![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper explores a little-known ‘book of days’ aimed at boys and their mothers in the wake of the First World War. Written by one Nora Brodie Thornhill, A Little Book for Mothers and Sons was published in London in 1919. In it the author uses anecdotes of army chaplains and others to create a religious coping mechanism for boys, as read by and with their mothers. The article provides context for this kind of text, and for diverse ways in which the relationship between mothers and sons was exploited before, during and after the war.
Notes
1. 1 Timothy 6:12; Wells, The War that Will End War. Wells wrote variants of the phrase in articles leading up to the book.
2. Ibid., 417.
3. Ibid., xiii, 125. Although the armistice had been signed November 11 and a ceasefire was under effect, the nations remained under a formal state of war until the Treaty of Versailles, 28 June 1919.
4. Cairns, The Army and Religion, 153.
5. Thornhill, A Little Book for Mothers and Sons.
6. Albert had six children from his first marriage. http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=thornhill1745a&id=I56 and https://www.geni.com/people/Albert-Thornhill/6000000023982422900. In the 1911 Census of England and Wales, she is listed as still living in Tunbridge Wells.
7. BL 4400.cc.29, Gen. Reference.
8. Thornhill, A Little Book, 63.
9. Ibid., preface.
10. Kidd, Making American Boys, 59.
11. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 18.
12. Ibid., 19. See, too, Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War, 154: ‘It built up a fleet of ambulances nearly all driven by clergy who acted as pastors as well as drivers. It organized visitors for the wounded, hostels for soldiers on leave in London, parcels for prisoners of war and recreation centres for wives of men at the front in London’.
13. See Reay, The Half-Shilling Curate.
14. Thornhill, A Little Book, 52 and 56.
15. Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young, 200.
16. Thornhill, A Little Book, 59.
17. Ibid., 46.
18. Ibid., 24.
19. Ibid., 32.
20. A darker version of Genesis 22:1–19 would come before readers in 1920 in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, where Abraham did not listen to God, but instead ‘slew his son/And half the seed of Europe, one by one’.
21. Ibid., 32.
22. Thornhill, A Little Book, 67.
23. Ibid., 31.
24. Horne, History and the Construction of the Child, 152.
25. Thornhill, A Little Book, 12.
26. Ibid., 34 and 66.
27. Marrin, The Last Crusade, 152–3. Cecil DeGrotte Eby points out that Colonel Robert Baden-Powell’s first number of Scouting for Boys as early as 1908 features a cover on which ‘a young Scout watches an enemy landing party’. Eby, The Road to Armageddon, 66.
28. Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print, 10.
29. Quoted in Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print, 10.
30. Prentiss, Ever Heavenward, 15.
31. Thornhill, A Little Book, 18. Here Thornhill recommends looking into Canon E. E. Holmes’ The Colours of the King, Red, White and Blue (1914; also published by Longmans). Holmes pointed out the significance of the crosses and the colours on the Union Jack: “Fight for the colours of Christ the King” (32).
32. Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print, 8.
33. Thornhill, A Little Book, 21.
34. Lyttelton, Mothers and Sons, 96. Lyttelton also played cricket for Cambridge and Middlesex, as well as representing England on the national football team, before becoming a cleric.
35. Ibid., 104.
36. Ibid., 119.
37. Prentiss, Ever Heavenward, 144.
38. Ibid., 18.
39. Ibid., 218.
40. Ibid., 96.
41. Ibid., 144.
42. Ibid., 250.
43. Ibid., 201.
44. Alcott, Little Men, 20.
45. Clark, Regendering the School Story, 5.
46. Pickering, A Boy’s Ambition, 7.
47. Ibid., 14.
48. See, for example, Butler, Undoing Gender.
49. Thornhill, A Little Book, 68.
50. Lyttelton, Mothers and Sons, 142–3.
51. Ibid., 119.
52. Ibid., 157.
53. Sewell, Mother’s Last Words, 3.
54. Ibid., 2.
55. Ibid., 16.
56. Robert Graves quotes this letter angrily and in full in Goodbye to All That, 190.
57. Barker, Mothers & Sons in War Time and Other Pieces, 3.
58. Zeiger, “She Didn’t Raise Her Boy to Be a Slacker,” 6–39.
59. Jennifer Terry points out that ‘‘momism’ bashing gained industrial strength during the decades following World War II.’ Terry, “‘Momism’ and the Making of Treasonous Homosexuals,” 169.
60. Ibid., 1.
61. Ibid., 55.
62. Ibid., 223.
63. Lyttelton, Mothers and Sons, preface.
64. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War, 236.
65. Strecker, Their Mothers’ Sons, 13 and 36.
66. Ibid., 13.
67. Reed, The Mother’s Manual, 4.
68. Prentiss, Ever Heavenward, 12. Matthew Grenby reminds us in his survey of early writings for children that ‘[i]n numerous ways . . . the origins of modern children’s literature can be seen in the books produced by the Puritans for children, however unpalatable we might think them today’. Reference?
69. Parker, “Shell-shocked Prophets,” 297.
70. Cairns, The Army and Religion, 153.