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Bernard J. James, Children, Children's games, Fidel Castro, Francesco Cossa, Fulgencio Batista, Iona and Peter Opie, J.H. Plumb, Military uniforms, Palazzo Schifanoia, Peter Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Robert Cowley, Roger A. Beaumont, Thomas Gainsborough, Vincent Cronin, Vladimir Sukhomlinov
The cover of this issue shows a details from The Triumph of Venus from the Palazzo Schifanoia by Francesco Cossa, accompanying an essay by Vincent Cronin, ‘The Humanists.’
Also in this issue:
A special section ‘Children: Past and Present’ begins with J.H. Plumb’s ‘The Great Change in Children’, arguing that it has only been relatively recently that children have been treated as ‘a special group…exiled to a separate existence’ from adults:
The world we think proper to children – fairy stories, games, toys, special books for learning, even the idea of childhood itself – is a European invention of the past four hundred years. The very words we use for young males – boy, garçon, Knabe – were until the seventeenth century used indiscriminately to mean a male in a dependent position and could refer to men of thirty, forty, or fifty. There was no special word for a young male between the ages of seven and sixteen; the word ‘child’ expressed kinship, not an age state…
Kept out of the adult world, the adolescents naturally created a world of their own choosing – one that incorporated their own music, their own morals, their own clothes, and their own literature…
Social movements and tensions in the adult world can be adjusted by politics, but adolescents and children have no such mechanism for their conflicts with the exclusive world of adults. And so the result has been, and must be, rebellion. That rebellion, however, is not due to the mistakes or difficulties of the last few years. Rarely do we look far enough into the past for the roots of our present problems. This revolution of youth has been building up for decades because we forced the growing child into a repressive and artificial world – a prison, indeed, that was the end product of four centuries of Western history, of that gradual exclusion of the maturing child from the world of adults. We can now look back with longing to the late medieval world, when, crude and simple as it was, men, women, and children lived their lives together, shared the same morals as well as the same games, the same excesses as well as the same austerities. In essence, youth today is rebelling against four centuries of repression and exploitation.
In ‘Their Work is Child’s Play’ Robert Cowley writes about Iona and Peter Opie, folklorists who studied children’s literature and play:
…[Children] are such strict observers of tradition. Tug of War, Blindman’s Buff, and Hide-and-seek…were played more than two thousand years ago in Periclean Athens, and Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims drew straws to decide who would narrate the first tale, just as children do to pick the person who will be ‘it’ or ‘he.’
But many old favorites, such as King of the Castle, Sardines, and Leapfrog, are diminishing in popularity. ‘We feel it is no coincidence,’ the Opies write, ‘that the games whose decline is most pronounced are those which are best known to adults, and therefore most often promoted by them…’ Games lived only as long as they have a reason to live, and the Opies see nothing intrinsically sad in the gradual disappearance of any particular one. Old games die out so new ones can flourish in their place: we threaten games most when we try to preserve them…
Most of their working lives revolves around Iona Opie’s study – the Folklore Room – where their collections of raw materials are filed…There seems to be nothing about children that the Opies do not collect: it is a house loaded with surprises.
In ‘The Games (Young) People Play’, the Opies give a detailed analysis of Brueghel’s 1560 painting Children’s Games:
‘Children as Seen by their Fathers: A Portfolio’ shows artists’ portraits of their children, including those of Gainsborough and Rubens:
In ‘The Sukhomlinov Effect’, Roger A. Beaumont and Bernard J. James argue that ‘in war victory goes to the armies whose leaders’ uniforms are least impressive’: