 Hi, can you hear me? Good. Thank you very much indeed for the invitation to come here and speak. It's a great privilege, I'm very pleased. And thank you very much to you as well for all not choosing to start your Easter weekend early. Or maybe this is how you're going to spend your entire Easter weekend, in which case you have started it early. This is a talk about children and antiquarianism and heritage. I'm going to be exploring the connections between those two things. I should say at the start as well a little apology, I suppose, because what I'm going to be ending with is a hypothesis, not a complete conclusion, but a hypothetical idea which I want to present to you and see whether you're in any way persuaded. I'll be equally happy if it turns out you're not persuaded because then I can go away and think some more about the question. Hopefully along the way I'm going to be presenting some material which is not quite so hypothetical, which you will find interesting, about the connections between children and young people and antiquarianism, 20th century, 19th century, and particularly in the 18th century. But I know that many people in this room as well will have things to say about that, which I'd be very keen to hear about. Things about the way that children and young people engaged with the material past. Many of you will have lots of expertise in this area and I'd be very keen to hear about it because as I say, this is still work in progress. So, where did it come from? It came from a project which took place a couple of years ago. The money came from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2013, and it was a collaboration between my institution, Newcastle University, and a number of other reorganisations including what was then English heritage. And what we did, we had a brief which was to try and work out ways in which digital technology, iPads, iPhones, all sorts of things like that could be used to engage children and young people with heritage sites in ways that they weren't already being engaged. And we worked with Belce Hall, which is that building up there, which is in rural Northumberland. We got together, we had lots of meetings between the various what I'm obliged to call stakeholders, that is to say the people who own the property, the academics and actual children, trying to work out the ways in which we could try and persuade children to become very interested and active within this space. There were lots of problems. The whole point is that the English heritage and parents didn't want their kids just to turn up at this building and then look only at their iPad and not engage with the place. So our big challenge was to try and work out the way that we could use an iPhone and iPad to try and get people to engage with the place, to see through the place through different eyes. I'm not going to tell you about this, but this is just... We came up with an app in the end, which is called the Wildman app. And we got the idea from the Wildman who was the emblem of the Middleton family who used to own Belsae Hall. So I'm not going to tell you too much about this. The app is still available in the app store should you want to download it. And you can use it away from Belsae Castle as well. But the point is that this got me thinking. Doing this work about how to engage children and young people with heritage sites got me thinking about the history of this. About children and young people, the way that they've engaged with heritage or antiquarianism in the past. And I don't think that has been written at all. If you look at the major books on the history of antiquarianism, you can look at the index and you won't find children mentioned. Antiquarianism, as we'll talk about in a second, is largely defined in opposition to childhood. That's very different from how it is today. If you look at any heritage provider today, like the National Trust or like English Heritage or any of these bodies, you'll find that children are absolutely central to their thinking. Go to the front page of the National Trust website and you'll find 50 things to do before you're 11 and 3 quarters. You can do them after you're 11 and 3 quarters as well if you're nimble enough to climb trees and build bifwax and so on. But the point is that they are targeting their whole campaigns at young people. Their understanding is that only by engaging young people can you kind of guarantee the future of this heritage in the country. And it's built into the national curriculum now as well. The national curriculum was redesigned a couple of years ago. It's history offering was redesigned specifically to take into account local heritage and to try and engage young people with their historic built environment and their natural environment as well. And another way of looking at this kind of close interconnection now is just to look at the statistics. There we have some. In 2013 72% of children had visited a heritage site in the last year. And when you ask people why they turn up at heritage sites, they almost always say for the children for the educational benefit of the children as it says there. So this is a very, very close connection now. That's my question though. When did it begin? And the answer I find is very difficult to ascertain. What I've been doing so far is ransucking different kinds of archives different kinds of material. It's not complete but this is what I've come up with. This is my kind of progress report so far about the ways in which children did with antiquarianism in the past. Now it's