| Summary: | <p>This thesis fundamentally reshapes understandings of working-class life and social mobility in modern Britain and disrupts existing histories of nineteenth-century institutional welfare. Focusing on the lives of 230 children who entered two Surrey-based reformatory and industrial schools between 1850 and 1895, it integrates qualitative and quantitative analysis. It uses rich archival data together with the latest digitised sources to contextualise children’s lives with those of their families (c. 1200 individuals). It reveals children’s experiences of welfare across the life course, within and beyond the British Isles.</p>
<p>The thesis explores the intellectual origins of reformatory and industrial schools. Through a focus on the causes of family breakdown, it reveals the harmful backgrounds of many children and shows that a substantial proportion considered institutional care preferable to life at home. It builds on these new understandings to argue for a reassessment of the purpose and effectiveness of institutional welfare.</p>
<p>The study provides the first comparative study of children’s life courses and demonstrates that philanthropic intervention delivered gains in social mobility for girls and especially boys. This contradicts existing characterisations of nineteenth-century welfare as ineffective or driven by motives of class control. Through an examination of the motives behind emigration, it shows that children were active agents in this process as they sought financial opportunity overseas. This argues for the inclusion of juvenile emigrants in histories of empire. It shows that working-class families thought of opportunity as transnational but not necessarily imperial.</p>
<p>The examination of children’s pre-institutional lives together with the social mobility benefits that welfare delivered, shows that nineteenth-century institutional care offered advantages unmatched in the twentieth century when welfare became centralised, living standards rose and investment dropped. This transforms existing histories of working-class life and undermines conventional narratives of linear progress in the welfare state.</p>
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