Child, nation, race and empire: Child rescue discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 9781526118059

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Child rescue discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915

S H U R L E E S WA I N AND MARGOT HILLEL

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general editor John M. MacKenzie When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded more than twenty-five years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With more than seventy books published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

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selected titles AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES MISSIONARIES AND THEIR MEDICINE A Christian modernity for tribal India David Hardiman

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LAW, HISTORY, COLONIALISM The reach of empire Kirkby and Coleborne

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RACE AND EMPIRE Eugenics in colonial Kenya Chloe Campbell SEX, POLITICS AND EMPIRE A postcolonial geography Richard Philips

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Child, nation, race and empire Child rescue discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel 2010 The right of Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ROAD, MANCHESTER M13 9NR, UK and ROOM 400, 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC PRESS, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 2029 WEST MALL, VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 7894 1  hardback First published 2010 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09   10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Trump Medieval by Koinonia, Manchester

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Contents

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General editor’s introduction—vi List of figures—viii Preface—x List of abbreviations—xii   1 The child as citizen

1

  2 The gospel of child rescue

16

  3 The body of the child

40

  4 The body of the nation

62

  5 The salvation of the race

79

  6 The salvation of the empire

108

  7 A new orthodoxy in child protection practice

129

  8 Lost, stolen or forgotten: the legacy of the survivors Bibliography—180 Index—193

159

[v]

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GEN ERA L EDITO R’S IN TR ODUCTIO N

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When General Charles Gordon lived at Gravesend in the 1860s, he turned

himself into a child rescuer. Since his duties in the Royal Engineers only took up his mornings, he used to gather up boy ‘waifs and strays’ (whom he called ‘scuttlers’) from the streets around his home. They were scrubbed by either his housekeeper or himself and he then ran classes for them. He also taught at a local ragged school. This represents an intriguing fusion of the iconic imperial hero, already celebrated for his suppression of the Taiping revolt and later elevated to the status of classic Victorian martyr at Khartoum, and the heroic child rescuer depicted in so much of the material surveyed here by Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel. Not the least of Gordon’s heroic reputation was based on what Victorians (and their successors) saw as his Christian philanthropic urges. For them, his ‘scuttlers’ represented the desires of an almost saintly character to elevate those less fortunate than himself. Moreover, this represented his espousal of a typical bourgeois ambition to cure perceived social ills and, by doing so, save the very nation itself. In this book Swain and Hillel survey the manner in which these typically Victorian obsessions fitted with images of childhood, with the metaphors that were used to represent the ideals associated with middle-class children, and with the ways in which the young were represented as the building blocks of a nation. These needed to be constructed on the sure bourgeois foundations of an essentially Christian ideology rather than on the shaky structures of poverty, vice and crime which appeared to threaten the survival of the edifice. Hence, child welfare and rescue movements were created not only to pursue the objectives of Charles Gordon, but also to provide, as their activists believed, a better life through emigration. These ambitions were cloaked in a strongly slanted propaganda which served to demonstrate that the often damaging effects of removing children from their own supposedly unworthy (or in some cases non-existent) families and morally repugnant environments ultimately led to worthier ends. But if the children were ‘saved’, they were invariably trained only for the most menial of tasks, and sent into colonial situations where physical and sexual abuse was rife. The actual lives they experienced were often very different indeed from the success stories laid out in the magazines, articles and lectures which the child rescuers used to propagate their Christian endeavours. In addition to dealing with the intriguingly manifold dimensions of this movement in Britain, the authors also reveal the manner in which child rescue ideas were translated to the British colonies, notably to Canada and Australia. As well as rescuing white children, however, these techniques, often in even more brutal forms, were converted to the ‘saving’ of Aboriginal and First Nations children. In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we have come to recognise the extent to which this ‘cure’ for alleged social and racial

[ vi ]

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general editor’s introduction

ills was often more damaging than the supposed social (and environmental) illnesses which alarmed the child rescuers. The middle classes and the Christian churches were assuaging their consciences rather than seeking to transform systems. Charity was more important than the structural changes (not least in economic opportunity) which were needed to alleviate child poverty or the plight of indigenous peoples left to moulder in reserves. Here was a classic case of inadequate forms of charity attempting to substitute for fundamentally necessary state action. This book is timely because its analysis of the manner in which such ideas are transmitted to the public and potential donors has real resonance for today. The ‘waifs and strays’ of Victorian times have been translated into the poor of Africa (most notably) and elsewhere. Similar techniques are used today to open the pockets of concerned individuals. Often aid, and the charitable impulses on which it is based, is indeed highly necessary, but it should never be allowed to obscure the international energies that need to be deployed in the alleviation of poverty, the improvement of environments and the avoidance of wars, inter-ethnic tensions and their results. When we hear of transnational adoption, an activity which seems to satisfy the impulses of the rich west in ‘saving’ one or two children rather than addressing the vast problem which they represent, we can see that it lies within this longer tradition of rescue. This book lays out the issues in a clear, concise and eminently readable form. John M. MacKenzie

[ vii ]

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list of Fig ur es

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1 Untitled, Children’s Advocate (1872), 1. (National Children’s Home collection, D541 D2/1/2, by courtesy of the Action for Children Archive, University of Liverpool Archives) 2 The kind policeman bent over the little human bundle, Our Darlings 60 (1882) p. 72. (Children’s book collection, JUV 586, by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library) 3 K.L. ‘Can yer spare a copper, sir?’, Bubbles (?1899), 196. (Children’s book collection, JUV 586, by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library) 4 ‘Curly’ in Canada, Children’s Advocate (June 1872), 1. (National Children’s Home collection, D541 D2/1/2, by courtesy of the Action for Children Archive) 5 A case of deliberate starvation & five weeks later, Children’s Aid Society Annual Report, 1914, p. 35. (Kelso collection, MG 30 C97, LAC) 6 What is the cause?, Children’s Advocate 20 (August 1873), 122. (National Children’s Home collection, D541 D2/1/2, by courtesy of the Action for Children Archive) 7 Jess: the story of a rescue, Bubbles (?1899), 252. (Children’s book collection, JUV 586, by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library) 8 W. Cheshire, Little Savages of Nodlon, Children’s Advocate (January 1873), 1. (National Children’s Home collection, D541 D2 /1/2, by courtesy of the Action for Children Archive) 9 Children of many nations, Highways and Hedges, XII: 143 (1899), 241. (National Children’s Home collection, D541 D2/2/12, by courtesy of the Action for Children Archive) 10 Evolution, Children’s Aid Society Annual Report 1898, following p. 30. (Kelso collection, MG 30 C97 Vol 27, LAC) 11 Rescued children as empire loyalists, Canada. (Kelso collection, MG C97 1975–69 Box 3790 PA 181968, LAC) 12 The children’s home at Koonibba mission station, near Ceduna, South Australia, 1915. (State Library of Victoria) 13 Mending day in our village, Our Darlings 80 (12 May 1883), p.  225. (Children’s book collection, JUV 586, by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library)

[ viii ]

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list of figures

14 Bett-Bett and Sue – ‘Me plenty savey Engliss, Missus’ (Mrs Aeneas Gunn, The Little Black Princess. Sydney: Robertson and Mullens, 1948. Frontispiece)

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15 Child migrants learning blacksmithing, Fairbridge Farm School, Western Australia, 1954. (National Archives of Australia)

[ ix ]

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prefa ce

Words matter. The way in which we are represented does have an impact on the way in which we understand ourselves. Unfortunately for the children who became the focus of the child rescue movement, which arose in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century and spread throughout the empire, the words which evoked pity and hence contributions from potential donors rarely constructed them in a positive way. This book arose from our intersecting interests in the history of childhood and of literature written for children. It begins by inviting the reader to explore the literature produced by the child rescue movement as received by contemporary readers, both through its own publications and through the children’s literature that incorporated child rescue themes. It then reverses the lens to ask readers to imagine the impact of such writing on the children who provided the subject matter, worked in the printeries that produced it and became its readers in their cottage homes, foster and employment placements – not all of which were as idyllic as the literature would suggest. In undertaking this analysis our aim is not to demean the work of the child rescue organisations, many of which continue today as vital providers of support to troubled families. Nor is it intended to further demean the children who were described in such denigratory and often racially offensive ways. Rather it is to urge caution, particularly in relation to simplistic solutions which see rescue as the answer to the problem of child abuse and neglect. The past has left a legacy in the present, just as present problems and practice have their origins in the past. This book aims to articulate such links in order to inform contemporary practice and policy. Our project could not have been completed without the assistance of many people. The research was funded, initially by a small grant through Australian Catholic University, which also provided the study leave which allowed the book to be completed, and later by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. This funding allowed us to employ a series of research assistants. Mary Tomsic and Julie Evans and her team did much of the early bibliographic work. Belinda Sweeney worked throughout the project, collecting and collating material, co-writing conference papers and articles, and consistently stimulating our thinking. Nell Musgrove and Ian Nisbet assisted with the preparation of the final manuscript. We have valued the support of colleagues in the School of Arts and Sciences (Vic), Australian Catholic University, and the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the staff at the repositories which are the custodians of child rescue material, and historical children’s literature, particularly Adrian Allen at the University of Liverpool Archives, and the staff at the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books at the Toronto Public Library and the Early Children’s Literature Collection at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. We owe a special debt of ­gratitude

[x]

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preface

to Sylvia Herlihy, whose quiet efficiency does much to make our lives possible, to our families for tolerating our frequent absences on research trips, to Carolyn Hateley for help in locating Canadian resources and to Kathryn and Richard, Eliza and Abe, David and Ofra and Rai for the free accommodation in the UK and Sydney. Finally we would like to thank the students on whom we have tested these ideas over recent years and trust that the research will continue to enrich our teaching into the future.

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Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel Australian Catholic University

[ xi ]

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list of abbre viati on s

ACW AH BS CA CAS CEM CG CH CLPP CR CT CU DBH FDD HH HREOC IOM LAC MN NCH ND NSPCC NSWPP NWM OBG OD OWS PROV RR RRJ RRU RSU RSUM SCMH SPCC VPP WC WSS YHLM

Australian Christian World Australian Herald Brothers and Sisters Children’s Advocate and Christian at Work Children’s Aid Society Church of England Messenger Child’s Guardian Children’s Hour from the Children’s Home Children’s League of Pity Paper Contemporary Review Children’s Treasury Children’s Union Dr Barnardo’s Homes From Dark to Dawn Highways and Hedges Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission In Our Midst Library and Archives of Canada Mission Notes National Children’s Homes Night and Day National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Votes and Proceedings of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly National Waifs’ Magazine Our Boys and Girls Our Darlings Our Waifs and Strays Public Record Office, Victoria Review of Reviews Reformatory and Refuge Journal Reformatory and Refuge Union Ragged School Union Ragged School Union Magazine Sydney City Mission Herald Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Votes and Proceedings of the Victorian Legislative Assembly War Cry Church of England Waifs and Strays Society Young Helpers’ League Magazine

[ xii ]

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Chapte r On e

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The child as citizen

On 13 February 2008 Australia’s new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, stood up in the federal parliament to offer an apology to Indigenous Australians for the pain, suffering and hurt caused to their communities by government-sanctioned child removal policies. It was a day of great emotion. Seated on the floor of the house were the elders of both ‘tribes’, Indigenous leaders who had been removed from their families as children and all but one of Australia’s living former prime ministers. The galleries and great hall of the parliament building were crowded with more members of what has come to be known as the ‘Stolen Generation’ and outside on the lawns, and in public spaces and workplaces across the nation, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians came together to witness the historic moment. The apology had been a long time coming. It was ten years since the findings of a Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) enquiry into Indigenous child removal had shocked the nation, years filled with discord as the then government refused to apologise.1 Positioning himself as defending ‘ordinary Australians’ against claims for ­reparation for wrongs for which they had not been responsible, the then prime minister, John Howard, instead committed substantial sums to contesting such claims in the courts. In Canada the path to apology has been more gradual, but no less contested. The abuse experienced by Indigenous people removed from their families as children and placed in church-administered residential schools burst onto the national agenda in public hearings associated with the 1991 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. When the minister for Indian affairs, Jane Stewart, delivered an apology as part of the government’s Statement of Reconciliation in January 1998, the victims of the child removal policy were given particular attention. A negotiated compensation agreement, which came into operation in September 2007, proved insufficient to overcome the hurt. In [1]

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child, nation, race and empire

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2008 the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear testimonies over the next five years from survivors of the residential schools and their descendants. On 11 June 2008 the prime minister, Stephen Harper, delivered an apology in the national parliament. Led into the house by survivors, 104-year-old Marguerite Wabano and Phil Fontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, he addressed an audience of parliamentarians and 250 residential school survivors, while others gathered at school sites across the country. Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influences of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture … Today, we recognise that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country … The government of Canada sincerely apologises and asks the forgiveness of the aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly, we are sorry.2

Apologies are essentially symbolic, a public acknowledgement which reverses the previous understandings of the dominant group and validates the views of the survivors. Of themselves they produce no practical change, although they can create a climate in which such change can be negotiated. Both Rudd and Harper posited their 2008 apologies as a new beginning, a first step on the way to reconciling the nation. However, there were voices on both sides of the debate who did not share their hopes: Indigenous peoples who wanted a greater commitment to practical services, and non-Indigenous people who continued to deny that any apology was warranted. The degree to which Indigenous child removal policies were embedded in the psyches of both nations in part explains the contestations about the need for apology. Howard’s ‘ordinary Australians’, fearful of the financial impact of reparation, were a receptive audience for right-wing commentators anxious to prove that no Aboriginal child was stolen, but rather, like non-Indigenous children, were removed in their best interests from situations of neglect or abuse. The policy, they argued, was benevolent, not genocidal. Similar voices were heard in Canada, suggesting that the apology cast as entirely bad a policy which had had mixed motivations and equally mixed results. The rush to apologise, it was argued, should not blind the population to the fact that ‘residential schools actually produced much that was good, alongside the much that was evil. Many of the students who attended received proper educations, learned how to speak English or French, were cured of contagious diseases and – in some cases – were actually saved from abusive situations within their own communities.’3 [2]

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the child as citizen

Such reassuring words spoke directly to the other group in the population unsettled by the discrediting of Indigenous child removal: the native and child welfare officials who had implemented the policies, and the donors who had supported them. How could a policy that was always presented so positively have harboured such harm? Why did the institutions established to improve the lives of their child residents create environments in which so many of them would be abused?4 It is not only Indigenous peoples who have contested the circumstances under which they came to be removed from their families. In Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom adults who spent time in their childhood in out-of-home care have also persuaded governments to enquire into their allegations of abuse. Their oral and written testimonies have been deeply shocking, raising questions again about the justification behind their removal from their families. Child migrants have been the subject of enquiries with similarly disturbing results and both groups have received official apologies. While it would be wrong to collapse the experiences of the groups who in Australia now call themselves Stolen Generations, Lost Innocents and Forgotten Australians, they share a need for an explanation of the social world from which their experiences emerged. This book aims to explore and explain the mentality which allowed child removal to flourish. It studies the emergence of this mentality through the publications disseminated by four influential English child rescue organisations, founded in the second half of the nineteenth century: Dr Barnardo’s (DBH), the National Children’s Homes (NCH), the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society (WSS) and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). Rather than entering into the long-running debate as to whether they were primarily humanitarian agencies or agents of social control, or contributing to the many exposés which show the disparity between rhetoric and practice, our interest is in how such organisations depicted what they were doing, as it was through this discursive process that popular notions of the child at risk were constructed.5 During the nineteenth century childhood was transformed. The child, regarded in law as little more than the property of the father, became, by century’s end, a citizen or potential citizen with a ‘new status and added respect’.6 The ‘heroic story of child rescue’ depicts anxieties aroused by the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation on child life as being resolved through the actions of individual philanthropists who alerted society to the need for change.7 This story, however, was more romance than reality. The emerging constructions of an ideal childhood arose from the clash between eighteenth-century notions of [3]

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child, nation, race and empire

the romanticised child and the grimmer realities of an industrialising Britain. ‘The more adults and adult society seemed bleak, urbanised and alienated’, Hugh Cunningham has argued, ‘the more childhood came to be seen as properly a garden, enclosing within the safety of its walls a way of life which was in touch with nature and which preserved the rude virtues of earlier periods of the history of mankind … the child was “the other” for which one yearned.’8 The pure and innocent child of the Romantics, a creature of nature and simplicity, stood as a beacon of hope in an increasingly ­disordered world.9 The discursive power of this construction provided the standard against which all provision for children was measured, the state of childhood increasingly serving as a barometer for the moral standing of the nation.10 Whether children were constituted as victims or threats, abused innocents or artful villains in training, their ­condition demanded attention. Victorian readers were introduced to such notions through ­melo­­drama, literature and other forms of cultural production, all of which child rescue advocates were later to employ. Stories provide ‘the most potent means by which perceptions, values and attitudes are transmitted from one generation to the next’.11 Children are ‘not in a position to manufacture a public image for themselves and have no control over the image others make of them’.12 The models of childhood which were developed and conveyed in children’s literature were devised by adults who had claimed the right to speak on behalf of children and to construct them in particular ways. Nineteenth-century children’s literature reinforced the tropes of the vulnerable child, needing to be taken from a life of poverty and degradation, and the charitable child, who needed to learn life-long lessons of selflessness and support for others. Books and periodicals designed to support child rescue were part of a long tradition of writing for children which emphasised charity, class and Christianity. The evangelical movement consciously used children’s literature to bring about the moral reform of the nation.13 Children would be led by example; if they read about pious and charitable children, they would desire to be similarly good. The preface to Maria Charlesworth’s Ministering Children: A Tale Dedicated to Childhood made this explicit: ‘Difficulty being sometimes felt in training children to the exercise of those kindly feelings which have the Poor as their object, it was thought an illustrative tale might prove a help’ in calling forth the desired feelings and ‘training the sympathies of children’.14 Charlesworth’s emphasis is on ‘busyness; Martha rather than Mary emphasises the Christian religious state’.15 From Isaac Watts onwards, in poetry as well as prose, ‘children were told to be thankful for their warm homes and to pity the poor’. In Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song, for example, a girl ‘who sits “in the chimney [4]

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the child as citizen

nook supping hot pottage” is “so sorry for the poor/Out in the cold”’.16 This literature also conveyed clear expectations for the behaviour of those who were the recipients of such pity. The valorised poor were those who absorbed middle-class values such as honesty, thrift and industry while ‘remaining satisfied with their humble stations in life’ and recognised the importance of religion in helping to lighten the burdens of working-class life.17 Adult readers were exposed to a similar message. Poor, exploited and neglected children were attractive to nineteenth-century authors because their plight could be seen as ‘responding to many of the social and spiritual concerns of the age and embodying a poignant and undoubtedly effective critique of contemporary values’.18 William Blake used his poetry to attack the inhumanity of industrialised English society, and its corrupting influence on children.19 ‘Holy Thursday’ directly challenges its reader to consider the incongruous juxtaposition of the poor and the richness of the country: ‘Is this a holy thing to see,/In a rich and fruitful land,/Babes reduced to misery,/ Fed with cold and usurous hand?’20 In ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ the child is depicted as a commodity, his essential helplessness abused by his father’s action. His childhood innocence has been corrupted – physically and spiritually – by the life to which he has been exposed. Addressing the reader, the chimney sweep declares: ‘When my mother died I was very young,/And my father sold me while yet my tongue/ Could scarcely cry “Weep, weep, weep, weep!”/So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.’21 Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Cry of the Children’ and ‘A Song for the Ragged Schools of London’ became anthems for the child rescue cause. She uses imagery designed to evoke in her readers both pity and a desire to change, contrasting ‘ragged children, hungry-eyed’ with ‘the sweet looks of our own children’.22 Barrett Browning savagely attacks a nation which allows the sacrifice of its children for material gain, concluding with the plea: ‘How long,’ they say, ‘how long, O cruel nation, Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart, – Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, And tread onward to your throne amid the mart? Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper, And your purple shows your path! But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper Than the strong man in his wrath.’23

Novelists also focused on the plight of children. James Greenwood’s The Little Ragamuffins or, Outcast London tells the story of a child [5]

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child, nation, race and empire

who runs away from home and becomes a street arab to escape the brutality of his father and stepmother. He steals to keep himself alive but his situation deteriorates when he is unable to find any work at the Covent Garden market. Told to ‘get out’ and ‘move off’, the boy finds it difficult to obey: ‘It’s all very well to give the order, but it isn’t everyone that can “move off” – that is, right off – for they don’t live anywhere’.24 Charles Kingsley believed that social change could only be brought about ‘by arousing the ruling classes to their duties’.25 In the tellingly named ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ he laments child mortality: God gives the most beautiful and precious thing that earth can have, and we just take it and cast it away; we toss our pearls upon the dunghill and leave them … I believe it to be a priceless boon to the child to have lived for a week, or a day: but oh, what has God given to this thankless earth, and what has the earth thrown away; and in nine cases out of ten, from its own neglect and carelessness! What that boy might have been, what he might have done as an Englishman, if he could have lived and grown up healthy and strong!26

By far the most powerful voice for children, however, was Charles Dickens, who created characters and environments which echoed throughout the child rescue literature well into the twentieth century. Dickens aimed to present the poor ‘in a favourable light to the rich’ in order to ‘advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances of their condition, in its utmost improvement, will admit of their becoming’.27 His detailed portrayals highlighted the differences in the living conditions of the people. The descriptions of slum areas – ‘some houses … were prevented from falling into the street by huge beams of wood reared against the walls … but even these crazy dens seemed to have been selected as the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches’ – are part of Dickens’s ‘profound manipulation of the reader’s visual sense in what is, in effect, the mass marketing of an ideology of sympathy’.28 Oliver Twist became the classic literary example of a vulnerable child. From his birth in a workhouse until his rescue by Mr Browning, Oliver’s life is one of neglect, brutality and societal indifference. Yet, as Margaret Weddell notes, given the sordid surroundings in which he was reared, Oliver remains ‘incredibly guileless and innocent, so pure of speech and so trustful in attitude that one might ask cynically what there was wrong with workhouse upbringing, if this was its result. Dickens, however, was a writer with a public to please. The system was bad, and he would expose it, but the little hero of his novel must not repel his readers.’29 The child rescue movement both informed and was informed by such literary endeavours. Famous authors visited the early ­child-focused [6]

