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Stories For Children, Histories of Childhood. Volume II

 | 
Rosie Findlay
, 
Sébastien Salbayre

‘Nettles and thistles...turned into roses for life’. Constructions of childhood in the international child rescue literature 1850-1915

Shurlee Swain

Abstract

‘Nettles and thistles...turned into roses for life’ Constructions of childhood in the international child rescue literature 1850-1915
This paper analyses the discursive strategies employed in child rescue literature circulating in Britain and Australia in the period 1850 to 1915. It demonstrates how the authors intertwined the salvation of the individual and the nation, eliding local and foreign sites of mission, and drawing on metaphors of gardens, and nature to reconstitute the everyday phenomenon of the street child as an object of pity, a victim of vice and neglect, simultaneously a threat to and the embodiment of the future of nation, race and Empire. These romantic imaginings, riven with assumptions of racial and national superiority, underwrote twentieth-century child welfare policy and practice across the Empire.

Full text

1In a visit to the National Children’s Homes in London in 1887 Santa Claus made children’s rights the focus of his annual oration:

  • 1 "Christmas at the 'Homes'", The Children’s Advocate, vol. VIII, no. 86, 1887, p. 461.

The rights of children; justice is their claim :
Protect and succour them; Charity’s sweet name
May be invoked, in this most human cause,
To save the victims, and demand such laws,
As shall prevent the sorrows they endure ;
Make vice submit; the cruel evils cure
By edicts stern, and penal labour forced
From reckless sots; who must be coerced
To feed and clothe their helpless little ones,
And yield to them the dues of English sons.1

2The speaker was far from alone in his concern for children’s rights. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of child rescue organisations in Britain and her colonies, all claiming to offer salvation, through removal and relocation, to children caught in, what were perceived to be, the morally contaminated environments of the inner cities. It is the ideology of child rescue, as articulated by the charismatic leaders of the movement, which provides the focus for this paper.

3The child rescue movement played a central role in what Hugh Cunningham has described as the romantic story of child welfare. In this account:

  • 2 Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Cent (...)

The old England of cottage and fireside condemned the new England of dark satanic mills...Lord Shaftesbury...took up the cause...his capacious sympathy and his guilt-driven energy widened out to include the poor street children who were welcomed into his Ragged Schools, and whose ultimate rescue would depend on an army of charities and philanthropists...Thus the crisis was resolved, and in its resolution both children and nation moved forward to a new level of civilization.2

  • 3 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Princeton, Princeton Univers (...)

4Rather than testing the veracity of the ‘story’, however, the paper will analyze the process of its construction. It will argue that the selfproclaimed child rescuers, through the literature they generated in support of their movement, constructed a series of ‘artistic fictions’3 which functioned to reconstitute the everyday phenomenon of the street child as an object of pity, a victim of vice and neglect, simultaneously a threat to, and the embodiment of, the future of nation, race and Empire. This reconstruction, which was to prove highly influential in developing definitions of child abuse and neglect well beyond its country of origin, derived its power from its active engagement with romantic images of an ideal childhood depicted in nineteenth-century art and literature. In child rescue journals, circulating in Britain, Canada and Australia in the period 1850 to 1915, the salvation of the individual was intertwined with the salvation of the nation. Local and foreign sites of mission were elided, and metaphors of gardens, nature and moral contagion were engaged in a romantic re-imagining of the children of the streets, transporting a notion developed within the East End of London to colonies where race, religion and ethnicity produced a starkly different demographic mix from that of the mother country.

  • 4 Gillian Wagner, Barnardo, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 19.
  • 5 S. Koven, Slumming, op. cit.
  • 6 R. M. Ballantyne, "A northern waif", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. I, no. 13, 1885, p. 1-2.
  • 7 R. V. Ballard, "A Christmas story", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. I, no. 104, 1892, p. 1. R. V. Balla (...)
  • 8 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The seed and the tree", Night and Day, vol. XXXI, no. 247, 1908, p. 77-8.
  • 9 Rev Dr Fitchett, "Children's Home Conference meeting", Highways and Hedges, vol. XII, no. 141, 189 (...)
  • 10 H. Rider Haggard, "A soldier’s child", Children's League of Pity Paper, vol. III, no., 1896, p. 95 (...)
  • 11 W.T. Stead, "For all those who love their fellow men: a supplement for Christmas time", Review of (...)
  • 12 Hesba Stretton, "London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children", The Children's Advocat (...)

