Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800-1950: (Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present)

Drawing on examples from British world expressions of Christianity, this collection further greater understanding of religion as a critical element of modern children’s and young people’s history. It builds on emerging scholarship that challenges the view that religion had a solely negative impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century children, or that ‘secularization’ is the only lens to apply to childhood and religion. Putting forth the argument that religion was an abiding influence among British world children throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, this volume places ‘religion’ at the center of analysis and discussion. At the same time, it positions the religious factor within a broader social and cultural framework. The essays focus on the historical contexts in which religion was formative for children in various ‘British’ settings denoted as ‘Anglo’ or ‘colonial’ during the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries. These contexts include mission fields, churches, families, Sunday schools, camps, schools and youth movements. Together they are treated as ‘sites’ in which religion contributed to identity formation, albeit in different ways relating to such factors as gender, race, disability and denomination. The contributors develop this subject for childhoods that were experienced largely, but not exclusively, outside the ‘metropole’, in a diversity of geographical settings. By extending the geographic range, even within the British world, it provides a more rounded perspective on children’s global engagement with religion.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Contours and Issues in Children’s Religious History Hugh Morrison and Mary Clare Martin Part One: Missions, Families and Childhood 1. Making missions through (re)making children: Non-kin domestic intimacy in the London Missionary Society’s work in late-nineteenth-century north India Rhonda Semple 2. Making missionary children: Religion, culture and juvenile deviance Emily Manktelow 3. Play, missionaries and the cross-cultural encounter in global perspective, 1800-1870 Mary Clare Martin Part Two: Educational approaches and opportunities 4. Sunday school prizes and books in early-nineteenth-century America David Greenspoon 5. Methodist childhoods: The education and formation of the young Methodist in Australia and Fiji, 1900-1950 Christine Weir 6. Leadership (with Fun and Games) instead of Domestic Service: Changing African Girlhood in a Johannesburg Mission, 1907-1940 Deborah Gaitskell Part Three: Literature and Discourses 7. ‘Children of Silence’: Disability, childhood and Christian suffering in nineteenth-century Britain Esme Cleall 8. ‘Nearly all are supported by children’: Charitable Childhoods in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Literature for Children in the British World Margot Hillel 9. Making Kiwi Christians: Children and religion in the House of Reed Geoffrey Troughton Part Four: Religious Communities and Citizenship 10. Signs and graces: Children’s experiences of confirmation in New Zealand, 1920s-1950s Grace Bateman 11. A ‘Religion of the Backwoods’: Religion and the Canadian Boy Scout Movement in the interwar period James Trepanier 12. Service, sacrifice and responsibility: Religion and Protestant settler childhood in New Zealand and Canada, c. 1860-1940 Hugh Morrison Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Hugh Morrison is Senior Lecturer in the College of Education at the University of Otago, NZ, and Mary Clare Martin is Head of the Centre for Play and Recreation in the School of Education at the University of Greenwich, UK.

Review :
"If you believe that childhood represents a formative period of psychological development and a lens through which new experiences and knowledge—religious or otherwise—are filtered, you will want to incorporate essays such as the ones provided in Creating Religious Childhoods into your work." - Joy Schulz, Metropolitan Community College "Overall, this is a very rich and fascinating volume. Because it deals with majority Christian subjects and themes alone there is clearly great scope for follow-up research into other childhoods in other religious contexts, spatially and temporally." - Stephen Parker, University of Worcester