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Faculty of History

University of Oxford

Dr Siân Pooley

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Dr Siân Pooley
Tutor in Modern British History
Magdalen College
01865 (6)10345
sian.pooley@magd.ox.ac.uk

My research explores the social and cultural history of nineteeth- and twentieth-century Britain. I am especially interested in family, intimacy and fertility; childhood, youth and education; and community, citizenship and social policy in modern Britain.

My research is centred on the question of how social change and continuity happened in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. I study the past through the experiences and social relationships that mattered to children, men and women, and my research focuses currently on two main areas.

My doctoral research, and the publications that emerged from this, explore questions of social change and diversity through a study of parenthood during the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fertility decline, when couples halved the size of their families. This interest in how men and women were altered by the experience of forming relationships with their children grew into working collaboratively on a co-edited forthcoming book on the the intergenerational transmission of parenthood.

My second research area examines children's lives and subjectivities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, especially as revealed by texts that were created by people when young. I am currently writing on the letters, drawings, poems and stories composed by children and published by the popular press in the seventy years before the Second World War. I also work on a collaborative research project on how experiences of adversity in childhood shaped the lives of people who grew up in twentieth-century Britain.

 

See page on Magdalen College website

Featured Publication

Sian Pooley,‘“Leagues of Love” and “Column Comrades”: Children’s Responses to War in late-Victorian and Edwardian England’, in L. Paul, R.R. Johnston, and E. Short (eds), Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 301-18

Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War

Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children’s Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as ‘enemy’ lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children’s literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.

Research
  • Social and subjective experience in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain
  • Children, childhood and the life course
  • Relationships between individuals, families and social policies

For further details of my collaborative research project on Childhood Adversity and Lifetime Resilience, see: torch.ox.ac.uk/childhood

http://history.web.ox.ac.uk/centre-history-childhood 

Publications

  • Children and the News

    2019
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900

  • Long-term trends in child maltreatment in England and Wales: A time series analysis of official record data from 1858 to 2016

    2019
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Lancet Public Health

  • Parenthood, Citizenship and the State in England, c.1870–1914

    2017
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, c. 1870-1950 Raising the Nation
    This innovative collection draws on original research to explore the dynamic interactions between parents, governments and their representatives across a range of European contexts; from democratic Britain and Finland, to Stalinist Russia ...
    History

  • Grandfathers, Grandmothers and the Inheritance of Parenthood in England, c. 1850–1914.

    2016
    |
    Chapter
    |
    PARENTHOOD BETWEEN GENERATIONS: Transforming Reproductive Cultures

  • Parenthood between Generations: Transforming Reproductive Cultures

    2016
    |
    Book
    Recent literature has identified modern "parenting" as an expert-led practice-one which begins with pre-pregnancy decisions, entails distinct types of intimate relationships, places intense burdens on mothers and increasingly on fathers too. Exploring within diverse historical and global contexts how men and women make-and break-relations between generations when becoming parents, this volume brings together innovative qualitative research by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. The chapters focus tightly on inter-generational transmission and demonstrate its importance for understanding how people become parents and rear children.
    Social Science

  • “Leagues of Love” and “Column Comrades”: Children’s Responses to War in late-Victorian and Edwardian England', in Children's Literature and Culture of the First World War

    2015
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Children's Literature and Culture of the First World War
    Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children’s Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as ‘enemy’ lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children’s literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.
    History

  • Children’s Writing and the Popular Press in England 1876–1914

    2015
    |
    Journal article
    |
    History Workshop Journal
    In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England, a popular culture of writing was created by children through weekly provincial newspaper columns. Working-class and lower-middle-class boys and girls from across northern industrial England penned letters, stories, poems, drawings and puzzles for publication. These texts offer unique insights into non-elite children’s lives as they interacted in print with adult editors and local reading publics. This enables a reassessment of historiographical accounts of the advent of modern journalism, the rise of mass literacy and young subjectivities. Not only were the editors of ‘family newspapers’ responsive to the enthusiasms of the more literate younger generation, but children exerted a significant influence on household consumption. Although basic signature literacy was learnt at school, it was through practising collaborative writing at home that writing became both a marker of growing up and a mundane enjoyable activity that children shared. The columns were founded on visions of idealized childhood and many young writers narrated their lives through conceptions of childish powerlessness. However, these young writers also positioned themselves as part of a world shared with adults and riddled with inequalities; it was these inequalities that the columns sought to disguise through their celebration of the moral, associational, democratic and everyday.

