In eighteenth century Britain, fa1milies began to express affection more openly than before. In addition it seems that for the first time children were no longer thought of as small adults, but as a distinct group of people with special needs. A century after the Quaker, Penn, there was a growing voice advising gentleness with children. One popular eighteenth-century handbook on the upbringing of children, itself a significant development, warned: ”Severe and frequent whipping is, I think, a very bad practice.” In 1798 another handbook told mothers that ”The first object in the education of a child should be to acquire its affection, and the second to obtain its confidence. The most likely thing to expand a youthful mind is … praise.
Girls, however, continued to be victims of the parents' desire to make them match the popular idea of feminine beauty of slim bodies, tight waists and a pale appearance. To achieve this aim, and so improve the chances of a good marriage, parents forced their daughters into tightly waisted clothes, and gave them only little food to avoid an unfashionably healthy appearance. Undoubtedly this behaviour explains the idea and reality of frail feminine health which continued into the nineteenth century.
Parents still often decided on a suitable marriage for their children, but they increasingly sought their childlen's opinion. However, sons and daughters often had to many against their wishes. One man, forced to give up the only woman he ever loved, wrote, ”l sighed as a lover, but I obeyed as a son. ”But love and companionship were slowly becoming accepted reasons for marriage. As one husband wrote to his wife after fifteen years of marriage, ”l have only time to say that I love you dearly, - best of women, best of wives, and best of friends. ”If such feelings described a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century marriage they were less openly stated, and perhaps less openly expected.
The increase in affection was partly because people could now expect a reasonably long life. This resulted mainly from improved diet and the greater cleanliness of cotton rather than woollen underclothing. However, it was also the result of a growing idea of kindness. For perhaps the first time people started to believe that cruelty either to humans or animals was wrong. It did not prevent bad facto･y conditions, but it did help those trying to end slavery. At the root of this dislike of cruelty was the idea that every human was an individual.
This growing individualism showed itself in a desire for privacy. In the seventeenth century middleclass and wealthier families were served by servants, who listened to their conversation as they ate. They lived in rooms that led one to another, usually through wide double doors. Not even the bedrooms were private. But in the eighteenth century fa1milies began to eat alone, preferring to serve themselves than to have servants listening to everything they had to say. They also rebuilt the insides of their homes, putting in corridors, so that each person in the family had his or her own private bedroom.
Britain was ahead of the rest of Europe in this individualism. Almost certainly this was the result of the political as well as economic strength of the middle class, and the way in which the middle class mixed so easily with the gentry and aristocracy. Individualism was important to trade and industrial success.