This book examines the British socialist movement in the last two decades of the 19th century through its policies on children's education. The author reassesses the nature of these policies and comments on the validity of those historiographical models used in analyses of the socialism of this period. "Socialist and British Education, 1883-1902" is a thematic study that examines the whole socialist movement of the period, drawing together policies and positions that socialists shared on education. The most important of these was the belief that neither the ethical transformation of individuals nor the material reformation of society alone would provide real progress; the "moral" and the "material" must occur together: children needed to be fed as well as educated if the socialist belief in the power of education and the innate goodness of humanity were to be realized. This underlying belief in the need for unity in moral and material reform affected all the socialist policies studied in this book, such as those concerning the family, teachers and the content of the school curriculum. The socialist programme also heavily concentrated on the direct democratic control of the education system, for example, through school boards. Thus, Manton claims that the socialist programme was not a "utopian wish list", but rather one that was capable of being realized through the sorts of state education machinery that were already in place at this time. He also emphasizes that the removal of this democratic machinery by the 1902 Education Act was one of the factors that led to the growth of state-centred and bureaucratic socialist solutions to the problems of education.