference of view, the difference of standard—nor
accept an inappropriate reward. Thus we behold her, a memorable
figure, inordinately praised and shrinking from her fame,
despondent, reserved, shuddering back into the arms of love as if
there alone were satisfaction and, it might be, justification, at the
same time reaching out with "a fastidious yet hungry ambition" for
all that life could offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting
her feminine aspirations with the real world of men. Triumphant was
the issue for her, whatever it may have been for her creations, and
as we recollect all that she dared and achieved, how with every
obstacle against her—sex and health and convention—she sought
more knowledge and more freedom till the body, weighted with its
double burden, sank worn out, we must lay upon her grave
whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose.
 The Russian Point of View
Doubtful as we frequently are whether either the French or the
Americans, who have so much in common with us, can yet
understand English literature, we must admit graver doubts whether,
for all their enthusiasm, the English can understand Russian
literature. Debate might protract itself indefinitely as to what we
mean by "understand". Instances will occur to everybody of
American writers in particular who have written with the highest
discrimination of our literature and of ourselves; who have lived a
lifetime among us, and finally have taken legal steps to become
subjects of King George. For all that, have they understood us, have
they not remained to the end of their days foreigners? Could any
one believe that the novels of Henry James were written by a man
who had grown-up in the society which he describes, or that his
criticism of English writers was written by a man who had read
Shakespeare without any sense of the Atlantic Ocean and two or
three hundred years on the far side of it separating his civilisation
from ours? A special acuteness and detachment, a sharp angle of
vision the foreigner will often achieve; but not that absence of self-
consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common
values which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and
take of familiar intercourse.
Not only have we all this to separate us from Russian literature, but
a much more serious barrier—the difference of language. Of all
those who feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the
past twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have been
able to read them in Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has
been formed by critics who have never read a word of Russian, or
seen Russia, or even heard the language spoken by natives; who
have had to depend, blindly and implicitly, upon the work of
translators.
What we are saying amounts to this, then, that we have judged a
whole literature stripped of its style. When you have changed every
word in a sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the
sense a little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in relation
to each other completely, nothing remains except a crude and
coarsened version of the sense. Thus treated, the great Russian
writers are like men deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident
not only of all their clothes, but also of something subtler and more
important—their manners, the idiosyncrasies of their characters.
What remains is, as the English have proved by the fanaticism of
their admiration, something very powerful and very impressive, but
it is difficult to feel sure, in view of these mutilations, how far we can
trust ourselves not to impute, to distort, to read into them an
emphasis which is false.
They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible catastrophe,
for some such figure as that describes the simplicity, the humanity,
startled out of all effort to hide and disguise its instincts, which
Russian literature, whether it is due to translation, or to some more
profound cause, makes upon us. We find these qualities steeping it
through, as obvious in the lesser writers as in the greater. "Learn to
make yourselves akin to people. I would even like to add: make
yourself indispensable to them. But let this sympathy be not with the
mind—for it is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love
towards them." "From the Russian," one would say instantly,
wherever one chanced on that quotation. The simplicity, the absence
of effort, the assumption that in a world bursting with misery the
chief call upon us is to understand our fellow-sufferers, "and not
with the mind—for it is easy with the mind—but with the heart"—
this is the cloud which broods above the whole of Russian literature,
which lures us from our own parched brilliancy and scorched
thoroughfares to expand in its shade—and of course with disastrous
results. We become awkward and self-conscious; denying our own
qualities, we write with an affectation of goodness and simplicity
which is nauseating in the extreme. We cannot say "Brother" with
simple conviction. There is a story by Mr. Galsworthy in which one of
the characters so addresses another (they are both in the depths of
misfortune). Immediately everything becomes strained and affected.
The English equivalent for "Brother" is "Mate"—a very different
word, with something sardonic in it, an indefinable suggestion of
humour. Met though they are in the depths of misfortune the two
Englishmen who thus accost each other will, we are sure, find a job,
make their fortunes, spend the last years of their lives in luxury, and
leave a sum of money to prevent poor devils from calling each other
"Brother" on the Embankment. But it is common suffering, rather
than common happiness, effort, or desire that produces the sense of
brotherhood. It is the "deep sadness" which Dr. Hagberg Wright
finds typical of the Russian people that creates their literature.