5The British child rescue movement grew out of the Evangelical revival but moved well beyond its religious origins. Central to each of the successful organizations was a charismatic male founder, many of whom had worked as evangelists in London during the 1866 cholera epidemic. They invoked their experiences during that epidemic to justify a focus on children. Adults, they claimed, were so deep in sin that they were beyond redemption.4 Constituting a distinct subset of the much larger group of ‘slummers’ identified by Seth Koven,5 child rescuers such as Thomas Barnardo, founder of Dr Barnardo’s Homes, Thomas Bowman Stephenson, founder of the Wesleyan National Children’s Homes, Edward de Rudolf, founder of the Anglican Waifs and Strays Society, and Benjamin Waugh, secretary of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, produced a prodigious literature, distributing journals to both child and adult supporters and publishing in the mainstream press. Their efforts were supplemented by more established authors and an array of lesser known writers, artists and poets, who incorporated child rescue themes into their work. Included amongst these supporters were such famous authors as R.M. Ballantyne,6 R.V. Ballard,7 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle8, Dr W. Fitchett9, Rider Haggard,10 W.T. Stead11 and Hesba Stretton.12 Their stories or poems were published alongside the regular contributions of staff writers and contributors whose poignant tales filled the journals month by month. Designed to alter national sensibilities while attracting continuing financial support, Barnardo’s Night and Day and Young Helpers’ League Magazine, Stephenson’s Children’s Advocate, Highways and Hedges and Our Boys and Girls, Rudolf s Our Waifs and Strays and Brothers and Sisters, and Waugh’s The Child’s Guardian and the Children’s League of Pity Paper, provide a rich archive for scholars of children’s literature and the history of childhood.

  • 13 Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, New York, Palgrave, 2001, p. 30.
  • 14 Ibid., p. 37.
  • 15 Pamela Brown, The captured World: the Child and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writings i (...)
  • 16 Harry Hendrick, "Constructions and reconstructions of British childhood: an interpretative survey, (...)

6Literary studies of the emergence of the Romantic notion of the child in pre-Revolutionary France claim that initially it had little place for the children of the streets. Judith Plotz, for example, has argued, that the lives of street children were so deformed that they were excluded from the Romantic definition of childhood.13 Yet it is difficult to agree with her conclusion that this exclusion was sustained in the longer term.14 The relationship is far more complex. The very discontinuity between the lives of such children and the Romantic ideal provided fruitful material for authors using literature to critique contemporary society.15 However, the Evangelicals, who dominated the child rescue movement, highlighted the discontinuity not in order to critique society but to control the parents and children whose morals and behaviour seemed to be threatening its stability.16 In the process they produced contradictory images locating street children simultaneously inside and outside the realm of idealized childhood, savages and aliens, yet potentially innocent and pure, and overwhelmingly in need of rescue. As Cunningham concludes, the ‘savages’ who threatened to

  • 17 H. Cunningham, Children of the Poor, op. cit., p. 5.

subvert the stability of mid-Victorian civilization...came also to be pitied, to be seen as ‘waifs and strays’ or ‘ragamuffins’ in need of rescue...and having at the same time a beauty and a fragility and a freedom from social conventions which made them a picturesque feature of the urban scene.17

  • 18 J. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, op. cit., p. 6.
  • 19 Ibid., p. 24.
  • 20 Rev W.J. Dawson, "Untitled", Highways and Hedges, vol. VI, no. 66, 1893, p. 106.

