ABSTRACT
The purpose here is to survey some of the most important social constructions of British childhood since the end of the eighteenth century, in order to illustrate the historical variability of the concept, and to show that by the 1890s the emergence of a clear notion of ‘the child’ was beginning to be formulated. Such a brief account is unable to do more than suggest the principal identities and the attributable ‘prime movers of social change’.1 The hope is that a familiarity with these perceptions, as held in the first instance by dominant interests, professional, religious and political, will both help to explain the tenacity and the self-confidence of our ‘modern’ interpretations of ‘childhood’, and unravel those understandings of childhood held by reformers, politicians and administrators throughout our period.