A generalisation of this kind will, of course, even if it has some
degree of truth when applied to the body of literature, be changed
profoundly when a writer of genius sets to work on it. At once other
questions arise. It is seen that an "attitude" is not simple; it is highly
complex. Men reft of their coats and their manners, stunned by a
railway accident, say hard things, harsh things, unpleasant things,
difficult things, even if they say them with the abandonment and
simplicity which catastrophe has bred in them. Our first impressions
of Tchekov are not of simplicity but of bewilderment. What is the
point of it, and why does he make a story out of this? we ask as we
read story after story. A man falls in love with a married woman, and
they part and meet, and in the end are left talking about their
position and by what means they can be free from "this intolerable
bondage".
"'How? How?' he asked, clutching his head. . . . And it seemed as
though in a little while the solution would be found and then a new
and splendid life would begin." That is the end. A postman drives a
student to the station and all the way the student tries to make the
postman talk, but he remains silent. Suddenly the postman says
unexpectedly, "It's against the regulations to take any one with the
post." And he walks up and down the platform with a look of anger
on his face. "With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with
poverty, with the autumn nights?" Again, that story ends.
But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have
overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without
the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we
say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption
that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so
doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where
the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains
discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we
can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end
a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on
talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of
literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last
notes which complete the harmony. Probably we have to read a
great many stories before we feel, and the feeling is essential to our
satisfaction, that we hold the parts together, and that Tchekov was
not merely rambling disconnectedly, but struck now this note, now
that with intention, in order to complete his meaning.
We have to cast about in order to discover where the emphasis in
these strange stories rightly comes. Tchekov's own words give us a
lead in the right direction. ". . . such a conversation as this between
us", he says, "would have been unthinkable for our parents. At night
they did not talk, but slept sound; we, our generation, sleep badly,
are restless, but talk a great deal, and are always trying to settle
whether we are right or not." Our literature of social satire and
psychological finesse both sprang from that restless sleep, that
incessant talking; but after all, there is an enormous difference
between Tchekov and Henry James, between Tchekov and Bernard
Shaw. Obviously—but where does it arise? Tchekov, too, is aware of
the evils and injustices of the social state; the condition of the
peasants appals him, but the reformer's zeal is not his—that is not
the signal for us to stop. The mind interests him enormously; he is a
most subtle and delicate analyst of human relations. But again, no;
the end is not there. Is it that he is primarily interested not in the
soul's relation with other souls, but with the soul's relation to health
—with the soul's relation to goodness? These stories are always
showing us some affectation, pose, insincerity. Some woman has got
into a false relation; some man has been perverted by the
inhumanity of his circumstances. The soul is ill; the soul is cured; the
soul is not cured. Those are the emphatic points in his stories.
Once the eye is used to these shades, half the "conclusions" of
fiction fade into thin air; they show like transparences with a light
behind them—gaudy, glaring, superficial. The general tidying up of
the last chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of values so
sonorously trumpeted forth, so heavily underlined, become of the
most rudimentary kind. Nothing is solved, we feel; nothing is rightly
held together. On the other hand, the method which at first seemed
so casual, inconclusive, and occupied with trifles, now appears the
result of an exquisitely original and fastidious taste, choosing boldly,
arranging infallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which we can
find no match save among the Russians themselves. There may be
no answer to these questions, but at the same time let us never
manipulate the evidence so as to produce something fitting,
decorous, agreeable to our vanity. This may not be the way to catch
the ear of the public; after all, they are used to louder music, fiercer
measures; but as the tune sounded, so he has written it. In
consequence, as we read these little stories about nothing at all, the
horizon widens; the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom.