certainly true that they were there before we get to the 20th century. Here is quite a celebrated letter from the Times. From 1881 I say celebrated because it appears in the book The Men from the Ministry and it says, Sir, permit me to draw attention to those of you who are interested in the preservation of ancient monuments to the present state of things at Furnace Abbey. And it goes on. The place was filled with a rough and noisy crowd of Virginists. And this is the bit I'll emphasise there. And a large numbers of children apparently under no control. This is the best kind of evidence we have actually. These places, Furnace Abbey, of course they didn't keep records. We can't tell who visited the site because they didn't have visitors' books and if they did they didn't tell people's ages. But we have this kind of complaints not just letters from the Times but other kinds of complaints as well which speak about children climbing so we know children were there using these places recreationally at least in the early 20th century and in the late 19th century. Whether they were being engaged through school is a much more difficult matter to ascertain. I mean remember that the major schools didn't have history on the curriculum at this time and the major public schools didn't have history on the curriculum at this period. It was only really starting to come onto the curricula in the late 19th, early 20th century. There were museums of antiquities at antiquities at places like Charter House and Harrow and Eton but their history hasn't yet been written either and we certainly don't know the history of the school trip. I've been trying to find out, I spent the last year and a half trying to find out the history of the school trip. Very difficult. There were some, definitely we know that there were some, they were often to scientific places of scientific interest or economic interest but when did this start? This is something I haven't been able to resolve really. We have an image there of what or may or may not have been one. There's no identifying details there but the school trip, did children engage with heritage through school? Probably not at the private schools unless it was through those museums of antiquities but we do know that there I've been able to find out some changes to regulations at places like the Tower of London. Tower of London, there are records for the Tower of London a few of them survive and we do know something about that. So here there are some regulations about elementary school regulations in the late 19th century which talked about permitting visits to during school hours to places of educational value. We know that the Board of Education waived admission fees after the First World War waived admissions fees to historic sites. And we know from these records of the Tower of London that that same period there were a number of children visiting through, probably through schools on visits every week and this got so bad by the interwar period that people started to complain about it. And there are plenty of complaints I've been able to unearth from that period about the fact that these huge numbers of schools, these huge school parties are making the visits of everybody else completely impossible. And so they came up in 1934 this plan to limit parties to 100 children from any one school so long as they were accompanied by a sufficient number of teachers. So we know that things are changing there and we know just going backwards you see what I'm doing here, I'm starting in the present and I'm going back through the 20th into the 19th century. We know also that there were places like the British Museum were available as well to show antiquities to children and children could be encouraged to visit places like this. Here is a book, Mrs Marcett was a famous educationalist. Conversations on the history of England in 1842 she's telling her children, these fictional children in the book but obviously this is a guide to parents and teachers about how they may educate their own children. She's saying, well if you want to know about Greece and Rome you won't be able to see these places because you'd have to travel too far but I will show you some prints of them this evening and someday I will take you to the British Museum a place where all sorts of ancient curiosities are kept and there you will see many Greek and Roman statues and indeed in that image at the bottom which is undated we do see a couple of children in the British Museum. Now that got me thinking about the British Museum and what we do have from the British Museum is their regulations as they change over time and this I think is tremendously interesting or at least indicative of changing attitudes to the relationship between children and antiquity. Working backwards 1871 no children in arms are to be admitted but if we go back to 1828 no children apparently under 10 years of age will be admitted back to 1803 and throughout the 18th century all of the regulations you can see there ban children entirely so just there in the regulations of that one institution we have a nice sense of how things are changing across the 19th century Now as I'm going to show that prohibition on no children being allowed into the British Museum that was quite often broken but nevertheless in terms of the official rule on whether children were allowed to be engaging with the British Museum in the 18th century the answer is no so that brings me to what I want to spend the most of today talking about which is what happened in this period the great