7Yet those who sought to write about, or on behalf of, poor children, struggled to find a language in which to do so. Separated both socially and geographically from their subject they were forced to use metaphor and analogy, intensifying the sense of distance and adding to the complexity of the images that emerged. Central to Romantic notions of the child were the garden analogies which located childhood in the realm of nature, an ideal constructed in direct opposition to a modernity which was seen as being estranged from nature.18 The ‘child in nature’ was free and unconstrained.19 It was the manifest falsity of such an image for the children of the poor that became a powerful tool for child rescue propagandists, accentuating the need for rescue rather than disqualifying such children from salvation. ‘Ruskin has reminded us,’ wrote the Rev W.J. Dawson, ‘that the most turpid puddle can still reflect the blue heaven and the stars; and so the soul most ingeniously darkened and befouled by man can still reflect the light and love of God.’20

  • 21 "Education and pauperism," Examiner, 1 April 1871, p. 331-3.
  • 22 Julia E. Work of Indiana, USA, cl892, quoted by John Joseph Kelso, Kelso’s notebook. Vol. 34, Kels (...)

8The garden was a source of equally powerful analogies for those who sought to advocate the means as well as the necessity for rescue. Supporters were urged to ‘cease to be content with lopping off a few leaves and branches from the poisonous tree of poverty, and boldly set themselves to attack it at its root,’21 for ‘experience proves conclusively the wisdom of removing the comparatively healthy slip from the diseased parent stock and transplanting to new and more productive soil’.22 The garden provided an argument for early intervention, for:

  • 23 Ibid., p 470.

As plants raised with tenderness are seldom strong
Man’s coltish disposition asks the thong;
And without discipline, the favorite child
Like a neglected forest, runs wild.23

  • 24 Rowland Grey, "The garden of the king", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. IV, no. 128, 1894, p. 379-80.

9In Rowland Grey’s ‘The Garden of the King’ a woman has a vision in which she is told that her mission is to transplant flowers (children) into the King’s garden.24 It is a theme repeated in Burton Betham’s poem ‘The Garden of Hope’:

  • 25 Burton Betham, "The garden of hope", Children's League of Pity Paper, vol. V, no. 5, 1897, p. 64-5

For crushed and blighted by storms unkind,
And beaten down in their fury blind,
They wither unseen till she draws near,
And brings new life with her human cheer.
And with gentle hands smooths out their leaves,
And from their softness the weed unweaves.25

  • 26 X. Chen, "Cultivating children as you would valuable plants", op. cit., p. 460.
  • 27 Ibid., ρ 461.
  • 28 Henrietta Bamett, "The home or the barrack for the children of the State", Contemporary Review, Ju (...)

10Canadian scholar Xiaobei Chen has argued that such gardening imagery was more than ‘mere rhetoric’26 Its power lay in its accessibility to a middle class audience familiar with the garden as a place in need of constant discipline and care.27 Hence they could readily comprehend Henrietta Bamett’s critique of Poor Law institutions: ‘Colossal schools, ten acre-fields in which to cultivate human flowers, each one of whom requires the special care of a cottage gardener’.28

  • 29 "The angel of the little ones, or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children",(...)
  • 30 Arthur E. Gregory, "The children of sorrow", Highways and Hedges, December 1907, p. 179.

11Child rescue literature drew much of its power from the contrast between the idealized notion of childhood (the carefully tended garden) and the ‘reality’ of life for the children of the streets (the garden run wild) to arouse support for the cause and argue for the possibilities of redemption. In an indirect reference to Wordsworth’s poem, ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy!’ Benjamin Waugh declared ‘theology is that earth’s greatest blessing and heaven’s nearest likeness is a child’.29 However, the children of the streets ‘had no heaven-surrounded infancy’.30 As Christian Burke reminded his readers in the poem ‘Grown Old Before their Time’:

  • 31 Christian Burke, "Grown old before their time", Night and Day, vol. XXII, no. 206, 1898, p. 67.

