"The things that spring to mind are household or personal accounts which will include payments for things like music or dancing lessons. However, the ones I know about are post-1700. The North papers include pre-1700 accounts, but I am not sure what is in them.

The Account book of Mary Gofton 1647-9 is the best thing I know as it includes payments for  toys and other gifts for children – including  a drum, dolls and a parrot (if I remember correctly). The account book is described here: https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/2118 .

I have some further notes if you need to locate the specific references to the presents for her grandchildren."

Mike Webb, Curator of Early Modern Manuscripts

“I've been through my own notes, and wondered whether any of the following were of interest on the early printed side:

Auct. 2 Q 5.9 – John Stanbridge (master of Magdalen College School, Oxford). 4 works bound together, with woodcut of school. 

Censorship: Vet. D5 e.678. Children’s encyclopaedia, with pages on childbirth stuck together and instruction not to read them; other refs to childbirth crossed out in text. 

Ashm. 55: several classical school texts (Horace, Vergil) bound with fair manuscript copies of commentaries; likely prepared for the education of French royal/noble children; fine French binding. 

Lawn d.184: Eliot’s dictionary, with a manuscript record of a girl beginning school in the 1650s. 

Other general areas of interest might be:

      Illustrations: of school (eg. Durer, schoolmaster and pupils, Broxb. 95.39), children playing and reading, with hornbooks, toys in printed margins of prayer book (eg. 8o K 20 Art.BS.)). 

      Conduct books (we have so many...). 

Our Opie lists, arranged by subject, might be of use for those who don't know them, as they show the types of material that can be found in the collection, and there might be things of particular interest in Opie X: https://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/rarebooks/childrens_books.”

Francesca Galligan, Centre for the History of the Book

“My initial [suggestion] would be atlases targeted at school audiences, of which there are significant numbers within the Map collection. They ought to be relatively straightforward to pin down on SOLO, combining “Atlas” with “School” in any ‘title’ search – that identifies 2,555 items right away.

Then there are those maps created with children in mind, for example maps of the Island of Sodor for ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ aficionados.

There is also the classic map reading guide for children – ‘The Map that Came to Life’”

Nick Millea, Map Librarian

“Some thoughts from the week…

Missionary publications.

Calcutta – School-Book Society’s Press. Do an advanced search on SOLO and set drop-down menus to "publisher" and "with my exact phrase" "School Book Society’s Press​". Similar press in Colombo and Madras – Christian Vernacular Education Society – set up the search as above. Also in Sri Lanka: Cotta Church Mission Press.

Readers, in numerous languages. On SOLO do a subject search for "Hindi readers" (or Urdu, Bengali etc). Set the search scope (above the search boxes) to “Oxford collections” to avoid getting too many irrelevant results.  

Textbooks. Issued by governments: try an author/creator search for "Bombay public instruction" and if you scroll down past the government reports and Sanskrit editions, you’ll find material such as Gujarati, Marathi and Sindhi primers and readers. Also commercial publishers such as Nawal Kishore: try place of publication search for "Lakhanau" (to pick up Hindi titles) or "Lakhnau" (for Urdu) and "any field contains" "textbooks". 

Lots of publications about education from pre and post-1947 – good way to find examples of pamphlets issued by the Department of Education is an “any field” search for "india education pamphlet" - set the search scope to “Oxford collections” (at the top) otherwise you’ll get thousands of results. NB the Indian government education publications are not all fully catalogued yet, so this is a sample.  (Just as I was about to click send, I thought of the National Council for Educational Research and Training - if you search for them you'll get reports and similar, but also textbooks issued by them - eg "How we govern ourselves : a textbook of civics for class VII".)

Reformatory schools? Annual reports from various reformatory schools. Search on SOLO for "india reformatory schools" (and again, set the search scope to “Oxford collections”).”

Emma Mathieson, Subject Specialist for South East Asia

“I had actually recently started to compile a list of children’s literature items – please find this attached. From your email, you might be particularly interested in 'The Kingsland Mercury', 'The Motor' magazines and 'The Unique manuscript magazine'.

With regards to items in our archive and modern manuscripts more generally (I work specifically on literary manuscripts and collections), it might be worth searching for the terms children, child*, etc., in our online catalogue: https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. You can also search for children as a subject term via https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/subjects - but do be aware that whilst we include subject terms for collections today, this was not always the case in the past.

Talking to a colleague, they mentioned there might be some material in the Oxfam archive relating to children’s projects (see Records produced by Oxfam's development education and youth work) and also found the following items which might be of interest:

MS. M. Deneke Mendelssohn d. 59 - A child's [music] album, 1842.

MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 590, Box 3, File 1 - Letters from John Ruskin to the Shaw children, 1871

MS. Eng. misc. c. 58 - Essays on subjects of folk-lore, 1892, written in a prize-competition by the school-children of Golspie, co. Sutherland, and used by E. W. B. Nicholson as the basis of his published work Golspie (London, etc., 1897).

There are also letters written by children in various collections – there are a few in the Archive of John Hungerford Pollen and the Pollen Family, which I catalogued recently and my colleague recently blogged about one she had found whilst cataloguing the Clarendon archive (http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/archivesandmanuscripts/2021/11/15/dear-papa/).

Rachael Marsay, Roy Davids Archivist

“The archives which we have relating to British colonies are generally the papers of British organisations or British individuals whose work took them to or involved them in colonial territories. For example, we have the papers of individuals who worked in medicine or education in various parts of the world, work which related to children as well as to adults. We have the archive of an Anglican missionary organisation which was also involved in education and in medicine and includes written material and photos (also African Tidings, a publication specifically about and for children dating from 1885). Also the archive of Oxfam GB which has a specific section on development education and youth work and files on projects relating to children in many parts of the world during the late colonial period and after (search for ‘children’ in the Navigate this collection box).

Our online catalogue for archives and manuscripts is here and can be searched for child/children/childhood/youth/schools/education etc in combination with colonial/Africa/Kenya etc to see if anything comes up. Not all of the catalogues are online yet and I attach scans of a couple which relate to Achimota College in Ghana (Williams and Fraser) and Trinity College, Kandy (Fraser) and include such material as school magazines and reports which may be of interest.

Some of the archives contain material created by children, for example:

https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/archival_objects/231787

I hope that this gives you an idea of the sorts of material which there are in the archives. Do get back to me if you have further questions.”

Lucy McCann, Senior Archivist, Special Collections