Songs of innocence

the long version

As recently as one hundred years ago British children existed in ways now unthinkable; boys as young as eight worked gruelling hours in unlit factories; girls were sold into sexual slavery with dolls still in their grasp; and boys at schools like Rugby and Harrow were brutally trained for their future at the helm of Britain's vast red empire. In 'Songs of Innocence' Fran Abrams charts the transformation of childhood in the UK from early Victorian disagreements about child-rearing to the Scouts' very direct involvement in the First World War, through the 'children's rights' movements of the 1970s and into the twenty-first century.