The first lines spoken by the old shepherd in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale are, “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”

Joseph Conrad recalled, “It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself, with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now, ‘When I grow up I shall go there.’”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, once said of Lord Byron, “I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: BYRON IS DEAD!”

In 1385 Robert Braybroke, bishop of London, recommended excommunication for boys who “play ball inside and outside the church [St. Paul’s Cathedral] and engage in other destructive games there, breaking and greatly damaging the glass windows and the stone images of the church.”

Phia Rilke’s infant daughter had died a year before she gave birth to her son. She named him René Maria—sometimes referring to him as Fräulein, Margaret, and Sophie—and gave him dolls to play with, dressing him as a girl until he was six years old. The poet did not start using Rainer instead of René until he was in his twenties.