  • Parenthood, child-rearing and fertility in England, 1850–1914

    2013
    |
    Journal article
    |
    The History of the Family
    Fertility declines across Europe and the Anglo-world have been explained as the result of reversals of intergenerational flows of wealth. According to this theory, the child was transformed from an economically-useful household asset to an emotionally-valued parental burden. This article is based on a comparative study of changing understandings of parenthood in three provincial English localities between 1850 and 1914. It works from the premise that in order to make sense of reproductive behaviour, it is essential to examine the meanings that men and women attached to childlessness, child-rearing and parenthood. It is argued that there was not a universal shift that made children into burdens. New understandings of the duties of parenthood did develop, but these were founded on class-, gender- and place-specific interpretations. These encouraged a minority of fathers and mothers to believe that together they had the capacity to improve the lives of their sons and daughters in pioneering ways. Given that husbands and wives had distinct motives for avoiding rearing many children and that the discussion of reproduction was shrouded in silence, the dissemination and use of new ideals of family was crucial in enabling birth control to be thought about respectably within marriage.

  • "All we parents want is that our children’s health and lives should be regarded”: child health and parental concern in England, c.1860-1910

    2010
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Social History of Medicine
    The policies of the early twentieth-century maternalist state have been studied extensively. This article argues that in order to understand Edwardian welfare provision, the relationships between class, place and gender in the previous century must be explored. This is studied through the interaction between child-rearing literature and the experiences of fathers and mothers in three contrasting localities in England from about 1860 to 1910. Mid-nineteenth-century advice manuals and parents expressed very similar understandings of child health. Only from about the 1890s were middle-class attitudes influenced by new medical ideas, which constructed working-class child-rearing as uniquely ignorant. Local government and philanthropic initiatives largely emphasised the importance of domestic care, which ignored parents' anxieties about dangers outside the home and left non-elite medical services structured to exclude children. However, diverse cultures of parental responsibility, of understandings of illness, and of public attitudes to childhood made class, place and gender central to the shifting ways in which health care was provided for children.

  • The Diary of Elizabeth Lee: Growing Up on Merseyside in the Late Nineteenth Century

    2010
    |
    Book
    Personal diaries provide rare glimpses into those aspects of the past that are usually hidden from view. Elizabeth Lee grew up on Merseyside in the late nineteenth century. She began her diary at the age of 16 in 1884 and it provides an unbroken record until the age of 25 in 1892. Elizabeth's father was a draper and outfitter with shops in Birkenhead, and throughout the period of the diary Elizabeth lived at home with her family in Prenton. However, she travelled widely on both sides of the Mersey and the diary provides an unusually revealing picture of middle-class life that begins to challenge some conventional views of the position of young women in Victorian society. The includes a detailed introduction to and analysis of the diary, together with a glossary relating to key people in the diary, a time line relating events in the diary to a wider context, and maps of the localities in which Elizabeth lived her everyday life. There have been a number of diaries published relating to 'ordinary' people, but most accounts were written as life histories, late in life, by people who eventually gained some degree of fame or prominence in society. This very rare firsthand account provides a unique insight into adolescent life in Victorian Britain.
    Biography & Autobiography
    • More
Teaching

Current DPhil Students

  • Jono Taylor

I would be willing to hear from potential DPhil students or any potential Masters students looking at Nineteenth and twentieth century British social and cultural history 

I currently teach:

Prelims

 FHS Masters

History of the British Isles VI: 1815-1924

History of the British Isles VI: 1815-1924

MSt in British and European History post-1500: Theories and Methods

History of the British Isles VII: From 1900

History of the British Isles VII: From 1900

 

Approaches to History

Special Subject: Becoming a citizen, 1860-1902

 

Optional Subject: The New Women in Britain and Ireland, c. 1880-1920

Disciplines in History

 
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