We are fortunate that a number of portraits survive of children from the upper levels of society in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. These give us a glimpse of childhood in that period and hint at the ways childhood, the raising of children, and even life itself differ from today. Infants were swaddled … Continue reading Early Modern Children
Childhood
One Minute Book Review – 12 Edmondstone Street by David Malouf
12 Edmondstone Street by David Malouf is a memoir/essay which uses his childhood home in Brisbane in the 1930s and 1940s to gently observe the way the beliefs and experiences of a family’s past shape a child's view of and relationship with the world as an adult. Room by room, down to the space beneath … Continue reading One Minute Book Review – 12 Edmondstone Street by David Malouf
One Minute Book Review – The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
The Spinning Heart is set in a small town in Ireland during the immediate aftermath of the Irish economic recession. The novel comprises twenty-one chapters, each a monologue by a different character, each capable of standing alone. The first chapter centres on Bobby Mahon whose story is revealed in bits and pieces through every other … Continue reading One Minute Book Review – The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
One Minute Book Review – The Visitors by Rebecca Mascull
Set initially on a hop farm in Kent at the end of the 19th century, The Visitors is the story of Adeliza Golding, a girl born with limited sight who in early childhood contracts an illness which renders her both deaf and completely blind. Her only communication is with the Visitors, ghosts she speaks to … Continue reading One Minute Book Review – The Visitors by Rebecca Mascull
