In this book Anthony Fletcher offers a sweeping and yet intimate portrait of English childhood and parenthood from the Stuarts to World War I. This is fascinating book full of lively descriptions of children's and teenagers’ lives and parents’ concerns, anxieties, and joys. Fletcher uses the rich source material left from economically and socially prosperous families, mining their letters, diaries, and portraits for evidence of their attitudes and experiences. As Fletcher notes this is full elucidation and expansion of chapters on children and education from his previous book, Gender, Sex and Subordination, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT, 1995), and the importance of gender and education remain central to this newer work. Unlike most histories that emphasize change, at its heart Growing Up in England is a story about stability. Fletcher asserts that “attitudes to upbringing developed, without changing fundamentally, across three hundred years” (80).

Fletcher argues that though material lives and even social attitudes toward children and home changed over the course of three centuries, the experience of children and young people remained remarkably stable. Affectionate and loving, parents controlled gendered teaching that focused on preparing boys for the harshness of public life and girls for the rigor of the marriage market and motherhood. Parental attitudes influenced the methods of education that taught their children gendered expectations: public schools (referred to as “parenting at one remove,” 196) and universities for boys, the school room with governesses and perhaps boarding school for girls. Fletcher's account brings to life the gendered parameters of childhood that, while patriarchal, were not particularly pleasant for boys, as the chilling account of boys’ experiences in public schools compared with girls’ relative enjoyment of school demonstrates (196–207, 244–58).

The book is divided into three groups. The first section explores prescriptive ideas about childhood, boyhood, girlhood, and parenthood. Though Rousseau had some impact on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parenting, Fletcher clearly sees that Lockeian ideas dominated early modern and Victorian parenting and education. The second section builds on the prescriptive discussion with a series of chapters about parenting, child mortality, the performance of parenting, and education (both at home and in school). This section and the last section use letters and diaries—with some references to the portraits included as black-and-white plates—to explore parental and adult attitudes toward children and childhood. Fletcher is wary, however, of reading into these adult accounts children's own “authentic” voice. Instead the third section shifts gears by focusing on teenage personal testimony in diaries—principally by girls—and in selections of letters young people exchanged with their siblings and other peers (317–18). Complimenting this thematic structure, each chapter chronologically covers the entire period (except the last section that, for evidentiary reasons, focuses on 1750–1914). This makes each chapter almost self-standing, easily read, and useful as a teaching resource. Remarkably, this structure does not feel repetitive. Instead, Fletcher has used this as a tool for emphasizing the differences between prescription and practice and between the genders and to underscore his stability argument.

Fletcher is up front that he was not overly concerned with argumentation. “This book,” he writes, “seeks to be sparing with assertion”—a strategy also evidenced by the absence of a conclusion (xxi). It also underscores why statements such as “the trials and tribulations of some mothers whose boys went away to school sheds important light on the workings of patriarchy in England” are left tantalizingly, and a little frustratingly, underexplored (195).

While he sticks to his promise to keep historiographic intervention to a minimum, Fletcher simultaneously raises several intriguing issues for future research. One of these is the importance of peers, particularly siblings, to children's gendered identity. While schooling in the home, at public schools, and at universities provided important sites for children and young people's gender identities, Fletcher asserts that educational continuity was due to parents’ continuing support for the development of manly character and female obedience (207, 219, 259). But the children in Fletcher's book are surrounded by a peer network of siblings, cousins, and later, school friends. How did siblings, who, as Fletcher acknowledges, “literally grew up together” and other peers influence one another's gendered behavior and identity (303; see also 323–24, 352, 359–68)? Attention to siblings’ more horizontal relationship could complicate the hierarchal family described by Fletcher.

Additionally, Fletcher's argument touches on the tricky and slippery nature of choice and agency. Historians of adults often focus on the individual's ability to choose from a particular set of cultural and social possibilities. In Fletcher's account children have no such choice. Fletcher asserts that “young girls in these centuries, with no choice, learnt to behave in the manner that was expected of them” (280; see also 258–59, 279). He describes school boys as inhabiting a “teenage world that thousands of them endured, more or less cheerfully and resignedly, over three centuries” (207). The tension between expectations and choice is not confined to Fletcher's work, but it raises issues for historians of children and the adults they become. If children and teenagers are left with so little agency, “with no choice,” what does that mean for adult agency? And was resignation, cheerful or otherwise, the only option for children?

These questions are not so much a criticism of Fletcher's work, but a recognition that he has given historians much grist for future research. Growing Up in England is a valuable contribution to the histories of gender, families, education, and children. His simple argument: “gendered parenting … produced gendered children” should spur new inquiries into the gendered nature not only of childhood, but of adulthood and the institutions they created and inhabited (55; see also 80).