Children of the Labouring Poor: The working lives of children in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire, Eileen Wallace, 2010, UH Press, 192p,

ISBN 978-1-905313-49-5, £14-99.

This very informative and well-sourced book achieves much more than its titles infers. Eileen Wallace has researched and explored the working lives of poor children in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire in a most helpful manner. As a result we know a great deal about the frequently extreme circumstances and contexts in which children were employed in farming, straw plaiting, silk manufacture, paper and brick making, and chimney sweeping.

However in doing so she has also introduced us to the nature of those particular occupations, and how they were affected by economic and social trends in the 19^th Century. Of course this is Hertfordshire but the insights have a much wider application for social and local historians of recent times.

Straw plaiting was an entirely unfamiliar occupation to me. It had never occurred to me to enquire what sourced the straw hat and boater industry in various locations, such as in nearby Luton.

This book will also be useful to family historians, not just those with ancestors from Hertfordshire but more widely, as Eileen Wallace gives us insights into how generally working class people lived and what difficulties they encountered. She also provides a salutary warning to those of us who tend to assume that mid-19^th Century census returns contain accurate information. Her assertion that ‘scholar' may not mean quite what we expect as a description for children and may indeed reflect attendance at a straw plaiting school, where there was minimal or desultory education provided, will need us to review carefully what assumptions we make about what was really the educational status of ancestors described as ‘scholar' in the pre-compulsory education era.

This book reveals an extraordinarily valuable piece of research.