This book presents an entirely fresh view of the upbringing of English children in upper and professional class families over three centuries. Drawing on direct testimony from contemporary diaries and letters, the book revises previous understandings of parenting and what it was like to grow up in the period between 1600 and 1914.Using advice literature which set out developing ideologies of childhood, gender and parenting, the book explores the separate but complementary roles of mothers and fathers in raising their children. Male upbringing is discussed in terms of schooling, female through the moral and social context of a domestic schoolroom dominated by a governess. Boys were trained for the world, girls for society and marriage. Rare teenage diaries surviving from the Georgian and Victorian periods show teenagers speaking for themselves about education; relationships with parents, siblings and friends; and their social, class and gender identity.

Anthony Fletcher has been professor of history at the Universities of Sheffield, Durham, and Essex, and director of the Victoria County History Project at London University. His previous books include Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800, published by Yale University Press.

'Since Philip Aries's classic Centuries of Childhood there have been plenty of studies redefining the early years... But Anthony Fletcher's is one of the first since then to bring all that information together, as well as adding his own important material.' - Kathryn Hughes, Saturday Guardian

'Anthony Fletcher is a professional historian who has conducted a prodigious amount of research into the childhood of real people growing up in England between the years 1600 and 1914 - in other words, during the peiod of this country's greatness. It makes an absolutely fascinating story .. that is why we can be so grateful to the patient Professor who has assembled such a cloud of witnesses from the past.' A. N. Wilson, The Daily Mail

'In this brawny book, a decade in the making, Anthony Fletcher explores what it felt like to be knee-high to the Stuart, Georgian and Victorian worlds.' Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

'[A] thoroughly researched and absorbing account ... Fletcher's fascinating subject is broad, and he illustrates his detailed explorations of such subjects as "Fathers and Educating Boys", "The Schoolroom", and "Training for Society" with an astonishing array of letters and diaries spanning three centuries.' Lucy Moore, The Daily Telegarph

'Growing Up in England is a model academinc survey; scrupulous, exhaustive, fearsomely footnoted and based on a wide range of often unpublished personal documents.' Hilary Spurling, The Observer

'Childhood is an experience we all undergo, lasting on historical average nearly a third of a lifetime; that Fletcher has managed to explore in depth its myriad over three centuries is an extraordinary achievement. To want more is to be as greedy as John Ramsden, aged 11, who in 1842 wrote to his mother from school asking for big marbles, biscuits, a brown bread loaf with currants, raisins and citron, and adding, "Are you not delighted, you will soon have the pleasure of seeing me again very very soon." Growing up in England is a huge currant, raisin and citron loaf, bursting with good things, which I shall return to very, very often.' Judith Flanders, The Sunday Times