age of antiquarianism the century of the founding of this society the time when antiquarianism took hold among British people really and when institutions started to appear like the British Museum in this founding period of antiquarianism how engaged were young people now the obvious answer is not at all I don't have to remind you I'm afraid about the classic caricature of the antiquarian in the 18th century they are as Rosemary Sweet has pointed out they are almost entirely figured as patrician, Tory Anglican and she doesn't mention this but I add this on because she is an adult not to say old look at any of those caricatures and their clear features their maleness and their oldness in fact to be blunt they are often juxtaposed with death aren't they for comic effect but the point being that the joke here being they are investigating a corpse but some of them are almost corpse like themselves the whole point I'm making I suppose someone puts it in this novel Francis Book puts it in a novel a young antiquarian a young antiquarian is every way a solicism an error something incorrect and inappropriate we have this notion in the 18th century obviously not saying this is in any way true in fact I'm going to investigate whether this is true or not but we have this notion, this popular conception that you cannot be a young antiquarian that antiquarianism is founded on the basis of age, experience and wisdom so that's what I want to explore is that true one way of looking at that is to say yes it is I've already talked about the British Museum that's Montague House where the British Museum was at the top right there and we've seen its regulations prohibiting children from entry I looked at the new attractions as they might be called in southern Italy Pompeii and the Herculaneum there are quite good records of who was allowed in there as well it doesn't specifically prohibit children but it does give the impression that because you had to write off in advance for a visa to see these places because your tour had to be conducted because you had to show your scholarly credentials that it was not going to be easy for children to access those spaces either then at the bottom left there do you recognise that? That is Strawberry Hill or it's Walpole's home which he opened to the public there are admissions tickets which survive there are a long list of regulations and at the bottom it says note persons are desired not to bring children with them this is all of a piece children seem to be excluded the only exception I've found in fact is the the museum how do you say this Trindium Tradescantium Tradescantium what later became the Ashmolean Museum and there there is one piece of evidence that children perhaps used it when it was housed in London in Lambeth which is a headmaster from Rotherham in fact in 1660 he was opining that it's not fair for a good education you have to go to London it's the best place for the improvement of children with a variety of objects which daily present themselves may easily be seen once a year by walking to Mr John Tradescant where rarities are kept nowhere else have I found any suggestion that these museums institutionally allow children to enter them but that is not to say that they didn't and this is what I want to challenge the notion that children were not actively engaged with heritage one way to challenge that assumption is to look at the antiquarians themselves the number of antiquarians in the 18th century is astonishing or people who self-defined as antiquarian I did a very simple search which I don't have the figures to have I didn't write them down but it is extraordinary if you go to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography you can search by anybody who is alive in that period the 18th century and you can search by their occupation and if you put in antiquarian and anybody who is alive in the 18th century you get about 5% of the whole population of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography self-designating themselves as antiquarian now that's a problematic figure in lots of ways isn't it because perhaps that just shows the preferences of the people who put together the ODMB but nevertheless it's a surprisingly there are a huge number of antiquarians at this point I'm making and they all many of them write their memoirs and in their memoirs they remember the time when they were children of course and remembering the time that they were children they remember their youthful engagement with antiquarian endeavours now memoirs are problematic we have to take them with a pinch of salt who knows what kind of acts of self-definition and self-fashioning are going on here it's very difficult to be absolutely clear about these I won't read this out but in books like Richard Warner's Literary Recollections you almost always find a passage where they talk about the fact that when they were 12, when they were 14 they went out, they poked around in this case a barrow he becomes fascinated by the olden time sepulchrw brasis, shattered urns, antique brick bats Celtic, Belgic, Roman Saxon, Danish Norman Pocherts and so on this is just entirely characteristic and if we put all of these together we get a sense that yes you'd walk out into the countryside you'd find a lot of young people digging around Orbury is there a more famous antiquarian? he talks about himself having a strong and early impulse to antiquity he drew the stone circle when he was 8 he talks later actually when he's devising the best strategy for educating a young man he talks