I have a feeling that Aries is merely guilty of something that most of us
historians are guilty of from time to time, and that is seeing the period that
we are dealing with as necessarily different from (and usually better than)
what went before - that we turn the horizon of our knowledge into a sort of
historical caesura.
What may well be different about childhood in the late 18th c. may perhaps not
be attitudes to childhood per se but the types of source material recording
views of childhood - there may be more diaries, for example.
Julia Barrow
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