But still in our teeming cities.
Though the highways be paved with gold,
Do they not wander with aimless feet,
Children whose childhood was never sweet,
Stifled in alley and crowded street-
Hungry, neglected, cold?31

  • 32 Archdeacon F. Farrar, "The church's duty and the children's cry", Night and Day, vol. XV, no. 153, (...)

12Yet, ‘under the rags and under the dirt of our poor children’ supporters were urged ‘to see them as their angels see them, who look on the face of our Father in heaven’.32

  • 33 Elizabeth Surr, "The child-criminal" Nineteenth Century, April 1881, p. 651.

The babe born of a besotted woman in a dismal den, where no ray of sunlight penetrates the ragstuffed window, is quite as guileless, tender, and innocent a creature, as susceptible in time of good impressions, and as capable of attaining moral excellence, under efficient training, as the infant in costly cradle, whose father is a peer of the realm.33

  • 34 F. Farrar, "The church’s duty", p. 69.

13True childhood could only be restored if supporters answered the call to ‘rescue the undestroyed and uncontaminated young’.34 In a direct appeal to girls enrolled in Barnardo’s Young Helpers’League M.G.E. wrote:

  • 35 M.G.E., "A word to girl leaguers," Young Helpers' League Magazine, 1900, p. 165.

Oh sisters! shall we let the children perish?
Lambs of the Shepherd’s fold so weak and tender,
Sweet childhood lost’midst paths of sin and pain,
With but a few their deeds of love to render,
To rescue such from lives of darkest stain!35

  • 36 X. Chen, "Cultivating Children as You Would Valuable Plants", op. cit. p. 466.
  • 37 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867, Ca (...)

14Redemption was a national as well as an individual imperative. Child rescuers argued that the future of the nation lay in the salvation of the child. Here grand images of empire were melded with garden analogies, linking the child rescue cause to Britain’s imperial mission. Just as a garden untended became a jungle, so its inhabitants could be compared to the ‘savages’ that missionaries and colonial administrators were called to ‘civilise’, or, at an even lower level, to the wild animals of such regions who needed to be tamed.36 The child rescue movement was a subset of the larger missionary enterprise which Catherine Hall has identified as central to the proves of making meaning and constructing identity in nineteenth-century Britain.37 Its literature reflected and refracted developing discourses around race, distorting and disturbing national identities in the process.

  • 38 Charles Strong, "The sign of Jonah", Australian Herald, February 1891, p. 94.
  • 39 E. Surr, "The child-criminal", op. cit., p. 652.

15The British experience in the colonies provided the language with which to construct images of decay from within, both in the new industrial cities and the overcrowded districts of older urban centres. Melded with a discourse on poverty that drew heavily on notions of disease and contagion, such accounts saw the ‘slums’ and the ‘rookeries’ transformed into a ‘malarious forest swamp...a boiling sea of want, idiocy, slavery, drunkenness, no-work, homelessness, starvation, outrage, sweating, murder, prisons, asylums, suicide, and despair’ trapping women and children alike.38 Here malaria was a moral rather than a physical disease, a’malady... virulent enough to taint a whole district ‘leaving’ sin-stricken’children in its wake.39 Brought together, such tainted districts came to represent ‘Darkest England’, a direct reference to Stanley’s Darkest Africa, and just as in need of exploration and conversion.

  • 40 Cited in "The boarding-out system", Pacific Weekly, 5 June 1880, p. 80.
  • 41 Cardinal Henry Edward Manning and Benjamin Waugh, "The child of the English savage", Contemporary (...)

16The children described by Carlyle as ‘the savages of civilisation’,40 were seen as being urgently in need of rescue from their neglectful parents who, it was argued, were worse than foreign savages because they were the products of Christian civilisation rather than having been ‘discovered’ by it.41 As Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna had warned in her 1840s novel, The Little Pin-Headers:

  • 42 Quoted in P. Brown, The Captured World, op. cit., p. 74.

