Troy Boone 
Youth of Darkest England [PDF ebook] 
Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire

This book examines the representation of English working-class children — the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban neighborhoods that a number of writers dubbed ’darkest England’ — in Victorian and Edwardian imperialist literature. In particular, Boone focuses on how the writings for and about youth undertook an ideological project to enlist working-class children into the British imperial enterprise, demonstrating convincingly that the British working-class youth resisted a nationalist identification process that tended to eradicate or obfuscate class differences.