Generational differences intrigue us in the twenty-first century, as we try to determine the causes of rapid cultural and political changes, mapping them on to Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Gen Z. Yet, as Barbara Crosbie points out in her subtle and satisfying Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England, historians do not often harness generations and the relationships between them in their attempts to understand shifts over time. Crosbie shows that a micro-study of two generations in a specific locality can provide such insights. Innovatively, she avoids a synchronic, age-cohort-based approach by pursuing instead a diachronic, cross-generational analysis that follows both generations across a time-bound period. Age Relations addresses the generation who were young adults in the 1740s and the generation that they parented, who came of age in the 1770s. Newcastle, the provincial capital of the north of England, a city with commercial links to London, is the crucible for the cultural change wrought by their interactions with each other and their society and culture.

Crosbie organizes her study around key entry points for investigating change: children's literature and teaching methods, the reorganization of apprenticeship and, through apprentices’ experiences, the ways in which shifts in the training of youths correlated with changing ideas about childhood and education. She closes the book by scrutinizing generational shifts through changing coiffeurs and cuisines and the generational tensions laid bare by the parliamentary election in Newcastle in 1774. Collectively, this helps the reader look afresh at some familiar subjects.

Section one, focusing on childhood, invites the reader to reconsider what we know of child rearing and education. Chapter 1 explores the new style books marketed for children, which popularized John Locke's ideas about children, even while they did not entirely follow his philosophy. Crosbie roots the literature and pedagogy in the parenting practices revealed in the letters exchanged between the Delavel family's parents and seven children, and the Northumberland Justice of the Peace Ralph Gray's letters to his son, all of which combined the cultivation of civility with affection. Mid-century parents accepted the premise that their offspring were tabula rasa and took responsibility for determining their behavior, while the younger generation focused more on the innate sensibilities of their offspring and the limits to children's rational qualities. Chapter 2 traces this shift through teaching methods, focusing on a series of published grammar textbooks by female and male authors. Crosbie shows that those teaching at mid-century eschewed traditional learning by rote and introduced new techniques that aimed at practice-based applied learning and shorter, easier, pedagogical formats. Their pupils, when adults, reclaimed more traditional teaching methods teachers, advocating both abstract and applied knowledge.

In section two, Crosbie traces generational shifts where they shaped the life-stage of youths, centering on Newcastle's apprenticeship practices which themselves paralleled national approaches to employing and managing juveniles. Chapter 3 traces the change across the period from apprentices of higher social rank living with their masters to lower-ranking youths who lived at home while training. Accompanying this was a fundamental transference in the locus of authority from the patriarchal head of household to the legal employer—with, thus, a very different set of intergenerational relationships. Chapter 4 offers Ralph Jackson and his diary, written from 1749, when he was thirteen and beginning his apprenticeship in Newcastle. This provides a charming account of a youth living away from home and acquiring skills and of his generational interaction with his master and his parents. By the time fathers of Ralph's generation were organizing their own adolescent sons’ training, however, they were less likely to send them to live in their masters’ households. Crosbie uses this shift to draw together threads from previous chapters to argue that the emphasis upon sentiment and feeling within the family presented a way to monitor and control youths’ behavior in the absence of direct, unmitigated patriarchal authority.

Section three moves to adulthood, first addressing how the two generations conceived of fashions in food and hair, in order to demonstrate their relative ways of conceptualizing their social and cultural worlds. Crosbie shows us how the authors of cookbooks, often female, aimed at a domestic readership, and she then charts changing styles in wigs, hair pieces, and haircuts, through the beguiling and frequently misunderstood figure of the macaroni to think afresh around local, gender, and national identities. She thereby reveals the two generations’ differing understandings of cosmopolitanism. The polite adults of the 1740s and 1750s rejected particularism and adopted a model of cosmopolitanism, which they conceived of as cultural innovation, adapting it to be less socially excusive and more domestic. This opened up the concept to women and the provinces. Its beneficiaries, the adults of the 1770s, however, prized youthful authenticity and sensibility, envisaging an individuality that signified autonomy. Now, masculinity incorporated a youthful aspect rather than being the preserve of maturity. In the final chapter, Crosbie uses poll books, linked to guild records, to explore the age distribution of voters in the 1774 parliamentary election in Newcastle. Broadly speaking, she finds that those voters born after c. 1740 were more likely to support the reformer candidates. This rising generation forged a new political-cultural identity, eschewing a now outdated polite cosmopolitanism for self-determination rooted in the locality, which did not defer to the metropole even while it had an imperial dimension.

It is not easy to write about generational change, since there is a circular rather than linear quality to these inter- and intra-relationships. Similarly, a life-phase structure can risk imposing a deceptive simplicity on the dynamics of generations moving through time themselves from childhood to maturity. Still, Crosbie does an impressive job of “mapping the generational contours of change” (243) and her conclusion draws together the various threads into a big picture, which cleverly nuances what we know about eighteenth-century cultural shifts in England. Essentially, this book sets out a new picture of how the polite generation gave birth to and raised the sensible generation.