This book presents a broad range of original data on childhood in Victorian Britain. It combines a social science approach to data with historical context, resulting in a highly readable account based on sound historiography. Against a backdrop of the industrial revolution, an expanding economy, and a rising standard of living, Victorian Childhood explores life and death, child development, the family, work, education, social life, cities, crime, and advocacy and reform. Presenting data on the deteriorating health of children during the nineteenth century and on their increasing displacement of adults in the workplace, the author demonstrates that they did not share proportionately in the increased standard of living. Jordan's book is a unique piece of scholarship in its range, focus, and presentation. Original sources such as diaries and memoirs not previously cited elsewhere, literature from the period, and anecdotes from the children themselves animate the statistical background and provide vivid pictures of their lives.

First published in 1932. This title is a first-person account of growing up in Victorian England. The book examines many aspects of the British Empire, and the family life and education of the poet, writer and high society hostess Claire Annabel Caroline Grant Duff. A Victorian Childhood will be of interest to students of history.

This book reads Victorian fin de siècle literature through the medium of perceptions of childhood. It examines the connection between ‘monstrous’ and idealistic symbolic representations of childhood represented by key cultural discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Specifically, anxieties about change are linked closely to anxieties about childhood, procreation, and maturation in a range of Children’s and Adults’ texts from the 1860s to the 1890s. The book demonstrates the ways in which the emergent social movements which have come to define and represent change in the fin-de-siècle period were inherently concerned with the ideas of childhood and parenthood and the ways in which they represented both the promise and the threat of the future. The texts are arranged by theme, and grouped according to whether they are seen primarily as intended for children, or for adults. In texts intended for adult readers, images of childhood are more covert and more metaphorical than those texts aimed at child readers, in which overt pedagogical concerns are often brought to bear. Nothing embodies the idea of the future more than the children who stand as a bridge between ‘now’ and ‘then.’ This book analyses the connections between Victorian perceptions of childhood and the anxieties and upheavals of the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle.

This book presents a broad range of original data on childhood in Victorian Britain. It combines a social science approach to data with historical context, resulting in a highly readable account based on sound historiography. Against a backdrop of the industrial revolution, an expanding economy, and a rising standard of living, Victorian Childhood explores life and death, child development, the family, work, education, social life, cities, crime, and advocacy and reform. Presenting data on the deteriorating health of children during the nineteenth century and on their increasing displacement of adults in the workplace, the author demonstrates that they did not share proportionately in the increased standard of living. Jordan's book is a unique piece of scholarship in its range, focus, and presentation. Original sources such as diaries and memoirs not previously cited elsewhere, literature from the period, and anecdotes from the children themselves animate the statistical background and provide vivid pictures of their lives.

The lives of Victorian children at home, work, school, and at play explored through a mixture of archive photography, period illustrations and artefacts.

By examining some of Dickens's works that contain the imperfect child, Malkovich considers the construction, romanticization, and socialization of the Victorian child within work read by and for children during the Victorian Era, contending that the Victorian child can still be found in popular literatures read by children contemporarily.

The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.