Research on childhood is reemerging as an intriguing site for exploring various dimensions of historical change. Work and Play is a case in point; it offers a solid historical analysis of the German toy industry as such, but goes far beyond a straightforward history of business. Hamlin enriches our understanding of the business of toy making by placing his findings about new approaches to toy production and marketing in their particular economic and cultural contexts—consumption and consumer-oriented capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and parental and pedagogic understandings of childhood.

Hamlin's introduction provides a wide and compelling framework for the book's arguments in terms of the construction of the modern individual as an ideological and practical project. He examines the role of childhood, and children's toys, in understandings of childhood that emerged in the Enlightenment era and the nineteenth century. He notes the paradox with which the theorists struggled—attempting to educate individuals according to their classical ideal in a world increasingly dominated by consumption in a mass-market society. In building the book's framework, Hamlin also attends to important questions of class and gender difference implicit in contemporary understandings of the individual (although his discussion might have profited from attention to feminist critiques of European theories of selfhood). Moreover, he looks broadly for sources—to the writings of philosophers and pedagogues, but also to the views expressed by parents and in the popular press and, importantly, also at sources that document practices. Hamlin consistently looks for evidence to ground his own theoretical claims, as well as those of the theorists he examines, in historical evidence about the processes of producing and playing with toys, although the results of the quest for documentation are a bit uneven from chapter to chapter.

The chapters are built around various dimensions of the history of toys, each somewhat distinct but all interrelated. He begins with a chapter on the history of Christmas, which, as historians of the family and folklorists have already demonstrated, took on an especially important new role in nineteenth-century Germany. Hamlin builds on previous work that suggests how Christmas became a focus of middle-class domesticity and examines in detail the marketing of toys at Christmastime as a way of launching his investigation into the innovations in the German toy industry. He acknowledges the class character of Christmas with brief allusions at the chapter's end to the still socially restricted nature of the market for commercially produced toys even at the end of the nineteenth century, but his more focused class analysis is located in other chapters centered on production.

In his second chapter, on the toy industry, Hamlin takes the very fruitful approach of examining evidence from three different regions of Germany that were characterized by varying forms of organizing toy production as it moved through the era of the industrial revolution. The Nuremberg metal toy industry provides a case where businesses succeeded largely by moving to larger-scale factory production; Sonneberg doll producers retained a mixed artisanal mode even while accommodating themselves in some respects to modern organizational and marketing techniques; and the Erzgebirge wooden toy industry kept itself alive by pushing the exploitation of its home-based workers (Heimarbeiter) to the limits of exploitation or self-exploitation. Focusing on a single industry with multiple forms of production, Hamlin demonstrates the complexity of business history in this era even as he outlines important changes in toy making in particular.

Chapter three focuses on marketing techniques and tracks the marketing of toys as it moved from the network of fairs and markets, such as the famous “Christmas markets” held in towns and cities all over Germany, to department stores and specialty shops. The Christmas markets don't disappear altogether, but they do get relegated to a small niche in a growing industry. Hamlin here picks up on a lot of the existing literature on the history of consumption as a form of spectacle, leisure activity, and personality reconstruction in nineteenth-century European cities more generally. Although this chapter is important for its contribution to particular changes in the ways in which toys in Germany were displayed, bought, and sold, and the connections between desire, consumption, and selfhood, it relies more heavily than do other chapters on the assertion of theoretical claims rather than rich empirical grounding.

Chapter four picks up on these more subjective dimensions of the history of toys by examining child development theories about play and toys that had been emerging in Germany since the Enlightenment, and relating them to the discussion of specific kinds of toys during the Second Empire. The first part of the chapter is a quick summary of competing views about toys—more utilitarian ideas that emphasized practical playthings that would teach children self-discipline and imitation of the world of adults as opposed to more Romantic suggestions that toys be a means of fantasy and self-expression. Both traditions emphasized play as an important element of self-cultivation, however. And from both traditions there emerged critiques of the impact of cheap and shoddy toys on children's development and worries about the negative consequences of consumerism for individualism.

The final chapter takes on “the social question” as it pertained to particular aspects of the toy industry. Of course, the apparent contradictions between the ideology of domesticity and Heimarbeit play a special role here, as did the increasing exploitation required to keep certain types of cheap toy production possible.

Work and Play holds important implications for business history, labor history, the history of consumption, and the history of subjectivity—the latter in an especially complex and interesting way as Hamlin is attempting to tease out adults' perceptions of children's minds as well as adult memories of and nostalgia for their own childhoods. More direct evidence about play from the point of view of children is more elusive, but that is always a problem for the history of childhood. And Hamlin is always careful to make clear the nature, usefulness, and limitations of his sources. The author is also to be commended for his combination of divergent approaches to produce a multifaceted study that examines various elements of the history of toy production and use in Germany and shows how they worked together and/or in tension with one another.