Pasts at Play: Childhood Encounters with History in British Culture, 17501914

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Description

This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Childrens Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to childrens culture and the uses of the past.

It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.

Reviews

Pasts at play makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on informal learning, revealing how much more we understand about the history of education when we look beyond the school gates.
Sin Pooley, Victorian Studies

Author Bio

Rachel Bryant Davies is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London
Barbara Gribling is a Visiting Researcher in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University