Very interesting question. Of course, the bleak
dog-eat-dog world that we are presented with in the grim pages of Coram
Boy is very different from the situation in our contemporary world today. It
does paint a very despairing view of childhood where children are dispensable and
terribly fragile. In this hard-hitting book we are very soon presented with pictures of
tremendous violence and neglect as Otis, the so called "Coram Man", collects
illegitimate children and as often as not kills them soon
after.
He
nodded curtly at Meshak. "Get the space. There's a good ditch just here. We'll dig them
in," he jerked his head in the direction of the panniers strapped to the train of mules.
"I don't want to take them into Gloucester."... Nothing to
deep or careful. There was a lot of water. Just dig a hole deep enough to submerge the
bundles. Foxes would do the
rest...
I think in a sense
the reason why we are presented with such shocking images towards the beginning of the
book is to present a sharp contrast between the conditions that children today have to
live in and the conditions of children just a few centuries ago. Jamilia Gavin, in her
introduction, seems to indicate that she wrote this book to highlight the conditions of
children in this time but then also to capture the story of one man who was key in
changing this perception of children:
It was often entirely a mater of luck if a child
was kindly and lovingly reared, and it was to redress this that Captain Thomas Coram
opened his hospital in 1741. It was people like him who gradually changed the whole
perception of child care and who touched the conscience of the
nation.
Thus, I don't think
this novel relates to contemporary thoughts about childhood, it rather sets out to show
where our ideas about childhood have emerged from and how they have changed so radically
thanks to the work of individuals such as Thomas Coram.
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