Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

History

Major Professor

Brian Connolly, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Kyle Burke, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Julia F. Irwin, Ph.D.

Committee Member

David K. Johnson, Ph.D.

Keywords

Child philanthropy, Class, Positive eugenics

Abstract

This dissertation uses the Children’s Country Holidays Fund (CCHF) as a critical lens to examine how philanthropy, childhood, class, public health, and rural nostalgia intersected within the broader context of citizen formation in interwar Britain. Founded in 1884 to provide country holidays for poor London schoolchildren, the CCHF evolved from a philanthropic response to Victorian slum life into an informal arm of welfare governance by the end of the interwar period. Through its country holidays, the Fund became an active participant in shaping ideals of health, morality, and civic responsibility in a period marked by heightened concern over national vitality and postwar reconstruction. In doing so, the CCHF both reflected and advanced a broader shift in child welfare, from charitable models rooted in liberal ideals of self-governance toward more centralized, expert-driven, and state-involved forms of social intervention.

Drawing on extensive research across institutional records, public health assessments, and contemporary sources, this study traces how rural vacations were mobilized not simply as charitable relief, but as instruments of social regulation. The countryside, cast as a space of physical regeneration and moral clarity, served as the stage upon which poor urban children were remade into future citizens. Beneath the rhetoric of pastoral innocence, the CCHF embedded eugenic assumptions, classed moralism, and state-aligned ambitions within its everyday practices, asserting professional and institutional authority over working-class families and positioning outside agents, rather than parents, as the primary experts in childrearing.

By situating the Fund within broader currents of nostalgic modernism, biopolitics, and voluntary welfare, this dissertation argues that the CCHF played a pivotal role in translating national anxieties about degeneration into tangible interventions in children’s lives. Ultimately, it reveals how the care of poor urban children became a project of national renewal, where the boundaries between charity, surveillance, public health, and state-building blurred in the making of modern Britain.

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