This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children's Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children's culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.

About the Author

Rachel Bryant Davies is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London
Barbara Gribling is a Visiting Researcher in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University

Reviews

'Pasts at play makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on informal learning, revealing how much more we understand about the history of education when we look beyond the school gates.'
Sian Pooley, Victorian Studies

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Book Information
ISBN 9781526171825
Author Rachel Bryant Davies
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Manchester University Press
Publisher Manchester University Press
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 15mm