about when a young man heirs himself either horse riding or walking let him be informed of botanics and husbandry but also antiquities and therefore an old antiquarish or botanist should travel with the young man to inform him so he's clear that you do need to be caught young and as he was himself I'm just going to press through a sort of three or four of these just to give you the general idea Joseph Hunter is interesting because he came from a very different background his father was a cutler in Sheffield but he became an antiquarian later on in his life but he was fascinated by antiquity in his own life in his own youth and here we actually have some evidence that he's not just making it up later on because he kept a reading journal of what he borrowed from the circulating library in the 1790s when he was a young man and it's full of antiquarian books which he borrowed copied pieces out of and then sent back to the library the Nicholls as well the Nicholls are a great family of antiquarians they started young the most obvious example the person who's best record is John Goff Nicholls, third generation who we know was here would it have been this room in Somerset House when he was 12 became a member attended the society's meetings presumably got doffed on the head with a mace he was a school paleographer by the time he left school he was contributing to antiquarian material to the gentleman's magazine at the age of 13 his sister is very interesting as well because she keeps a diary and she talks about how she and all of her younger siblings are being traipsed all over London all over the country to see an old house next door by their father, by their mother, by other people clearly these people were not being excluded from their family's antiquarian endeavours Thomas Chatterton is another famous example of someone who caught this bug young because he was such a celebrity his life was chronicled in some detail and we know that he was bewitched as it says here by the medieval cultivating a taste of an old English vernacular poetry drawn from a range of popular literary antiquarian works was perpetually rummaging and ransacking every corner of the house for more parchment when he was a boy that's Chatterton the same could be saved as Scott Scott is, I'll just read out that bottom paragraph show me an old castle of a field of battle and I was at home at once filled with its competence and their proper costume and overwhelmed by my hearers with the enthusiasm of my description these are unusual figures I'm not saying that they are typical of every young person but it does show that you were not excluded from antiquarian activities just because you were young they are unusual but not as unusual as Charles Lamb this is not the writer Charles Lamb this is the Charles Lamb who kept a herd of guinea pigs he kept a series of guinea pigs and he gave them medieval names and he got his father's carpenter to build a huge city for these guinea pigs to run around in and he gave them all kinds of chivalric names and chivalric pastes and pedigrees and chivalric adventures to perform I only put him there because he's so much fun but also because I suppose he shows this kind of antiquarian interest is entering into children's play as well or at least it is with Charles Lamb that you can see the son of a Sus experiment those are unusual examples I'm not saying that they are typical but there is evidence that they weren't completely bizarre that you would walk out in the 18th century to a site of antiquarian interest to a ruined castle, a ruined abbey wherever it may have been or one of the buildings in London and that you would meet young people there I'm going to look at this set of evidence in two stages first it's by looking at the Grand Tour in fact we can't miss out the Grand Tour I don't want to dwell too long on this because I want my focus to be on British antiquarianism but nevertheless young people on the Grand Tour is an interesting subject which needs more exploration you know of course about the Grand Tour don't you this finishing school for young men as it's generally thought of centre-broad to complete their education perhaps before they go off to university and there is a kind of satire of it you see that the Grand Tour is there at the bottom left being surrounded by all of these people who are trying to delude him and in some ways take advantage of him this huge train as he arrives in Rome but again the sense here if you read the prescriptive literature if you read the guidance the sense that you get here is that it's not appropriate for children to go until we are 5 and 20 little or no benefit results to the far greater part of those who make what is called the Grand Tour you know we think of it as kind of young men perhaps aged about 18 to 24 not children and young people but even they are being criticised for being too young to appreciate it but what was the reality and this is a question I don't think has been asked well I think that lots of people were engaged with the Grand Tour lots of young people much younger than we might think were engaged with the Grand Tour there are two ways of looking at this one is to take the approach of some critics some scholars who are now looking at the Grand Tour and to say well just because there was one young man who is let's say 20 going off on the tour of the continent doesn't mean that younger people still back at home weren't also engaging with the Grand Tour the point being that there was a these families who were paying for an older son to go on