Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family From the 1820s to the 1920s

In this companion volume to Useful Toil, John Burnett has drawn extensively on over eight hundred previously unpublished manuscripts. The result is a unique record of childhood that reveals in intimate detail the trials and hard-won triumphs of nineteenth-century working-class life. Besides affording rare insights into the developing child’s world of dreams, hopes and fears, they reflect a crucial period in the evolution of a family tradition; a time when, to counteract the brutalizing pressures of urbanization and industrialization, ordinary people turned to each other for support.
Children have seldom had a voice in history: these writers and their experiences take their place as part of the essential fabric of our past.