Ginger S. Frost

Lady Wombat says:

Frost provides a clearly written overview of life for children in England, Scotland, and Wales during the Victorian period. Attempting to move beyond the two major stereotypes of Victorian childhood – oppressed, abused children, or innocent children ensconced in a loving, if conservative and patriarchal, family – Frost acknowledges that both have roots in historical fact, but urges her readers to delve more deeply in the nuances and details of children’s lives. While the Victorians didn’t “invent” childhood, they did carry on innovations, especially from the 18th century, even while simultaneously retaining many older views about childhood (10). Still, Frost argues, “the Victorian era was crucial to the development of modern childhood. The amount of attention to children’s needs, the range and number of reforms, and the many parliamentary acts to increase the legal rights of children all point to the significance of the nineteenth century in improving children’s status. In other words, even if the ideas or impulses were not new, their implementation and reach were innovative and had far-reaching effects” (10).

In her introduction, Frost outlines the different social identities that made significant differences in the lives of children in the period: what generation they grew up in (early, mid or late Victorian); where they grew up (town or countryside; nation); what class they belonged to; and what sex they were. Frost is careful to recognize how these differences influenced the ways that children were treated and conceptualized in the four subject-based chapters that follow, focusing on families, on schooling, on work, and on play. The final three chapters discuss larger institutional forces: religious and patriotic/imperial groups for children; workhouses and jails; and child-saving movements and institutions.

Focusing on children younger than 14, Frost draws on primary resources, particularly autobiographies, although she also relies on a few major secondary sources written by previous historians, primarily Eric Hopkins (Childhood Transformed: Working-Class Children in Nineteenth-Century England), Pamela Horn (The Victorian Town Child), and Thomas Jordan (Victorian Childhood: Themes and Variations, which I tried to read first but couldn’t stomach because of its ahistorical, judgment-laden approach to the material). Rather than analyzing ideologies of or discourses about childhood, Frost’s work draws focuses upon the actual child in history, and includes many quotations from autobiographies, particularly those written in the latter part of the period. She is wary of our own tendency to impose current-day ideas about childhood on the past, and warns us to “keep in mind that myths about childhood exert a powerful pull on the contemporary imagination. In other words, one should not read current expectations of childhood into a different context” (5). She is careful to contextualize differences between Victorian views of children and current-day ones, as well as to point out the roots of current-day approaches to childhood in Victorian innovations.… (mere)