A Home from Home?

Abstract

Abstract A pioneering study of children’s social care in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book presents new information and develops conceptual thinking about the history of children’s care by investigating the centrality of key ideas about home, family, and nurture that shaped welfare provision for children at this time. Departing from narratives of reform and discipline which have dominated scholarship on children’s welfare institutions, the book’s focus on key themes of home, family, and nurture offers a radically different view of the role and function of children’s care agencies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on material culture and social history approaches, this book provides a new type of study of social care that offers a ‘bottom-up’ study of children’s welfare and the significance of specific types of care practices that held particular cultural and ideological meaning. At its core, the book uses unique first-hand accounts, individual case records, and personal correspondence of children in care in Britain to locate the voices and subjectivities of institutionalized children and their families within the voluntary welfare system between 1870 and 1920. In doing so, it uncovers the real lives, experiences, and attitudes of the children placed in care and their family members and offers new understandings about the role of children’s social care in the past, at a time when children’s care historically and in the present day is a topical issue in public consciousness in the UK and internationally.