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

A pioneering study of children's social care in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, A Home From Home? presents new information and develops conceptual thinking about the history of children's care by investigating the centrality of key ideas about home, family, and nurture that shaped welfare provision. Departing from narratives of reform and discipline which 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 new type of study of social care by offering a 'bottom-up' study of children's welfare, and studying the significance of specific types of care practices that held particular cultural and ideological meaning. At its core, the book uses unique first-hand accounts, individual case records, and personal correspondence of children in care in Britain to locate the voices and subjectivities of institutionalised 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.

Claudia Soares, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow/NUAcT Fellow, Newcastle University

Claudia Soares is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and NUAcT Fellow at Newcastle University. Her current research combines 'new' imperial history and history of emotions approaches to examine the development of transnational welfare policy and recover the experiences of individuals who spent time in state and voluntary institutions across Britain, Australia, and Canada between 1820-1930. She has published her work in The History of the Family, History Workshop Journal, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Cultural and Social History. Her research interests include welfare and poverty, the history of the family, the history of emotions, race, empire and migration, and histories of landscape and environment.