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the child as citizen

missions, the founders of which drew regularly upon their works to invoke easily recognised stereotypes to describe their clientele. The central feature of such missions was the optimistic belief that early intervention in the lives of children could break the cycle of poverty.30 In 1836 Robert Owen, convinced that the ‘wickedness and misery’ of the world could be attributed to human ignorance, argued for the need to reprogramme humanity so that individuals acted ‘for the good of the whole’.31 He introduced infant schools through which ‘children of the working classes … might be withdrawn from the most unfavourable and vicious circumstances, and placed within combinations of the most favourable and virtuous that could be devised’, a scheme which he saw as having local, national, imperial and international implications.32 Child rescue, however, drew its inspiration from a more conservative source, the evangelical movement, which after establishing missions to the heathen abroad, had turned its focus to the heathen at home.33 Child rescuers located themselves within an evangelical genealogy which stretched back to the work of such anti-child labour campaigners as the earl of Shaftesbury and George Smith of Coalville, orphanage founders George Muller and Mary Bosanquet (Fletcher), the Scottish child rescuer, William Quarrier, and such influential early child evangelists as John Falk, Elizabeth Dawbarn and William Williams. What distinguished these individuals from the broader group of people working to improve services for children through such organisations as the Reformatory and Refuge Union (RRU) was the belief that they were called to the work by God, or God speaking through the voice of a child. While many of the techniques they would later use, such as the employment of boy beadles to locate street children, and the use of rural placements and child emigration, were pioneered by the Union, this sense of a personal call led child rescuers away from developing notions of scientific charity towards a reliance on personal conviction and prayer. Most of the early child rescuers had their first experiences of working with children in the ragged schools, which also had a complex genealogy. Although Dr Guthrie of Edinburgh was recognised as their pioneer, he acknowledged the influence of John Pounds, a Portsmouth cobbler, who had earlier used hot potatoes to attract boys to come to the classes he held in his workshop. Guthrie wrote widely about his experiences, disseminating the idea of the ragged school first to English urban centres and then to the colonies.34 After twelve years he was able to claim that ‘thousands of miserable children have been turned into happy and valuable members of society’.35 When the schools celebrated their silver jubilee he went further, arguing that they had both ‘put an end to juvenile mendacity’ and ‘diminished [7]

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crime’. In 1844 Guthrie’s English followers came together to form the Ragged School Union (RSU), with Shaftesbury as its chair.37 Coordinating and informing the work of the existing mission schools, and encouraging the foundation of many more, the Union was soon able to boast of similar success, receiving ‘ragged children … [and] turn[ing] them out clothed’, transforming them as they arrived ‘in their state of heathenism and turn[ing] them out committed Christians’.38 The schools provided a space in which the wealthy classes could have contact with the poor. As Europe erupted into revolution, supporters argued, the influence of the ragged schools served ‘to keep London in peace’.39 Without their influence, Shaftesbury claimed, ‘it would not have been possible for any government, with all its command of physical and military force, to have kept this country in order and subordination’.40 Ragged schools cleared ‘the noxious exhalations from an unhealthy district’ by going ‘to the source of the evil, to the head of the springs which percolate through this marshy district, and by turning them into new channels … for the uses of mankind’.41 In this they modelled the theology of the German Johann Wichern, whose juvenile reformatory, the Rauhe Haus, founded in 1833, was visited by child rescuers from both Britain and abroad, and whose German Inner Mission, established in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, was to be particularly influential amongst English evangelicals. Wichern argued that once the church had been accepted by the state in the reign of Constantine it had ignored the heathen within its midst, who now needed to be brought back to God.42 His Inner Mission was philanthropy with a wider purpose: ‘its object is to do within the sphere of Christendom what the church is endeavouring to accomplish in heathen lands ... It aims at a relief of all kinds of spiritual and temporal misery by works of faith and charity; at a revival of nominal Christendom, and a general reform of society on the basis of the Gospel and the creed of the Reformation.’43 The Ragged School Union Magazine (RSUM), which quickly attained a circulation of 5000, embraced a similar theology, using the language of mission but redirecting it to local causes.44 ‘Though we compass land and sea to win a single heathen’, one writer declared, ‘we will scarcely move a foot to save from misery and ruin the more benighted heathen at our own door.’45 Ragged school advocates argued that neither punishment nor poor relief would succeed unless the focus was on moral as well as physical reform.46 ‘The incipient disease of vice’ would only yield ‘to the ameliorating treatment of kindness’.47 Just as young people across the country had contributed to England’s success in the foreign mission field, now they could bring further glory, and stability, to their nation by contribution to ‘the necessitous at home’.48 [8]

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Ragged schools quickly developed a keen sense of their own history. Reports of individual schools began with a brief history of the district in which they were located, contrasting its past greatness to its current squalor.49 Into this environment came the original founder, commonly depicted as a missionary or explorer bravely going into unknown and dangerous territory, where children were waiting to be discovered. Come! there are RAGGED ones waiting admittance, Seeking the school-house and thronging the door, Look at the mind in their shrewd, earnest faces; Do not despise them because they are poor; The powers they possess are all wrongly directed – Too often led onward from folly to crime; Would you save them from sorrow, and ruin, and sadness? Haste to the rescue then, while there is time.50

The RSU publicity material provided vivid word pictures of the location of the schools and the children whom they served, creating the images which later child rescuers would so successfully employ. Stories and poems described the ‘overcrowded lanes and alleys’ which predominated in the ‘dark purlieus of the metropolis’, sites of ‘practical heathendom’ and ‘hotbeds of pollution’, their ‘wretched inhabitants’, ‘strangers to moral and religious principles’ yet still capable of being saved.51 Initially located in the large centres ‘where the neglected portions of humanity had gathered like a bulky sentiment’, ragged schools quickly spread across England, Scotland and Ireland, and later to the colonies, wherever ‘such numbers of ragged wanderers have presented themselves, as to be more than sufficient to fill the benches’.52 The ragged school publicists shared with the later child rescuers the conviction that a child’s condition could be read from the body, drawing on familiar tropes which enabled the reader to recognise the pale ragged child as simultaneously morally at risk and risky.53 Shaftesbury’s description, written in 1844, captures this device well: It is a curious race of beings that these philanthropists have taken in hand. Every one who walks the streets of the metropolis must daily observe several members of the tribe – bold and pert, and dirty as London sparrows, but pale, feeble and sadly inferior to them, in plumpness of outline … Whitechapel and Spitalfields teem with them like an ant’s nest … Their appearance is wild; the matted hair, the disgusting filth that renders necessary a closer inspection before the flesh can be discerned between the rags which hang about it; and the barbarian freedom from all superintendence and restraint … Visit these regions in the summer, and you are overwhelmed by the exhalations; visit them in winter, and you are shocked by the spectacle of hundreds shivering in apparel that would be scanty in the tropics.54

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child, nation, race and empire

Shaftesbury was far from alone in his use of racialised imagery which firmly positioned the children as ‘other’, foreign and yet at home, and always, subconsciously, threatening: ‘Little Bedouins … wild Arabs … Like the nigger, they cannot be put down.’55 At the same time, they are inherently children who, ‘rescued from want, ignorance and misery’, could through tender training become a ‘fine, rosy, flaxen-haired, blueeyed little creature … the pet of the whole establishment’.56 Salvation, in ragged school narratives, functioned on several differ­ ­ent levels. The ultimate goal was religious conversion fitting the child for a good Christian death. The RSUM frequently featured stories of pupils embracing their early death because it gave them access to heaven.57 Reformed children could also have a redemptive impact on their parents, ‘singing the hymns they had learned at school … [to] their drunken mothers, who are lingering in front of the gin-palace’.58 Such possibilities argued against the need to remove children from their homes. In the RSUM the children are remarkable for their respectability and independence. ‘It does not follow that, because a boy is very poor, and often very hungry and very cold, he is sure to be a thief … Some of them are not very honest, but they have also very kind hearts. Many of them love and pity each other. They love their parents, and do all they can to help them.’59 Ragged, orphaned or outcast, they are nevertheless pious, honest and clean, attending the ragged schools but continuing to support themselves, and sometimes their families, in the various trades available to poor children in the city.60 Sweeping the crossings Out in the rain, Seeking a living, But seeking in vain! Their features like charts are Painted with truthfulness, Showing their hearts are Old in their youthfulness.61

Readers were encouraged to identify with the children, even as they pitied them. Dirty or ragged clothes were evidence of the plight of children who had no one to do their laundry, and no replacements for clothes that became worn.62 Without a ‘mother’s care’ or a ‘father’s tender kindness’ the child reader was invited to reflect that they too ‘might have been a beggar’s child,/The pains of hunger oft to feel,/And learn, like some of them, to steal’.63 RSUM writers were particularly critical of people who spoke of ragged school pupils as ‘these poor creatures … like another race of beings’ without ever having met them, because ‘under a ragged exterior beats many a filial and ­affectionate [ 10 ]

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heart … which, if timely acted upon by a wise course of moral and religious training, cannot fail to produce the best results’.64 The locus of fault in such stories lay not with the children but with their parents. Writers recognised that some parents ‘were decent and industrious, until prolonged illness reduced them to extreme poverty’ or were poor widows struggling to keep their children out of the workforce but needing somewhere safe for them while they were at work.65 However, they constantly attacked ‘parents so debased and worthless as to sacrifice the good of their children for the gratification of their own disordered appetites, who will not allow their children to attend school … and who send them out to beg and steal, in order that they … may live in riot and licentiousness’, even in situations where accompanying case histories made it clear that the children saw poverty rather than parental failure as the source of their need.66 The RSUM argued against the removal of children, insisting instead that they needed to be educated and trained in the environments in which they lived.67 However, over time, the RSU pioneered most of the placement alternatives which child rescuers would later claim as their own. By 1857 the Union was responsible for 150 ragged schools, encompassing 128 Sunday schools, ninety-eight day schools, 117 evening schools, eighty-four industrial schools and sixteen refuges, and had sent over 500 children to the colonies.68 This expansion was depicted as a natural evolution, with new services developed in response to demand. Assuming that their pupils were being exploited in their street employment, individual schools developed ‘brigades’ for shoe blacks and crossing sweepers.69 While RRU members argued for the need to remove such children from the workforce, the RSU focused on the need to provide an education which would enable them to move beyond casual work.70 Concerned that some students had nowhere to sleep, individual teachers opened their classrooms as dormitories, from which developed the refuges that would later become homes.71 The debate about the merits of providing out-of-home care is a clear indication that the children accommodated were not always orphaned or homeless. Traditional philanthropy argued that to remove children was to reward pauperism by relieving parents of their responsibilities. The advocates of the new refuges responded that by removing such children they deprived lazy parents of their livelihood.72 The new refuges rewarded children by providing them with a ‘real’ home, ‘a place in which the great bond of love which binds all the world together comes out and is recognised’.73 Emigration was similarly depicted as removing the child from its worthless parents and dispatching it to colonies where workers were in short supply.74 Ragged schools were involved in child emigration from the 1840s, initially to South Africa, [ 11 ]

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and then to Australia and later Canada.75 The most common emigrant was the adolescent boy, a threat in his own country but depicted as welcoming the opportunity to take his chance abroad. ‘The poor crossing-sweeper … had a pleasing and most intelligent countenance, but in his bright blue eyes we never but once saw a look of gladness – and that once when he was accepted as an Emigrant.’76 Left ‘to starve or to steal’, such boys faced the risk of transportation. Emigration offered a more honourable alternative. ‘For those who see most of the offspring of care,/Who swarm in our streets, they are bold to declare,/ Though some may look doubtful, and others may chafe,/In Britain, they perish; – abroad, they are safe!’77 Central to the justification of emigration, and indeed to the appeal of the ragged schools, was the blending of pity and fear. While pity served to attract initial interest to the cause, it was the threat of what might happen should the schools not be supported that sustained donations. Writing in 1857, a ragged school advocate warned: ‘in the lower regions of society there are large numbers of the population steeped to the very lips in pollution and sin, the moral miasma which they engender will … spread far and wide … the deadly virus will be transmitted with increased force to their descendants … and … the whole nation might in time be corrupted by its poison’.78 The schools and their associated institutions offered a partial antidote to this threat, educating ‘wild creatures’ unaccustomed to ‘any kind of moral restraint’.79 Over time, the claims for success become more muted. Ragged schools could not offer ‘a panacea for all moral evil’, but they were, Shaftesbury concluded, ‘a palliative for a great and increasing evil’.80 Their contribution needed to be measured in terms of ‘the evil we prevent’ rather than ‘the good we accomplish … if crime is still so great and young thieves so numerous in London, what would have been the state of things had Ragged Schools not been in operation these thirteen years?’81 By the 1870s, the initial fervour which had inspired the ragged schools was in decline. The development of more specialised services for children, and, in particular, the introduction of board schools in most urban areas, addressed many of the needs which the Union had seen as its own. After some years of confusion it moved its emphasis to focus on children with disabilities and continues to provide services in that area today.82 The imagery which ragged school advocates had created in attracting support to their cause, however, remained potent, providing a vocabulary that would influence perceptions of both children in need and the appropriate ways to intervene on their behalf. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the potential of the child as citizen had been clearly articulated, although that status had [ 12 ]

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still to be secured in law. Unlike other human rights, however, the rights attached to this imagined child as citizen involved a limitation rather than an expansion of freedom or liberty, articulating what parents should do for children rather than what children could do for themselves. The corollary of such a definition was that where parents failed, children should be removed from their care. It was this notion of the child as citizen that lay at the core of the child rescue movement that emerged just as the ragged schools began to decline. While its founders adopted both the vocabulary and the fund-raising techniques that the ragged schools had pioneered, they put them to a more aggressive purpose, advocating active intervention to separate children from parents perceived to have failed, and, in the process, created a new orthodoxy for child welfare practice.

Notes   1   2   3   4   5

  6   7   8   9

10 11

12 13 14

Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: HREOC, 1997). Stephen Harper, ‘Text of prime minister Stephen Harper’s residential schools apology’, Toronto Globe and Mail (11 June 2008). ‘Editorial’, National Post (12 June 2008). Law Commission of Canada, Restoring Dignity: Responding to Child Abuse in Canadian Institutions (Ottawa: Ministry of Public Works and Government Services, 2000), 1. Bruce Bellingham, ‘Institution and family: an alternative view of nineteenthcentury child saving’, Social Problems, 33: 6 (1986), S33–S57; Clay Gish, ‘Rescuing the “waifs and strays” of the city: the western emigration program of the Children’s Aid Society’, Journal of Social History, 33: 1 (1999), 121–31. Eric Hopkins, Childhood Transformed: Working-Class Children in NineteenthCentury England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 315. Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 9. Ibid., p. 2. Pamela Brown, The Captured World: The Child and Childhood in NineteenthCentury Women’s Writings in England (New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 80. Cunningham, Children of the Poor, p. 2; Alan Richardson, ‘Romanticism and the end of childhood’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 21: 2 (1999), 171. ‘Things hoped for’, Child’s Guardian (CG) I: 6 (1887), 41–2. Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 1; Gillian Avery, ‘Children’s books and social history’ in Selma Richardson (ed.), Research About Nineteenth-Century Children and Their Books (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 23. Patricia Holland, What is a Child?: Popular Images of Childhood (London: Virago, 1992), p. 19. Margaret Nancy Cutt, Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Writing for Children (Wormley, Herts: Five Owls Press, 1979), p. 20. ‘Maria Charlesworth’, in Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer and Elaine Showalter (eds), The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 124.

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child, nation, race and empire 15 John Gilliver, ‘Religious values and children’s fiction’, Children’s Literature in Education, 17: 4 (1986), 218. 16 Barbara Garlitz, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song and nineteenth-century children’s poetry’, PMLA, 70: 3 (1955), 541. 17 Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 47. 18 Brown, Captured World, p. 90. 19 Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: a Study of the Theme in English Literature (London: Penguin, 1967), pp. 64, 66. 20 William Blake, ‘Holy Thursday’ in Alicia Ostriker (ed.), William Blake: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 119. 21 Blake, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ in Ostriker (ed.), Blake: Complete Poems, p. 108. 22 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘The Cry of the Children’ in The Complete Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Kessinger Publishing, 2005), http://books. google.com.au/books?id=7J0k1–1h6UUC. Accessed 14/01/09, p. 486. 23 Ibid. 24 James Greenwood, The Little Ragamuffins, or, Outcast London. A Story of the Sorrows and Sufferings of the Poor (London: Ward Lock, n.d.), p. 149. In all quotations, capitalisation, italicisation and other forms of emphasis are reproduced from the original source. 25 Humphrey Carpenter and Mairi Prichard, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 295. 26 Charles Kingsley, ‘The massacre of the innocents’ in The Works 1880–1885 Vol. XVIII. Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays (Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlags Buchhandlung, 1969), p. 263. 27 Monroe Engel, ‘The politics of Dickens’ novels’, PMLA, 71: 5 (1956), 957. 28 Audrey Jaffe, ‘Spectacular sympathy: visuality and ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol’, PMLA, 109: 2 (1994), 256. 29 Margaret Weddell, Child Care Pioneers (London: The Epworth Press, 1958), pp.   67–8. 30 George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Stan­­ ford: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 10. 31 ‘Association of all classes of all nations, institution, 14 Charlotte Street’, New Moral World, 2: 65 (1836), 97. 32 ‘Association of all classes of all nations, institution, 14 Charlotte Street’, New Moral World, 2: 64 (1836), 89. 33 William C. Barnhart, ‘Evangelicalism, masculinity and the making of imperial missionaries in late Georgian Britain, 1795–1820’, The Historian, 67: 4 (2005), 714. 34 ‘Sorrows of childhood’, Church of England Messenger (supplement, 7 October 1869), 3; Charles Loring Brace, Home Life in Germany (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853), pp. 72–3. 35 Jonathan Dakin, ‘An essay on ragged schools’, Tasmanian Messenger (May 1865), 140. 36 ‘Ragged schools’, Sunday Magazine (1 March 1869), 356. 37 David Williamson, Ninety – Not Out: A Record of Ninety Years’ Child Welfare Work of the Shaftesbury Society and R.S.U. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd, 1934), pp. 20–2. 38 ‘Special city meeting’, Ragged School Union Magazine (RSUM), 9: 99 (1857), 49. 39 Williamson, Ninety – Not Out, p. 23. 40 ‘Lord Shaftesbury on ragged schools: the Sheffield meeting’, RSUM, 8: 92 (1856), 149. 41 Williamson, Ninety – Not Out, p. 27. 42 ‘Germany: annual meeting of the Evangelical Church at Elberfeld in 1851: second notice’, Evangelical Christendom: Its State and Prospects, VI (1852), p. 142. 43 John F. Hurst, History of Rationalism (London: Trubner and Co., 1867), p. 264. 44 ‘The past and the future’, RSUM, 2: 21 (1850), 218.

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54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

‘The thieves’ school’, RSUM, 3: 25 (1851), 36. ‘Emigration from the ragged schools’, RSUM, 2: 15 (1850), 60. ‘Pauperism versus ragged schools’, RSUM, 4: 38 (1852), 28. ‘Emigrants from ragged schools’, RSUM, 7: 80 (1855), 160. ‘The North Street ragged schools’, RSUM, 7: 78 (1855), 125. ‘Teach the “little ragged heathen”’, RSUM, 10: 109 (1858), 17. ‘Scenes and sights in London. No. II. Golden Lane and Whitecross Street, St. Luke’s’, RSUM, 1: 8 (1849), 222. ‘A visit to the Perth industrial schools’, RSUM, 2: 13 (1850), 14. ‘Ragged schools: their locality, operations, condition, and results - Field Lane’, RSUM, 4: 48 (1852), 223. Quoted in ‘The late Earl Shaftesbury, K.G.’, Night and Day (ND), IX: 98–103 (1885), 156. Harold King, ‘A boys’ home’, Once a Week (25 August 1866), 215. ‘Wandsworth refuge and reformatory’, RSUM, 8: 89 (1856), 82. ‘Hope in death’, RSUM, 2: 13 (1850), 17. ‘The past and the future’, 219. ‘The honest ragged boy’, RSUM, 2: 16 (1850), 99. F. D., ‘The ragged convalescent’, RSUM, 3: 30 (1851), 123–4. John Westley Whitefield, ‘Poverty’s children’, RSUM, 6: 69 (1854), 182. ‘The clean shirt; or, where there is a will there is a way’, RSUM, 2: 13 (1850), 21–2. ‘No home’, RSUM, 8: 93 (1856), 184. ‘Emigration from the ragged schools’, 293. ‘The orphans of the poor’, RSUM, 3: 29 (1851), 97–9; ‘Education for out-door pauper children’, RSUM, 7: 83 (1855), 217–19. ‘The thieves’ school’, 32. ‘Town and country reformatories’, RSUM, 8: 91 (1856), 137. ‘Special city meeting’, 46. ‘Our crossing sweepers’, Reformatory and Refuge Journal (RRJ), XLVIII (1870), 60–2. ‘Street folk’, RRJ, LIII (1872), 217–22. ‘Twelve orphan boys’, RSUM, 7: 83 (1855), 209–10. R. Culling Hanbury, ‘The repression of crime’, RRJ, XXXIII (1866), 173–8. King, ‘A boys’ home’, 216. George Bell, ‘Emigration in connection with ragged and industrial schools’, RSUM, 4: 46 (1852), 182. John Eekelaar, ‘“The chief glory”: the export of children from the United Kingdom’, Journal of Law and Society, 21: 4 (1994), 488. ‘Emigration from the ragged schools’, 58. J. Payne, ‘Joy to the barque: a plea for emigration’, RSUM, 2: 15 (1850), 67. ‘The effect of ragged schools on our national morality’, RSUM, 9: 104 (1857), 147. ‘Two months’ personal experience in a ragged school farm’, RSUM, 2: 21 (1850), 230. ‘The past and the future’, p. 218; ‘New school house, Coram Street’, RSUM, 9: 98 (1857), 16. H. S., ‘The ragged school tree, No. II’, RSUM, 8: 95 (1856), 212. The Union was known as the Shaftesbury Society from 1914, and has recently merged with the John Grooms organisation to become Livability.

