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Volume One of this work covered the social concern and statutory provision for the care and welfare of children in England from Tudor times to the end of the eighteenth century. This second volume covers the period from the last years of the eighteenth century up to the first half of the twentieth, a time in which problems caused by urbanization, industrialization, the rapid increase in population, and failure to provide adequately for the welfare of children led to a new awakening of the national conscience.

The volume demonstrates how, in this momentous period, deep concern for the abuses suffered by industrially exploited, deprived, neglected and delinquent children brought about the demand for new legislation and some measure of community support for such children. The gradual recognition that failure to make adequate social provision for all the nation's young was both economically wasteful and morally wrong is shown to have led to more comprehensive policies for community responsibility in the twentieth century. The authors consider that the resulting network of social legislation has changed the parent-child relationship which had existed for centuries, and has given all children a new status based on their own legal rights.