The miseries, the wretchedness, the sufferings, the degradation of young English girls, far exceed those of the little heathen abroad... the foulest system of pagan demoralisation, cruelty or crime, [is] second in atrocity to that which varnishes itself over with the name of Christianity, and seizes for its victims the free-bom children of Britain, baptized into a faith of which they live and die in soul-destroying ignorance.42

  • 43 T.J. Barnardo, "A rescue across the sea", Night and Day, vol. XVI, no. 163, 1892, p. 62.
  • 44 H. Manning and B. Waugh, "The child of the English savage", op. cit., p. 688.

17Comparisons invoking race were meant to shame as much as to shock. In 1892, Barnardo wrote in praise of the people, in a West Indian port, who had subscribed to rescue a golden-haired child from her depraved mother and send her to back to Britain.43 Meanwhile at home, Benjamin Waugh and Cardinal Manning warned: ‘in the light of English Christianity and in the rankness of English civilization the strong and the wicked wreak their strength and their wickedness, without remorse or pity, upon innocent and helpless childhood’.44 The plight of such child victims could only be eased if those who were so concerned for the fate of the heathen in foreign lands, turned their attention to their own country.

  • 45 Mrs E.S. Craven Green, "The claims of the needy", Ragged School Union Magazine, vol. I, no. 2, 184 (...)

Oh, Christian mothers! England's honour'd matrons,
Whose hands free aid to the far heathen pour,
How long shall little children be forbidden
To tread with naked feet, the sacred floor
Of those high temples where the SPIRIT moves,
Of Him who ever pleads and ever loves?45

  • 46 Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin Osbourne, "The Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin's letters to the 'Times'" Nig (...)

18One writer went so far as to blame the Whitechapel murders on those who work for foreign missions, while avoiding the mission field that lies within a cab fare of their homes and threatens the nation.46 It was a concern which spread well beyond the mother country. The magazines circulated in Australia, Canada and South Africa where they both cultivated support for the organisations’ child migration programs and maintained a state of alarm about continuing degeneration in the mother country. The founders, at different times, embarked on world tours, spreading the message that the survival of empire was threatened by decay at its core. It was a message that was readily echoed by supporters in the colonies. Returning, in 1891, from a trip to London, Australian clergyman, Dr Charles Strong, alerted his congregation to the danger:

  • 47 C. Strong, "The sign of Jonah", op. cit., p. 94.

If we have any patriotism, must we not feel shame that such a blot should be upon our Empire? If we are wise men, will we not recognise the fact that if one member of the race suffer, all the members suffer with it? A moral cesspool in the heart of modern civilisation must affect even those living far from its neighbourhood, especially in these days, when the nervous system of the social organisation is becoming so complex, and the end of the earth are bound together as closely as in old days were two parishes in the same provinces.47

  • 48 A. Gregory, "The children of sorrow", op. cit., p.
  • 49 O.E. Buxton, "Save the child and you will save the world", Highways and Hedges, vol. X, no. III, 1 (...)
  • 50 "Emigration: industrial schools," Australasian, April 1851, p. 387.
  • 51 Harold King, "A boys' home", Once a Week, 25 August 1866, p. 216, Rev. C.F. Tonks, "A great nation (...)
  • 52 C.F. Tonks, "A great nation", op. cit., p. 82-3

19The Darkest England metaphor served a double purpose. By situating the child as the future of the nation its advocates drew attention to the risk of national degeneration while simultaneously asserting the potentialities for change. ‘The children of the nation are its most precious treasure,’ wrote Arthur Gregory. ‘Neglected they become a curse and a burden, helped in good time they become its joy and crown.’48 ‘Childhood’, declared O.E. Buxton, ‘is the fountain with the limpid stream which if properly guarded may flow on to bless the world... Save the childhood of three generations, and we shall have saved the world.’49 It was this task which child rescuers sought to claim as their own. ‘There is a fine field for us in the young – the homeless, hopeless children of vice and misery, who swarm in our streets, and infest our highways,’wrote an early advocate of the movement.50 ‘Savages in the midst of the highest civilization... [who] have never known the tender cares, the exquisite solitude of a home’51 ‘properly cared for... will be the basis of a great nation.’52 Or, to put it in more poetic language:

  • 53 G.B.H.B., "By the wayside", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. VII, no. 186, 1899, p. 168.