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Chapte r t wo

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The gospel of child rescue

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. But careless custom will this plan reject: ‘Tis new and strange,’ say they, ‘and we object, With parents’ rights, at all to interfere; The policy for us is laissez faire.’– Aye; policy of self, and selfish might; – To starve their children – is that parents’ right? Shall sottish idleness every claim neglect Of child and country; and must we then respect Such cruel license – the ‘right’ to curse the land With feeble famished Ishmaelites, whose hand In vengeance, shall be lifted for the wrong, Done to their weakness, by the heartless strong?1

Delivering his annual oration at the National Children’s Homes Edgworth training farm in 1886, Santa Claus set out the central tenets of the child rescue movement. Scarcely twenty years since its foundation, the movement’s leaders were able to claim not only that they had developed a new concept of children’s rights, but that they were well on the way to having it enshrined in law. While the new ideas about childhood served as an inspiration to many individuals and groups who joined the child rescue campaign, the extraordinary energy and effectiveness of the movement in England derived primarily from the [ 16 ]

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the gospel of child rescue

activities of four men, each of whom found in child rescue the mission that would guide the rest of his life. Thomas Barnardo (1854-1905), Thomas Bowman Stephenson (1838– 1912), Edward de Montjoie Rudolf (1852–1933) and Benjamin Waugh (1839–1908) constituted a distinct subset of the much larger group of ‘slummers’ identified by Seth Koven; middle-class Christian men who felt ‘called’ to bring salvation to the urban poor.2 Placing themselves within a Christian meta-narrative which constantly looked forward to the end times, these young men understood themselves as doing God’s work. Their target was not the foreign heathen, but the local unchurched population who had an entitlement to salvation. All worked initially as inner city evangelists, and came to share a belief that, while adults were set in their sinful ways, children were malleable and open to salvation, if they could be removed both from their evil surroundings and from the parents or guardians who had left them unprotected. ‘If the Church of Christ would but cast the arms of her faith and love round about the Children of Darkest England, before the devil raises his standard in the neglected and unhappy child-heart,’ wrote Barnardo, ‘the greatest increase the Church has ever known since apostolic days would be made in her ranks.’3 Stephenson, the son of a Wesleyan minister, was ordained at 19, and served in several northern industrial towns before being posted to Lambeth in 1868. His sympathy was immediately engaged by his ‘poor little brothers and sisters, sold to hunger and the devil’, of whom he declared, ‘I could not be free of their blood if I did not at least try to save some of them’.4 Through Wesleyan contacts he met Alfred Mager, 30, and Francis Horner, 22, engaged on a similar mission. Inspired by the example of John Falk and Johann Wichern, they decided to emulate their work in London, setting up a home in Waterloo Road into which the first boys were received in July 1869.5 Within four years Stephenson had been removed from circuit responsibilities and appointed principal of the children’s home.6 While he continued his evangelical preaching and played an active role in the governance of the Wesleyan church it is for his work amongst children that he is now remembered. Irish by birth, Thomas Barnardo came to London in 1866 as a candidate for the China Inland Mission, but quickly became engaged in mission activities in the East End. Within a year of his arrival he was appealing in evangelical newspapers for funds to provide shelter for children, opening his first cottages in 1868. However, his biographer, Gillian Wagner, suggests it would be more accurate to date the beginning of his work to 1870, when he used funds raised through contacts in the RRU to open his first permanent home in Stepney.7 Barnardo acknowledged few mentors, but his justification of his decision to [ 17 ]

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focus specifically on children reflects the language of Wichern’s inner mission:

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Our work for Christ among the neglected children of our large towns … is mission work … the very title, mission work, reminds us both of the need for such work and the character of it: the need for it, for the word brings to mind the idea of the heathen; the character of it, because it reminds us … that to be successful with this class, or any other class of the poor and sorrowful, we must bring them in contact with the blessed Lord Himself.8

Barnardo, like Stephenson, maintained an active preaching role through­­­­­­out his career, but it was his work amongst children that brought him national acclaim. Ordained in the Congregational church, Benjamin Waugh began his work with children after his appointment to Greenwich in 1866. Ill health forced his retirement from active ministry, but in 1874 he became editor of the Sunday Magazine, consolidating a writing career which had begun a year earlier with the publication of his influential book, The Gaol Cradle, Who Rocks It? In 1884, Waugh’s articles, hymns and stories for children on child rescue themes attracted the attention of the author Hesba Stretton (Sarah Smith) who asked him to co-found a London branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC).9 The London Society was the progenitor of the NSPCC, incorporated by royal charter in 1895 with Waugh as its paid director.10 Although his close collaboration with Cardinal Manning in the early years of the NSPCC acted against the more overt expressions of evangelicalism common amongst his fellow child rescuers, he freely invoked religious language in attracting support to the cause. His theology, it was reported, was simple: ‘Earth’s greatest blessing and heaven’s nearest likeness is a child.’11 However, it was also touched, with a sense of millenarian urgency, warning: ‘The time is coming when every place of worship worthy of the name of the House of God will feel that Divine service is only a blasphemous species of spiritual self-indulgence, unless means are taken to secure the discovery of every hidden, starving, and tortured little one in its neighbourhood, and to secure its protection from … ill-treatment.’12 Edward de Montjoie Rudolf came from more straitened origins, having been his family’s sole wage earner from the age of 13. However, he studied at night and passed the civil service examination in 1871. Outside working hours he taught at the Anglican Sunday school in South Lambeth, where he became superintendent in 1872. He, too, cited as his motivation an urgency that children should be brought to Christ, but he saw the church as providing the essential pathway.13 [ 18 ]

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With the support of local clergy and businessmen he founded the Church of England Central Home for Waifs and Strays in 1881, and acted as its honorary secretary.14 In 1890 this became the full-time salaried position which Rudolf, who was ordained priest in 1907, would occupy until his retirement in 1919.15 While the earliest historians of child rescue wrote in praise of the energetic founders, more recently their record has been subject to some critique. The wide disparity between publicity and practice has been well established, as has the use, or more appropriately the misuse, of photography, particularly in Barnardo’s publications, with historians drawing attention to both its persuasive misrepresentations and its sexual suggestiveness.16 This study, however, is concerned with the way in which the activities of child rescuers were understood in their own time. Stephenson, Barnardo, Waugh and Rudolph owed much of their success to the effectiveness with which they used print media to generate sympathy and financial support for their cause. Engaging with existing concerns about the threat to childhood, they constructed a series of discourses that helped to shape contemporary public opinion and hence had a significant influence on the shaping of child welfare policy, initially in Britain, but later across the empire, establishing a milieu in which proactive removal came, in some instances, to be seen as in the best interests of the child. The material produced by these child rescuers was a part of a much larger body of literature which sought to represent the ‘poor’ to middleand upper-class readers, a literature which promised to bridge the gap between the ‘two nations’ but simultaneously functioned as a cordon sanitaire, built upon a series of ‘misrepresentations and illusions’.17 It spoke to an audience informed by melodrama, and other popular forms of cultural production, and derived much of its power from its ability to replicate established cultural forms. The plight of childhood was a familiar topic, embraced by popular novelists and writers producing material specifically for children. Readership grew as schooling spread across the country, drawing lower-middle-, and even working-class children to a literature which emphasised doing something for those worse off than oneself.18 Discarding earlier Puritan views, these writers saw childhood as a time of happiness, reserving a particular pity for children who were manifestly unable to share in its joys. The child rescue message was developed in so-called ‘waif novels’, the most famous of which was Stretton’s Jessica’s Last Prayer. In such novels the plot moved forward through dialogue rather than extensive description, allowing the key redemptive character to illustrate central tenets in relation to salvation, heaven, sanctified death and Jesus’s love for children.19 In the Reverend Walter Senior’s A Strange Christmas [ 19 ]

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Angel, for example, Uncle Bob, a poor man who was ‘crippled’ by his drunken father as a baby, befriends a group of street children and gives them a Christmas dinner, at which the grand feature is a magic lantern show illustrating the Christmas story. The ‘street-arab speak’ acts as a kind of shorthand for the reader, quickly and clearly differentiating the speaker from the middle-class readers.20 Waif stories were published in different formats for different sections of the market. The Religious Tract Society, for example, published the Bouverie Penny Stories series in which they reissued works previously produced in hard cover as well as, on occasion, stories which had been published elsewhere. The child rescue magazines, in turn, would later elicit contributions from established ‘waif novel’ authors to engage their child readers. Unlike Glasgow’s William Quarrier, who, refusing to ‘send out circulars or reports broadcast over the land to interest the community’, relied on appeals in the local press augmented by a lengthy annual report distributed amongst supporters, the English child rescuers generated extensive publicity.21 Building on an audience already established by Sunday school or mission periodicals, they developed targeted magazines as a way of increasing support for their cause. Stephenson released the first issue of the Children’s Advocate and Christian at Work (CA) in 1871, adding a second magazine with a catchier title, Highways and Hedges (HH), in 1880. Barnardo’s first venture into journalism came in 1874 when he purchased an existing magazine which he retitled the Children’s Treasury (CT). Dedicated to ‘the Children of the Rich, for whose improvement and instruction the following pages were written and to the Children of the poor, for whose benefit they are now published and circulated’, CT was a commercial publication from which Barnardo derived an income.22 However, its viability was damaged in 1877 when he launched Night and Day (ND), a magazine devoted exclusively to the work of the homes. Rudolf launched his first magazine, Our Waifs and Strays (OWS), in 1882, and the NSPCC followed with the Child’s Guardian (CG) in 1887. Although these magazines regularly included material directed at children, the importance of this sector of the market was emphasised by the decision to launch separate publications for the child reader. Stephenson’s Our Boys and Girls (OBG) came first in 1877, although it was later reincorporated into the adult magazine. In 1889 he launched a second publication, the Children’s Hour from the Children’s Home (CH). When CT sales began to fall, Barnardo relaunched the magazine as Our Darlings (OD) in 1881, and in 1888 developed a second publication explicitly for children, entitled Bubbles. Later magazines were designed specifically to support the work of children’s auxiliaries: Brothers and Sisters (BS), first issued in 1890 in association with [ 20 ]

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the Children’s Union (CU), founded in 1888 to support WSS work; Barnardo’s Young Helpers’ League Magazine (YHLM), established in 1892, to support the work of a similarly named organisation founded in the previous year; and the Children’s League of Pity Paper (CLPP), published in 1893, to support the work of the leagues established by the NSPCC in 1891. The CH supported Stephenson’s work, urging children to collect for and visit the homes, and describing the lives of the children who lived there.23 Printed in-house and available by subscription, but also distributed to potential supporters and allied organisations, the magazines became the primary means by which each of the emerging organisations publicised its work. Although each had an individual style, they shared a common purpose: to inform and entertain potential donors. Night and Day, Barnardo wrote: is issued in order that our friends and the Christian public generally may more clearly understand the objects for which support is asked … Accounts of our work amongst the destitute waifs and strays of society, whether adult or juvenile, will, of course, therefore, occupy a prominent place … True narratives will, from time to time, appear … of our midnight expeditions and of our daily toils.24

Justifying his new children’s magazine, Stephenson presented himself as a ‘link between the children who have lost their father and mother, or who have been cruelly neglected or ill-used by their parents, and the children who have always been loved and cared for’ in order to remind the latter ‘that all the world is not perfectly happy, and was not made only to be a pleasant place for well-to-do children’.25 To maintain their interest he offered puzzles, competitions and adventure stories alongside the articles providing details of the work. The magazines offered a blend of literary and documentary material in both poetry and prose. They used illustrations and first names to personalise the work and to give it an immediacy for the reader. The aim was to evoke a strong visual image – ‘Dora … is four years old … very sweet to look upon, with flaxen hair, bright eyes and rosy cheeks’, for example – before going on to give details of the child’s plight.26 Affectionate or diminutive terms such as ‘wee’, ‘bairns’, ‘little maids’ and ‘laddies’ were used to reinfantilise the children and blunt any potential threat. Text boxes provided lists of facts designed to catch the reader’s eye. Stephenson’s CH listed the growing number of children being given ‘shelter and training’ in his homes under the heading ‘Who Will Help Us?’ and finished with the appeal: ‘Will not every boy and girl who reads this paper try to help us in some way or another?’27 Readers who responded to such personalised appeals were [ 21 ]

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Figure 1  This evocative untitled image locates the homeless child outside the sanctuary of the middle class home.

reassured that their donations were gratefully received. ‘My heart’, wrote Barnardo, ‘was made very glad and happy by such a proof of the love and generous care of the children for their poor little sisters.’28 [ 22 ]

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The editors adopted pseudonyms such as Aunt Nancie (Stephenson) and Uncle Edward (Rudolf) to directly address young readers. The mother of one wealthy child in a YHLM story encapsulates the importance of self-sacrifice when she says ‘it’s no gift at all if you don’t go without something. God does not call that giving.’29 Bazaars selling work made by children in the auxiliaries and performances of plays printed in supporter magazines were encouraged. Central to such endeavours was the belief that the giver could develop a relationship with the children they set out to help. Child readers were encouraged to imagine themselves in the place of the destitute child. ‘Whilst you ply your busy needles and work in other ways’, Rudolf urged CU members, ‘picture those who, like crushed and broken flowers, are sickening unto death in the dark and overcrowded city slums where God’s sunlight cannot enter.’30 Detailed, positive descriptions of the ‘homeliness’ of the various institutions in which rescued children were located encouraged readers to see removal as the logical solution to child poverty. Supporters were urged to visit the homes so that these positive impressions could be reinforced.31 The magazines made extensive use of illustrations, initially black and white line drawings, augmented later by watercolours and photographs. Illustrations reinforced the vulnerability of the children, who were depicted in ways which emphasised their poverty, dependence and fear. Hunched and set apart, ‘street arabs’ were often shown as excluded from the warmth and security of a happy, middle-class home, gazing enviously into a world they could never know (see Figure 1). Poverty was depicted via rooms, bare of the basic necessities of life, in which children huddled together trying to give each other comfort, often with the eldest girl holding the others. In such illustrations the line of her arm leads the eye of the viewer across the group, situating the girl as a substitute parent, placed in a position where childhood innocence and happiness are denied her, as she takes on responsibilities beyond her years. While the children in such illustrations are the objects of the gaze of the viewer, they rarely return that gaze, being positioned instead as subservient, looking sideways out of the illustration, up at an adult, or gazing heavenward to indicate both the ultimate help and reward. Such messages were reinforced by the individual stories which provided the core content of the magazines. In an adaptation of the waif novel, case vignettes, poems and serials were used to personalise the story of child rescue, using the plight of an individual child to stand for all. Central to such representations was the concept of melodrama, which, with its simplified characterisation and exaggerated emotions, was ideally suited to the purpose. The format was familiar: ‘the [ 23 ]

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endangered child represented pure innocence. The children’s parents, however, were either completely absent … or restricted to the role of fiendish villains.’32 The two-dimensional characters in such stories performed a symbolic function depicting recognisable types – the drunken father (the villain); the rescuer (the hero); the child as victim and redeemer – but the reader was assured of a happy ending, a child saved either through rescue or a good Christian death. Historians have shown that these stories did not accurately reflect the work of the organisations.33 However, this does not diminish the importance of such material in the shaping of public opinion. In the Victorian era the print media provided the major site for the fermentation and dissemination of social panic and moral outrage.34 Although contributors to child rescue magazines promoted their stories as ‘authenticated narratives of thrilling interest’, the claim to fact is muted.35 The stories were not simply fiction, but rather provided audiences with a ‘tool for ordering and understanding society’.36 The familiarity of the structure eased acceptance of the message, giving to such fiction / faction a mythic quality and encapsulating the foundational truths of the child rescue movement. Like all discursive constructions, such stories produced and were produced by the practices and populations they supposedly described. Understood in this way they give the historian access to ‘the intricate double helix of discourse and practice’, providing texts which can be analysed to demonstrate ‘how meanings were organised and, furthermore, how meanings informed social action’.37 Discursive analysis of such sources provides a means of understanding ‘reformers’ imaginations’ and the ‘meanings they ascribed to … [the] social and economic transformations’ of which they were a part.38 Central to the familiarity which rendered such material accessible to the reader was the use of metaphor. Romantic literature around childhood had introduced readers to the notion of childhood as a garden, providing a valuable source of imagery with which child rescue writers could engage. Children were frequently depicted as being an integral part of the ‘natural kingdom’, an affinity which was part of both their innocence and their ability to act as redeemers of the adult world.39 ‘Children in the world are the little leaves upon the tree of life. They counteract the poisonous influence of the world, the selfishness, the distrust, the unlovely things, and bring us in their place earth’s fairest flowers and golden fruit – they bring us love, and gentleness, and purity, and trust.’40 Slum children, alienated from the natural world, were represented as longing to be back in their ‘natural’ environment. They were ‘bruised lilies … down-trodden by the tramp of reckless feet’ which, with the gift of human love, could be saved ‘to bloom above’.41 [ 24 ]

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Child rescuers frequently depicted their work as gardening. Barnardo, for example, was described as finding children nettles and thistles, and turning them into ‘roses … for life’.42 The restorative touch of a woman is the theme of Burton Betham’s poem ‘The Garden of Hope’: 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.43

The garden was also used to illustrate the importance of environment. The ‘carefully nurtured’ child / plant was compared with the one raised in a much harsher environment: ‘even if taught at all what is right and good, how can the buds of beauty and of goodness open? Yet the beauty is there hidden.’44 However, readers were warned, the nature of the seed determined the quality of the fruit.45 In the common lodging houses and other haunts of the inner city ‘the vilest seed is … all too quickly sown, and rapidly bears fruit of the saddest kind’.46 Such gardening imagery was more than ‘mere rhetoric’.47 Rather it functioned as ‘a fitting allegory for bio-power … very useful for illustrating and naturalizing the governing mode within child saving … [because] gardening was a common and taken-for-granted practice that at least the middle-class could very easily relate to’.48 The implied familiarity naturalised child removal because ‘experience proves conclusively the wisdom of removing the comparatively healthy slip from the diseased parent stock and transplanting to new and more productive soil’.49 ‘Poor wee flowers’ who had experienced ‘no sunshine and little but storm’ could be ‘transplanted into one of the Church’s gardens, where such human flowers are tended and cultivated’.50 Nautical imagery provided a second powerful language through which to depict the plight of suffering children. ‘The cold world’s hungry sea’ was a more malevolent environment than the garden. It ‘tossed’ the ‘tattered, battered, weary, lone’, leaving the ‘little helpless ships … at the mercy of the storm’.51 Children asking for help were depicted as shipwreck victims for whom the homes provided both the lighthouse and the rescue boat.52 ‘The life-boat that can face the storm and save a child costs only £16 per year for each rescued waif. “Who will give a hand to help us launch the boat away?”’53 Those still trapped in the ‘great ocean of child-suffering ever rolling round us – a dark and mighty flood of sorrow’ called for child rescuers to follow the disciples and engage in some ‘deep-sea fishing’.54 ‘To lead the wandering feet of these poor outcasts to Jesus Christ were indeed a task worthy of [ 25 ]

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angels’ toil; but God in His sovereign grace has delegated it to none others than saved sinners.’55 This biblical reference points to the third, and by far the most powerful, source of imagery: evangelical Christianity. Addressing a biblically literate audience, child rescuers were able to use scriptural references to quickly convey a sometimes complex message. The most used text was Matthew 25:40: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’, so redolent of meaning that it could be summed up in a single word ‘Inasmuch’.56 It appears in its whole or in its constituent parts in poetry and prose, as an invocation and a justification, an encouragement and a warning, across time and place, reminding the reader that the child stands in the place of Christ, and that, therefore, in helping the child they provide direct service to the Saviour.57 Charity, Rudolf reminded his supporters, was not a claim of the poor upon the rich, but a service owed by man to God.58 The opportunity to minister to ‘one of the least of these little ones’ was an ‘honour and privilege’, rather than a burdensome duty, for each of these little ones was proof that ‘unheard … unseen … He walks on earth … and all good deeds are done to Him’.59 The image of Christ as the Good Shepherd was also open to multiple uses, with the suffering children being equated with the lambs to be fed or the lost sheep which needed to be found.60 Without a shepherd the children of the street were left at the mercy of the cold and at risk from wild beasts, which often also functioned as a metaphor for the temptation to sin.61 The parable of the lost sheep was invoked to remind readers of ‘what Christian men and women ought always to be doing, going after the lost, who are so numerous in our large cities and whose moral and religious welfare is a matter of such vast import to every one of us’.62 For those who chose to ignore such encouragement, the story of Dives and Lazarus served as a potent reminder that wealth could not ensure eternal life. The childhood of Christ as detailed in the gospels, and the special attention he paid to children during his ministry, also provided valuable material. Born in a stable, Christ was imagined as having a particular empathy with homeless children.63 Matthew 19:14, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me’, was used both in its literal meaning to illustrate Christ’s inclusive attitude towards children, and reversed to imply that children should not be suffering. ‘Suffer the little children’, in this context, became an order to latterday disciples to actively seek the suffering and bring them into his care.64 If Christ came to London, readers were reminded, he would be found ‘not feasting at the rich tables of the West End, but lamenting the wretchedness and weeping over the miseries of the helpless little [ 26 ]

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children of the East End slums and alleys’.65 Such behaviour provided the standard against which his followers would be judged. Child rescuers constructed their own stories within the context of this shared understanding of scripture, presenting themselves as being called by God acting through a child. This, their supporters argued, was how change came about. ‘First, God puts it into the mind of some one or more of his servants the prophets; disciples are made for the cause and a society is formed; finally the Nation awakes and acts.’66 William Quarrier cited an encounter with a small boy in 1864 for inspiring him to begin his child rescue work.67 Barnardo’s founding story centred around Jim Jarvis, a homeless boy of about 10 whom he met early in his evangelical career. When Barnardo asks Jarvis whether there are others like him, the boy replies, ‘Oh yes, sir, lots – ’eaps of ’em! More’n I could count!’ Having been taken by Jarvis to the places where he slept, Barnardo determined to make the rescue of such children his life mission.68 Later developments in his work were also justified through such individual encounters. The story of ‘Carrots’, John Somers, a boy found dead after having been refused access to Barnardo’s shelter because of lack of room, was used to explain his decision to adopt the slogan ‘No destitute child refused admission’.69 Credit for the move to accommodate girls was given to ‘a poor, ragged, homeless little girl’ who knocked on the door at Stepney and asked: ‘Please, do you take little “gells” here?’70 Stephenson attributed his call to the ‘street arab’ who interrupted one of his first attempts at street preaching in London.71 This disruptive boy inspired him to seek out ‘homeless children in old warehouses and barrels, on waste land and on the wharves near London Bridge’ and to gather them in a home.72 Rudolf dated his call to the moment when ‘two little fellows … amongst the best behaved and most regular attendants’ at his Sunday School ‘suddenly disappeared without previous warning’. He enquired into their situation and found that the death of their father had left the family penniless, forcing the boys into begging. Shocked that no Anglican institution was available to assist such regular churchgoers, he determined to meet this need.73 Although the NSPCC traced its origins to the Mary Ellen story which led to the foundation of the first SPCC in New York, Waugh was not beyond creating a mythology of his own.74 Well before Barnardo, admirers were told, Waugh was acquainted with ‘the plight of neglected, ill-treated and wronged children … [the] many waifs whose only bedroom was some untenanted shed or lean-to in a dark alley’.75 Foundation stories shared a series of common tropes. They all depicted child rescue as an active process, in which the rescuer / explorer ventured into unknown areas to seek out the child at risk. [ 27 ]

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‘If we wish to get to the very bottom of the social deep we must not trust to our ears only, but try to see with our own eyes as far as we possibly can.’76 In a process colourfully described as waif-hunting, the child rescuers or their acolytes, with a policeman or rescued boy as a guide, set out into the night (see Figure 2).77 ‘We have learnt that about one o’clock in the morning is the best time to begin our search. By this time those who have no better shelter, being down on their luck, have crawled in and settled down somewhere for the night.’78 ‘We hunt in pairs’, wrote one of Rudolf’s workers. ‘There is a room, with a fire, and there provision is made for tea and bread-and-butter … It is from this room we set out, after kneeling in prayer for Divine guidance and assistance.’79 Divine guidance ensured that the waif-hunter ‘could see something in a ragged child in the street that everyone else would pass unnoticed’.80 Waugh enjoined his inspectors: ‘Going through the street, do not look at its buses, shops, and people, see its children – rejoice in their mirth, pity their languor, and weep over their hurts’.81 In accounts of such adventures the child rescuer was always the hero.82 Barnardo provided vivid accounts of being attacked by wild women and bed bugs in common lodging-houses, while Rudolf’s publications preserved a special place for the handsome young curate always on hand to demonstrate that ‘the Church cares!’83 While it was common in such accounts to valorise the children rescued in this way because they were not the ‘type’ who would actively seek out help, there is a contradictory thread which justifies the work on the basis of the children’s initiative.84 A begging child, asked what he required, ‘fixed his sad eyes on me, / As a short reply he made: / “Everything.” – Such the only / Claim of the child for aid’.85 More commonly the child is depicted as asking for help on behalf of others, younger siblings or fellow street workers in greater need. ‘There’s fifty up our alley, alone, / As plays along with me.’86 Even those who ask on their own behalf echo the child rescuer’s definition of their need. Sam Lepper, asked why he wanted to abandon the freedom of street life, replies: ‘Well, it ain’t exactly enjoy’ble, ye know, but it ain’t bad. There’s a livin’ to be got, but it’s hard work, wery, and then there’s the cold and the wet and the bein’ down on yer luck and getting’ into scrapes sometimes … it’s all wery well now when I ain’t growed, but in a year or so people won’t give me a job.’87 Child rescuers also claimed allies amongst the poor, who ‘hopelessly ruined ... yet could not view with indifference’ the fate of children who had not yet fallen.88 Few parents were credited with such insight. By constituting their charges as orphans or ‘worse than orphans’ child rescuers aimed to attract support which may have been less forthcoming if the failings of the parent had to be taken into account. The [ 28 ]

