The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny

Well, this was a strange book. First published in 1972, reissued in 1985, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny is a not very scholarly, highly anecdotal, frankly psychoanalytical account of the history of nannies and nannying. I have a fascination with the British servant class (I wouldn't be at all surprised if my ancestors were 'in service') so I couldn't resist this one.

Gathorne-Hardy writes very much from the perspective of the nannied, despite having interviewed dozens of nannies -- as he rightly points out, the last generation of Victorian and Edwardian nannies who raised whole generations of upper and middle class children. He is very interesting on the probable effects of this phenomenon of entire classes of children being raised by people who were not their parents: the split in affection and authority between the nanny and the parents; the resulting attitude to women (he argues that many nanny-raised men became sexually fixated with 'lower class' women like their nannies); the opportunities for cruelty and abuse; the idealised, distant mother; the sense of betrayal and insecurity when a nanny left the family, and much more. He traces the famous English emotional repression and stiff upper lip to the often 'over-strict' and 'depriving' regime of the Nanny, where any pleasure for its own sake was suspect. It's an interesting theory but in Gathorne-Hardy's account, entirely without actual evidence.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny is packed with intriguing stories, bizarre facts, wild speculation and peculiar digressions (there is a whole half chapter on the nanny-related murder which was the subject of Kate Summerscale's book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher). But one subject on which it's strangely silent is Mr Gathorne-Hardy's own personal experience of being brought up by a Nanny. We know he was, he mentions it in passing, but by the end of the book, I was dying to know how much of his sexual and psychological theories were informed by his own life.

My copy came with an inscription:

To my wife, Margaret,

Who, on balance, is a more pleasant person than the Nannies and Matrons of my experience.

Love from Peter

York, Christmas 1985

Questions upon questions!