Children, Childhood and Irish Society: 1500 to the Present ed. by Maria Luddy, James M. Smith (review)

This is an eagerly awaited and valuable addition to the scholarship on children and childhood in Ireland from 1500. Containing twenty-one chapters and five sections (“The Child and History”; “Charity, Welfare and Child Care”; “Shaping Childhood Cultures”; “Literary Imaginings”; “Cultural Representations”) as well as a robust introduction from the editors, this interdisciplinary volume represents the most substantive collection of essays on the topic to date. The collection examines changing attitudes toward children, being informed partly by children’s studies and recent scandals in Ireland which resulted in renewed focus on children as subjects. While seven of the chapters were previously published in the 2009 Eire-Ireland special edition “Children, Childhood and Irish Society,” the additional fourteen make for fascinating reading, and in its entirety it is a significant resource for both students and scholars. Much of the volume is concerned with literary and cultural representations of childhood, as opposed to the history of childhood. However, chapters by Mary O’Dowd, Mary Daly, and Gillian McIntosh add to this burgeoning field. In her examination of early modern Ireland and the child, O’Dowd demonstrates that the institutional framework to care for poor and abandoned children associated with the nineteenth century was in place from the early decades of the eighteenth century. This represents the only chapter dealing with the early modern period. Moving into the modern period, McIntosh highlights the importance of the 1903 Employment of Children Act—and points to a further gulf in the historiography, the history of “street” children and the history of children and work. Similarly, Daly’s examination of the role of parents in their children’s education raises further questions about the attitude of parents and the state to the education of children after the Second World War.

In the second section, Crossman’s stimulating article on children under the Irish poor law is of particular note, as is Eoin O’Sullivan’s chapter on the development of child welfare services in the 1970s. The early years of the NSPCC are dealt with by Maria Luddy, who highlights the importance of the society in raising the issue of cruelty to children in the public mindset, while Robbie Gilligan addresses the experience of the “public” versus the “private” child. In section 3, chapters by Ríona Nic Congáil, Ciaran O’Neill, Claire Lynch, Máirín Nic Eoin, and Barry Sloan delve into the importance of the Irish Fireside Club, the schoolboy novel, childhood reading, Irish language autobiographical writing, and boyhood. In the “Literary Imaginings” section there is a fascinating mix of topics, from Jonathan Swift’s fictional childhoods, to the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde; from the work of Kate O’Brien to that of Patricia Lynch; from ideas about Irish girlhood in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne to Mary Robinson’s notions about the Irish literary childhood.

In the final section, Margot Backus provides a comparison of representations of poor children in the mainstream nationalist press, with Ruth Barton examining cinema and the Irish child. Harry Hendrick ends the volume with a significant chapter on age as a category of analysis in the history of childhood. Drawing on Joan Scott’s seminal thesis on gender, Hendrick explores the problems in researching and writing the history of young people, putting forward the concept that age may hold the key to this dilemma if theorized rigorously and applied with a political and generational consciousness. It is a highlight of the volume and lays down the gauntlet for scholars of Irish childhood in the coming years.

In the introduction, the editors state their aim is “to refocus the debate to include representations of childhood and to engage with children’s experiences” (17). They are particularly conscious of moving away from past institutional histories and memoirs of poverty to examine “other childhoods.” The inclusion of different literary and cultural representations of childhood is certainly...