June 2002
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36 Reads
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32 Citations
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
While Karen Calvert's book, Children in the House, deals with middle-class play, there is very little work devoted to children's toys and games in a working-class context. This paper uses the toy assemblages from two working-class sites to begin a discussion of working-class play and the struggle nineteenth-century working-class parents waged to impart their own values to their children. Because marbles were the predominant toy recovered from both sites, the nature of the game is discussed, and its relationship to working-class values is considered.