ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters have shown that eighteenth-century satirical prints do not exclude children or childhood from public scenes and sites but render children’s bodies, their education and their position in the family matters of public concern that are even prone to politicization.1 Presenting children and childhood as public issues, eighteenth-century mass media such as periodicals and prints frequently illustrate what historian Peter Borsay suggests in his article on ‘Children, Adolescents and Fashionable Urban Society in Eighteenth-Century England’, namely, that contrary to Ariès’s segregational thesis, children did participate in eighteenth-century public life. This chapter will therefore examine prints that expressly represent children in public scenes or sites, exploring the function and position of child figures in such situations and locations. As with most of the prints discussed so far, the public scenes in question form part of urban life and they show children not in a world of their own, but immersed in the world of adults. This participation in public life raises the question of childhood innocence: if childhood innocence is conceived of as a distinctive marker separating childhood from adulthood, it would only be logical if prints representing children’s participation in public were to eschew the idea of innocence and, rather, depict versions of an experienced child(hood). To what extent, then, are children or childhood framed in such public scenes so as to make the beholder perceive the respective figures as idiosyncratic and distinct?