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Figure 2  Here the policemen is depicted in waif-hunting mode.

appeal of the waif, ‘a child … alone in the world … without a friend, without a home’, was well established.89 Poems and stories capitalised on this image, often placing child rescue workers in the place of the missing parents.90 ‘Actual mothers have not the sole rights of motherhood’, NCH workers were told. ‘There are many potential mothers and [ 29 ]

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fathers who have never held their own child in their arms, yet are our great teachers and organisers of child life, and the parenthood of a vast army of other people’s children.’91 Where parents could not be totally erased, children were depicted as seeking to be rescued from them. ‘Poor little mites, some orphans, born in the mid’st of sin, / No one to love or help them, no one to take them in; / Deserted by cruel parents, left on the streets to die: / “O for food and shelter,” this is the children’s cry.’92 The best parents, worthy widows or fathers with drunken wives, realised their own inadequacy and voluntarily relinquished their children to save them from inevitable harm.93 Their children are constituted as burdens from which the parent needs, and should want, relief.94 An invalid husband whose wife had to work to support the family expressed gratitude to the benefactor who agreed to provide for their youngest son: ‘he’s not hardened like the others, and it’ll take care to rear him; and with trousering she can’t take care, like what mothers do who don’t trouser and who have men to work for ’em instead of men to do for, like with me’.95 Most parents, however, were cast in the role of villain. Even those depicted as victims of an economic downturn attracted little sympathy. ‘They had squandered their money in reckless extravagance … and now they had to suffer for it,’ readers were told, but ‘the little children – what had they done?’ 96 Where parents failed, the intervention of the child rescuer was a ‘necessary interference’.97 ‘The child is the first to suffer, therefore the child is the first to need our care.’98 To remove children in such circumstances was not to reward parents for their indolence but ‘to save young lives from the poverty, neglect and peril into which they have been thrust by the culpable ignorance and shiftlessness, or vice and intemperance’ of their parents.99 By consistently attempting to imagine such children as orphans, Lydia Murdoch has argued, child rescuers were engaged in an act of duplicity, as part of a larger project, to deprive working-class parents of citizen rights.100 While child rescue was undoubtedly a conservative project, the purpose of this deception was far more straightforward. Unlike Muller and Quarrier, these English child rescuers rejected the notion of the faith mission.101 ‘We believe in faith’, argued Stephenson, ‘and could never have won success without it. But we believe also in works.’102 As the expansion of the work depended on effective fundraising all of the founders became masters of the art, repackaging their material to best appeal to the giving public. They did this by transforming the ordinary, everyday phenomenon of the street child into a cause or a wrong demanding individual and national action. The target audience was not unaware of the existence of street children. Newsboys, crossing sweepers, match and flower sellers, [ 30 ]

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essentially self-supporting and successfully avoiding the attention of the guardians of the poor, were a familiar sight, but child rescuers set out to problematise their situation, suggesting both that they were deserving of pity and, if left unattended, would, in adulthood, join the ranks of the criminal and the vicious. Rather than rush past ‘that dirty and ragged lad standing by the station gate’, readers were enjoined to ask ‘why he is what he is’ (see Figure 3).103 Instead of ignoring the newsboy, they were asked to consider ‘Where shall he sleep, or how be fed?’104 The plaintive flower seller was reimagined as the victim of a vicious mother who would beat her if she returned home with her stock unsold.105 ‘But what will become of them, left as they are, / In a life that is worse than death by far? / Must they fall in the enemy’s cruel snares, / The little street girls for whom no one cares?’106 The writers drew on existing tropes to reposition such children in the middle-class imaginary. The use of children for begging was reconstituted as ‘white child slavery’ and Dickens’s famous child characters, Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Nell, were used to good effect.107 By this process such children were ‘othered’ just as they were being embraced. Numerous poems and stories contrasted the lives of the children of potential donors with those of the ‘other children’ on whom ‘no sunbeams smiled’.108 Child readers were reminded that their privileged childhoods obliged them to help those who were less fortunate.109 At the conclusion of a play written to be performed by CU members the (now rescued) waif tells the audience: ‘There’s lots of little Waifs and Strays like me, and we want you to help them. Billy and me has got our warm clothes now, but if you can spare a copper for little ’uns as aren’t as lucky as we … Billy and me will say – “Thank you very much.”’110 It was an obligation that the rich crippled girl, Gladys, was depicted as embracing. Having agreed to sponsor a similarly disabled girl in one of the WSS homes, she was somewhat taken aback when the child observes she may be ‘crooked like me … but you’re not a nobody’s child’. ‘“We are both God’s children,” said Gladys gently, “and though I’m crooked like you, as you say, and only a child like you, I am going to call you my child”.’111 In serials this exclusion / inclusion could be developed more fully with plot lines that saw a ragged child rescued by a lonely woman turn out to be the woman’s own child, believed dead, but actually stolen by servants or gypsies many years before.112 The needy child, readers were reminded, was not alien, but could indeed be their own. The appeal of children lay in their potential for transformation, a theme already well established in children’s literature. R.M. Ballantyne’s Dusty Diamond Cut and Polished: A Story of City Arab Life [ 31 ]

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child, nation, race and empire

Figure 3  Problematising the familiar image of the street child

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the gospel of child rescue

and Adventure introduced Hetty, ‘one of those dusty diamonds of what may be styled the East-end diggings of London … whose lustre is dimmed and whose intrinsic value somewhat concealed by the neglect and the moral and physical filth by which they are surrounded’, yet with the potential to be both brightly shining and valuable to society if only she is rescued from her plight.113 Barnardo told and retold the story of ‘Punch’, the leader of a gang of young thieves who agreed to come to the home having been promised that he would learn to read, and emerged a changed man.114 ‘Nobody’s children’ became ‘somebody’s darlings’, their lives transformed by love.115 Encountering a woman who had shown him kindness as a child, a once ragged boy declared: ‘Your face, madam, has been a light to me in my dark hours of life; and now, thank God, though the boy is still a humble, hard-working man, he is an honest and grateful one.’116 The magazines provided the child rescuers with an outlet through which they could define and redefine the services they were ­delivering. The work was preventive, rescuing children before they became ‘profligates and criminals’ and hence a cost to the state.117 They emphasised the homelike nature of their institutions, where children were cared for in families – a privilege, it was soon argued, that should be extended to the orphans of ‘respectable parents’ as well as to street children.118 As material conditions for children in the inner cities improved, particularly after the introduction of board schools in the 1880s, child rescue organisations justified their continuing operation by alerting readers to the ‘youthful nomades’ whom the board schools did not reach, ‘that friendless and destitute class of juveniles who otherwise would almost inevitably lapse into crime’ and the children with disabilities who needed specialised care and training.119 When the NSPCC brought child cruelty to the fore, the other societies used their magazines to show that they were already alert to the problem and to illustrate how they cooperated with the NSPCC to accommodate the child victims. Once it became apparent that the bulk of the cases in which the NSPCC was intervening did not involve the drastic cruelty which had attracted attention to the cause, the CG mounted an argument that neglect also constituted cruelty.120 Although the child rescuers presented themselves as being engaged in a common endeavour, they were also rivals. Quarrier reacted angrily when Barnardo’s, described only as a ‘certain London institution’, established a receiving house in Edinburgh, arguing that his organisation had shown that Scotland could care for its own.121 Barnardo, in turn, was constantly seeking to differentiate his work. He accused Rudolf of attempting to ‘blacken my character and to traduce the work’ by suggesting that a separate organisation was needed for [ 33 ]

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child, nation, race and empire

Anglican children and argued that his was the only organisation that accepted and maintained all children irrespective of age and condition. According to him, the NSPCC had come under Catholic control.122 Barnardo also used the pages of Night and Day to respond to accusations of sectarianism and child abduction, declaring: ‘The Church of Rome not only prefers that its own children should die of want rather than for them to enter a Protestant institution; but it will even set all its machinery in motion … to make proselytes of those who have been deprived of their natural protectors.’123 Quarrier regarded the ‘Romish priests’ who took him to court on several occasions in a similar light.124 Stephenson, however, chose to avoid such conflicts. While he was equally suspicious of the Catholic church’s motives, he argued that it was better to put Catholic children ‘into the hands of the authorities of that Communion at once, rather than spend money and labour on them, only to have them taken from us after all’.125 Rapid expansion brought increasing debts, but the magazines chose to focus on the achievements of the founders, in the hope that readers would respond generously. The tone was celebratory, with significant anniversaries commemorated by impressive lists of achievements, and detailed accounts of public meetings at which the work of the homes was praised, interspersed with groups of children ‘performing’ their plight and their rescue. Barnardo’s silver anniversary appeal invited readers to imagine: a vast procession … of over 18,000 individuals … ten thousand are tearstained … for each has lost one parent or both … Six thousand march with drooping heads and faces of shame, for their parents, one or both, are such as no child could ever honour or regret. Two thousand … bear sore bruises or recent scars … The serried ranks are closed by fifteen hundred … [of] the maimed, the halt, the blind … Every little heart has already known its own bitterness. They look so wan, ill-fed, thin-clad, and wretched.126

By the thirtieth anniversary a further 12,000 children had been added to the imagined procession and on Barnardo’s death the number had doubled.127 The other child rescuers used similar tactics, although they made more modest claims. NCH accommodated 1000 children when Stephenson retired in 1900, a number which continued to grow in the following years.128 After twenty-five years Rudolf could boast of being responsible for ninety-nine homes accommodating 3501 children, with up to 1000 being admitted annually.129 The child rescue movement was largely coincident with the reign of Queen Victoria, and used her jubilees and death to reflect on its achievements with pride. ‘Every single Act now standing on the [ 34 ]

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the gospel of child rescue

Statute Book for the protection of children has been passed during Her Majesty’s reign’, boasted Barnardo.130 The ‘most remarkable development’ of the nineteenth century ‘was the discovery of the child’.131 Child rescuers claimed a central role in this discovery, positioning themselves as the ‘Christ-like rescuers’ who had saved ‘the nomad and wastrel children’.132 The notion of child abuse and neglect and the solution which they propagated came to be accepted as real both by the readers of their magazines and the politicians and policy makers whom they were in a position to influence. Children reproduced romantic stories of child rescue to be published alongside the work of the many prominent authors who contributed to the magazines, while politicians, churchmen and national heroes endorsed their work at large public events. The gospel of child rescue was a discursive creation, the impact of which would be felt for generations to come. The founders of the English child rescue movement have been widely praised for the contribution they made in establishing citizenship rights for children, freeing them from their prior legal status as paternal property. By reconstituting poor children as worse than orphaned, they shifted the emphasis from the failings of the parents to the vulnerability of the child. The dramatic growth in support for their work is evidence for the attraction of this strategy. However, it was a strategy which constructed a particular type of victim, and implied a particular type of treatment, which, in the long term, was not always in the best interest of the child.

Notes   1 ‘Christmas at the “Homes”’, Children’s Advocate (CA), VIII: 86 (1887), 40.   2 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).   3 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The economics of child rescue’, ND, XIX: 182 (1895), 3.   4 Songs of the Christian Life and Work, Sung by T. Bowman Stephenson, B.A., of London, England, in Behalf of the Children’s Home, London, Edgworth and Gravesend (in England), and Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, with Four Engravings of the Homes, and a Sketch of Their History (Toronto: Samuel Rose, 1877), 8. ‘Dr. Bowman Stephenson and the children’s home’, Spectator (20 October 1882), 294   5 Cyril Davey, A Man for All Children: The Story of Thomas Bowman Stephenson (London: Epworth Press, 1968), pp. 35–40.   6 Ibid., p. 72.   7 Gillian Wagner, Barnardo (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), pp. 25–8, 36.   8 T.J. Barnardo, Little emigrants’, ND, VIII: 87 & 88 (1884), 101.   9 Benjamin Waugh, ‘Come, Ye Children’: Heart Stories for the Young (London: Cassell and Co., 1889). 10 George Behlmer, ‘Waugh, Benjamin (1839–1908)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36787. Accessed 14/03/08. 11 ‘The angel of the little ones, or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’, Review of Reviews, 4 (1891), 524.

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child, nation, race and empire 12 Ibid., 526–7. 13 Brother Bill, ‘An interview with Uncle Edward’, Brothers and Sisters (BS), 142 (1905), 6. 14 ‘Untitled’, Our Waifs and Strays (OWS), 78 (1890), 3. 15 Margaret Weddell, Child Care Pioneers (London: The Epworth Press, 1958), p. 27. 16 On photography see Seth Koven, ‘Dr Barnardo’s “artistic fictions”: photography, sexuality, and the ragged child in Victorian London’, Radical History Review, 69 (1997), 6–45; A. McHoul, ‘Taking the children: some reflections at a distance on the camera and Dr Barnardo’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 5: 1 (1991), 35–50. 17 Joseph W. Childers, ‘Observation and representation: Mr. Chadwick writes the poor’, Victorian Studies, 37: 3 (1994), 408. 18 J. S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 63. 19 Ibid., pp. 192–3. 20 Anna Davin, ‘Waif stories in late nineteenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal, 52 (2001), 76. 21 William Quarrier, A Narrative of Facts Relative to Work Done for Christ in ­Connection with the Orphan Homes of Scotland, and Destitute Children’s Emigration Homes, and City Home and Mission, Glasgow (Glasgow: Aird and Coghill, 1890), p.  95. 22 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Preface’, Children’s Treasury (CT) (July 1876), unpaginated. 23 Stephenson, ‘A peep at a boys’ dinner table’, CH, 56 (1893), 4; CH, 63 (1894), 2; CH, 122 (1899), 4. 24 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Editorial’, ND, I: 1 (1877), 1–2. 25 Thomas Bowman Stephenson, ‘Introductory’, Children’s Hour from the Children’s Home (CH), 1 (1889), 1. 26 Marian Isabel Hurrell, ‘Babies’ castle’, in Bubbles (London: The Children’s Bookroom, 1899), p. 295. 27 CH (18 June 1890), 4; CH (January 1899), 2. 28 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The children’s gift’, Our Darlings (OD), 18 (March 1882), 147. 29 A. Jaye Penne, ‘Connie’s gift’, Young Helpers’ League Magazine (YHLM) (December 1908), 253. 30 Edward de M. Rudolf, ‘A New Year’s message’, BS, 166 (1907), 3. 31 Stephenson, ‘A peep at a boys’ dinner table’, 4. 32 Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 9. 33 See for example Bruce Bellingham, ‘Waifs and strays: child abandonment, foster care, and families in mid-nineteenth-century New York’, in Peter Mandler (ed.), The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 133ff.; Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1879–1924 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), ch. 4. 34 Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson, ‘Introduction’, in Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson (eds), Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social Panics, and Moral Outrage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), p. xxii. 35 Hon. Thomas Pelham, ‘The story of a street singer’, ND, I: 10 & 11 (1877), 121. 36 Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, pp. 15–16. 37 Stephen Garton, ‘Asylum histories: reconsidering Australia’s lunatic past’, in Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (eds), ‘Madness’ in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003), p. 5; Carolyn Strange, ‘Stories of their lives: the historian and the capital case file’, in Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson (eds), On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 26–7. 38 Kathleen Canning, ‘Feminist history after the linguistic turn: historicizing discourse and experience,’ Signs, 19: 2 (1994), 382–3. 39 Robert Rosenblum, The Romantic Child from Runge to Sendak (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 39.

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the gospel of child rescue 40 M.G.P., ‘The orphan’s cry’, CA, 4: 26 (1874), 19. 41 Sarah Doudney, ‘Living flowers’, ND, VI: 58 & 59 (1882), 34. 42 Rev. Canon Fleming, ‘The arms of God’s mercy and love’, National Waifs’ Magazine (NWM), XXVIII: 232 (1905), 10. 43 Burton Betham, ‘The garden of hope’, Children’s League of Pity Paper (CLPP), V: 5 (1897), 64-5. 44 M.B., ‘The two kalmias; or, a plea for our “homes”’, OWS, I: 100 (1892), 11. 45 Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, ‘The Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin’s letters to The “Times”’, ND, XII: 129 (1888), 114. 46 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Rescued for life: the true story of a young thief’, ND, VI: 66 & 67 (1882), 114. 47 Xiaobei Chen, ‘“Cultivating children as you would valuable plants’: the gardening governmentality of child saving, Toronto, Canada, 1880s-1920s’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 16: 4 (2003), 460. 48 Ibid., 461–2. 49 Ibid., 460. 50 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 11 – a transplanted rose’, OWS, VII: 186 (1899), 166–7. 51 Rev. Joseph McKim, ‘Night and day’, ND, XXX: 241 (1907), 40. ‘Wrecks and rescues’, OWS, XIII: 324 (1912), 321. 52 T.J. Barnardo, Shipwrecked at Our Doors! (London: National Incorporated Waifs’ Association, n.d.). 53 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Flotsam and jetsam’, ND, III: 6 (1879), 68. 54 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Delivered from bondage’, ND, XIX: 186 (1895), 74. 55 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Deep sea fishing’, ND, II: 2 (1878), 33. 56 ‘Inasmuch’, NWM, XXIV: 212 (1900), 46. 57 See for example A.A.M, ‘A Christmas appeal’, ND, XXII: 207 (1898), 88; Rev. L.L. Barclay, ‘Do help the little ones’, OWS, IV: 108 (1893), 54; Helen Crofton, ‘To the members of the Children’s Union’, BS, II: 20 (1894), 56–7; Dec, ‘Helpless little beggars’, YHLM (1900), 109–10; Archdeacon Farrar, ‘Archdeacon Farrar on the children’s home’, Highways and Hedges (HH), VI: 66 (1893), 114. 58 ‘Principle in charity’, OWS, I: 19 (1885), 2. 59 ‘The secretary’s letter’, Spectator (29 July 1892), 664; ‘Help the Children’s Aid Society to help the children’ (n.d.), Kelso papers, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), MG30 C97 Volume 36 File 259. 60 See for example Elliot, ‘Haunted’, CA (May 1873), 66; Mrs Merrill E. Gates, ‘Feed my sheep!’, ND, XXXIV: 257 (1911), 39; J.W. Horsley, ‘Cui bono?’, OWS, XIV: 335 (1913), 109; M.G.E., ‘A word to girl leaguers’, YHLM (1900), 165; Helen Milman, ‘The “C.U.” Motto’, BS, 1: 7 (1891), 106; Dr Barnardo, ‘The lost child’, CT 262 (1880), 14; Miss M.A. Kidder, ‘Open the door to the children’, HH, VI: 70 (1893), 193; Eleanor G. Hayden, ‘A transformation’, in Bubbles (London: The Children’s Bookroom, 1888), p. 138. 61 T.J. Barnardo, ‘From the shadows of the back courts’, ND, XVII: 170 (1893), 14. 62 ‘Report of the proceedings of the sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Hamilton Children’s Aid Society’ (Hamilton: Children’s Aid Society, 1910), Kelso papers, LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 25 Children’s Aid Society (CAS) Hamilton folder. 63 K.L.S., ‘The Christmas sermon’, OWS, V: 141 (1896), 209; Esther Wiglesworth, ‘Christmas Day’, OWS, I: 21 (1886), 7. 64 O.S., ‘In memorium: Thomas John Barnardo, F.R.C.S. Ed: Born, July 4, 1845. Died, September 19, 1905’, NWM, XXVIII: 234 (1905), 41. 65 ‘Give the lad a chance’, OWS, XI: 277 (1907), 157. 66 Rev. F.L. Donaldson, ‘The over-parent’, ND, XXXV: 261 (1912), 5. 67 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: George Gallie & Son, 1872), p. 3. 68 T.J. Barnardo, ‘An oft told tale’, ND, II: 6 (1878), 66. 69 This story has many iterations. See for example ‘Street boys rescued’, ND, I: 9 (1877), 106–7; ‘Little “Carrots”’, CA (April 1872), 3. 70 M. Garside, ‘Origin of Barnardo’s home for girls’, Spectator (7 June 1907), 938.

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child, nation, race and empire 71 History of the Children’s Home, Ch. I’, HH, I: 1 (1888), 14. 72 Gordon E. Barritt, Thomas Bowman Stephenson (Peterborough: Foundery Press, 1996), p. 8. 73 This story too is much told. See for example Edward de M. Rudolf, The First Forty Years: A Chronicle of the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society 1881–1920 (London: Church of England Waifs & Strays Society, Kennington, 1922), pp. 1–2; J.J.B., ‘By highway and byway. VII. - after office hours’, OWS, XIV: 333 (1913), 61. 74 Anne Allen and Arthur Morton, This Is Your Child: The Story of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). 75 W. Gordon Robinson, Benjamin Waugh (1839–1908) (London: Independent Press, 1961), p. 6. 76 ‘Hungry and homeless’, ND, VIII: 92 (1884), 164. 77 Charlotte Grange, ‘Waif-hunting by the river’, YHLM (1899), 107. 78 Rev. H. Grattan Guinness, ‘The fight with the dragon’, NWM, XXVI: 224 (1903), 35. 79 Rev. Prebendary Billing, ‘Waif-hunting’, OWS, I: 28 (1886), 2. 80 Grange, ‘Waif-hunting by the river’, 107. 81 Rosa J.P. Hobhouse, Benjamin Waugh: Founder of the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children (London: The C.W. Daniel Co. Ltd, 1939), p. 25. 82 Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson, ‘Causing a sensation: media and legal representations of bad behaviour’, in Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson (eds), Behaving Badly: Social Panic and Moral Outrage – Victorian and Modern Parallels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 33. 83 T.J. Barnardo, ‘A very restless night’, ND, I: 4 (1877), 41; ‘A thrashing’, ND, I: 8 (1877), 85–6. Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 7. – mothered by the Church’, OWS, VI: 172 (1898), 340. 84 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘One taken – the other left’, HH, X: 111 (1897), 50. 85 ‘Freely ye have received, freely give’, OWS, I: 43 (1887), 5. 86 ‘Children’s free dinner table’, ND, I: 12 (1877), 161. 87 ‘From the streets’, ND, XI: 117 & 118 (1887), 32. 88 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Left alone’, ND, 5: 1 (1881), 1–2. 89 A.H.H., ‘A plea for the waifs and strays’, OWS, XII: 310 (1910), 466. 90 ‘The father of nobody’s children’, Spectator (10 June 1904), 912. 91 Mrs. W.F. Lofthouse, ‘The child character and its development’, HH, XXIV (1911), 101. 92 H. Coradine, ‘Little outcasts’, HH, XVI (1903), 171. 93 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The seed of the righteous’, ND, X: 115 & 116 (1886), 234. 94 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 42. – the widow’s friends’, OWS, XI: 283 (1908), 296. 95 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 43. – her protégé’, OWS, XI: 289 (1908), 447. 96 Margaret Field, ‘Which?’, OWS, I: 10 (1885), 2. 97 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Is philanthropic abduction ever justifiable?’, ND, IX: 98–103 (1885), 151–2. 98 Rev. C.F. Tonks, ‘A great nation’, OWS, XIV: 334 (1913), 82. 99 ‘Glimpses into applicants’ homes III’, HH, VI: 65 (1893), 89. 100 Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, p. 7. 101 Anna Magnusson, The Quarrier’s Story: One Man’s Vision that Gave 7,000 Children a New Life in Canada (Toronto: Dundern Press, 2006), p. 46. 102 H.K., ‘The children’s home: the story of the home II’, Spectator (24 July 1891), 705. 103 ‘Give the lad a chance’, 156–7. 104 Phoebe Cary, ‘Nobody’s child’, CA, VIII: 86 (1887), 44. 105 ‘The flower girl’, ND, VII: 79–80 (1883), 128. 106 Maria Osborn, ‘The little street girl’, CA (May 1872), 6. 107 T.J. Barnardo, The 1/- Baby: An Incident of the London Slave Trade (London: Dr Barnardo’s Homes), p. 2. Sister Alice Gough, ‘Dickens and children’, HH, XVII (1904), 47–8. 108 R.V.B., ‘A dream’, OWS, I: 98 (1892), 14.

