Childhood and War in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Childhood and War in Eighteenth-Century Britain considers how British and foreign youngsters affected the waging of war, not only as stalwart camp followers, boy soldiers, patriotic civilians and bereaved victims, but also as evocative images of innocence, inability, and dependence. Though victimhood might jump most readily to mind when thinking about how war affected young people, it is only a small part of the picture. The Seven Years War and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars influenced how children played, learned, worked, and perceived the world around them, regardless of whether they were in the heart of the battle or far from the action. Young people resisted adult conceptions of war that marginalized them and considered them useless. Viewed from a juvenile perspective, war was sometimes safer than peace, and better refuge might be found with enemy soldiers than British civilians. Though many histories of eighteenth-century childhood consider the impact of the Enlightenment, they pay little attention to war. Despite recent interest in the degree to which war penetrated civilian life and vice versa, children remain largely invisible. In using wartime accounts of children as a prism, this book addresses neglected aspects of the history of childhood and military history from the 1750s to the 1830s. The same sentiments that set childhood apart as a distinct stage of innocence were used to marginalize youngsters’ war contributions or leveraged by the state to further military goals. The overall thrust of this monograph is that, in an era that purported to have a new appreciation of childhood, more young people were drawn into war.