Excerpt from Dr. Shanker’s newest book Restoring Resilience
The Victorian view of stress derived from the mechanical concept of force. The latter originated in the 15th century to describe how much stress a metal could absorb without cracking. One of the great discoveries of the 16th century was that you could change the stress tolerance of metal, wood, or glass by smelting and firing.
Using heat, pig iron could be turned into cast iron. Cast iron was far more stress-resistant and could be used to build bridges and decorative gates that didn’t break under pressure. The same treatment was used to strengthen wood. Wood exposed to a low flame is three times more stress resistant than untreated wood is. This discovery had huge implications for the construction of multi-story buildings and for the development of tempered glass, which could be used for carriages and fireplaces.
The most famous scientist of the time, Robert Hooke, discovered a scientific law that became known as Hooke’s Law. Hooke’s law of elasticity was a way of measuring the stress resistance of metal, wood, or tempered glass (Hooke, 1678). This law could be used to experiment with and devise methods for increasing the stress resistance of these materials. All the terms that we use today to talk about stress: resilience, pressure, elasticity, stress-load and stress tolerance were originally used to talk about tempering. These terms all date back to the 17th century and were used to describe the internal property of raw materials that determines how much force they could withstand without fracturing.
In the early 19th century, the Victorians applied this mechanical concept of stress to human beings. The Victorians believed that their society was a “dog eats dog world” in which life was brutal and only the strong would succeed. Stress, in its mechanical sense, was used to describe the essence of work: to be a worker in Victorian society was ipso facto to be under physical stress. The ability to cope with stress was based on a person’s character. Like a piece of iron or wood, whether a person was going to break or be resilient was a function of their inner nature. As Charles Mercier put it, “for every individual, as for every wooden beam, there is a breaking point” (1890).
If the “breaking point” of wood or metal could be strengthened, might the same be true for a child? The secret was to push the child up to, but not past their breaking point. In other words, the brain-forcing described in Dombey and Son was seen as a method to strengthen a child’s ability to cope with all the stresses that they would encounter as adults. A common metaphor was that it was like forcing a plant to grow by increasing the greenhouse temperature.
Quotations from the time are grounded in this view of child rearing – or rather, child tempering. Pye Henry Chavasse wrote that a child “should be brought up rather hardily, than otherwise; he should be made to rough it” (1872). The way a child is raised could mold them into someone strong enough to deal with life’s stresses without falling apart or they would fail due to internal weakness.
Whatever parents do, they mustn’t rear their child in such a way that makes them weak or cowardly. Samuel Smiles’ 1859 best-selling Self Help was the ultimate expression of this outlook. Humans (Smiles was referring to Englishmen) are the greatest power on earth. Their power rests on their remarkable determination to overcome adversity. For England to stay strong, those who work the hardest must be rewarded. Those who shy from work should be left to sink to the bottom of the social strata.
“No one chooses to be distressed.”
– Stuart Shanker
Keep reading this passage to learn more about how Self-Reg evolves this thinking in…
