A Home from Home?: Children and Social Care in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, 1870-1920

A Home From Home? is a pioneering study of children's social care in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that investigates the centrality of key ideas about home, family, and nurture in shaping welfare provision. It offers a bottom-up study of children's welfare, using unique first-hand accounts, individual case records, and personal correspondence to locate the voices and subjectivities of institutionalized children and their families within the voluntary welfare system.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 08 February 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press

A groundbreaking exploration of children's social care in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, A Home From Home? offers fresh insights and fosters conceptual thinking about the history of children's care by examining the centrality of key ideas about home, family, and nurture that shaped welfare provision.

Diverging from narratives of reform and discipline that have dominated scholarship, and drawing on material culture and social history approaches, as well as the extensive archives of the Waifs and Strays Society, Claudia Soares provides a novel type of study of social care by undertaking a bottom-up study of children's welfare, and examining the significance of specific types of care practices that held particular cultural and ideological meaning.

At its core, the book employs unique firsthand accounts, individual case records, and personal correspondence of children in care in Britain to locate the voices and subjectivities of institutionalized children and their families within the voluntary welfare system between 1870 and 1920. In doing so, it uncovers the real lives, experiences, and attitudes of the children and their families, and offers a timely new approach to understanding the history of children's social care.

Dimension: 234 x 153 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192897473