Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-war Settlement

Abstract

This is a narrative of childhood and its construction and an elegy for a lost, romanticised world of child freedom in the context of a wide-ranging account of England after the Second World War. It is charmingly illustrated with photographs from Roger Mayne and others representing urban childhood in a new way in the years of austerity and affluence alike. Thomson follows up his earlier account of psychology by here investigating and, to some extent, challenging the chronology and the emphasis of historians of childhood. He uses three main sites of symbolic space: the institution, the home and the outside world. He acknowledges that he owes much to predecessors who have written about these institutions in particular but could say more about one of the main imaginative landscape of childhood studies in the twentieth century—the primary school—where some of his questions have already been raised by historians of education. He covers evacuation, war, cars, attachment, play, streets and paedophilia as well as children's rights.