These souls so lost and wretched,
Restored to joy and health,
Shall prove a priceless treasure,
Her wealth - the nation’s wealth.53

  • 54 F. Farrar, "The church's duty", op. cit., p. 70.

20By the end of the century the child rescuers were able to begin to claim success in their mission. Archdeacon Farrar asked a meeting of supporters in 1891 to ‘Consider how, if they had not thus been gathered from the streets, they might have grown up to pour oil upon the roses of their youth; how they might have grown up to swell the reeling army of our drunkards; how they might have grown up to be even felons or criminals’.54

  • 55 H. Cunningham, Children of the Poor, op. cit., p. 5. In the more than 1500 articles from child res (...)
  • 56 Troy Boone, Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire, New (...)
  • 57 Rev W.H. Finney, "Some principles of our work of waif rescue", National Waifs’Magazine, vol. XXVI, (...)
  • 58 T. Boone, Youth of Darkest England, op. cit., p. 85.
  • 59 "Going forth unto the springs," Our Waifs and Strays, vol. VII, no. 185, 1899, p. 150-1.

21While, in Cunningham’s ‘heroic story’, the threatening Arab was replaced over time by the pitiable, but redeemable, ‘waif and stray’, in the child rescue literature the two images existed side by side.55 To the Evangelical, both the savage and the waif served as evidence of urban degeneration, while simultaneously embodying the possibility for regeneration, inherently flawed yet capable of being saved.56 The salvation of the individual, and, therefore, the salvation of the nation, was dependent upon the intervention of informed and benevolent middle-class reformers who, alone, had the skills necessary for ‘rescuing’ the ‘children of England’ and ‘moulding them into a useful manhood and womanhood’.57 A successful ‘remoulding’ would also advance the imperial project, populating the ‘empty spaces’ of empire58 and fulfilling God’s plan for Anglo-Saxons to purify the earth through colonisation.59 Grown to adulthood, the former ‘savages’ of the English cities could go out to guide and control the ‘savages’ of the empire who remained perpetually children.

22Such child rescue discourse was an important component of the heroic story of child welfare, leaving its mark on child protection policies well into the twentieth century. It structured both public and political understandings of child welfare practice, creating a climate in which the separation from family could be justified as being in the ‘best interests of the child’. It also constructed and constrained the subjectivities of those who were the focus of the policy. Children in institutions, foster and adoptive homes were both readers of, and, in later years, contributors to the literature, reiterating messages of gratitude and personal salvation. The various publications, however, allowed no space for the more negative survivor stories of resentment and abuse that have emerged in recent years.

  • 60 Robert Van Krieken, "The barbarism of civilisation: cultural genocide and the 'stolen generations' (...)

23Arguably, it was in its imperial manifestation that the impact of the discourse was at its most pernicious. Local societies proliferated as colonial Evangelicals, avid readers of child rescue literature, began to perceive in their own cities, the seeds of the problem so manifest in Britain. However, in the Australian and Canadian colonies there was a ‘savage without’ as well as the ‘savage within’, a displaced Indigenous population who, in the nineteenth century, were increasingly housed in locations, remote from the gaze of local child rescuers. In child rescue literature, Indigenous peoples are present only in their implied absence, with the settler colonies repeatedly constructed as 'empty' lands. The racialised discourse of child rescue was uncritically absorbed by colonial societies, and, through their influence, became firmly implanted in statutory child welfare departments, where it was, in the future, to have a devastating impact on Indigenous populations. If the ‘savages within’ had to be deprived of their children in order to stem the moral degeneration threatening to engulf the nation, how much greater the risk posed by the ‘savages without’ whose assumed incapacity to parent came to form the basis of a nation-wide Statesponsored child removal programs in both Canada and Australia. These programs, it has been argued, were ‘not the result of the disintegration’ of Aboriginal society, as their supporters claimed, but evidence of a ‘particular form of barbarism explicitly within civilization’.60 Child rescue discourse, transplanted from the context in which it was developed, yet still imbued with the imperial and racialised assumptions of its origins, rendered this barbarism benevolent, providing justification for a policy which was to do great harm to the Indigenous communities of both emerging nations.