the tour were actually thinking in terms of the family strategy that young man would send letters home which the siblings at home would read would benefit from, would discuss would be part of their education in other words what a lot of people are now saying is that in fact it wasn't just the young man it was a larger section of population including children a wider penumbra is the phrase that one uses other sets of scholars who are looking at the Grand Tour also talk about the way that we shouldn't now think exclusively of the tourists themselves as the only protagonists in the Grand Tour instead we have to think about all of the people who were kind of helping to make the Grand Tour happen and that would have included the hosts in Italy in France in Switzerland wherever they were going many of whom were children and in fact we have a number of accounts of the tourists themselves running into children wherever they went as you see in that picture of the road to Rome there at the bottom right but that's one way to look at it and I could explore that but another way to look at it is actually to think that a number of children were on the tour and this seems to be undeniably the case it's undocumented you can look at all of the books on the Grand Tour and you won't see children mentioned but they were undeniably there we see them when we start to look for them just in a image like that lots of images in fact and when you start to investigate the people who are actually in these celebrated paintings you find out that some of them were really quite young they could be 60 there's one who's 11 there's another evidently very young person what about this one a portrait of Louisa Grenville aged 6 she was on the Grand Tour families went on the Grand Tour as a whole they didn't just go when they were 20, 21 year old men they went as families and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that this was the case and that the children weren't left at home they weren't left in the home when they travelled either they were taken around the sites we know this from one extraordinary case John Blathwaite of Dearham Park when he was 15 he visited Rome with a tutor and his tutor had to report back to the father still at home that he'd lost his son in the catacombs in Rome and he'd had to go back in and burn his shirt in order to act as a torch in order to try and find the boy so he could bring him out again John Blathwaite refused to go back into the catacombs you'll be unsurprised to hear and the tutor was very apologetic in his letter but it gives us an evidence that the tour was not just for older men another very interesting piece of evidence is the other way someone from the continent coming to Britain this was Mozart's sister his older sister so Mozart as you know is touring the continent with his father but also his sister and she gives Mozart himself when he was in Britain was too young to write a report but his sister does write a report of presumably in defiance of the prohibition being taken to the British Museum also to Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall seeing antiquities of all sorts including one or two antiquities available in the British Museum you can still go there and see that model of the Holy Sepulchre which is presumably what she means there as a grave of Jerusalem so we know about her and that leads me nicely to move from the Grand Tour on to tourism at home as well this has to be more of my focus because I'm most interested in antiquarianism in Britain and it is very clear here that again children were being taken around the country as a number of educationalists a number of antiquarians suggest should be the case foreigners greatly blame the English for sending their children to travel abroad before they know anything of their own country sending their children to travel abroad I notice before they know anything of their own country but they were also increasingly being shown around their own country now we get a sense of this from the imagery just as with the Grand Tour we can find plenty of engravings such as this one from the 18th century from the early 19th century which showed children and young people now you may argue that they're there not as documentaries this should not be taken as documentary evidence rather perhaps they're there to give a sense of scale or something like that but nevertheless it is an interesting kind of evidence which we might want to explore further and we can compare it with journals and diaries which are very clear that young people were being taken by their parents on Grand Tours of England Lady Grantham of 1798 engaged a tutor for her sons to take them on a tour of Yorkshire to join them Castle Howard, Revo Abbey the boys then returned to Harrow in September George III or in 1805 Dr John Fisher, Bishop of Exeter tutor to Princess Charlotte in British history paid a visit to the Tower of London with his pupil and her governess so there are plenty of people being taken on these tours and in fact talk of the Tower of London leads me naturally on to some of the more celebrated accounts of tourism in the capital Tower of London, not only does it have probably the best records of any heritage sites the best archive of any heritage site in Britain but it also was a magna for people for visitors going we talked already about the number of people turning up in the early 20th century but here in the 17th and 18th century it was certainly already part of a tourist itinerary and an itinerary which children went on every time peeps