Making Socialists: Writers, Childhood and an Alternative Socialist Education, 1880-1911

This thesis argues that children and childhood were central to the project of 'making socialists' in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While scholars have examined how socialism was cultivated through adult education, leisure, fellowship and political culture, the role of childhood within this history has received comparatively little attention. By placing childhood at the centre of analysis, this thesis demonstrates that many socialists regarded the upbringing and education of children not as a peripheral concern but as a precondition for social transformation. It argues that children's literature, fantasy and fairy tale formed an important part of this project, enabling socialist writers to explore alternative social relations and cultivate future generations of socialists. At the same time, it examines the tensions this produced: between parental authority and collective responsibility, environment and heredity, children's agency and adult instrumentalisation, and utopian aspiration and social reality.