Bibliography

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———, "A northern waif", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. I, no. 14 1885.

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———, "The outcast live", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. VII, no. 185, 1899.

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Notes

1 "Christmas at the 'Homes'", The Children’s Advocate, vol. VIII, no. 86, 1887, p. 461.

2 Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991, p. 9.

3 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004.

4 Gillian Wagner, Barnardo, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 19.

5 S. Koven, Slumming, op. cit.

6 R. M. Ballantyne, "A northern waif", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. I, no. 13, 1885, p. 1-2.

7 R. V. Ballard, "A Christmas story", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. I, no. 104, 1892, p. 1. R. V. Ballard, "The outcast lives", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. VII, no. 185, 1899, p. 151-2.

8 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The seed and the tree", Night and Day, vol. XXXI, no. 247, 1908, p. 77-8.

9 Rev Dr Fitchett, "Children's Home Conference meeting", Highways and Hedges, vol. XII, no. 141, 1899, p. 205-7.

10 H. Rider Haggard, "A soldier’s child", Children's League of Pity Paper, vol. III, no., 1896, p. 95-6. H. Rider Haggard, "Mr H. Rider Haggard on the Society", The Child’s Guardian, vol. XVIII, no. 8, 1904, p. 85-6. H. Rider Haggard, "The real wealth of England", Night and Day, vol. XXX, no. 243, 1907, p. 74-6.

11 W.T. Stead, "For all those who love their fellow men: a supplement for Christmas time", Review of Reviews, July-December 1901, p. 670-90.

12 Hesba Stretton, "London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children", The Children's Advocate, vol. VI, no. 65, 1885, p. 89-90.

13 Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, New York, Palgrave, 2001, p. 30.

14 Ibid., p. 37.

15 Pamela Brown, The captured World: the Child and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writings in England, New York, Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 90.

16 Harry Hendrick, "Constructions and reconstructions of British childhood: an interpretative survey, 1800 to the present", in Allison James and Alan Prout (eds) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological study of childhood, London, Falmer Press, 1990, p. 42-3.

17 H. Cunningham, Children of the Poor, op. cit., p. 5.

18 J. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, op. cit., p. 6.

19 Ibid., p. 24.

20 Rev W.J. Dawson, "Untitled", Highways and Hedges, vol. VI, no. 66, 1893, p. 106.

21 "Education and pauperism," Examiner, 1 April 1871, p. 331-3.

22 Julia E. Work of Indiana, USA, cl892, quoted by John Joseph Kelso, Kelso’s notebook. Vol. 34, Kelso Papers, National Archives of Canada, cited in Xiaobei Chen, "'Cultivating children as you would valuable plants': the gardening governmentality of child saving, Toronto, Canada, 1880s-1920s", Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 16, no. 4,2003, p. 460.

23 Ibid., p 470.

24 Rowland Grey, "The garden of the king", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. IV, no. 128, 1894, p. 379-80.

25 Burton Betham, "The garden of hope", Children's League of Pity Paper, vol. V, no. 5, 1897, p. 64-5.

26 X. Chen, "Cultivating children as you would valuable plants", op. cit., p. 460.

27 Ibid., ρ 461.

28 Henrietta Bamett, "The home or the barrack for the children of the State", Contemporary Review, July-December 1894, p. 244.

29 "The angel of the little ones, or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children", Review of Reviews, July-December 1891, p. 524.

