Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World ed. by Shirleene Robinson, Simon Sleight

Reviewed by: Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World ed. by Shirleene Robinson, Simon Sleight Kristine Moruzi Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Edited by Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2016. xiii + 328 pp. Cloth $100. One of the most exciting aspects of a collection like this is seeing how different disciplines approach the question of historical children and childhoods. In this case, the answers are inflected by understandings of British imperialism and settler colonialism. The contributors come from archeology, art history, history, social welfare history, literary studies, and American studies, and together they demonstrate the multifaceted nature of child and childhood throughout the British world. Divided into six sections, the first part, on “Children and Adults,” discusses the relationships between these two sets of actors to examine hierarchies of knowledge and power. Shurlee Swain explores the role of Queen Victoria as a symbol of child protection legislation during her reign, while Suzanne Conway uses depictions of Indian ayahs to explore ideas of race, colonialism, and constructions of British childhood. S. E. Duff explores the introduction of the New Zealand mothercraft movement into South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s to show how science was mobilized to improve the health and mortality rates of young white children. The second part, “Rites of Passage,” examines different coming-of-age narratives enabled through and by travel. Ellen Filor’s study of family letters exchanged between Scotland and Madras, complemented by white and mixed-race children sent from India to be raised by relatives in Scotland, illuminates childhoods otherwise ignored by the official archive. Clare L. Halstead also draws upon family connections in her exploration of letters written by British children evacuated to Canada during the Second World War to uncover alternate wartime experiences of British children while also demonstrating the implications of childhood migration. Timothy Nicholson’s chapter on East [End Page 273] African students of the late 1950s and early 1960s explores how their experiences studying abroad transformed their world through transnational networks enabled through education. The third part, on “Indigenous Experiences,” addresses a range of different indigenous experiences, including Aboriginal child resistance in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Australia by Shirleene Robinson. Her chapter explores the limits of childhood agency in a colonial British world with strict racial hierarchies. Satadru Sen discusses the writings of essayist Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay to examine the discourse of conservatism in late nineteenth-century Bengal, which was articulated in terms of child-rearing, education, and health. Mary Clare Martin considers the experiences of indigenous Girl Guides in Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia between 1908 and 1920. In the fourth part, “Literary Childhoods,” Michelle J. Smith discusses environments of colonial danger in Australian and New Zealand children’s literature at the end of the nineteenth century. She argues that children’s literature set in these colonial locations tends to emphasize the threats and dangers posed by nature, with these fears diminishing in the early twentieth century. Hilary Emmett examines the role of the “willful” girl in the sentimental domestic novel of the Anglo world to demonstrate how this model was both endorsed and resisted in the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century in Canadian, Australian, British, and American texts. In part five, “Youth and Sexuality,” Yorick Smaal examines boys and homosexual behaviors in Queensland between 1890 and 1914 to demonstrate the nuanced complexities between danger and possibility for boys in age-structured homosexual relationships. Melissa Bellanta discusses colonial “larrikin” girls who participated in an aggressively masculinist subculture of loosely organized street gangs that rendered them sexually and physically vulnerable, while also enabling these girls and young women to rely on attractively brazen types from popular theatricals as models. In the final part on “Children’s Empire and Material Cultures,” Ruth Colton examines how the experience of childhood in the late Victorian and Edwardian public park was shaped by notions of the British Empire and how it became a site where child “savages” could become civilized. Kate Darian-Smith discusses the memorialization of colonial childhoods as they move from the frontier to the museum in the former white settler colonies of the British world...

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