in his diary every time peeps gets visitors who are children where does he take them? to the Tower and to Westminster Abbey you know this famous quotation here on his birthday he goes into Westminster Abbey he gets shown around the tombs and he delights in kissing the wife of Henry V do you know this? her body was her tomb was destroyed at one point and her body was therefore moved out and put in a rather flimsy coffin in a different part of the abbey and for a small sum you could like peeps go and have a look at her kind of desicated remains I don't think kissing her was entirely encouraged but peeps decided to do it that itinerary though that Tower and Westminster Abbey became increasingly well it is completely standard completely conventional and these places must have been heaving with children just judging by the number of accounts we have the tower in particular they weren't necessarily going to see the historic buildings of course because what also was there was the famous menagerie and they all mentioned going to see the lions and you can see how much that cost these were a tourist attraction they had their own rules they had their own entrance they had their own entry prices and children routinely go and have a look at them and you'll see there in that image which is from a children's book of the early 19th century children looking at the lions in their cages the other place was Westminster Abbey as I've said and the tombs there at the end we have an equal number almost equal number of people paying to go paying a small fee to a custodian to go and see the monuments of the east end of the abbey so just a few examples I'll rush through these but you can look at Swift children come and see him what does Swift do he takes them to the tower he takes them to Bedlam where there was a cabinet of curiosities and in his case to a puppet show in the tatla Isaac Bickerstaff takes three lads and a hackney coach to show on the lions the tombs, Bedlam other places which are entertainments this is my favourite the president mentioned that I'm editing the letters of William Godwin from the early 19th century Godwin is quite a serious minded man but we have his diary his diary goes into his life in immense detail there's a few pages from it and you will see that he as a young family including the future Mary Shelley as was mentioned but four other siblings as well and what does he do with them and his wife he takes them to Westminster Abbey there he takes them to the tower that says that bottom entry says tower with Mary Jane his second wife TT is Thomas Turner CC is Charles Clarem on his stepson and 5 no hand s is that I'm not sure beasts and armory he sees so everybody is going to these attractions with their children as a fairly routine undertaking and of course the tower still remains this extraordinarily popular attraction the line of kings which was the chief non-animal attraction at the tower of London this kind of armory this display of armory presented as a kind of range of kings through the ages that was there, that was a hugely popular attraction and it remains so today I see from the tower of London website in fact Historic World Palace's website that it's now builds as the world's longest running visitor attraction surely open to question but nevertheless it has been redesigned for 2013 so what we have what I've tried to suggest from all of these different kinds of evidence we can put into juxtaposition with each other none of them are convincing on their own right but I think what we do get from putting them all together is a sense that children were engaging with antiquarianism on a number of different bases they could be the children of celebrated antiquaries they could be interested themselves in antiquarianism either through their family or individually they could be taken to these places as trees they could be tourists either abroad or in Britain or when they come up to London from the provinces but all of those kind of instances that I've mentioned in the 18th century I think are informal individual they're not institutional as we've said the institutions prohibited them from attending and they're not educational it's not something that's done through schools it's not something which is understood to be an essential part of a child's education we know that that has changed by the time we get to today by the time we get to the early 20th century even we have heritage as distinct from antiquarianism which is very much directed at children as I was saying right at the beginning the question I need to answer and the hypothesis that I've come up with is addressing this question how do we get from that kind of individual informal engagement in the 18th century to something which is much more structured much more understood to be essential today so let me just for the last part of what I want to say address that now for me the key is children's books this has been the surprising discovery that I feel I've made it's something that hasn't really been noticed before but it's about the extent to which antiquarianism dominated children's print culture I work on children's literature a lot so I can take this for granted but I don't know how much you know about the invention of children's literature there are questions about it and its history has kind of been yet to be written but nevertheless people would look at children's literature as an invention of the mid 18th century from about the 1740s there's a sudden boom in the production of children's books this is slightly earlier this is 1727 