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the gospel of child rescue 109 ‘C.U.: it is more blessed to give than to receive’, BS, 1: 8 (1891), 118; Benjamin Waugh, ‘Children’s song: for opening League of Pity sales of work’, CLPP, III: 5 (1895), 42–3. 110 Evelyn Thomas, ‘Molly’s dream: a Christmas piece for the waifs and strays’, BS, 126 (1903), 142. 111 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 32. – we two’, OWS, X: 252 (1905), 69. 112 See for example Winifred Pierce, ‘Maria: a slum story’, OWS, XI: 287 (1908), 396–8; Annie Frances Perram, ‘Eva’s mission: or, losing to find’, CA, 89 (1887), 110–14. 113 R.M. Ballantyne, Dusty Diamond Cut and Polished: A Story of City Arab Life and Adventure (Project Gutenberg [Ebook #21729] 2007), p. 22. 114 Barnardo, ‘Rescued for life’, 113–21. 115 ‘Nobody’s darling or somebody’s?’, CA, III: 25 (1882), 14–16. 116 ‘The beggar boy’, Spectator (11 January 1901), 66. 117 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Preventive homes’, ND, I: 1 (1877), 3. 118 ‘The children’s home annual meeting’, HH, XII: 138 (1899), 130. 119 T.J. Barnardo, ‘London lodging houses: boys found in them’, ND, I: 6 (1877), 83; ‘Concerning our “homes”’, ND, VII: 70–2 (1883), 38; Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 35. – fireworks’, OWS, X: 261 (1906), 184–6. 120 ‘The cruelty of neglect’, Child’s Guardian (CG), XVII: 8 (1903), 85–6. 121 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: Aird and Coghill, 1892), p. 95. 122 E. de Rudolf, ‘Dr Barnardo and Mr. Rudolf’, OWS, V: 134 (1895), 94–5; T.J. Barnardo, ‘The editor at the bar’, ND, XXII: 203 (1898), 30–2. 123 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Saving outcast children’, NWM, XXVII: 229 (1904), 36–7. 124 See for example Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: Aird and Coghill, 1890), p.  11. 125 H. K., ‘The children’s home: the story of the home, VII’, Spectator (11 September 1891), 873. 126 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Our silver wedding fund: a change, an appeal, and some responses’, ND, XV: 151 (1891), 43. 127 ‘Dr. Barnardo’s children: thirtieth anniversary of the homes’, Spectator (21 August 1896), 621. ‘Dr Barnardo, the friend of waifs and strays’, Sydney City Mission Herald, IX: 3 (1905), 10. 128 ‘All sorts and conditions of children’, HH (1906), 178. 129 Rudolf, The First Forty Years, pp. 116, 66. 130 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The Queen’s diamond year: how to commemorate it’, ND, XXI: 198 (1897), 1. 131 ‘All sorts and conditions of children’, 177. 132 William Baker, ‘Clearing the streets’, ND, XXX: 241 (1907), 37.

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Chapte r t hr ee

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The body of the child

Don’t enlarge, mother! I really do not enjoy the ghastly details of these special cases of yours. Let us preserve the cloud of ignorance and romance which wraps them round as cases. Once they are real children they haunt one!1

The fictional Gladys’s selfish complaint points to one of the key strategies of child rescue. The neglected child, however romanticised, had also to be made real if they were going to attract financial support. Like Gladys’s mother, writers had to provide the ‘ghastly details’ in order to create the strong visual images that would haunt the reader. Central to such visual images was a focus on the body which functioned in the literature as the site of both diagnosis and transformation. Evangelical Christians came quickly to realise that in order to save the souls of the poor they needed first to save their bodies. While searching for a mission to give meaning to her life Honora, the orphaned heroine of one of the earliest OWS serials, encountered three neglected children living nearby. She wanted to ‘teach them, if God would let me, that their present sad life is not all – that they have to look forward to a future life’, but she decided to approach that spiritual objective by an earthly route: ‘If I fed their bodies, they might listen to me more willingly.’2 In the pages of both the magazines and children’s literature addressing child rescue themes, individual children appealed to be fed, using their bodies as visual evidence of their plight. In some cases the appeal was spoken, a ‘waif’ of the city, a ‘poor little shivering boy’ declaring: ‘I am cold – and ragged – and hungry, / Yet nobody heeds my plea, / I am tired, friendless, and homeless, / Yet nobody cares for me.’3 More commonly, children appealed in silence, their bodies serving as their voice. ‘Eloquent the children’s faces,– / Poverty’s lean look which saith, / “Evil circumstance has bound us; / Sin and ignorance surround us; / Life is ofttimes worse than death”.’4 White and hungry faces were reconstituted as beautiful, [ 40 ]

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tear-filled eyes were seen as wistful, mutely appealing for assistance.5 The aim of such writing was to take a familiar image – the tattered, ragged, dirty body – and reconstitute it as a figure of pity rather than fear, looking beyond the exterior to an inner potential for change. The ‘crushed, moist, ragged, barefooted, little wizened lad’ had the look of a poet, even if his long hair was ‘matted, and much less picturesque’.6 ‘Ragged little Scaramouch / Dirty and bad’, was, nevertheless, still a child.7 Readers were encouraged to see in the unwashed faces, the ragged clothing and the shoeless feet a child created in the image of God.8 ‘And chiefly in the children, though neglected, wild, and sad, / We recognise the beauty that hath been, and yet may be / A reflection of the Christ-Child, of the Light that maketh glad / The gloomy realms of ignorance, of despair and misery.’9 The prevalence of child neglect in nineteenth-century England, imagined as ‘the favoured country wherein, as a rule, childhood is specially dear and sacred, and whose child-life, in its pure pleasures and happiness, is perhaps unequalled in any other country’, was seen as a source of shame.10 The bodies of neglected children were confronting because they were so different from the readers’ own understandings of childhood. The ‘little, thin, transparent, timid waif was such a contrast to the rosy, fat, country children’ who were the imagined readers of the books and magazines.11 Confronted with a ‘little girl with a living sorrow in her face – the poor features were so pinched and haggard, the large blue eyes so hollow and melancholy, the little hands and arms so skeleton-like’, ‘Lucy’ could not but recall her own little girl ‘in her soft merinos and flannels … her heavy cloak on, her warm furs, and her jaunty new hat’.12 Parents and children alike were enjoined to remember ‘those other children … Not fresh as the dew or the morning’s hue / But haggard, and lean, and old’, who, though ‘faded and down-trodden’ had ‘baby-faces, too’ and hence were entitled to a childhood. 13 Shall not their small thin fingers Respite from labour know? Shall not the soft, warm breezes O’er their pale faces blow? Should not their cheeks be blooming? Shall not these grave blue eyes, In the light of your loving pity, Dance with a sweet surprise?14

The essential goodness of such children was emphasised in stories in which the ‘ugly, ragged, half-starved, and dirty’, ‘the shabbiest and poorest’ performed acts of heroism, giving their lives in order that other, usually more privileged, children could be saved.15 [ 41 ]

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Extensive descriptions of the bodies of children at risk are not simply illustrative, but constitute them as texts on which their vulnerability is written, a device already well established in children’s literature. Frances Hodgson Burnett often used clothing and bodily image as an important part of the construction of her characters. The Little Lord Fauntleroy image – velvet suit, lace collar, curly hair – was copied by many middle-class mothers in the early twentieth century as they sought to convey an image of their sons as beautiful and good and themselves as both caring and wealthy enough to afford such outfits; clothing thus became a signifier of worth. In Burnett’s A Little Princess, the transformative nature of clothing is a crucial plot device, signifying the child’s fall from middle-class wealth to poverty-stricken dependency. Sara Crewe, left in a boarding school by her soldier father, is welcomed by the headmistress who had heard that he was ‘a rich father who was willing to spend a great deal of money on his little daughter’.16 When, however, money stops arriving and it is rumoured that Sara’s father has died in poverty, the ‘beautiful child’ is reduced to the rank of servant, her poverty and dependence encoded in her clothing (‘broken shoes’ and ‘forlorn hat’) her bodily image (‘cold, hungry and tired’) and her face with its ‘pinched look’.17 She is, in a sense, performing poverty with her clothing, playing a role in the construction of her identity.18 Despite her distress, Sara manages to preserve an innate sympathy for children in a similar or worse plight, thus acting as a model of charity for other characters in the book and its readers. She particularly notices the ‘little figure’ near the bakery, a figure ‘which was not much more than a bundle of rags from which small, bare, red muddy feet peeped out’.19 Rendered genderless and anonymous by its poverty, the child is transformed through the charity of the woman in the bakery, emerging, no longer ‘a beggar-child’, but clean, properly clothed and with ‘a nice face, now that she was no longer a savage’. Clothing here functions as a ‘densely coded system of signification’ which transmits, among other things, psychological and cultural messages.20 The reader is invited both to pity the poor child because of what it lacks in its life and to recognise its potential value if well-treated in the present. The detail in the descriptions of bodies is indicative of their diag­­ nostic value.21 Although the conclusion drawn from such descriptions is often validated by the personal testimony that follows, the visual evidence is uppermost. The ‘ragged, half-famished’ street singer, whose plaintive song, she later confessed, was all lies, had ‘No need for a song or story, / No need she should plead her case, / For sorrow and want had written / It all on her wee white face’.22 Similarly, the woman ‘bringing a bright, keen-eyed little girl of about seven years old’ [ 42 ]

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did not need to speak for they were immediately recognised as ‘travelstained, ragged and unmistakably destitute’.23 The ‘wan expression’ and ‘wistful’ look, combined with the ‘tattered … rags’, ‘torn hat and kneeless trousers / Dirty face and bare red feet’ of many street children rendered the ‘story’ unnecessary.24 Yet such visual evidence, ‘the sight of … [the] rags and wretchedness … [which] moved our hearts’ also warned of the dangers if the child rescuer did not intervene. ‘There he was, friendless, almost naked, his features already taking on the cast of crime.’25 Although there is some admiration for the ‘wild, almost untameable’ street boy, ‘as full of tricks as a young monkey, but singularly free from real vice, and evidently possessing the raw material out of which a useful man might, by God’s blessing, be made’, he needs the intervention of a child rescuer if that potential is to be realised.26 ‘Sharp and observant’ though such boys may be, ‘thin, starving … homeless and destitute’ they were destined to drift into crime, despite their intelligence.27 Two key discourses structure most such physical descriptions. The first is a discourse of pity. Children are alone and cold, dejected, desperate and destitute, feeble, forlorn and faint with hunger, little creatures, mites and sufferers, pathetic, miserable and wretched, shivering, sickly, sad and poor, weakly, woebegone and waif-like, victims of cruelty and neglect. Strung together these words produce striking images: bundles or heaps of rags, suffering cruel buffetings against jagged rocks; dejected little automatons, like lambs without a shepherd; feeble mites of humanity; neglected little ones; poor little terrified creatures; suffering childhood.28 Such language renders the children victims, and hence fit objects of charity. The second discourse defines children by what they lack: bootless, coatless, hatless, shirtless, shoeless and stockingless, fatherless, motherless, friendless, homeless and shelterless, helpless, hopeless and penniless. Half-clad, half-frozen, half-perished and halfstarved, they are nobody’s children, uncared for and unloved, wanting in multiple ways. The ‘lonely little derelict’, ‘scantily clothed’, was little more than a ‘mass of human atoms’, ‘starving within reach of plenty’.29 The sense of pity here is infused with a conviction of powerlessness, or more accurately an incapacity or inability to act on their own behalf, justifying the need for intervention from the child rescuer. ‘Dear little bent forms, in your narrow alleys, / Hidden from the searching sun that longs to make you well: / Forms that never ran and leaped, in grassy groves and valleys, / Stand before a startled world that knows not where you dwell.’30 Through the use of such discourses the child was constructed as the object of the gaze of both the author and the reader. Subject to the power of the gaze the child symbolically represented the general plight of street children in an uncaring society. [ 43 ]

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Recent theorising characterises the gaze as more than mere looking, ‘encouraging us to see the social and gender relations involved’.31 The key signifiers utilised in child rescue literature related to race and class. One of the ways in which children were rendered appealing was by their physical attractiveness. ‘I think people always like pretty children’, says one of the little girls in Evelyn Farrar’s 1888 book Every Day.32 Maria Osborn’s ‘little street girl’ is described as having ‘a pretty face, though pinched and thin / (Poor pretty face ’mid such ugly sin!)’.33 For the greengrocer and his wife, anxious to help a recently widowed woman by taking one of her children, it was Polly’s ‘pretty curly hair – and the big brown eyes’ that rendered her the child of choice.34 However, such a choice was relatively unusual, for the word pretty was far more commonly associated with the paler features of the idealised English child.35 The ‘blue-eyed, golden-haired fairy of five years old’ seems far more attractive than the ‘tiny girl, clad only in a few worn-out oddments, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a face so pallid and wan’.36 Evelyn Everett-Green’s little match-girl was rendered attractive by her ‘pathetic little face, with singularly delicate features for a child of the people; framed in a tangled mass of short, yellow hair; which, if properly dressed and cared for would have been a real beauty. The blue eyes could sparkle with joy or swim with tears in equal readiness, just as the varying mood of childhood prompted.’37 When God ‘stretched forth His hand’ to rescue Little Millie from ‘the depths of a hell on earth’ it was ‘the blue eyes, down, down in the pit’ that first attracted his attention.38 Attractiveness influenced not only initial impressions but long-term outcomes. From a family of four ‘fair-haired, pretty … Rose was transplanted into one of the Church’s gardens, where such human flowers are tended and cultivated’ and ‘wee Daisy’ was adopted, but their sisters, ‘two tiny, dark, gypsies, Belle and Lily’, were left dependent on an uncle for their care.39 Fair hair and blue eyes served as a code for skin colour, a whiteness too often obscured in the unwashed state in which children were found. When Ellice Hopkins encountered Little Mary ‘clad in an old greatcoat … she was literally as black as coal’.40 While blackness was always used to signify difference, either moral or racial, whiteness had more mixed connotations.41 The words blanched, pale, pallid and wan were deployed to elicit sympathy, while fairness served as an indicator of superior social status, and hence of greater potential for change.42 The child huddled on the doorstep at Christmas with a ‘white, thin face with misery stamped on every feature, and a few awful rags huddled round the poor little body’ was an object of pity, but when, in another story, ‘a decidedly rough little boy in muchpatched garments rushed in, followed by a beautiful little pale-faced [ 44 ]

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girl’, readers were told, ‘the visitors exchanged significant glances’.43 Whiteness provided a means by which class could be read from the body. Middle-class children rarely came to the attention of child rescuers, but a largely middle-class audience had to be reassured that both their status and their particular need would be recognised if the unthinkable should occur. ‘Bonnie, rosy, healthy children’ could become ‘thin, pale, and wan’ if their parents succumbed to drink.44 Forced to make do in the nether world to which the poor were confined, children with ‘golden curls’ and ‘pretty refined features’ were seen as at particular risk of being ensnared by women seeking to use them for begging or worse.45 Yet, readers were assured, child rescuers could recognise the ‘refined air’ and ‘nervous manner’, even amongst children ‘clad in the vilest rags’, the ‘unmistakable look of birth and breeding’ which entitled them to a better future than that offered to most children in the homes.46 Like Oliver Twist, the ‘pure, spotless child, beautiful and fair as the lily grown in the black bog’, could and did remain ‘spotless’.47 Initial judgments based on appearance were validated as the children lived up to the expectations of the class to which they had been assigned. A fair child, who stood out amongst a group of ‘waifs’, was adopted and proved to be a worthy son.48 Once washed the ‘small dirty boy’ found in a ditch by a Scottish spinster, Miss Mercer, displayed a skin that was ‘white and tender’, ‘a glint of gold’ through his thick brown hair, and a ‘face [that] bids me think he comes from gentlefolks’.49 Concluding that he had been stolen and later abandoned by tinkers, she planned his future carefully in order to ensure that he occupied an appropriate station in life, higher than the working folk but with no aspirations to challenge the gentry. By the end of the story Miss Mercer’s initial assessment proved correct, when the boy was discovered to be the nephew of the laird, lost to the family after his father made an inappropriate marriage leaving his child unprovided for when he died.50 Child theft was a far more common explanation for children found out of their class. The infant whom Honora rescued revealed, by its ‘vigorous kicks and struggles’, ‘the clothing of a delicately cared-for nursling’. It was, in fact, the child of her cousin, estranged from his family and now tragically widowed in a ferry accident.51 At the end of the story the infant was returned to his grandmother, who was also reconciled with her son, the barrier to their relationship having been conveniently removed by the death of his wife.52 Following publicity about a series of missing children, Highways and Hedges offered a story of a woman charged with unlawful possession of a child who confessed that when she first acquired the child ‘he had long curly [ 45 ]

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locks, and was well dressed’.53 The message to readers was clear: the child you save may be your own. Despite the rigidity applied in such assumptions about the ability to read class from the body, the child rescuers’ primary message was about the possibilities for transformation. ‘The masquerade of dirt’ which served as the ‘most opaque costume of class and racial otherness’ had to be dismantled if the child was to be saved.54 Donors had to be persuaded that children were redeemable, capable of rising out of poverty. In an allusion to baptism, the initial transformation was signified through washing. The bath brought revelation: slate or black skins became white, displaying not only the emaciation, and, on occasions, ‘deep dark bruises’, but also the potential for change.55 Curly, who had arrived wearing ‘nothing but a ragged frock … her face … black with dirt, and her hair matted over her bright black eyes’, emerged the next day a ‘different child’, ‘quite clean and warm, and looking so bright and happy’ (see Figure 4).56 However, it was not only the external appearance of the child that needed to be transformed. Child rescuers were selective, believing that only they could see the potential for redemption in the unsaved child. ‘In dealing with the plastic material of an ill-spent childhood’, declared Barnardo, ‘we have it still within our hands … to prove that the day of miracles is not yet wholly past.’57 Street children were not without their virtues. Their business acuity, independence and kindness towards each other gave them a certain attraction. However, child rescuers warned, without intervention ‘these tender traits or character [would] disappear’.58 The willingness to make eye contact, the sharpwittedness and independence of the street boy were read as indicative of a mind ‘capable of noble things’, ‘the beautiful little forget-me-not’ flowered even in ‘very slimy mud’, but it could not survive in this unnatural condition for too long.59 ‘Nobodies … came into the world with that moral clothing of self-respect and truthfulness and purity’ and it was the responsibility of ‘the Somebodies [to] stop raising their eyes, and … raise their hands [to] teach you better things’.60 The first step in transformation was to teach the new arrival how ‘to be a little child once more’.61 Set ‘loose amid the joyous youngsters of our Home to seek and find a chum and playmate’, the ‘wan, spiritless’ former workhouse boy became ‘a fine, big, plump, rosy chap’ who ‘almost made one fancy that the country and not East London had been his home’.62 The inner transformation created a new exterior, rendering the children almost unrecognizable to their former benefactors. A face ‘pinched … careworn and fearful’ was replaced by a complexion ‘clear and … eye bright’, previously ‘puny children’ displayed ‘rosy, sunburnt cheeks and sturdy limbs’, and ‘the neglected little waif of so [ 46 ]

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Figure 4  Curly’s attractiveness is even more apparent when she is relocated in Canada

few months ago’ was transformed into ‘a plump little maiden, with a serene and confiding smile, and a gentle air of self-possession and gentle queenliness’.63 The contrast between ‘past and present environment’ was thus mirrored in the body of the rescued child.64 The magazines depicted the children as both recognising and being grateful for the change. A poem written in the voice of a rescued boy [ 47 ]

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testified to his transformation: ‘You wouldn’t think that me, sir, wi’ my cheeks now plump and red, / Was once but a bag o’ bones like, an’ a face as white as the dead!’65 A girl out walking encountered ‘an urchin whose rags hung round him in quite a picturesque fashion’ and declared that she had once been just like that.66 When ‘Little Johnnie’s’ ‘childish feet that trod such a thorny path’ were ‘walking in pleasant ways’, he had only one remaining sadness: ‘the thought of his playfellow and friend still suffering’.67 The transformation was also represented visually in performances at which ‘the lately rescued children, with the shadows of the past still sadly visible upon their faces’, contrasted sharply with ‘the bright, ruddy-cheeked lads who will shortly sail to the far West’.68 The magazines were liberally ­illustrated with before

Figure 5  A Canadian version of the familiar before and after image

[ 48 ]

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and after sketches or photographs (see Figure 5), the power of which was not diminished by admissions that the image was often manipulated. It was not uncommon for before and after photographs to be taken on the same day, with the transformation signified by a change of clothes and a ruffling of the hair. Original clothing was often deliberately scanty or tattered to increase the effect.69 Parents are absent from stories of transformation. ‘Lost by his parents’ transgressions, / Before his own sins began; / Lost by his mother’s vices, / By the course his father ran’, the child’s body could only be repaired in the absence of those who had harmed it.70 Parental neglect could be passive, the result of ‘mothers [who] had to go out during the day to work in factories’ or those too selfish or poor ‘to fulfil their responsibilities’.71 However, greater emphasis was given to cases involving drunkenness or exploitation (see Figure 6). ‘Once … a soft-eyed cooing little boy baby, the joy of his mother’s heart’, Tom’s life changed dramatically when his father’s imprisonment led to his mother’s death. Left in the care of his grandfather, ‘Drunken Joe’, he had had ‘nothing but kicks for his kindness’ before he came into the home.72 The children Honora set out to save had been exploited by their drunken parents, the boy starved until he was a living skeleton, the girl forced to act as deaf and dumb, as they wandered the country to perform as the Wonderful family at local fairs.73 The poor districts of the big cities were also understood to be populated by substitute carers whose attention to children could be even more deficient than that of parents. A surprise visit to the woman caring for the son of a widowed father found the baby ‘white and thin … limp and helpless’ but, in contrast to the nurse, whose ‘face was not a good one’, there was ‘something about him that indicated vitality … He had a fine head, and … would have been pretty.’ In the account that followed it was the father’s poor judgment, not his desperation, which was acknowledged.74 The advent of the NSPCC altered the discourse around the body, adding a new level of drama to existing narratives without challenging the assumptions on which they were based. ‘Helpless’ and ‘friendless’ children were depicted as ‘martyrs’ or ‘ill-used subjects’, the ‘wretched victims’ of ‘cowardly brutes’, their ‘fiendish parents’ who ‘starved’ and ‘tortured’ them in their ‘wild, jaundiced madness’.75 While the ‘poor ragged children’ rescued by the existing societies might still have had ‘sunshine in their lives’, the children who came into NSPCC shelters had none.76 They represented the antithesis of an idealised childhood; ‘afraid to laugh’ for fear that ‘harsh words and cruel blows may be its portion instead of the offered happiness … children who do not know how to play’ and do not grasp the ‘meaning of their companions’ [ 49 ]

