During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British society gradually began to see 'adolescence' as a distinct social entity worthy of concentrated study and debate. Jenny Holt argues that the social construction of the public schoolboy, a figure made ubiquitous by a huge body of fictional, biographical, and journalistic work, had a disproportionate role to play in the development of social perceptions of adolescence and in forming ideas of how young people should be educated to become citizens in an age of increasing democracy. With attention to an admirably wide range of popular...

Posing a challenge to more traditional approaches to the history of education, this interdisciplinary collection examines the complex web of beliefs and methods by which culture was transmitted to young people in the long eighteenth century. Expanding the definition of education exposes the shaky ground on which some historical assumptions rest. For example, studying conventional pedagogical texts and practices used for girls' home education alongside evidence gleaned from women's diaries and letters suggests domestic settings were the loci for far more rigorous intellectual training than has...

Taking Isaac Watts's Divine Songs (1715) as its point of departure, this collection gives sustained attention to the literary, aesthetic, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of seminal works of children's poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While attending to central figures of children's poetry such as Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reassert the literary significance of landmark - though often marginalized - poetic works written during the past three centuries. In spite of the enduring...

Shedding light on an important and neglected topic in childhood studies, Anja Muller interrogates how different concepts of childhood proliferated and were construed in several important eighteenth-century periodicals and satirical prints. Muller focuses on The Tatler, The Spectator, The Guardian, The Female Tatler, and The Female Spectator, arguing that these periodicals contributed significantly to the construction, development, and popularization of childhood concepts that provided the basis for later ideas such as the 'Romantic child'. Informed by the theoretical concept of 'framing', by...