An invaluable introduction to the history of European childhood in both Western and Eastern Europe c.1700-2000.

Colin Heywood is Professor Emeritus of Modern French History at the University of Nottingham and is currently the honorary president of the Children's History Society. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has served on the Committee of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. His previous books include Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health and Education Among the 'Classes Populaires' (Cambridge, 1988), and Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic (Cambridge, 2007).

Introduction; Part I. Childhood in the Villages, Eighteenth-Nineteenth Centuries: 1. Conceptions of childhood in rural society; 2. Growing up in the villages; 3. Work, education and religion for children in the countryside; Part II. Childhood in the Towns, c.1700-c.1870: 4. Enlightenment and Romanticism; 5. Middle- and upper-class childhoods in the towns, c.1700-1870; 6. The 'lower depths': working-class children in the early industrial town; 7. Work versus school during the Industrial Revolution; Part III. Childhood in an Industrial and Urban Society, c.1870-c.2000: 8. The scientific approach to childhood; 9. Growing up during the twentieth century (1): in the family and on the margins of society; 10. Growing up during the twentieth century (2): light and shade in an affluent society; 11. Work and school in an urban-industrial society; Conclusion.