In this companion volume to Useful Toil, John Burnett has drawn extensively on over eight hundred previously unpublished manuscripts. The result is a unique record of childhood that reveals in intimate detail the trials and hard-won triumphs of nineteenth-century working-class life. Besides affording rare insights into the developing child's world of dreams, hopes and fears, they reflect a crucial period in the evolution of a family tradition; a time when, to counteract the brutalizing pressures of urbanization and industrialization, ordinary people turned to each other for...