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Pasts at Play

Childhood Encounters with History in British Culture, 1750–1914

Rachel Bryant Davies editor Barbara Gribling editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Manchester University Press

Published:22nd Sep '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Pasts at Play cover

This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children’s Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children’s 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.

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.’
Siân Pooley, Victorian Studies

ISBN: 9781526128898

Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 16mm

Weight: unknown

272 pages