Seminar Series
Child in the World Seminar Series
The Child in the World project hosts a series of public seminars connected to the project’s wide research themes. These are held at the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green and the audience is made up of students, researchers and members of the public.
Please contact a member of the project team if you would like to receive email updates. The project team would also be pleased to receive suggestions for future speakers.
‘Researching Children’s Everyday Lives’
12 March 2012 17.30–19.00
This event offers complementary perspectives on children’s everyday lives. Dr Olivia Stevenson (University of Glasgow) will discuss her work on children, families, technology and domestic space within the recent project ‘Young Children Learning with Toys and Technology at Home’ at the University of Stirling. Mary Guyatt (Studentship One) turns to the family lives of middle-class children between 1870-1914 and the sources available from the period.
Bookings open 14 days in advance on 020 8983 5205. There is no charge to attend the seminar.
‘The Child Reader and the Birth of Children’s Literature, 1700-1840’
Dr Matthew Grenby, Newcastle University
14 May 2012 17.30–19.00
Children's literature, it is often said, was an invention of the eighteenth century. But who owned and read these new books, where did they get them, and what sort - and how many - of them were they likely to own? Moreover, how did these young people actually use this new-fangled product, and what did they think of it? Since children leave so few reliable records of their lives these are all difficult questions to answer. But by combining many unused and unusual kinds of evidence - inscriptions, marginalia, journals, letters, portraits, and the contents of the books themselves - it has been possible to discover much about this first generation of readers of children's literature, and, from this, to say with much more certainty how children's literature began.
Past Seminars
‘India, Canada and the British Family: Empire, Class, and Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century’
23 May 2011
Dr Elizabeth Buettner (University of York), author of ‘Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India’, spoke about the late-Victorian letters and keepsakes exchanged between parents and children living separately in different parts of the British Empire. There was also an opportunity to examine some children’s items connected with the British in India.