Reading Lives and Lives of Reading : Reconstructing British Childhoods, 1860-1920

Drawing on a variety of disciplines, this study examines the social, political and cultural forces that redefined childhood in Britain between 1860 and 1920, as well as the relationship of childhood to struggles over class, gender and race.

Taking as its focus the question of how children's literature and children's reading practices became central to contemporary preoccupation with childhood, Galbraith seeks to identify the range of actors and institutions, and the historical moments of conflict involved in reconstructing childhood.

The 1870 Education Act's introduction of mass education in Britain opens up working-class childhood for study and allows an exploration of how middle-class notions of childhood were contested at the levels of school and neighbourhood.

Carried out in Parliament, school board meetings and the popular press, debates over how working-class children should be educated reveal tensions between an idealized vision of a protected childhood available to all and the reality of childhoods divided by class and gender. Galbraith also looks at how the child-development movement in Britain took up similar questions about the relationship between children's bodies and minds as it worked to put knowledge about childhood into scientific form.

Through this "science" of childhood, a loose coalition of teachers, mothers and doctors ultimately shaped Britain's debates about, and implementation of, social and education policy.

Finally, this study explores how adult writers, through the medium of autobiography, reconceived their own childhoods.

Written by men and women across Britain's class spectrum, these autobiographies almost universally rely on a shared myth of childhood to explore the personal and historical changes through which they lived.