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The Children of the Poor, Hugh Cunningham; pp. viii + 283. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991, L35.00, $48.95.
In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880-1940, edited by Roger Cooter; pp. xii + 292. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, L45.00, $69.95.
These two volumes on the history of childhood trace a fascinating discourse on childhood and offer a multi-faceted analysis of socio-medical forces that will be of interest to humanists and social scientists alike. As Hugh Cunningham notes, the history of childhood entered a state of flux in the 1960s. Representing the extreme, Lloyd de Mause argued that the further a researcher went back in time, the worse was the care for children. There was a general consensus that modern attitudes about the treatment of children emerged in the eighteenth century. By the end of the 1980s, new work reemphasized change, albeit limited, and claimed that parents always loved their children.
In The Children of the Poor, Cunningham seeks to explain these shifting attitudes toward children, noting that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, commentators celebrated those differences between rich and poor that we now deplore (2-3). By the late-seventeenth century, collective projects arose for the betterment of the poor. The family, as an agency of order, received help from the Poor Law, which meant that the children of the poor became both identifiable and a problem.
Cunningham's study focuses on publicists' views of how children ought to be treated to derive the concepts of childhood that such writers held (2). For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, childhood was time of inurement to labor; children of the poor had economic value for their parents. How was it that these children came to be considered worthy of the same childhood constructed in the middle-class world! (3)
Changes in the economy played a central role. The lack of regular labor or schooling meant...