Pasts at Play
Childhood Encounters with History in British Culture, 1750–1914
Rachel Bryant Davies editor Barbara Gribling editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Manchester University Press
Published:30th May '23
Should be back in stock very soon
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: 9781526171825
Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 15mm
Weight: unknown
272 pages