In reading Tchekov we find ourselves repeating the word "soul"
again and again. It sprinkles his pages. Old drunkards use it freely;
". . . you are high up in the service, beyond all reach, but haven't
real soul, my dear boy . . . there's no strength in it." Indeed, it is the
soul that is the chief character in Russian fiction. Delicate and subtle
in Tchekov, subject to an infinite number of humours and
distempers, it is of greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky, liable to
violent diseases and raging fevers, but still the predominant concern.
Perhaps that is why it needs so great an effort on the part of an
English reader to read The Brothers Karamazov or The Possessed a
second time. The "soul" is alien to him. It is even antipathetic. It has
little sense of humour and no sense of comedy. It is formless. It has
slight connection with the intellect. It is confused, diffuse,
tumultuous, incapable, it seems, of submitting to the control of logic
or the discipline of poetry. The novels of Dostoevsky are seething
whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil
and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of
the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded,
suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of
Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading. We open the door
and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the tutors of
Russian generals, their step-daughters and cousins and crowds of
miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices
about their most private affairs. But where are we? Surely it is the
part of a novelist to inform us whether we are in an hotel, a flat, or
hired lodging. Nobody thinks of explaining. We are souls, tortured,
unhappy souls, whose only business it is to talk, to reveal, to
confess, to draw up at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those
crabbed sins which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us. But, as
we listen, our confusion slowly settles. A rope is flung to us; we
catch hold of a soliloquy; holding on by the skin of our teeth, we are
rushed through the water; feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now
submerged, now in a moment of vision understanding more than we
have ever understood before, and receiving such revelations as we
are wont to get only from the press of life at its fullest. As we fly we
pick it all up—the names of the people, their relationships, that they
are staying in an hotel at Roulettenburg, that Polina is involved in an
intrigue with the Marquis de Grieux—but what unimportant matters
these are compared with the soul! It is the soul that matters, its
passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness.
And if our voices suddenly rise into shrieks of laughter, or if we are
shaken by the most violent sobbing, what more natural?—it hardly
calls for remark. The pace at which we are living is so tremendous
that sparks must rush off our wheels as we fly. Moreover, when the
speed is thus increased and the elements of the soul are seen, not
separately in scenes of humour or scenes of passion as our slower
English minds conceive them, but streaked, involved, inextricably
confused, a new panorama of the human mind is revealed. The old
divisions melt into each other. Men are at the same time villains and
saints; their acts are at once beautiful and despicable. We love and
we hate at the same time. There is none: of that precise division
between good and bad to which we are used. Often those for whom
we feel most affection are the greatest criminals, and the most
abject sinners move us to the strongest admiration as well as love.
Dashed to the crest of the waves, bumped and battered on the
stones at the bottom, it is difficult for an English reader to feel at
ease. The process to which he is accustomed in his own literature is
reversed. If we wished to tell the story of a General's love affair (and
we should find it very difficult in the first place not to laugh at a
General), we should begin with his house; we should solidify his
surroundings. Only when all was ready should we attempt to deal
with the General himself. Moreover, it is not the samovar but the
teapot that rules in England; time is limited; space crowded; the
influence of other points of view, of other books, even of other ages,
makes itself felt. Society is sorted out into lower, middle, and upper
classes, each with its own traditions, its own manners, and, to some
extent, its own language. Whether he wishes it or not, there is a
constant pressure upon an English novelist to recognise these
barriers, and, in consequence, order is imposed on him and some
kind of form; he is inclined to satire rather than to compassion, to
scrutiny of society rather than understanding of individuals
themselves.
No such restraints were laid on Dostoevsky. It is all the same to him
whether you are noble or simple, a tramp or a great lady. Whoever
you are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy,
yeasty, precious stuff, the soul. The soul is not restrained by barriers.
It overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of others. The simple
story of a bank clerk who could not pay for a bottle of wine spreads,
before we know what is happening, into the lives of his father-in-law
and the five mistresses whom his father-in-law treated abominably,
and the postman's life, and the charwoman's, and the Princesses'
who lodged in the same block of flats; for nothing is outside
Dostoevsky's province; and when he is tired, he does not stop, he
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