ABSTRACT
Childhood, as a cultural concept or a lived experience, is neither a static nor an autonomous phenomenon. It is something constantly subject to changing external pressures, as the political, economic and social system of which it is part alters and reformulates. This chapter focuses on the most striking changes in elite society in eighteenth-century England, the development of a new world of commercialized and urbanized public leisure. It explores the extent of high status children’s participation in the new world of urban leisure and the reasons behind their engagement with this world. The chapter examines the implications such involvement has for our understanding of eighteenth-century childhood. It explains in detail why children of the well off became so much a part of the changing social and cultural agenda of their parents. Persuasive evidence exists that young people, children as well as adolescents, were a ubiquitous presence in the new world of fashionable urban leisure.
