Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century

Looking at privileged boys in school as well as those of the laboring class, criminal boys who ended up in prison, and apprentices in the printing press whose labor helped them achieve respectable manhood, this book argues that boys in the long eighteenth century constituted a particular kind of currency, both valuable and expendable—valuable because of gender, expendable because of youth. As such, boys were all, one way or another, made useful, and their stories run the gamut from trivial to tragic.