The Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 192 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688100; Life Below Stairs in the Twentieth Century, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 294 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688124; Women in the 1920s, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 256 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688117

Amberley are to be congratulated for making available uniformly priced, attractively produced new editions of three popular titles, replacing previous editions dated 1989, 2001 and 1995 respectively.  Dr Pamela Horn is an experienced former teacher of economic and social history in higher education who has produced an impressive corpus of well-researched and well-written studies on aspects of British social history which are highly accessible to a wide readership. Her Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild examines the impact of W.E. Forster's Education Act of 1870 on the lives of the children of the working and lower middle classes who attended the new elementary schools during that period and is illustrated with over 130 carefully selected archive photographs. Some like the 1904 photograph of Bradford school baths in 1904 graphically illustrate the social welfare dimension of education emerging in the Edwardian era. Pamela Horn's Life Below Stairs in the Twentieth Century when it was first published was the first major study of domestic workers in the twentieth century and it utilises both personal reminiscences as well as newspaper reports and official records to reconstruct the downstairs world in the post-Victorian era. Finally, the author's Women in the 1920s broadens the author's perspective to consider the impact of the First World War on women throughout society encompassing elite women feeling socially constrained by personal and financial losses, new middle-class professionals now able to take increasing advantage of social as well as domestic freedom and working class women still predominantly employed in factory and domestic service. Amberley's timely re-publishing programme of these texts will ensure a new lease of life for all three texts.