With or without the books, most children eventually learn, and remember, to control their volume, but not everyone does; it can be an especially difficult skill for autistic children to master.

Teenagers who experience moderate conflict with their parents tend to be the best adjusted, more even-keeled than those who have little conflict with their parents, or, obviously, a lot.

For now, after a couple of centuries of believing that children were born either bad or blank, children were presumed to be born good. It was the mother’s job to protect them from any corrupting forces, to preserve them in a suffocating innocence for as long as possible.

Interestingly, the Llewelyn Davies boys were first cousins of gothic novelist Daphne du Maurier, whose own rather gothic childhood is a story in itself, and the reason du Maurier would not permit the publication of her childhood diaries until fifty years after her death.

In the United States teen rebellion is considered standard, putting the American adolescent in the awkward position of having to rebel in order to conform to societal expectations. For an obedient rule-following teen like I was, this is utterly flummoxing.

They ushered in what became known as the golden age of children’s literature, and remain classics today. As a child myself I felt like I should like them, because they were classics and I was pretentious, but something about them put me off.

By sixteen months, they know what bothers their siblings and will annoy them on purpose.

Not for nothing did H. L. Mencken define Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

She slept with her parrot, which she forced to lie on its back, using slaps to overrule the animal’s every natural impulse to not sleep on its back in a bed. Eventually, she’d kill it by washing it in soap and water and setting it to dry before the fire. When she washed her lamb – in the ocean – she dried it by burying it up to its nose in the sand. She did other odd things, like trying to force a blindfolded donkey to swim; and of course, writing a dozen utterly terrifying books for children.

If the mother can’t afford to hire a nurse, she should pretend she is one herself: “she must look upon herself while performing the functions of a nurse as a professional woman and not as a sentimentalist masquerading under the name of ‘Mother.