A "Socially Civilising Influence”? Play and the Urban "Degenerate"*

Abstract

The article looks at a number of attempts to organise the play of the children of the urban poor in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines the Romantic assumptions about the city that underlay many of these projects and it also discusses the role of social class and gender in shaping the views of the organisers of play of the poor and the slums which they inhabited. The involvement of members of the Froebel and Settlement movements in the provision of play activities is outlined and it is suggested that theirs was an approach to poverty that was supplanted by ones that stressed class divisions. A number of theories that seek to explain the motives of the play organisers are referred to and that of social control is dismissed. The episode is located in a context of growing collectivism in which voluntary effort such as the organisation of the play of the poor child in the city was financially supplemented and eventually supplanted by the state.