slightly before that boom starts but it's a kind of harbinger I suppose of what is going to happen later on this is spiritual songs for children and here I just start with this one because even here we have a children's poem which is talking about the kind of attractions that we've already met the Tower of London to view the armour Westminster Abbey, Gresham College and if you notice what it's saying there it's using these attractions to make a moral point you can go and see the breathless shapes of princes and all the armour there but you should remember that they cannot move the breadth of one poor hand at Westminster Abbey there are the bones of great people but you trample on them they feel no pain in other words all of these things are all of these things are not as significant as the spiritual they're purely kind of material remains you should go and see them but perhaps they should only adduce to your moral education so that's 1720s but about the same time in fact in the very same year I noticed that this happens there's a book which is published for young people we wouldn't call it children's literature because it's too factual it's not a story, it's not poetry it's actually a kind of guidebook to how you should live your life you can see there in the young man's companion it has easy rules for measuring the board and timber it has directions for measuring gouging and plotting land it has a map of the globe it has various observations on gardening so this is supposed to be a useful book for young men to have in order to get through life it's been published since 1681 but in 1727 something interesting is introduced into it and that is a section on the curiosities of London and Westminster this is an account here of old buildings, the Temple Church the Charing Cross the Royal Exchange Gresham's College and of course Westminster Abbey as well that's introduced in 1727 and I think that's taken with spiritual songs which we just looked at this is the beginning of a new trend which becomes very very marked in the 1740s from the 1740s which is as I said the crucial decade for the invention as it were of children's literature this is one of the books which defines that invention or one of a series of books which defines that invention I don't know much about him but he produced these books and they're often seen as the first of the new children's literature books which are designed to be instructional but also very appealing to children one way that they're supposed to be appealing to children as you can see is their size they're called gigantic histories is their name but actually they're tiny these are real people's thumbs and fingers here that gives you a sense of the size they are just a couple of inches high it's supposed to be a joke because they're called gigantic histories but in fact they're so tiny but what hasn't really been noticed or commented upon is the fact that they are almost the whole series is a guide book choreographical tour books as I'm calling them the history and description of St Paul's Cathedral curiosities of the Tower of London Westminster Abbey as well it's intriguing that this children's literature doesn't in the very early 1740s it seemed the first books that publishers choose to publish are actually concerned with antiquarianism it's not something that's been noticed before and it's something that's significant because it's a trend that doesn't just stop there it carries on throughout the 1740s and 1750s and throughout the rest of the century in fact a museum for young gentlemen and ladies or a private tutor of little masters and misses it includes an account of ancient Britain a very unusual thing to find in a book it doesn't have a very obvious moral or religious slant it doesn't have any particular applications to modern life but the editor of this, the author of this whoever it was has decided to put into it an account of Druids and ancient monuments in Britain as well as the Seven Wonders of the World as well as a letter from Jackie Curious to his mamar in the country giving a description of the tower, the monument, St Paul's places which I remember to have heard was much talked of in the country in which scarce anybody that comes to London amidst seeing and so we go forward I'll just talk about this one other example in detail because it's so fascinating this is 1746 so of the books which survive of the children's books, these very early children's books which survive, this is one of the very very first 1746 is really early just after the Bournemond books which we just looked at and it's called The Travels of Tom Thumb over England and Wales now if we believe the preface he says Tom Thumb says I've touched very slightly on those particulars of old ruins, roads and camps which are so thinking it's sufficient that I give my readers a tolerable picture of what every county in a remarkable town now is without amusing him with brutalist inquiries concerning what has once been so he's saying he's not going to have antiquarian material that's not true in fact because as we go through this account of the different counties there's a lot in each county which is antiquarian and there's a lot which is really strikingly which is incredibly up to the minute here obviously I went to Wiltshire and I had a look at the entry for Wiltshire and there there's a normal description of the buildings you can find there, the landscape but also of Stonehenge and Avery and he mentions by name the ideas of Avery and of Stokely has only published on Stonehenge and Avery just a