This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship, and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialization, 1790-1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanization and the division of labour in this...

A unique 2010 account of childhood during the industrial revolution through the autobiographies of working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A new edition of the leading textbook on the economic history of Britain since industrialisation. Leading historians and economists examine the foundational importance of economic life in modern Britain as well as the close interconnections between economic, social, political and cultural change. Each chapter provides a clear guide to the major controversies in the field and students are shown how to connect historical evidence with economic theory and how to apply quantitative methods. Volume 2, on 1870 to the present, tracks the development of the British economy from late...