Product Description
by Rachel Bryant Davies (Editor), Barbara Gribling (Editor)
This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children's Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children's culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination.
Back Jacket
Pasts at play examines British children in the late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian eras as active consumers of a variety of pasts, from the biblical and classical to the medieval and early modern. This period, 1750-1914, saw crucial developments in children's culture and historical education, as children became target consumers for publishers. Boys and girls across the social classes often experienced multiple pasts simultaneously for the
purpose of amusement and instruction. Their encounters were interactive, imaginative and, above all, playful.
Author Biography
Rachel Bryant Davies is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London
Barbara Gribling is a Visiting Researcher in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University
