This book is a successful effort to examine urban Victorian poverty from below, particularly giving an historical voice to the children who attended one London Ragged School, that of Compton Place in Camden. The project was made possible because of the central source used by Mair in her work – the seven school journals of the leading teacher and superintendent of that school, Martin Ware, written between 1850 and 1867. In these annual diaries Ware recorded his interactions with the children of the school, giving the children's own words in clearly identifiable quotation marks. Mair acknowledges that these testimonies are filtered through that of their teacher, but argues that they do nevertheless provide an opportunity to listen to the voices of London juvenile poor. This central record is supplemented by Mair's use of wider Ragged School sources, including publications, the writings and speeches of prominent Ragged School advocates and newspaper reports from a number of such schools across Britain. A further source used by Mair is the 227 letters written to Ware by his ex-pupils living both in Britain and the empire.

Mair places the Compton Place School within the Evangelical Victorian project of reforming an ungodly Britain, as Ware was a devout barrister of the Anglican Evangelical constituency, though with earlier personal and family connections to Nonconformity.

The book is an important contribution to the history of the Ragged School Movement, and covers its most vigorous years from its foundation in 1844 with the inauguration of the London Ragged School Union, to the advent of its decline with the passing of Education Act for England and Wales in 1871. While Ragged Schools have been the subject of earlier work, much of this has been overly celebratory, with critical investigations largely confined to mentions within larger topics, or to a small number of journal articles and theses. As most of these have used structural sources such as subscription lists and official reports, they have not been able to provide insight into Mair's central concern, the interaction between teachers and children.

Mair sets her investigation of this one school in an initial setting of Victorian attitudes to poverty, Christian duty, children and education, as these all influenced the Ragged School movement. From there she gradually narrows her focus to the children themselves and the school classroom. This is followed by a chapter on Ware himself and the boys whom he taught, his journals being not just a record of their interactions with him, but also his devotional diary, a characteristic of Evangelical piety. Ware acknowledges that one omission from her investigation is the girls of the Ragged School, but in the segregated environment of the Victorian classroom Ware had no connection with female pupils. The final chapter analyses the letters to Ware of his ex-pupils, focusing particularly on their expressions of the varied aspects of the scholar-teacher relationships.

Mair takes issue with the motif of social control over-used by a number of historians as an explanation for the middle- and upper-class support for various philanthropic ventures towards the lower classes. In support of an alternative of greater working-class and even pauper agency she cites a number of pieces of evidence from her research. Teachers in the Ragged Schools were artisans and not just middle class, so that the schools facilitated cross-class relationships not just between teachers and scholars, but between teachers themselves. She demonstrates that the philanthropic agenda of improvement in reading and writing was upheld by many children themselves, who also saw it as a way to improve their lot. So the children could be active in seeking aid for themselves from their teachers and their school, using letter-writing and social behaviours as their tools in doing so. As Mair states, ‘This book has shown that interpretations that cast the child as subject and adult as actor not only attribute too little agency to scholars, but too much agency to teachers’ (p. 212). Children in the school could also sincerely accept the Christian priorities that Ware and his school had as their principal concern, again raising further questions, similar to other recent research, about the way religion has been reduced to social control in this period. Historians of emigration will be interested in Mair's conclusion that emigrant ex-pupils used their connection to Ware to support their connection with Britain in letters to him requesting he send them newspapers, and to pass on messages to ex-pupils. Mair's contention of ‘the possibilities that microhistory presents to historians’ is indeed borne out in this work of meticulous research.