The Story of British Childhood. Author Fran Abrams charts the transformation if childhood in the UK from early Victorian disagreements about child-rearing to the Scouts' very direct involvement in the First World War. Poignant first-hand accounts of poverty and deprivation as well as innocent pleasures carry the reader through a Dickensian landscape of urchins and Fauntelroys, the cosseted lives of Edwardian children to the self-sufficient charges of Baden-Powell.