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Figure 6  One of many images in which alcohol is the explanation for child neglect

shouts and merry laughter’.77 Even ‘fiends’, readers were told, would be ashamed to be so cruel.78 The NSPCC refrained from publishing images of cruelty in its children’s magazine, illustrating them instead with pictures of sparsely [ 50 ]

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clothed, supposedly innocent children which to the twenty-firstcentury viewer verge on the pornographic.79 However, its ­publications for adults attracted repeated criticism because of their graphic images and articles.80 Anxious not to lose any of their existing support the other child rescue organisations quickly adopted a similar tone. Parents became ‘ghouls all sin-defiled’ who actively maimed their children rather than simply neglected them.81 Night and Day featured stories of the ‘hundreds of little martyrs … born to suffering’ whose ‘PARENTS were the aggressors’ and plaintive verse about infants thrown into fires.82 Our Waifs and Strays published poems about the ‘thousand homeless homes today’ in which ‘the sot, the savage bears remorseless sway’, and members of Barnardo’s Young Helpers’ League were urged to: Think of kicks, and cuffs, and bruises, which would make a man’s flesh smart, Yet they’re just some children’s everyday affair! There are cases told us sometimes, you’ll be sorry when you hear-that these little helpless beggars unprotected, Have been made intoxicated, just for human brutes to jeer, and have grown up brutes themselves, when left neglected! Lost child-poor child-knowing childhood’s hell, Give him a chance of something else, you’ll get your thanks some day! 83

Child cruelty, the NSPCC argued, was not a function of poverty. ‘No class devotes itself with such constant self-sacrifice to its children as the honest and working poor, but the idle and drunken poor’, Hesba Stretton believed, ‘seem to lose their natural affection, and to hate and oppress these miserable little creatures, who owe their wretched being to them.’84 Nor was cruelty confined to the poor. The Society, Waugh liked to boast, was deterred ‘by neither the poverty nor the wealth of their wrong-doers’.85 Cruelty was present in middle-class suburbs, and throughout the countryside, but people needed to be educated to see it.86 Although surviving case records would suggest that NSPCC inspectors spent most of their time in the poorer districts, the Child’s Guardian regularly reported cases of privileged parents mistreating their children, and encouraged servants to report their employers if they thought children were being misused.87 The child body, the Society argued, needed as much protection as the animal body, adding: ‘It is better today to be the pig of an English brute than to be his child.’88 If the law indeed allowed the parent to ‘do what I like with my own’, then the law had to be changed.89 Transformation remained central to all such appeals. ‘Little Tim’, who had escaped from a woman who took in children to train as thieves, showed great promise of rehabilitation even though his ‘weak physical [ 51 ]

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frame’ had received ‘injuries which can never be effaced’ as a result of being ‘beaten, ill-treated, half-starved by his persecutor’ because he refused to steal.90 Becky, sold by her stepmother to a woman who ‘tied the child to a bed, [and] thrashed her poor little naked body with the buckle end of a strap until she was black and blue and bleeding’ was transformed, upon rescue. ‘Spotlessly neat and clean’, with ‘very small hands and feet’, she displayed ‘a certain dignity and refinement’ which reflected her class of origin.91 Towards the end of the nineteenth century the child rescuers turned their attention to a group of children for whom such transformation seemed more remote. The sudden ‘discovery’ of children with disabilities, uniformly described in the literature as ‘cripples’, is perhaps indicative that changes in legislation and social provision were bringing about a decline in the number of ‘waifs and strays’ who had provided the societies’ original clientele. While there is clear evidence that there had always been some such children amongst those applying for admission, by the end of the century they played a major role in fund-raising, with hospitals and cripples’ homes providing a particular focus for both the Children’s Union and the Young Helpers’ League. In 1907 Rudolf reminded readers that the ‘first boy waif’ he had rescued was ‘a little cripple just ten years old’ but no mention of his disability was made in the publicity at the time.92 Seven years earlier Barnardo had claimed that his was the only organisation prepared to receive ‘the lame, the halt and the blind’, a manifest untruth given the extensive provisions also made by his competitors.93 Clearly by this time the disabled body had an appeal to supporters that previously had been unrecognised. Where, in earlier material, the ‘little heap of rags’ may have been a ‘wee hunchback’, the ‘stricken matchboy’, a ‘crippled beggar’, now it was the disability itself which qualified them for rescue. 94 The disabled child was a familiar character in children’s literature. Constructed as being doubly excluded from society – by both their disability and poverty – these children were seen as having a special call on charity. In Dibs: A Story of Young London Life an intellectually disabled boy was excluded from the Sunday school. However, his greater understanding of Christianity and his claim to charity and compassion as ‘one of the least’ of Christ’s children was reinforced when he turned as he was leaving and declaimed: ‘Some day I shall sit at Jesus’ feet clothed and in my right mind. Shall you?’95 Authors called on readers to have special consideration for such children. ‘Uncle John’,writing in the Band of Hope Review, urged: ‘Boys and girls! Let me advise you always to treat the blind, the deformed, the lame, the sick, with great kindness. Ever be ready to perform the kind action, or speak the kind word.’96 This emphasis on difference reinforces the [ 52 ]

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creation of ‘otherness’ and even childishness as the person with the disability became the object of pity and charity by those much younger than themselves. Such children were defined as ‘other’ to the norm of the happy, laughing, innocent child. The construction of an ideal mother, who, ‘if in a family there be one child which needs more care than all the rest’ will give that child the largest share of her love, ‘because God had kindly put it into her heart to do so, that the little sufferer may receive that help and comfort which it needs’, created as its binary opposite, the necessity of removing children who did not have access to such special care.97 S.M. Fry’s book The Little Orange Sellers used the common device of a family of orphaned children as a means of evoking sympathy from young readers from secure family homes. There were three children in the family, the youngest of whom, Teddy, was ‘crippled’: ‘only eight, but looking like an old man’.98 Like many such characters, Teddy was coded as ‘holy child’, patient in suffering and trying to bring his siblings back to God. Although Teddy had not completely accomplished this task by the time of his death, his legacy lived on, with his brother later reflecting: ‘I wish I could be good but I don’t know how. Poor Teddy. If he wasn’t dead, I wouldn’t mind asking him; he’d tell me what to do. He said I must ask God … I think I’ll try.’99 Florence Burch’s book, Jack and Gill, followed a similar trajectory. Jack and Gill were two orphans living alone in a slum garret, but Gill had a ‘bad back’ and could almost never go out. Although she could not kneel to pray, she shut her eyes regularly to ask God’s help. Eventually, with the help of a friendly young doctor, the children moved to a cottage in the country – a place which always signified a removal from corruption and the opportunity of a better life – where Gill was instrumental in bringing her (hard-working and therefore deserving) brother to Christ. The child rescuers employed similar imagery in attempting to render children with disabilities attractive to their donors. Using the story of ‘Blind Bobby’, a disabled infant whose ‘mother did not love him’, Barnardo reminded his readers that ‘among our 4,000 boys and girls are quite a few who are blind, or deaf, or dumb or lame, or deformed, or so ill that they can never hope to run about, and work or play with their fellows’.100 Evoking Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Sister Alice utilised the image of ‘“Tiny Tim” sheltered in The Children’s Home; the little wan face, the poor thin little body, leaning on a little crutch, with limbs supported by an iron frame’.101 The poem ‘Jack and Me’ told the story of a boy selling papers in partnership with his brother. Injured in a street accident, Jack had ‘never been all right since, sir / Sorter quiet and queer’ but his role was to manage the money, ‘He’s what they call cashier’.102 [ 53 ]

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Writing in 1896 Stephenson sought to persuade his readers of the need to extend his work into this new area. Earlier appeals for help for disabled children had brought little response, leading him to ask whether he had ‘gone as far as God wills me to go?’ His question was immediately answered by a vision of a ‘miserable little child; too weak to sit up; crippled in every limb; without a soul in the world with whom it can claim kinship. Can it be the will of the merciful God that such a forlorn soul should be in His universe? And if not, is there not somebody meant by God to be father and mother to this little life?’103 Six years later Stephenson was able to announce the opening of a seaside home in which could be gathered all the ‘poor little crippled children’ already in the homes. ‘Is it not a beautiful thing’, he asked, ‘that these poor helpless little waifs have been taken hold of by the loving hands of the men and women who are doing their Christlike work in the Children’s Home?’104 By 1910, continuing a Victorian tradition of using ‘consumptive’ children to evoke sympathy, readers were being regularly informed about the progress of ‘children threatened with consumption’ at Harpenden, ‘cripples’ at Chipping Norton and ‘delicate children’ at Alverstoke.105 Only the ‘actually imbecile or those whose residence with other children is for some physical or moral reason undesirable’ were now excluded.106 Despite the many possible causes of disability in Victorian and Edwardian England, child rescuers chose to emphasise the role of the parents, thus linking their new cause with the NSPCC’s campaign against cruelty. Of the 700,000 souls added to the population in one year, between 2,000 and 3,000 were born cripples; while the number of children actually maimed, and too often it is to be feared from wanton neglect, during the early months of existence, may be approximately inferred from the almost appalling fact that during the same limited period … between 8,000 and 9,000 cripples died in their first year of age … If thrice as many cripples succumb in a given year as are born in it, how terrible the cruelty, neglect, and suffering prevalent; and how significant the increase in the ranks of the impotent!107

‘Alice had not always been a cripple, nor had her family always been poor’, readers were informed. ‘Her father had met with bad companions, who led him into temptation and sin’, and, in a drunken state, he had pushed her. ‘She fell down the steep, dark staircase … crippling her for life.’108 The deformity of a little boy ‘with his pretty face … was caused entirely by the neglect and selfish cruelty of his own grandmother’.109 Ella, with her ‘bright but rather sad face, and such pretty fair hair’, had never recovered from the night when she was turned out into the cold by her father, ‘and her baby toes were so dreadfully [ 54 ]

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frost-bitten that they had to be amputated’.110 ‘Little Fan’, whose spine was damaged when ‘her poor miserable sin-beset mother had flung her down the steps in a drunken frenzy’, found a friend in ‘Daft George … whose mother had fallen with him against the curb-stone when reeling home in the darkness’.111 The victims of such cruelty were imagined as being doubly disadvantaged, their disabilities preventing them from the escape open to more able children, leaving them instead ‘crouching in vile dens, reeking with filth and the fumes of drink; huddled in corners of wretched rooms up still more loathsome courts; in pestiferous cellars and draughty garrets – wherever they could be stowed away by besotted parents, to be abused and scorned by night, and whence they could be dragged by day through the streets as striking objects to excite the pity of passersby’.112 The mother or guardian who forced the cripple to steal was a frequent character in this literature, as was the parent who compelled such children to work or do errands despite their disabilities, without offering any possibility of relief from their dismal environment.113 The discourse around disability evoked both pity and possibilities. Despite her ‘attenuated body’ the ‘hunchbacked girl of seven’ had the ‘face of an unwashed angel’.114 The ‘crippled little ones’, Rudolf reminded his readers, ‘are like flowers in a garden – some in bad surroundings have to be moved, some will never grow straight, but they may still bear beautiful flowers’.115 Needing no words, their twisted bodies made mute appeals: Come, oh come and help us, Bitter is our woe: Sick we are, and dying, Homeless, starved, and cold; Give, oh give your labour, Spare for us your gold.116

Christ ‘knocks at your door in the disguise of a little crippled child!’ young supporters were reminded. ‘Can you fancy the sad look in the Divine Face should He knock in vain?’117 Children were encouraged to imagine a relationship with their ‘unfortunate brothers’ and ‘crippled sisters’, to which ‘neither health, in one case, nor affliction, in the other, was felt to be a barrier’.118 Drawing on the trope of the holy child, some stories situated the disabled child in the position of redeemer. The ‘cheerful words’ of the ‘laddie’ on the ‘little crutch’ were, his benefactor testified, ‘sweet as sweetest hymn’.119 ‘Hunchie’, the hero of an 1896 OWS serial, is first encountered telling stories to a group of children in an alley. Under his influence they are persuaded to attend a gospel meeting ‘with the promise of a bun and orange at the end’.120 [ 55 ]

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child, nation, race and empire

Mortally wounded in a traffic accident, Hunchie asks the narrator to tell him more ‘about the Man what comforts’. He is baptised and, at the moment of his death, shouts that he can see Jesus.121 Hunchie’s fate was far from unusual for while ‘good food, [and] healthy surroundings, are not without their desired effect’ often the best that child rescuers could offer was to ‘brighten the last few months of a laddie’s life’.122 Death was a commonplace in nineteenth-century children’s books, the decline in infant and child mortality during that period having little impact on the popularity of the theme.123 It was a particular focus of evangelical literature, where it served both an instructive and a redemptive purpose.124 The death of a small child preserved for ever its innocence, removing it from the dangers of the world.125 For older children the emphasis was placed on the importance of religious last words and the comfort the child received from those who had brought him or her to the realisation of the afterlife. The death-bed scene in Johnson’s novel, Dibs, exemplified the good Christian death. Stricken by ‘inflammation of the lungs’ Dibs manages to say the whole of his favourite hymn with his Sunday school teacher, before singing the final refrain alone: ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Till the dawn of endless day’.126 The testimony of the dying child could also be a means of bringing a parent or other adult to an understanding of God. Wee Dan, son of a drunken father, died seeing a bright light, which told him: ‘The Son – of Man – came – to seek – and – to save’ (the punctuation serving to emphasise the last, dying breath). His father, informed by the niece of the local mill owner that he would only see Wee Dan again if he abandoned his drinking, immediately signed the pledge.127 Conversion and salvation were central to all child rescue work. Children needed to be rescued from the ‘heathenism’ of the street with its consequent fear of death, and come instead to look to heaven as their ultimate destination. Rather than fear ‘everlasting perdition’, they were encouraged to model themselves on the stories of converted children who died with ‘sweet eyes full of love and trust’, saying, ‘Don’t cry, mamma; I’m going to be with Jesus’.128 Rescue on earth was but a preliminary step preparing them for ‘that bright Home which is better than any earthly one’.129 Readers were told that although their donations would ensure skilful, loving, motherly care, many of the children were so damaged that death would come as a welcome relief.130 Sentimental poems about homeless children out in the cold often depicted them as wishing for death.131 Their rescue came with the intervention of angels, or Christ himself, to take them to their rest.132 The ‘emaciated frame’ of the ‘poor skeleton’ rescued in ‘Honora’s Effort’, ‘worn down by long starvation … was breaking up [ 56 ]

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like a rotten branch’ and ‘had not long to live’, but, after a talk with the local clergyman, the boy died happy.133 Even such poor children were depicted as testifying through their deaths. Annie, dying the day before she was due to attend a Barnardo’s banquet, reassured her Irish mother: In her wake, little voice: ‘Mammie, darlint, Don’t cry ’cause I’m goin’ away. Tomorrow they’ll go to the dinner; They’ll have beautiful times, I know; But heaven is like it, and better, And so I am ready to go.’134

The boys who participated in the ‘cripples race’ at Quarrier’s May Day picnic, or the ‘cripples cricket’ at Barnardo’s anniversary tableaux, may have been ‘amongst the brightest and most mischievous lads in the home’ but their potential for earthly transformation was limited.135 Young readers were reassured that deceased children had gone to ‘a better Home, where the crooked are made straight, and the pain taken from them, and where the Good Shepherd waits this little lamb with outstretched loving arms’.136 Saved from a life of sorrow, Free from all sin and care, He dwells at rest for ever In that bright land so fair, Where those who have been weary Are evermore at peace; Where God gives to His children Joys that can never cease.137

While awaiting their eventual reward, suffering, sickly children were depicted as sacrificial, bearing the pain of others in a Christ-like gesture, which encouraged other parents to be grateful that their child was well. ‘Is it, or is it not, worth having a little hospital in which the sick children may be nursed, though it be only for a Home in heaven?’ a visitor to the NCH infirmary asked. ‘If you cannot answer the question, hand it over to your wife, and let her ponder it upstairs by the side of that little white cot which she and you know so well.’138 God had decreed that ‘some lives must be sad and weary’ in order that others could be glad, and children were depicted as embracing their suffering, celebrating the abilities they had rather than those which they had lost.139 Nor were they allowed to be idle while awaiting their eventual reward. With ‘watchful love … e’en these little ones’ could be trained for ‘useful lives’, preventing them from sliding into the ‘life of hopeless crippledom’ for which they would otherwise have been destined.140 [ 57 ]

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In their detailed description of the neglected, battered and broken bodies of the children who came to the homes, child rescuers drew on themes already established in children’s literature to evoke sympathy for their cause. The rapid growth of their organisations testifies to the success of such techniques. However, if the work was to continue to expand, it was important to move beyond the individual. The child had not only to be embodied but also located. The body of the child had to be conceptualised as one component of the body of the nation. Strengthened and supported it could contribute to national prosperity, but ignored it could bring about a degeneration, causing ‘the British breed, once lusty and virile’ to decline ‘to a place among the “dying nations”’.141 Child rescue was, thus, rendered not personal, but national.

Notes   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 12 – a contrast’, OWS, VII: 187 (1899), 185. ‘Honora’s effort’, OWS, I: 4 (1884), 5. Miss Munro, ‘The outcast’s plea’, HH, VII: 80 (1894), 144. Mary Howitt, ‘The prayer of the children’, HH, VI: 69 (1893), 172. Stephen, ‘The children of our land’, HH, XXIV (1911), 55. Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 29. – not Diogenes, but another!’, OWS, IX: 241 (1904), 295. Maria Osborn, ‘Little Scaramouch’, CA (July 1871), 1. Rev. W. St. Hill Bourne, ‘Waifs and strays’, OWS, 2 (1883), 6. ‘Room for the little fellows’, 63. J.W. Horsley, ‘Untitled’, OWS, I: 33 (1887), 1. J. Pendlebury, ‘Lights and shadows of child-life: Benny’s wrongs and rescue’, HH, I: 1 (1888), 3; Rev. James Wells, ‘The child under paganism’, ND, XXXII: 248 (1909), 18. ‘Children’s corner’, OWS, 62 (1889), 7. ‘Lucy’, CA (April 1872), 2. ‘These and those’, ND, XIX: 191 (1895), 125; J.T.T., ‘The rescued flower’, ND, I: 6 (1877), 76; ‘A Christmas appeal’, ND, XXII: 207 (1898), 88. Josephine, ‘The babies of Bethnal Green’, CA (June 1871), 5. Ina Leon Cassilis, ‘“Tater” – one of thousands’, OWS, XI: 278 (1907), 171; Adela de C. Pereira, ‘Nancy – a memory’, BS, 82 (1900), 2. Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 4. Ibid., p. 110. Nina Felshin, ‘Clothing as subject’, Art Journal, 54: 1 (1995), 20. Burnett, Little Princess, p. 111. Felshin, ‘Clothing as subject’, 20. Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor, Child Welfare and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 71. Millie Sanderson, ‘The little street singer: a Bible reader’s story’, ND, IX: 104-6 (1885), 172. T.J. Barnardo, ‘Our lifeboat among the breakers’, ND, VI: 60 & 61 (1882), 43. ‘Remember, boys make men’, HH, I: 4 (1888), 80; ‘Freely ye have received’, 5. T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Charley’, CA (April 1871), 1. T.J. Barnardo, ‘Wastrels’, ND, I: 6 (1877), 70. Frank Fingerpost, ‘The lucky horseshoe’, YHLM (1900), 124; Frank Hills, ‘I was hungry, sir’, HH, XIV: 159 (1901), 65.

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the body of the child 28 See for example T.J. Barnardo, ‘Of the household of faith’, ND, XXII: 206 (1898), 61; K.L.S., ‘The Christmas sermon’, OWS, V: 141 (1896), 209; ‘The crossing sweeper’, YHLM (1900), 66. 29 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The street newsboy’, ND, II: 12 (1878), 157. Broeder, ‘A story of the snow’, ND, III: 12 (1879), 148. 30 ‘Orphaned childhood’, HH, VI: 67 (1893), 130. 31 Gillian Perry (ed.), Gender and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p.  27. 32 Evelyn Farrar, Every Day (London: Religious Tract Society, 1888), p. 128. 33 Maria Osborn, ‘The little street girl’, CA (May 1872), 6. 34 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 18. – a larger heart, the kindlier hand’, OWS, VIII: 204 (1901), 65. 35 See for example Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 33. Worse than motherless’, OWS, X: 255 (1905), 122; M.E.J., ‘S. Chad’s Home, Far Headingley, Leeds’, BS, 61 (1898), 58. 36 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Left alone’, ND, V: 1 (1881), 2; Miss A.M. Lester, ‘Cameos from life: cruel kindness’, OWS, XIII: 325 (1912), 354. 37 Evelyn Everett-Green, ‘The Little Matchgirl’ in Our Winnie and The Little MatchGirl (London: John F. Shaw and Co. [1904]), p. 129. 38 T.J. Barnardo, ‘A waif of Babylon’, ND, XV: 156 (1891), 126. 39 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 11. – a transplanted rose’, OWS, VII: 186 (1899), 166–7. 40 Ellice Hopkins, ‘Little Mary’, ND, V: 2 & 3 (1881), 25. 41 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 8. – feeling for the child’, OWS, VI: 173 (1898), 357–8. 42 See for example Barnardo, ‘Left alone’, 2; Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life, No.  24. – a modern Samaritan’, OWS, VIII: 222 (1902), 379; H.C., ‘One of His helpless ones: the bare facts’, HH, XVIII (1905), 111. 43 K.L.S., ‘The Christmas sermon’, 209; Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 23. – a deserter?’, OWS, VIII: 220 (1902), 351. 44 Margaret Field, ‘Which?’, OWS, I: 10 (1885), 5. 45 F.E. Reade, ‘Two little orphans’, OWS, I: 33 (1887), 3. 46 T.J. Barnardo, ‘A romance of the slums’, ND, XXII: 206 (1898), 65. 47 Sister Alice Gough, ‘Dickens and children’, HH, XVII (1904), 47. 48 J.C., ‘The future of a waif’, CA, 1: 9 (1880), 142–4. 49 E.N. Leigh Fry, ‘By the Gail Water, Ch II’, BS, 25 (1895), 15. 50 E.N. Leigh Fry, ‘By the Gail Water, Ch XII’, BS, 35 (1896), 13–16. 51 ‘Honora’s effort’, 5–6. 52 ‘Honora’s effort’, OWS, I: 8 (1884), 5–7. 53 ‘Lights and shadows of child-life: nobody’s child!’, HH, IV: 42 (1891), 101. 54 Eve Lynch, ‘Out of place: the masquerade of servitude in Victorian literature’, Pacific Coast Philology, 31: 1 (1996), 98. 55 See for example T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Lights and shadows of child-life: not a button, but a possibility’, HH, III: 1 (1890), 5; E.S., ‘Joy in Heaven’, OWS, V: 144 (1896), 266. 56 M.E.J., ‘From the Ripon and Wakefield dioceses. St Chad’s Home, Far Headingley, Leeds’, BS, 53 (1897), 58. 57 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Penal servitude for life’, ND, XIV: 143 &144 (1890), 133. 58 ‘The street arab’, ND, II: 12 (1878), 171. 59 Mrs H. Grattan Guinness, ‘Let down your nets!: a haul at the “Edinburgh Castle”’, ND, II: 1 (1878), 15; T.J. Barnardo, ‘Winter experiences’, CA (October 1871), 5; ‘Give the lad a chance’, OWS, XI: 277 (1907), 157. 60 E.B. Aveling, ‘Nobody: a seasonable biography in two parts’, ND, III: 12 (1879), 140. 61 T.J. Barnardo, ‘All alone in the world’, ND, VI: 68 (1882), 152. 62 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Gone mad!’, ND, I: 2 (1877), 16. 63 Stephenson, ‘Not a button’, 4; ‘A peep at one of the homes’, OWS, 87 (1891), 13; ‘The S. Nicholas Home’, BS, 28 (1895), 54. 64 A.W.M., ‘Stories of our own boys and girls: baby “Jack”’, HH, VI: 70 (1893), 187.

