Romanticising the Past

I watched part two of Ian Hislop's "The Age of the Do-Gooders" last evening. In many ways I am a Hislop fan - I admire his self - deprecating wit and cynicism and he is an erudite and able presenter. Last night dealt mainly with the lot of children in the not so distant past - Lord Shaftsbury the campaigning peer whose persistence brought about (among many other things) legislation for child employment, Mary Carpenter the educator, Charles Kingsley the clergyman whose book "The Water Babies" instantly pricked the Victorian conscience and relieved the lot of boy chimney sweeps, Dr. Barnado the famous founder of the schools for destitute children and W T Stead whose journalism put the spotlight on child prostitution. It soon becomes apparent that Hislop will not airbrush out the failings of these Victorian do-gooders nor should he. The best of men and women are flawed. Neither is it a surprise that there is a touch of scepticism when he traces the motive behind Shaftsbury's campaigning spirit to a thoroughgoing evangelicalism - that is to be expected in this post-modern day and age. The thing that is so shocking is how soon we have romanticised the past. I guess that we are all guilty of it even within the context of our own lifetimes. Unless we have been truly badly treated in our childhood we are all tempted to put on the rose-tinted glasses when we think of our childhood. I guess that many of our impressions of immediate past centuries are strongly influenced by the romantic literature of the period forgetting that much of that literature was produced by the middle or upper class. Our appetite for period drama - Lark Rise to Candleford, Cranforth and Downton Abbey to name but a few recent efforts - has conspired to give us a very skewed notion of the recent past.

The programme faithfully documented the conditions prevailing at the time and brought home the true horror of the exploitation of children in the terrifying and dangerous conditions of the mines and the mills, the destitution of children left to wander the streets and fend for themselves and the stark reality of child prostitution. On the one hand it makes you realise that things have hardly changed - there are plenty of countries where child labour is exploited, children are left destitute to fend for themselves and where child prostitution is still common. But beyond that it makes you realise that mankind has not changed. These horrors did not start on the Victorian age - they have been part of the history of mankind since the dawn of time. Neither have they ceased in Britain. Children are still exploited and paedophilia is not a modern disease - it is as old as time itself but with a new notoriety enhanced by the internet. It is ironic that Hislop gently mocks the notion of original sin and the basic depravity of man in a programme which simply illustrates the depths to which this country had sunk within its immediate past and not, as we are tempted to think, a long time ago in a galaxy, far, far away....