Colin Heywood is Professor Emeritus of Modern French History at the University of Nottingham and is currently the honorary president of the Children's History Society. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has served on the Committee of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. His previous books include Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health and Education Among the 'Classes Populaires' (Cambridge, 1988), and Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic (Cambridge, 2007).

• Introduction; Part I. Childhood in the Villages, Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries: 1. Conceptions of childhood in rural society; 2. Growing up in the villages; 3. Work, education and religion for children in the countryside; Part II. Childhood in the Towns, c.1700–c.1870: 4. Enlightenment and Romanticism; 5. Middle- and upper-class childhoods in the towns, c.1700–1870; 6. The 'lower depths': working-class children in the early industrial town; 7. Work versus school during the Industrial Revolution; Part III. Childhood in an Industrial and Urban Society, c.1870–c.2000: 8. The scientific approach to childhood; 9. Growing up during the twentieth century (1): in the family and on the margins of society; 10. Growing up during the twentieth century (2): light and shade in an affluent society; 11. Work and school in an urban-industrial society; Conclusion.

'Historians have started to wrench childhood from the historical shadows and explore its social, cultural and economic aspects. The result is a burgeoning and diverse literature. Colin Heywood, one of the early contributors, has pulled this literature together, ranging over modern Europe and employing ideas and arguments from sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics and social policy. The result is a masterly survey, a necessary addition to the libraries of teachers and students alike. But Heywood goes beyond a historiographical review to challenge a complacent or Panglossian view of the history of childhood. The book hammers home what we (especially children) have gained but also suggests what we (and especially children again) might have lost: an important read.' Jane Humphries, University of Oxford