ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author refers to “the Edgeworths” when discussing material co-authored by father and daughter, and “Edgeworth” when discussing work written by Maria on her own. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile(1762) also champions the child’s right to play, but as one part of a broader defense of natural childish pleasure. From Practical Education, and throughout her long and prolific career, Edgeworth was recognized as a serious, empirically minded, progressive thinker about childhood development. Edgeworth has received particular criticism, in her time and our own, for seeing children’s toys as being all about the work of education rather than the joy of play. For Edgeworth and the wider educational reform movement she represented, middle-class family life was not about leisure, but about work – the toil of educating children. There is great continuity in the history of childhood, but history also shapes ideas of childhood and children’s experiences.