couple of years previously this is surprising very extraordinary stuff to Ryan to I thought in a children's book and this tour book tradition continues I'm just going to flip through these because you'll get a sense of the proliferation of them in the second half of the 18th century what have we got there, a family tour or the juvenile tourist England delineated or geographical description the travels of a British Druid relics of antiquity the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum Reuben rambles travels through the counties of England the Cambrian excursion loiterings in the lakes of Cumberland any, you know this is not something which has been understood so far but if you were to look if you were to undertake a full bibliography of the books produced for children in the second half of the 18th century early 19th century I think an extraordinary number of them are the tour books of this kind which set out to teach children about the antiquarian attractions of Britain and in some cases a further afield there's one I'll just end of wonders descriptive of some of the most remarkable in nature of art and there we have Stonehenge with verses underneath it published by John Harris in the 1820s okay what am I concluding this is a very intriguing quotation isn't it heritage is the rock out of which the nation's children will be hewn said Stanley Baldwin the prime minister between the wars I've read that quotation loads and loads of times and I still don't really understand it I'm not totally sure what he's saying and how we should interpret it heritage there but it does occur in I got this quotation from Simon Thurney's book The Men from the Ministry again history of heritage in Britain he doesn't give any citation for it so I don't know where it comes from in that period the 20s and probably the 30s heritage at least if we understand that word as we do today heritage is being seen as central to teaching children about the nation and to making them the kind of citizens of the future Baldwin thinks that in the 20th century it seems how do we get there though that's the question how do we get there from the 18th century to those 20th century views the conclusions that we can draw are that I think in the 18th century it's not the case that children are excluded as I've tried to show antiquarianism is not just an exclusively adult preserve I mean we used to think of it as an exclusively male preserve no women involved but Rosemary Sweet has shown that that's not the case we used to think of it as an entirely patrician an upper class activity again that's been shown not to be the case and we can now do I think the same with childhood that we used to think of antiquarianism even in the 18th century as something which only adults engage with but I don't think that's the case there were young people too that's one conclusion problem was that it didn't seem to be institutional as I said earlier it was informal it was individual in the 18th century but what I'm arguing and what I'm inviting you to believe and you may wish to disagree with me is that it's children's books which are the key to understanding how we get to Baldwin's position in the 18th century position because it's in these children's books not at the sites themselves not at museums and certainly not in schools that antiquarianism was being translated if you like or transmuted into something which is more amenable to children and to young people it's in print culture that we need to look for our answers there so if we're asking how we get from that position to that position we can come up with a sort of formula and I know this is a very problematic and oversimplified formula but I'm thinking that if we start from the position of what antiquarianism is we can't get to Baldwin's and the 20th century idea of heritage without adding in children. Children seem to be this kind of what transfers something which is scholarly and you should be undertaking as a kind of as a pastime to something which is of national importance something which actually is kind of for the betterment of the whole of society and I think the kind of what the missing thing that allows antiquarianism to turn into heritage is this kind of decision that it needs to be made more appropriate to children but as I'm saying and this is my final point I think it's print culture which is the catalyst for allowing that to happen it's in children's books that we see the educational potential of antiquarianism being explored not that they're trying to get rid of it's fun value not that they're trying to make it something which we can't which children can't appreciate and enjoy no actually the children's books are rather successful at fusing the two children's books are all about instruction and delight and we see that in their approach to antiquarianism as well they understand in the children's books that this is something which is educational for the good of the individual and for the good of society and that it can also be fun and that's why I'm arguing that it's children's books that can happen it may have happened anyway but it's children's over a longer period but it's in children's literature which we can search for this kind of way in which the classic 18th century antiquarianism is transmuted into something which is much more appropriate for children and young people to engage with but also which is understood as something which they ought to engage with and that's the hypothesis I'm presenting to you at the end and I wonder what you think of it thank you very much