30 Arthur E. Gregory, "The children of sorrow", Highways and Hedges, December 1907, p. 179.

31 Christian Burke, "Grown old before their time", Night and Day, vol. XXII, no. 206, 1898, p. 67.

32 Archdeacon F. Farrar, "The church's duty and the children's cry", Night and Day, vol. XV, no. 153, 1891, p. 70.

33 Elizabeth Surr, "The child-criminal" Nineteenth Century, April 1881, p. 651.

34 F. Farrar, "The church’s duty", p. 69.

35 M.G.E., "A word to girl leaguers," Young Helpers' League Magazine, 1900, p. 165.

36 X. Chen, "Cultivating Children as You Would Valuable Plants", op. cit. p. 466.

37 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867, Cambridge, Polity, 2002, p. 12-13.

38 Charles Strong, "The sign of Jonah", Australian Herald, February 1891, p. 94.

39 E. Surr, "The child-criminal", op. cit., p. 652.

40 Cited in "The boarding-out system", Pacific Weekly, 5 June 1880, p. 80.

41 Cardinal Henry Edward Manning and Benjamin Waugh, "The child of the English savage", Contemporary Review, January-June 1886, p. 688.

42 Quoted in P. Brown, The Captured World, op. cit., p. 74.

43 T.J. Barnardo, "A rescue across the sea", Night and Day, vol. XVI, no. 163, 1892, p. 62.

44 H. Manning and B. Waugh, "The child of the English savage", op. cit., p. 688.

45 Mrs E.S. Craven Green, "The claims of the needy", Ragged School Union Magazine, vol. I, no. 2, 1849, p. 80.

46 Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin Osbourne, "The Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin's letters to the 'Times'" Night and Day, vol. XII, no. 129, 1888, p. 114-5.

47 C. Strong, "The sign of Jonah", op. cit., p. 94.

48 A. Gregory, "The children of sorrow", op. cit., p.

49 O.E. Buxton, "Save the child and you will save the world", Highways and Hedges, vol. X, no. III, 1897, p. 50-1.

50 "Emigration: industrial schools," Australasian, April 1851, p. 387.

51 Harold King, "A boys' home", Once a Week, 25 August 1866, p. 216, Rev. C.F. Tonks, "A great nation", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. XIV, no. 334, 1913, p. 82-3.

52 C.F. Tonks, "A great nation", op. cit., p. 82-3

53 G.B.H.B., "By the wayside", Our Waifs and Strays, vol. VII, no. 186, 1899, p. 168.

54 F. Farrar, "The church's duty", op. cit., p. 70.

55 H. Cunningham, Children of the Poor, op. cit., p. 5. In the more than 1500 articles from child rescue journals on which this paper is based the term ‘savage’ is invoked 91 times between 1851 and 1910, reaching its peak in the 1880s. The term ‘waif’ is invoked 479 times between 1855 and 1914, rising steadily in frequency throughout the period.

56 Troy Boone, Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire, New York, Routledge, 2005, p. 13, 86.

57 Rev W.H. Finney, "Some principles of our work of waif rescue", National Waifs’Magazine, vol. XXVI, no. 225, 1903, p. 51.

58 T. Boone, Youth of Darkest England, op. cit., p. 85.

59 "Going forth unto the springs," Our Waifs and Strays, vol. VII, no. 185, 1899, p. 150-1.

60 Robert Van Krieken, "The barbarism of civilisation: cultural genocide and the 'stolen generations'", British Journal of Sociology, vol. 50, no. 2, 1999, p. 299.

Author

Associate Professor Shurlee Swain is Reader in History at Australian Catholic University and a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History. Her most recent publications in the history of childhood include Confronting Cruelty, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002 (with D. Scott); ‘Infanticide, Savagery and Civilization: the Australian experience’ in D. Cooper Graves and B. Bechtold, Killing Infants: Studies in the Worldwide Practice of Infanticide, Lewiston, Mellen Press, 2006, pp. 85-105 and ‘In whose interest? Voluntarism and child care, 1880-1980’ Australian Journal of Early Childhood, vol. 29, no. 4, December 2004.

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