Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 1890-1940 (review)

A recent addition to a new series of "Historical Urban Studies" that now numbers over twenty volumes, Pomfret's book amply fulfills the assertion by the series's editors, Richard Rodger and Jean-Luc Pinol, that the works they are showcasing are informed by "analytical frameworks... in a comparative context" (p. viii). Pomfret focuses on two towns, both with industrial bases in the areas of textile production, coal mining, and metalworking, each of which was of medium size in relation to other urban settlements in its respective country—Nottingham having, in 1901, a population of 259,902, while its French counterpart numbered 139,129 inhabitants. He examines conditions and developments within each of them—and also, albeit less systematically, within the countries in which they were located—that pertained to the experiences and roles of city dwellers who had not yet reached adulthood. Continually crisscrossing the English Channel in each chapter, Pomfret takes up a sequence of topics, each of which he treats with regard to most if not all of the half century he has marked out for consideration. In so doing, he depicts a pair of cities both as partly similar and partly contrasting localities and also as sites in which larger developments that transcended both of them can be illustrated.

Arguing that a decline during the period in the percentages of city dwellers who were younger than twenty led to growing rather than diminished concern about the future of young people, Pomfret dwells primarily on efforts by grownups—among them, teachers, clergymen, medical professionals, labor leaders, local authorities, and politicians—to protect, educate, guide, and mobilize them. In the thinking of these individuals, youngsters needed to be rescued from urban threats both to their bodies and to their morals, so that they could be enlisted in larger tasks of urban and national reform and regeneration.

Two of the book's early chapters focus on work. Pomfret offers contrasting accounts of attempts both by members of the middle classes and by labor leaders to prohibit or regulate certain kinds and times of paid labor, with a view to encouraging children to spend daytime hours at school and nighttime hours at home. More successful in Nottingham than in Saint-Etienne, where labor leaders placed a higher priority on enabling workers' families to maximize their incomes, these efforts led in both cities to the overall realization of "a non-working childhood" (p. 51). It thus seemed increasingly sensible for reformers to focus on older segments of the non-adult population, whose members had finished their schooling and taken up work that was still legitimate. The book's longest chapter, on "employment and unemployment" offers (too much) detailed information on labor markets for teenagers and, to better effect, analysis of various ways in which representatives of the state and trade unionists—and to a lesser extent employers—sought to enhance young workers' abilities to work effectively. Doing so, Pomfret points out, entailed among other measures the introduction of better opportunities for on-the-job training in the form of apprenticeships, which further tended to exclude the young from full participation in the world of work and thus to extend their dependence on adults.

In subsequent chapters, Pomfret takes up attempts to ameliorate conditions that impinged upon the young outside workplaces, in public spaces, and parallel efforts to mold and mobilize them symbolically and politically. He has a great deal of interest to say about efforts to promote healthy leisure-time activities in "spaces of regeneration." Arising for the most part out of voluntary impulses, which received much of their impetus in both cities (particularly in Saint-Etienne) from churchmen, such endeavors were motivated by desires not only "to instill religious observance, self-discipline, and moral purity" (p. 113) but also to combat physical evidence of "degeneration." They resulted in support for organizations such as the Boy...