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REVIEWS
| Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 1890–1940. By David M. Pomfret (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. xii plus 315 pp. $84.95).
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| A recent addition to a new series of "Historical Urban Studies" that now numbers over twenty volumes, Pomfret's book amply fulfills the assertion by the series's editors, Richard Rodger and Jean-Luc Pinol, that the works they are showcasing are informed by "analytical frameworks ... in a comparative context" (p. viii). Pomfret focuses on two towns, both with industrial bases in the areas of textile production, coal mining, and metalworking, each of which was of medium size in relation to other urban settlements in its respective country—Nottingham having, in 1901, a population of 259,902, while its French counterpart numbered 139,129 inhabitants. He examines conditions and developments within each of them—and also, albeit less systematically, within the countries in which they were located—that pertained to the experiences and roles of city dwellers who had not yet reached adulthood. Continually crisscrossing the English Channel in each chapter, Pomfret takes up a sequence of topics, each of which he treats with regard to most if not all of the half century he has marked out for consideration. In so doing, he depicts a pair of cities both as partly similar and partly contrasting localities and also as sites in which larger developments that transcended both of them can be illustrated. |
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Arguing that a decline during the period in the percentages of city dwellers who were younger than twenty led to growing rather than diminished concern about the future of young people, Pomfret dwells primarily on efforts by grownups—among them, teachers, clergymen, medical professionals, labor leaders, local authorities, and politicians—to protect, educate, guide, and mobilize them. In the thinking of these individuals, youngsters needed to be rescued from urban threats both to their bodies and to their morals, so that they could be enlisted in larger tasks of urban and national reform and regeneration. |
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