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This article analyzes how children in 1930s' Britain narrated their everyday behavior, feelings and fantasies when asked to do so by their teachers. It is based upon a study of over one thousand essays that were written by children in 1937 and 1938, which were collected by the British social investigative organization, Mass Observation, as part of its Worktown Project. The argument is situated within the history of emotions and we interrogate the utility of recent conceptual frameworks for the better understanding of children's subjectivities. The essays show that children were able to juggle contradictory demands and expectations, learn emotional codes and match emotional style to spatial context when moving between school, home and leisure arenas. To some extent, then, children adapted and shaped their behavior to comply with specific emotional communities. However, we argue that this model offers only a partial account of children's emotional practices. In the second part of the article we suggest a move away from thinking about emotional communities or emotional styles as predominantly value-based and spatially-defined (by the school, home, streetspaces which children inhabited and might have influenced but which were conceived and built by adults) and argue instead for increased attention to be paid to the material context and, 2 particularly, the relationships that operated within and across these spaces. Ultimately, we argue, children's emotional experiences were less about "learning to feel" than feeling through practice.

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This article is based on 269 essays written in 1937 by Middlesbrough schoolboys aged 12-16 years on the topic 'When I leave school', which were collected by the social research organization Mass Observation. The essays provide a counterpoint to social scientific surveys of ordinary people and allow us to work with the boys' own understandings of the world they inhabited. They offer an alternative lens on a period which, at least in relation to the industrial areas of Britain, is often characterized by poverty and unemployment. This representation is largely absent from the children's essays: instead, an overwhelming sense of possibility characterizes their writing, from their wildest fantasies to their most concrete plans. Most dreamt of lives that would be long, fulfilling, domesticated, and happy. This is not to say that they were oblivious to the world around them; indeed an emphasis on security and planning suggested an implicit awareness of material context. Nonetheless these boys expressed a marked determination that their lives would be better than those of their parents. As such, they embodied the educational and occupational aspirations that are more often seen as characteristic of post-war Britain. Their essays illustrate emergent and widely held expectations of social mobility and dreams of cradle-to-grave security in the years before the Second World War, articulated-as they were being lived-by a generation which would go on to elect the 1945 Labour government.