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

In this companion volume to "Useful Toil", John Burnett has drawn extensively on over 800 previously unpublished manuscripts. The result is a record of childhood that reveals in intimate detail the trials and hard-won triumphs of 19-century working-class life. Besides offering 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: individual to the last, these writers and their experiences take their place as part of the essential fabric of our past. Burnett has also plublished "Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England From 1815 to the Present" (Routledge); "A History of the Cost of Living (1969); "The Challenge of the Nineteenth Century" (1970); "Useful Toil" (1974); "Destiny Obscure" (1982); and "Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790-1990" (Routledge).