ABSTRACT
This impressionistic chapter has shown that understandings of what constituted a proper and ‘natural’ childhood were subject to development during the nineteenth century. In other words the concept of childhood in 1800 was not that of 1900. In 1800 its meaning was ambiguous; nor was there a popular demand for an unproblematic conception. By 1900 the uncertainty had been more or less resolved and the identity of childhood determined-to the satisfaction of the middle class and the respectable working class. At the risk of appearing anachronistic, it could be argued that a recognisably ‘modern’ notion was being put into place: childhood was being legally, legislatively, socially, medically, psychologically, educationally and politically institutionalised. During the nineteenth century the making of childhood into a very specific kind of agegraded and age-related condition went through several stages, involving several different processes. Each new construction, one often overlapping with the other, has been described here in approximate chronological order as: the natural child, the Romantic child, the evangelical child, the factory child, the delinquent child, the schooled child and the psycho-medical child.
