ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes the social constructions of British childhood since the end of the eighteenth century. It focuses on four related themes. First, the gradual shift from an idea of childhood fragmented by geography - urban/rural - and by class life-experiences; second, the rise and development of what historians refer to as the domestic ideal among the nineteenth-century middle classes; third, the evolution of an increasingly compulsory relationship between the State, the family and child welfare; and finally, the political and cultural struggle to extend the developing constructions of childhood through all social classes, to universalize it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the plurality of childhoods made it difficult to capture the desired condition and to secure agreement on what it should be. Consequently, disciples of Rousseau, Romantics, Evangelicals, child-labour reformers, psycho-medics and advocates of all aspects of child welfare struggled to regularize competing identities, through what was a developing conception of proper childhood, designed to secure universal approval.