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child, nation, race and empire 65 Charles W. Barker, ‘Told in Canada’, ND, XI: 120 (1887), 74. 66 Sister Frances, ‘Stories of children lost and found: just like that, Sister’, HH, VII: 79 (1894), 121. 67 ‘Lights and shadows of child-life: anywhere to get rid of him’, HH, IV: 37 (1891), 5–6. 68 ‘Dr. Barnardo’s homes: twenty-seventh anniversary’, Spectator (28 July 1893), 552. 69 T.J. Barnardo, Down Newport-Market Way (London: Home for Working and Destitute Lads, undated pamphlet), p. 15. ‘Force of character – inhuman and human’, CG, IX: 12 (1895), supplement. 70 Maria Osborn, ‘Lost’, CA, 3 (1872), 5. 71 ‘The northern C.U. conference at York’, BS, 158 (1906), 105; ‘Underfed children: the Society’s plan: a fact for the community’, CG, XVI: 8 (1902), 84. 72 Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 29’, 295. 73 ‘Honora’s effort’, OWS, I: 2 (1884), 5. 74 H.C., ‘Bare facts’, 211–12. 75 G.A. Sala, ‘Our Society’s deserts’, CG, I: 8 (1887), 60. ‘In a roadside cottage’, CG, I: 1 (1887), 2–3. 76 Miss Bolton, ‘The month of sunshine and flowers’, CLPP, II: 9 (1895), 73–4. 77 Sister Grace, ‘Stories of our own boys and girls: Jennie’s chance’, HH, VI: 61 (1893), 6. 78 ‘Topics: cruelty to children’, Spectator (4 January 1895), 3. 79 These images were similar to those discussed in Susan Edwards, ‘Discourses of denial and moral panics: the pornographisation of the child in art, the written word, film and photograph’ in Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson (eds), Behaving Badly: Social Panic and Moral Outrage – Victorian and Modern Parallels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 178. 80 ‘No sensation, pray!’, CG, VI: 10 (1892), 125–6. 81 Rev. Joseph McKim, ‘Night and day’, ND, XXX: 241 (1907), 40. 82 ‘Cruelty to children’, ND, IX: 95–7 (1885), 73; Millie Sanderson, ‘Our fire baby’, ND, VIII: 81–6 (1884), 33. 83 Sir Lewis Morris, ‘A plea for children’, OWS, VI: 163 (1897), 181. Dec, ‘Helpless little beggars’, YHLM (1900), 109. 84 Hesba Stretton, ‘London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’, CA, VI: 65 (1885), 89–90. 85 Anne Allen and Arthur Morton, This is Your Child: The Story of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 27. 86 ‘Eyes and no eyes’, CG, I: 5 (1887), 33–4. 87 See for example ‘The story of the Shrewsbury case’, CG, I: 2 (1887), 9–10; ‘A rich woman and her child’, CG, V: 9 (1891), 89. 88 ‘The bill’, CG, III: 29 (1889), 73–4. 89 Jas. O. Bevan, ‘The lost and the found’, OWS, I: 18 (1885), 2. 90 Leslie Keith, ‘Nobody’s lad’, ND, 5: 46 & 47 (1881), 62. 91 ‘The taming of a savage’, Spectator (9 April 1897), 310. 92 ‘Once a little cripple boy’, BS, 168 (1907), 70. 93 ‘A remarkable cripple’, Spectator (13 July 1900), 995. 94 T.J. Barnardo, ‘A little waif’, ND, XXII: 207, 78; O.H., ‘The match boy’, ND, VI: 58 & 59 (1882), 36. 95 Joseph Johnson, Dibs: A Story of Young London Life (London: Religious Tract Society, no date), p. 64. 96 Uncle John, ‘The blind musician’, Band of Hope Review, 76 (April 1857), 1. 97 ‘Mothers-monsters’, Juvenile Missionary Magazine, VII: 3 (1850), 140. 98 S.M. Fry, The Little Orange-sellers (London: Religious Tract Society, [1859]), p. 7. 99 Ibid., p. 27. 100 T. Barnardo, ‘Blind Bobby’, Our Darlings (OD), CXV (May 1891), 227. 101 Gough, ‘Dickens and children’, 47. 102 ‘Jack and me’, CA (April 1871), 3.

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the body of the child 103 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Reject?’, HH, IX: 97 (1896), 12–13. 104 ‘The cripples’ home’, Spectator (18 January 1901), 98. 105 See, for example, E. Kerr, ‘The Daily Telegraph boy’, Our Boys and Girls (June 1881), 46–8 and E.M.L., ‘Little Annie’s Christmas’, Aunt Judy’s Magazine, LXVIII (December 1871), 118–23. 106 Arthur E. Gregory, ‘A message to all who love the children’, HH, XXIII (1910), 172–3. 107 Our special commissioner, ‘What others are doing: II homes for cripples’, ND, I: 7 & 8 (1877), 88. 108 Alice Leigh’s Mission (London: Religious Tract Society, 18??), pp. 9, 10, 12. 109 ‘The S. Nicholas Home’, BS, 26 (1895), 31. 110 M.E.J., ‘From the Ripon and Wakefield dioceses’, 93. 111 Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 35 – fireworks’, OWS, X: 261 (1906), 184. 112 Our special commissioner, ‘What others are doing: II’, 88. 113 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 28. – God’s tenth’, OWS, IX: 238 (1904), 230. ‘From “our alley” to the green fields’, ND, VII: 73–8 (1883), 103. 114 Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 32– we two’, OWS, X: 252 (1905), 68. 115 ‘The mission of the child’, BS, 214 (1911), 18. 116 Miss Charlotte Murray, ‘Leagued in love’, YHLM, I (1892), 58. 117 Crofton, ‘To the members of the Children’s Union’, BS, II: 20 (1894), 57. 118 Uncle Edward, ‘From Uncle Edward’, BS, 1: 7 (1891), 107. 119 M.E. Sangster, ‘My brave laddie’, CH, 42 (1892), 4. 120 Lillian C. Hume, ‘Hunchie’, OWS, V: 150 (1896), 361. 121 Lillian C. Hume, ‘Hunchie’, OWS, V: 151 (1896), 377. 122 Gough, ‘Dickens and children’, 47. 123 Gillian Avery, Nineteenth-Century Children: Heroes and Heroines in English Children’s Stories 1780–1900 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965), p. 212. Elisabeth Jay, ‘“Ye careless, thoughtless, worldly parents, tremble while you read this history!”: the use and abuse of the dying child in Evangelical literature’, in Gillian Avery and Kimberley Reynolds (eds), Representations of Childhood Death (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 128. 124 Kimberley Reynolds and Paul Yates, ‘Too soon: representations of childhood death in literature for children’, in Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 168. 125 Ibid., pp. 163, 167. 126 Johnson, Dibs, p. 154. 127 A. Rycroft Taylor, Wee Dan, or ‘Keep to the Right’ (Manchester: John Heywood, 1882), p. 86. 128 Elliot, ‘This is no place for the likes o’ you’, CA, 18 (June 1873), 86. 129 Jaye A. Penne, ‘Connie’s gift’, YHLM (December 1908), 253. 130 ‘S. Nicholas home for cripple [sic] children’, BS, 1: 13 (1893), 199; Miss Charlotte Murray, ‘The league hymn – we’ll all help’, YHLM, I (1892), 19. 131 ‘The waif-girl’, CA, 5: 41 (1875), 57. 132 ‘Lines written on the narrative entitled “Found dead”’, ND, II: 8 (1878), 108; H.A.P., ‘Their angels’, BS, 112 (1902), 105. 133 ‘Honora’s effort’, OWS, I: 10 (1885), 5. 134 ‘Annie’s Ticket’, ND, III: 12 (1879), 156. 135 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: Aird and Coghill, 1897), p. 31; ‘Dr. Barnardo’s homes: twenty-seventh anniversary’, 552. 136 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 38. – in memory of little Millie’, OWS, X: 269 (1906), 317. 137 Lilian A. Cowell, ‘The wayside cross’, OWS, IV: 114 (1893), 147. 138 ‘The children’s home, XII’, Spectator (30 October 1891), 1041. 139 R.V.B., ‘A dream’, OWS, I: 98 (1892), 14; Sangster, ‘My brave laddie’, 4. 140 ‘S. Nicholas home for cripple [sic] children’, 199; Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 25. – the charwoman’s helpless child’, OWS, IX: 226 (1903), 22. 141 Rev. W. Wade, ‘Physical deterioration’, OWS, IX: 246 (1904), 379.

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The body of the nation

Take up the Rich Man’s burden – And think of those who need Some gleam of light to brighten, Some ray of sun to speed The stunted growth of goodness – Choked by the thousand tares That round the slum-bred children Spread wide their sordid snare.1

The power of child rescue narrative to shape understandings of child neglect lay as much in its creation of location as in its construction of character. The body of the child was placed within a familiar environment, rendered threatening by the new social, religious and moral meanings ascribed to it. Hence rescue became an imperative not only for the individual but also for the community – and indeed the nation – and the rescuer was transformed from an individual religious enthusiast into a national hero. The initial focus of child rescue activity was London, the centre of ‘an Empire on which the sun never sets’, yet harbouring within it ‘narrow court[s] in which the sun never shines’.2 ‘A great and rich city’, it was compared to Nineveh and Babylon, biblical examples of cities blinded by their own wealth to their responsibility to their people.3 It was a blot on ‘our beautiful British Isles’, ‘a blot upon our Christianity … a blot upon our humanity’.4 ‘Hordes of men and women are living in parts of this great city of London worse, so far as their condition is concerned, than the very brute beasts.’5 ‘In the midst of England’s capital! – there, in the heart of the richest and most orderly Christian nation under heaven’ within sight of the Mansion House … where each year there is spent in dainty banquets a sum sufficient to feed all the homeless children in London … the Royal Exchange … within whose walls every day millions change hands as

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easily as though they were units … [and] the Bank of England … where gold is piled so high and broad, that a guard of soldiers is thought necessary for its protection … [were] English lads, without a bed, without a shoe, without a penny – with no trade but cadging – with no schools but the streets – with no career save one that leads ever downward – with no knowledge of God, and not a glimpse of heaven!6

In the ‘heart of the wealthiest city / in this most Christian land’ children slept in ‘cold dark archway[s]’ and died alone in the snow.7 Pre-eminent ‘among the nations … good and noble and Godlike’, ‘in an age of culture and refinement … when knowledge is making such rapid strides’ London’s poorer areas were depicted as a ‘terrible pollution of the stream of our national life’, ‘the disgraces of modern civilisation’.8 ‘League upon league of dank and dismal streets; / A low grey sky, a yellow, sickly mist; / And spires of cheerless smoke that turn and twist / O’er the gaunt chimneys; roof with roof high meets.’9 The dramatic descriptions of London’s East End were intended to shock as well as to shame. Working within a binary of darkness and light, child rescue literature depicted a world ‘paved with grey’ where ‘the sky is shut out by tall, dark houses’ and ‘babies’ funerals are so frequent they excite no notice’.10 In the narrow, dirty and noisy streets, ‘the air was heavy, but not with the perfumes of meadow and hedgerow, and the slimy mud which fastens itself upon you is not honest Mother Earth, but like the hideous stew in the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth’.11 ‘Crowded thousands’ of children, growing up ‘ignorant alike of health and happiness, green grass, and sunlight’, ‘teemed’ in ‘dingy alley[s] / where squalor reigned supreme’, prowling about ‘railway arches, fruit markets, and the river foreshore’.12 Playing in gutters, with mud and stones their only toys, surrounded by sights ‘of moral degradation’, children witnessed ‘lying and theft, drunkenness and misery, foul language and worse deeds’, and were ‘beaten and driv’n to beg or steal / by drink-besotted, hardened men’.13 From the scenes around them learning Soon the spoils of sin to share; Luring lights around them glaring Lead them in the downward way, Where the joys of sense, ensnaring, Hold them in their evil sway.14

At night the children slept, ‘crouched in stifling loathsome dens’, ‘huddled together like rats in a sewer’, ‘lonely and cold beneath some arch’ or sheltered ‘under hedges, under carts, on warm dunghills, on doorsteps’.15 ‘In these gloomy and wretched holes and corners they conceal themselves until the pangs of hunger and opportunities of earning a penny draw them forth again at the return of day.’16 [ 63 ]

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Where there was some remnant of family their living conditions were depicted as equally desperate. Dying mothers lay in dark, almost empty, windowless rooms ‘at the top of some rickety stairs’.17 The rooms reeked of ‘dirt and misery’, with ‘carpetless’ floors, that had ‘apparently never known soap and water’, wall-paper hanging ‘in dismal tatters’, and ‘a few miserable rags by way of bedclothes’.18 ‘Herded’ into one room, in which ‘it is not usual for the graces of humanity to flourish’, poor children experienced ‘a home which was no home’, unlike the ideal English home, modelled on the ‘home at Nazareth’, where ‘the parents were truly God-serving people’ and the child made the home happy.19 Material filth and wretchedness also signified moral impurity.20 Dirt and darkness symbolised the ‘dark and hideous pathway’ facing children who were not brought to Christ.21 ‘They are unused to the light, and the living waters do not reach them: they wither and perish; but only to rise again from the dead as witnesses against false Christians.’22 Where there was no cleanliness, readers were warned, there was no decency and hence, ‘none of that happy family life on which the moral and economic safety of a nation depends’.23 The conditions prevailing in the ‘squalid tracts of London’ created a ‘childhood not only crippled of joy, but utterly deprived of hope, and fore-doomed to destruction and despair’, the antithesis of the ‘bright and happy childhood’ to which children were not only entitled, but which they needed if they were to ‘go out into the world with every chance of doing well and leading happy and useful lives’.24 Child rescuers developed a taxonomy of space in which geography determined destiny. The ordered, privatised spaces in which the middle classes lived were contrasted with the disorder of the slums which were a threat both to an idealised childhood and to the stability of the nation as a whole.25 The magazines offered no critique of the social conditions that produced such destitution, but rather looked back nostalgically to a rural England which they imagined as far more morally pure, a bucolic ideal which invoked a ‘double longing after innocence and happiness’ (see Figure 7).26 Such rural nostalgia was a prominent feature of much of the literature written in response to the mass industrialisation and urbanisation that Britain had experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. In child rescue literature poor families were depicted as having been lured from ‘the early associations and friends that cluster round the little cottage in the quiet hamlet’ in which they were born and ‘the kind clergyman or other minister’ to whom they were ‘known by name’, to an uncaring anonymous city which rarely provided the higher wages and better conditions it had promised.27 In London their children were [ 64 ]

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Figure 7  The rescued child relocated from urban squalor to rural idyll

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confined in dark chambers, ‘overhung with cobwebs’. ‘Lost in wretchedness and misery’, like ‘plants which have struggled up without sunshine’, they were equated with weeds.28 Rural children, the bishop of Bedford argued, may appear ‘somewhat lethargic, unimaginative, and more remarkable for healthy frames than for active intellects, yet they not seldom develop later on into strong, steady, sensible men and women’, whereas in the ‘great cities … childhood, as we understand and love it, almost seems to slip out, and the boy and girl to be suddenly grown up in the precocity of knowledge and experience and independence’.29 Children were depicted as longing for the beauty of the country. Taken to the country, a ‘poor little waif’ declared she had never seen ‘anything pleasanter’, but on her return to London, her pleasant memories faded. ‘When I’ve been selling my papers / I’ve tried to see it all, / But I couldn’t, for the dirty street, / The noise, the dingy wall.’30 YHLM contributor Marian Isabel Hurrell’s description of child flower sellers used the imagery of lavender as a symbol of the countryside itself – a means of highlighting the differences between an environment where youth and sweetness flourish and one in which growth is stunted and children become old before their time.31 Child rescuers were ambivalent towards modernity, admiring the changes it had wrought, while simultaneously deploring its harsher impacts. The ‘machinery’ which had been so emblematic of Britain’s nineteenth-century advancement could also be hard and cruel, the ‘mills of competition’ grinding ‘to dust’, the ‘mighty host of inefficient and inept people’. Crowded into ‘towns and cities, where the struggle for existence grows fiercer every year ... the weakest go to the wall, or in the fight are trodden under foot’.32 Yet, their children constituted the ‘raw material’ rather than ‘waste products’ of the great industrial age.33 The components of mire, ‘clay, and soot, and sand, and … water’, once refined, could become porcelain, opals, diamonds and crystals, but the ‘souls of poor children are capable of being made something infinitely more precious’.34 Just as cyanide was used in the South African mines to extract further gold from discarded tailings, ‘Christian cyanide’ could regain ‘residual gold’ from the ‘tailings of the street’.35 Readers were asked to imagine the children as crowded onto a ‘train of human life … rushing with the speed of the age in which we live along the narrow gauge of social existence’. Their donations had the power to determine whether the journey would end at ‘that bright terminus of safety and security upon the rails of Christianity, education, industry, and virtue’ or the ‘other winding way which leads to darkness and ignorance – misery here, and eternal unhappiness beyond’.36 [ 66 ]

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Rural nostalgia, however, more commonly produced a revulsion against the city, depicted as so alien as to qualify as a mission field. The term ‘civilising mission’ was used primarily to describe the attempts by Evangelical Christians to ascribe a benevolent purpose to British imperial expansionism, providing the justification for missionary activity overseas. Child rescuers, however, identified with a broad group of Christians who, following Wichern, argued that a civilising mission was also necessary at home. In London, ‘the very centre from whence the Gospel light is diffused’, Barnardo argued, ‘the Divine Commission’ was at risk of being overlooked.37 The British experience in the colonies provided the language with which to construct images of decay from within. 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’ which trapped 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. This confused and confusing metaphor, used most effectively by Salvation Army founder General William Booth, legitimated the reimagining of the landscape, reconstituting its residents as the ‘other’, as alien as the characters in mission narratives and travellers’ tales.40 Living in ‘dusky dens’ in a state of ‘practical heathendom’, ‘fresh from the mud of river-bank or street / rude as the heathen of benighted lands’, the children’s needs were presented as more pressing than those of ‘the far heathen’ whose calls were far more readily heard. This strategy was not without its risks, as advocates had to be careful not to alienate potential supporters. In a speech to Children’s Union workers in 1906, Rudolf praised their support of foreign missions before putting the case for our ‘own flesh and blood starving in souls and bodies’.41 ‘Yes, go to China and live and speak for Christ’, wrote Barnardo. ‘But I would say, let none of us forget that at our door – not 1,000 miles away, but at our very door – are the heathen also; those children for whom Christ died.’42 The Reverend Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne was more forthright, declaring that it was a ‘standing shame to the nation’ that ‘nearly half a million pounds’ was raised annually ‘to propagate the Gospel in foreign parts’ while there was a ‘portion of eastern London … utterly devoid of the commonest ­attributes of [ 67 ]

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civilisation’. ‘Street arab’ Dibs was depicted as dying on Christmas Day in a London in which ‘wealth and poverty’ sat alongside ‘vice … sin and crime … squalor and misery … pain and suffering … greed and lust’, ‘thousands of churches and chapels’ co-existed with ‘10,000 public houses’, and ‘mitred prelates … [and] its most unlettered local preacher’ lived amongst ‘its multitude of the vicious and its 80,000 paupers’, clear evidence of ‘how far the life of this centre of civilisation is from the true realisation of that Spirit of Christ’.44 The contrast was made more powerful by situating the povertystricken areas of London in relation to landmarks which were the focus of national pride. ‘Under the very shadow of Westminster Abbey’, wrote the NCH’s Sister Grace, was ‘a terrible neighbourhood’ in which children ‘lived as utterly heathen a life as if they had been born in India or China’.45 As the work expanded ‘the natives … of the Cowgate and West Port in Edinburgh, of Pilgrim Street, Newcastle, of the vile slums in Liverpool, and of the Cowcaddens in Glasgow’ were added to the list of home heathen ‘allowed to live and die amid conditions so abominable as to baffle description, enveloped the while in a moral darkness dense enough almost to be felt’.46 Neglected children were to be found ‘all over this Christian land of ours under the noses of city missionaries, police, and school board officers, but as undefended as if born in an uncivilised desert’.47 ‘Outcast London’ was more than matched by ‘miserable Manchester and squalid Liverpool’.48 Even the countryside was not exempt. ‘A beautiful West Country town’ harboured ‘Rookeries … where Souls catch Contagion … [and] Fever Dens abound’. A seaport town was ‘literally a warren of infamy and brutality’ in which the ‘seeds of villainy, early implanted, flourish abundantly’.49 In the classical mission narrative, ‘male clerical heroes … move from the Christian heartland into a kind of global religious vacuum peopled by non-Christians who are sometimes portrayed as noble, sometimes as vicious, but always as ignorant of the benefits of the Christian gospel’.50 By constituting darkest or outcast England as their mission field, child rescuers were able to depict themselves in a similar light, saving the nation from internal decay. ‘It would be a splendid education for all of us if we were bound to go and look at the misery which existed amongst the children in the dark places of all our large cities’, wrote Rudolf.51 Detailed accounts of excursions into this alien territory had a voyeuristic quality, taking the reader into places where the respectable did not go, and providing lurid descriptions designed to shock and perhaps even titillate. In Glasgow, Quarrier reported, ‘There were “Indians” to be seen in the east and “Mexicans” in the west – Dennistoun and New City Road alike had “furriners” in their midst … but we wished to see Wild Arabs so we journeyed south [to the [ 68 ]

