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Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England, 1750-1914. Edited by Nigel Goose and Katrina Honeyman. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. xi + 358 pp. Cloth £75.
C hildhood and Child Labour in Industrial England, 1750-1914 provides a Britain. This volume corrects the earlier harsher views that children were exploited and were mistreated "victims" of the industrializing process. Editors Nigel Goose (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Katrina Honeyman (for- merly of the University of Leeds, UK) offer a tempered view, emphasizing the importance of child labor and arguing that working children should be neither "invisible" nor marginalized, but given a voice and their rightful place in his- tory. The cogent introduction explains new perspectives on childhood studies from the fields of sociology, psychology, literature and culture, and medicine. The twelve chapter essays following the introduction are written by well- credentialed authors; each moves children into more central positions within academic analysis and is shaped by concerns for children's welfare. A cohesive mastic to these essays is that working children contributed to household econo- mies substantially for the poor. In brief, working children were a good thing and...