Child philanthropy, family care and young bodies in Britain, 1876–1914
September 2021
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Chapter
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Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain
Adults in the early twentieth century had no doubt that the welfare of British children had been transformed in recent decades. They also thought that they were responsible for these changes. Historians know a great deal about the aims and actions of elite women and men who sought to alter their nation’s future by remaking working-class childhoods. This chapter uses writing by working-class children to examine the impact and limits of investments in children’s lives by the state, the voluntary sector and private families.
SBTMR
Children's Experiences of Welfare in modern Britain
September 2021
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Edited book
The history of childhood and welfare in Britain through the eyes of children. Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain brings together the latest research as provided by the state, charities and families from 1830 to 1980. Demonstrating how the young were integral to the making, interpretation, delivery and impact of welfare services, the chapters consider a wide range of investments in young people’s lives, including residential institutions, emigration schemes, hospitals and clinics, schools, social housing and familial care. Drawing upon thousands of personal testimonies, including a wealth of writing by children themselves, the book shows that we can only understand the history and impact of welfare if we listen to children’s experiences.
SBTMR
‘The Borough Council have done a great deal ... I hope they continue to do so in the future’: children, community and the welfare state, 1941–55
September 2021
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Chapter
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Children's Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain
Children and the News
December 2019
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Chapter
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Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900
Long-term trends in child maltreatment in England and Wales, 1858-2016: an observational, time-series analysis.
March 2019
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Journal article
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Lancet. Public health
BACKGROUND:It is unclear whether child maltreatment is increasing or decreasing in England and Wales. More evidence is needed, from multiple sources and over longer periods of time, to explore trends in child maltreatment. We investigated whether the annual incidence of child maltreatment has changed over time, using official record data and time-series methods to establish long-term trends. METHODS:In this observational time-series analysis, we used six data sources (Government records for child mortality, police-recorded child homicides, crimes against children, child protection, and children in care; and NSPCC data) to estimate the incidence of child maltreatment in England and Wales and examine long-term trends. We included nationally representative data that could estimate the incidence of child maltreatment for more than 25 years. Our primary outcomes were the number of victims (age <20 years) or perpetrators (age >16 years) of child maltreatment per 12-month period in England, including or excluding Wales. We fitted Poisson regression models with year as the exposure and the number of victims or perpetrators of child maltreatment as the outcome (adjusted for population age-structure and size). When a linear trend was not appropriate, we fitted generalised additive models with penalised splines to visualise trends. FINDINGS:The incidence of child mortality by homicide or assault decreased by 90% (2·7 per 100 000 children) between 1858 and 2016 and the incidence of people guilty of child cruelty or neglect decreased by 83% (6·7 per 100 000 adults) between 1893 and 2016, whereas child protection registrations increased by 182% (328·7 per 100 000 children) between 1988 and 2016. Crimes against children and children entering care increased between 2000 and 2016. In 2016, 40 children died by homicide, with twice as many adolescent (15-19 years) deaths than infant (age <1 year) deaths. In 2016, 67 700 children were placed on the child protection register and neglect and emotional abuse were the most common reasons. INTERPRETATION:Although long-term trends have decreased, child maltreatment remains a major public health problem in England and Wales. Further research is needed to establish whether adolescents are a particularly vulnerable age group and whether neglect and emotional abuse are increasing. Future child protection policies and practices should respond to these areas of growing need. FUNDING:Andrew W Mellon Foundation and Clarendon through The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, Oxford.
Journal Article
Parenthood, Citizenship and the State in England, c.1870–1914
December 2016
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Chapter
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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.
April 2016
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Chapter
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PARENTHOOD BETWEEN GENERATIONS: Transforming Reproductive Cultures
Parenthood between Generations: Transforming Reproductive Cultures
April 2016
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Edited 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
December 2015
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Chapter
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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
October 2015
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Journal article
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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
April 2013
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Journal article
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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
December 2010
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Journal article
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Social History of Medicine
4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 5002 History and Philosophy Of Specific Fields, 3 Good Health and Well Being
The Diary of Elizabeth Lee: Growing Up on Merseyside in the Late Nineteenth Century
June 2010
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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
Domestic servants and their urban employers: a case study of Lancaster, 1880-1914
May 2009
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Journal article
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Economic History Review: a journal of economic and social history
It has been argued that domestic service heightened divisions of class and gender, and supported the private nuclear family in late nineteenth-century England. This case study of one urban locality (Lancaster) between 1880 and 1914 uses qualitative and quantitative techniques, particularly longitudinal record linkage, to explore relationships between live-in domestic servants and their employers. It is argued that there were considerable similarities between the backgrounds and life-cycle-related motivations of both servants and employers. Relationships were highly diverse, but service simultaneously depended upon and played a crucial role in sustaining complex, localized networks that extended far beyond the servant-employing household.