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Gorbals]’. While there are traces of the social survey model, using a map to divide the city into districts and allocating a worker to each one, the language of child rescue is far more aggressive. In explorations of ‘the lowest depths of Slumdom’, lodging-houses are ‘invaded’, market places are ‘scrutinized’, courts are ‘penetrated’, ‘every hole and cranny’ is ‘thoroughly searched’ and those found living there thoroughly ‘interrogated’.53 Stumbling ‘up the stairs, groping in the darkness’, Stephenson’s workers burst into a room ‘impregnated with the vile, sickly odour of poverty and filth combined’.54 Barnardo uncovered ‘a hotbed of impurity, as vile as Sodom and Gomorrah … within fifty yards of a stately temple for divine worship’.55 Wretched-looking, slatternly women gossip the morning away in groups, or pass stealthily into the ever-gaping doors of the Red Lion at the corner, there to prepare themselves for fierce and brutal quarrels between themselves or their husbands later in the day, and sometimes far into the night. Sharp-featured, unwashed and unkempt children gamble or struggle or wrangle together in the foetid slush that sluggishly flows down the centre of the court, and shout wrathfully together in a language that is as noisome and morally pestilential as the tainted atmosphere of the slum.56

Night excursions disclosed conditions in which ‘morality and decency sicken and die’, children making ‘their homeward way amid scenes of revelry and sin’, ‘men, women and children … sleeping together’ on the ‘staircases of some tenement houses’ and boys sleeping out, crowded ‘together like pigs’ in ‘the haunts in which they are to be found’.57 In all such accounts the immorality and even the destitution of the adults serve as a self-consciously Dickensian stage set. The ‘wretched denizens’ of the ‘dens of iniquity’ were depicted as beyond redemption, loving ‘the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil’.58 The focus was always on the child. Helen Crofton took her young readers ‘down a crowded alley’, passing ‘in at an open door’. Although the ‘language’ she heard and the ‘cruel faces’ she saw made her ‘shudder and tremble’ she climbed ‘a creaky stair, and, attracted by sounds of sobbing’, turned a handle and found herself ‘in a bare and dirty room. In the corner … on a bed of straw, with an old sack for a pillow’, she saw ‘a little child’.59 If, as Cardinal Manning and Benjamin Waugh believed, ‘the Christianity and the civilisation of a people may both be measured by their treatment of children’, such explorations found a nation which was truly lacking.60 ‘In England’, Rudolf argued, ‘we claimed to be the most civilised country in the world … but it was quite common to find a child dying at our very doorsteps.’61 The cries of children ‘unfed and unsatisfied’, forced to sleep ‘on unpillowed, unblanketed beds on the floor’ were ‘as often as not unheeded’.62 [ 69 ]

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Redemption was a national as well as an individual imperative. 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.63 The 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 potential 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.’64 ‘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.’65 It was this task which child rescuers sought to claim as their own. ‘In this age of Christian activity’, wrote Barnardo, ‘there is no work more fruitful than this. It is bearding the foe in his chosen den. It is enlisting recruits for our Christian army in the very midst of the enemy’s country.’66 Comparing themselves to the soldiers who struggled on the ‘field of Waterloo’ or the rescue party sent to the black hole of Calcutta, they argued that child rescue was essential if the nation were to be saved.67 While slums might be an inevitable ‘creation of civilisation’ they were no place for children.68 Inaction would have an economic, intellectual and, most importantly, a moral cost, ‘undermining the health and destroying the physique of a large proportion of the nation, demoralizing and ruining thousands, body and soul’. ‘From infancy the boys and girls get inured to indecency. As children, and afterwards as young men and women, they are forced to live among themselves and with their parents, as though sex had ceased to be sacred, and purity become impossible.’69 The key discourse employed in transforming the work from the individual to the national was one of fear. Here again there was evidence of considerable slippage between the language used to describe (and condemn) subaltern populations in colonial locations and that applied to the lowest stratum of the working class at home. The children were depicted as deformed, degraded and depraved, at the least dirty, but more commonly filthy, loathsome, sullen, savage and wild, living in conditions that were squalid and verminous. Victims of tainted inheritance, marked by the pauper brand or taint, their humanity was compromised. Living amidst the ‘filth and nastiness of life’, such ‘human driftwood’ or ‘human wastrels’ were ‘inheritors of sin and [ 70 ]

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shame’. ‘Poor specimens of humanity’, bearing the ‘wild look of a hunted animal’, their very presence threatened ‘savage wrath’ towards the uncaring populace amongst whom they lived.71 Such language was designed to elicit not pity but fear from the reader, whose donations, it was implied, could buy safety from the danger which would inevitably come if the problems of youth in the inner cities were not addressed. Middle-class children as well as adults were taught to recognise street children as threatening. ‘If I was kept so dirty, I should think that nothing matters, / I never could feel very good in rags and tears and tatters; / And if I’d not one bit of food, and saw a lovely dinner, / I’d almost feel that I could steal, and be a wicked sinner.’72 In transposing this threat from the personal to the national, the literature rendered support for the child rescue movement a patriotic act. Although the discourse of contempt contained some sense of power, it was a power which threatened the very people whose sympathy was being engaged, and hence it called for a solution that contained, rather than liberated, children at risk, who were constituted as victims of others but threats in and of themselves.73 They suffered despite rather than because of the glories of the empire but, left unattended, they had the potential to bring about its ruin. This discourse functioned to render the reader fearful. Images of children, grown ‘misshapen’, ‘useless tares or noxious weeds’, ‘prowling about the streets getting initiated into the arts of vice and crime’, sat alongside poems in which angry children threatened vicious retribution against any who did not heed their cries.74 Central to this threat was the risk of contagion. ‘The poorest slums’, readers were warned, were immediately adjacent to ‘the broader thoroughfares in which are luxurious mansions of the rich’.75 In London’s West End, ‘squalor the deepest and affluence the most luxurious are separated by but a few yards’, while ‘in a popular Southcoast town … the opulence that airs itself contentedly on “the front” is … a bitter contrast to the squalor and misery of the low, crowded streets which lies just behind’.76 ‘An adverse environment’, readers were reminded: while it kills some, will also weaken many of the survivors … the health and well-being of the poor child reacts upon the health and well-being of the child of the well-to-do … each city-dweller is linked with every other city-dweller; each broad thoroughfare has its boundary of mean streets, and the disease spot festering in the slum may send the breath of death into the cosiest nursery … such things are a menace to national prosperity.77

By supporting child rescue, readers would minimise the risk to their own children, stemming ‘the tide of wickedness’ that threatened to [ 71 ]

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engulf all. Like bacteria that ‘cannot exist in a ray of sunshine … the germs of evil in the dark places of this earth will disappear in the light of Christian charity properly administered’.79 ‘To deodorize, and still more to purify, any polluted brooks which are falling into the stream of life’ was ‘the prime duty of the community’.80 The relationship drawn between the nation and the child enabled child rescuers to articulate a new concept of children’s rights, creating a direct claim to citizenship which bypassed the property rights of the parent. However it was a concept lacking any call for social justice or children’s rights such as would later be elaborated by the NSPCC and, more prominently, by some branches of the child-saving movement in the United States. Children were constituted as victims, not of an unjust society but of the failings of their parents or other caregivers, often articulated in terms of the old evangelical discourses of morality and sin. The only right to which they were entitled was the right to be protected by those who benevolently, but paternalistically, took up their cause. As objects of charity their role was to be grateful, serving their benefactors by performing the lowliest roles in the workforce when their training was complete. And, in the minds of both those who undertook their care and those whose donations supported their work, their status as potential threats justified a training regime that was characterised by rigour rather than love. ‘We seek to make it as great an advantage to be an English child as to be an English man’, declared the Child’s Guardian.81 The ‘babe born of a besotted woman in a dismal den’ had the same rights ‘as the infant in costly cradle, whose father is a peer of the realm’, because both had the potential to contribute to the nation.82 However, that potential was circumscribed by class and status. Rescued children were to be trained to be ‘useful citizens while on earth, and, some day, as heavenly citizens in God’s eternal kingdom’, accepting rather than contesting their allotted place.83 The goal of child rescue was to protect children from the ‘evils’ which they understood as the ‘enemies of childhood’, defined as drink, common lodging houses, overcrowding, child vagrancy, premature wage earning and juvenile street trading, rather than enabling them to challenge such understandings.84 ‘Contaminated at the outset by vicious surroundings, it is no wonder that destitution in the case of a child results in the contradiction of all that childhood ought to be.’85 ‘The home in Poverty Court, or Idle Lane’, wrote NCH’s Alfred Mager, ‘is not conducive to virtue or self-respect.’86 The hotels, gin palaces and common lodging houses which provided centres of sociability in such locations were cited as evidence of the failure of working-class family life to nurture the domestic spaces, demarcated private, which idealised notions of [ 72 ]

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childhood mandated.87 The relationship between private and public spaces in the slums was understood as being mutually constitutive. ‘The home life of the poor and the public-house act and react on each other’, one Highways and Hedges writer argued; ‘the more miserable the home, the greater the dirt, the more the public-house attracts; the more it attracts, the viler the home life, the greater the misery and dirt’.88 When ‘closing time’ brought quiet to the ‘gin-palace’, Mary Lester observed, ‘the horrors of the home night had begun’.89 Common lodging houses and ‘furnished rooms’ were reconstituted as sources rather than solutions to the street child’s problems. Here their parents were corrupted and children left to mix with ‘the class best described as life’s hopeless failures’.90 ‘Youthful depredators who study thieving as a science … the youth who has robbed a hundred shops and still eluded the policeman’s grasp … the girl that can show the earliest precocity in immodesty’ became the imagined models of innocent but abandoned children looking for a way into earning a living.91 Where American child rescuer Charles Loring Brace liked to depict the boys he rescued as the most evolutionarily advanced of individuals, because the entrepreneurial skills they had developed enabled them to survive in the nation’s harshest environments, his British equivalents were more concerned to combat fears of degeneracy.92 The supposed ‘freedom’ of the street trader’s life was recast as a ‘freedom to grow in evil’, releasing the children from the ‘surveillance’ considered essential if they were to be returned to childhood.93 Most other forms of child labour were similarly dismissed, judged on their moral rather than their material value. ‘Industrial overcrowding’, it was argued, had its worst impact not in the lowering of wages, but in the ‘frequent periods of enforced idleness, which impair efficiency, destroy ambition, and breed all kinds of evil habits’. Forced into work to supplement the family income, ‘children’s prospects were sacrificed to immediate needs’, leading them into ‘blind alley occupations that discharge them, on the threshold of manhood, unfit for anything but unskilled labour’.94 Most urban employment was condemned because it exposed children to ‘the lower quarters of the town’ and the ‘worst conceivable’ ‘conversation and surroundings’. Agricultural labour was preferred, except where it was itinerant, ‘throwing’ children into ‘association with the lowest classes from large towns, or with tramps’.95 The city itself was constituted as threatening. ‘England’, declared Barnardo, ‘can no longer tolerate such hotbeds of dangerous passions, such seed-plots of revolution and disorder, to remain among her crowded populations’.96 ‘The wretched and hopeless poverty in which large masses of our Metropolitan poor are plunged’, Lord Brabazon agreed, ‘is a standing menace to the social fabric of the State’.97 [ 73 ]

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However, the child rescuers advocated the removal of the child to a new environment rather than an attempt to reform the environment in which they were found. It was the ‘new and healthy environment’ that held the power to transform.98 By ‘providing a better environment for the early years of life’, the movement would enrich ‘the State with young citizens of a higher type of mind and of a sounder body’.99 Rescue was thus constituted a ‘wise and patriotic, as well as a benevolent act’, providing the individual with ‘self-respect’ and the nation with a ‘prosperous and productive’ workforce in the future.100 The debate took on a heightened political tone. ‘By imperilling the citizen in embryo’, argued Barnardo, ‘the future of the State of which he will soon be an integral part’ was simultaneously threatened.101 ‘Socialism’, he proclaimed, was a disease, the ‘deadly symptoms’ of which were apparent in unrest in Europe, but in England it had been shown to be preventable. ‘Every boy rescued from the gutter is one dangerous man the less; each girl saved from a criminal course is a present to the next generation of a virtuous woman and a valuable servant.’102 ‘No-one’, an 1871 article argued, ‘can dispute Lord Shaftesbury’s assertion that “when children are thus treated it is time for the State to come forward and stand in the place of the parents and rescue the children from such degradation.” This is a phase of Communism that even Tory peers must approve of.’103 Such vivid depictions provided a lens through which concerned individuals came to understand the causes of and solutions to child abuse and neglect. While Lydia Murdoch’s work has clearly illustrated the ways in which the lives of poor children differed from the negative depictions in the magazines, the impact of such propaganda remained, rendering the child simultaneously victim and threat, and hence demanding of national attention.104 By the eve of World War I the discourse had become deeply imbricated in race, taking on an increasingly imperial tone. Using notions of childhood innocence that were transcended even as they were being constructed, child rescuers both at home and abroad reinforced notions of the rightness of empire and the superiority of the white Britons to whom God had entrusted large portions of the world’s landmass. But the empire, readers were reminded, was ‘no greater than its citizens’, in particular its babies, who needed to be nurtured if they were to grow up to be responsible adults.105 ‘Give them clean homes and a healthy atmosphere, ensure intelligent feeding by the parents, and a great step will have been taken toward the betterment of the race.’106 ‘What will it avail to encircle our shores with fleets, and crown our hills with fortresses, if evil saps our national life within? England’s true treasure is her children; if she squander that, nothing else will be worth saving.’107 The pre-eminence [ 74 ]

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of the English nation and the British race was understood to be both fragile and conditional. Without continuing attention to the fate of childhood at home, the empire, and ultimately the nation, would be lost, and God’s bounty squandered. The work begun by Barnardo, Stephenson, Rudolf and Waugh was now recognised as essential for national survival.108 However, the unwritten assumption was that the child was to be moulded to meet the needs of the nation rather than the nation adapting to meet the needs of the child.

Notes   1 X., ‘The rich man’s burden’, HH, XII: 142 (1899), 239.   2 J.J.B., ‘By highway and byway. XXI. – thinking imperially’, OWS, XIV: 343 (1914), 304.   3 Rev. Dr Fitchett, ‘Children’s home conference meeting’, HH, XII: 141 (1899), 206; ‘Who is to blame?’, ND, VI: 62–5 (1882), 96; T.J. Barnardo, ‘Flotsam and jetsam’, ND, III: 6 (1879), 67.   4 Sister Alice Gough, ‘An S.P.C.C. case’, HH, XVII (1904), 229; Rev. Canon Barker, ‘A plea for the homes’, NWM, XXV: 217 (1902), 73.   5 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Our Mildmay meeting’, ND, XI: 120 (1887), 66–7.   6 ‘Stories of our work: Big Joe’, CA, 5: 33 (1874), 129.   7 ‘Found dead in the street’, ND, 5: 51, 52 & 53 (1881), 146: A.A., ‘The city waif’, CA, II: 19 (1881), 112.   8 ‘Going forth unto the springs’, OWS, VII: 185 (1899), 150; A.H.H., ‘A plea for the waifs and strays’, OWS, XII: 310 (1910), 466; ‘The Children’s Union conference: the Dean of Westminster’s speech’, BS, 225 (1911), 361–2.   9 J.A. Nicklin, ‘Stepney Causeway: the open door’, NWM, XXVIII: 232 (1905), 17. 10 Hesba Stretton, Lost Gip (London: Religious Tract Society, undated), p. 3. 11 F. Horner, ‘A winter’s tale’, HH, XXII (1909), 10. 12 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Preventive homes’, ND, I: 1 (1877), 3; J.J.B., ‘By highway and byway. V. In the holiday crowd’, OWS, XIII: 327 (1912), 394. 13 Fides, ‘A new year’s word for waifs and strays’, OWS, I: 22 (1886), 3; J.T. Torr, ‘A contrast’, ND, I: 9 (1877), 108. 14 J.C.W, ‘Gather them in!’, ND, XI: 119 (1887), 46. 15 Fides, ‘A new year’s word’, 3; Rev. Chas Whitaker, ‘Waifs and strays’, OWS, 1 (1882), 5; Lady Henry Somerset, ‘Drink and the slum child’, HH, XVII (1904), 33; T.J. Barnardo, ‘A waif of Babylon’, ND, XVI: 156 (1891), 126. 16 Barnardo, ‘Preventive homes’, HH, XVIII (1904), 3. 17 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 13 – adopted’, OWS, VII: 192 (1900), 272. 18 An outsider, ‘Little Tim’, ND, XIV: 131 & 132 (1890), 91. 19 Barnardo, ‘London lodging houses’, 84; Rev. E. Whitmore Isaac, ‘Words to children No. 4.’, BS, 1: 4 (1890), 59. 20 Adela C. Pereira, ‘Nancy – a memory’, BS, 82 (1900), 2–3. 21 Gough, ‘An S.P.C.C. case’, 229. 22 ‘Degradation in cities’, Church of England Messenger (CEM) (supplement, 30 December 1869), 2. 23 J.J.B., ‘By highway and byway. III – lest we forget’, OWS, XIII: 321 (1912), 248. 24 M.E.J., ‘S. Chad’s Home, Far Headingley, Leeds’, BS, 61 (1898), 59; Rev. W.J. Dawson, ‘Untitled’, HH, VI: 66 (1893), 106. 25 Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 45. 26 Renato Poggioli quoted in Phyllis Bixler, ‘Idealisation of the Child and Childhood in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer’, in Selma Richardson (ed.), Research About Nineteenth-Century Children

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child, nation, race and empire and Their Books (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 86. 27 Barnardo, ‘Wastrels’, ND, I: 6 (1877), 69; T.J. Barnardo, ‘A fatal mistake’, ND, 5: 48 (1881), 80. 28 John Ryley Robinson, ‘The influence of a flower’, Good Tidings, XI: 573 (1896), 410; ‘Children I have known. III – neglected children’, OWS, I: 14 (1885), 5. 29 Bishop of Bedford, ‘Child-life in our great cities’, OWS, I: 44 (1887), 5. 30 ‘Is it all there still?’, Our Boys and Girls (OBG) (January 1889), 5. 31 Marian Isabel Hurrell, ‘Sweet lavender’, YHLM (1900), 134-6. 32 ‘The S. Nicholas Home’, BS, 31 (1895), 91; H. Rider Haggard, ‘The real wealth of England’, ND, XXX: 243 (1907), 75; T.J. Barnardo, ‘The church’s care of waifs and strays’, ND, XIX: 190 (1895), 103. 33 ‘Raw material’, HH, XII: 139 (1899), 145. 34 Archdeacon Farrar, ‘Archdeacon Farrar on the children’s home’, HH, 66 (1893), 116. 35 Lord Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway, ‘The cyanide process’, ND, XXXIII: 252 (1910), 11. 36 T.J. Barnardo, ‘An alternative. Which?’, ND, III: 9 (1879), 113. 37 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The bitter cry of the outcast children’, ND, VII: 79–80 (1883), 142. 38 Charles Strong, ‘The sign of Jonah’, Australian Herald (February 1891), 94. 39 Elizabeth Surr, ‘The child-criminal’, Nineteenth Century (April 1881), 652. 40 ‘General Booth’s darkest England’, London Quarterly Review (October–January 1890–1), 331–2. 41 ‘The northern C.U. conference at York’, BS, 158 (1906), 106. 42 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The cry of the children’, ND, VIII: 89–91 (1884), 103. 43 Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, ‘The Rev. Lord Sydney Godolphin’s letters to the “Times”’, ND, XII: 129 (1888), 114. 44 Joseph Johnson, Dibs: A Story of a Young London Life (London: Religious Tract Society, no date), pp. 145–6. 45 Sister Grace, ‘Child pictures from real life: little English heathens’, CH, 37 (1892), 4. 46 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The economics of child rescue’, ND, XIX: 182 (1895), 1. 47 ‘Were hungry, naked, sick, and in prison! A sketch of our shelter today’, CG, I: 8 (1887), 58. 48 Archdeacon Farrar, ‘Archdeacon Farrar on the care of children’, OWS, I: 31 (1886), 3. 49 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The king’s business requireth haste’, ND, 5: 49 & 50 (1881), 113; J.J.B., ‘By highway and byway. XIV – mending and making’, OWS, XIV: 341 (1914), 259. 50 Jeffrey Cox, ‘Master narratives of imperial missions’, in Gareth Griffiths and Jamie S. Scott (eds), Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 6. 51 ‘The northern C.U. conference at York’, 106. 52 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: Aird and Coghill, 1892), p. 18. 53 Barnardo, ‘The church’s care’, 103; T.J. Barnardo, A romance of the slums’, ND, XXII: 206 (1898), 65; Hume, ‘Hunchie’, OWS, 150 (1896), 361; J.W. Horsley, ‘The bed of a waif and the bedding of a stray’, OWS, I: 20 (1885), 3. 54 ‘Glimpses into applicants’ homes III’, HH, VI: 65 (1893), 88. 55 Barnardo, ‘Bitter cry’, 141–2. 56 Barnardo, ‘A fatal mistake’, 80–1. 57 One Who Saw Them, ‘Waifs and strays at supper’, CEM (10 May 1886), 8; A.F.P., ‘Two evenings at Bonner Lane’, HH, V: 53 (1892), 90; C., ‘Vagrant children’, OWS, XI: 273 (1907), 54; T.J. Barnardo, ‘The poor and the needy’, CA (October 1871), 4. 58 Sister Grace, ‘Lights and shadows of child-life: when mother and me was drunk’, HH, V: 60 (1892), 227. 59 Helen Crofton, ‘Links in a chain’, BS, II: 20 (1894), 52. 60 Cardinal Henry Edward Manning and Benjamin Waugh, ‘The child of the English savage’, Contemporary Review (CR) (January–June 1886), 687. 61 ‘The northern C.U. conference at York’, 106. 62 ‘Our little sufferers: twenty-three deaths in a month from child cruelty’, HH, XV (1902), 113.

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the body of the nation 63 Xiaobei Chen, ‘“Cultivating children as you would valuable plants”: the gardening governmentality of child saving, Toronto, Canada, 1880s–1920s’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 16: 4 (2003), 466. 64 Arthur E. Gregory, ‘The children of sorrow’, HH (1907), 183. 65 O.E. Buxton, ‘Save the child and you will save the world’, HH, X: 111 (1897), 51. 66 T.J. Barnardo, ‘London lodging houses: boys found in them’, ND, I: 5 (1877), 66–7. 67 W.L., ‘The field of Waterloo’, CA (February 1872), 5. ‘Our expedition for the children’, CG, 4 (1896), 49–50. 68 ‘The why and the how’, CA, VI: 71 (1885), 208–9. 69 Rev. W. Wade, ‘The enemies of childhood. No. 3 – overcrowding (cont)’, OWS, VIII: 216 (1902), 274. 70 T.J. Barnardo, ‘A chapter from a life story’, ND, XIII: 132–3 (1889), 39; T.J. Barnardo, ‘From the shadows of the back courts’, ND, XVII: 170 (1893), 14; T.J. Barnardo, ‘One of my failures’, NWM, XXV: 219 (1902), 118. 71 ‘Rescue work: a true story’, OWS, XI: 283 (1908), 296; Aveling, ‘Nobody’, ND, III: 12 (1879), 139; ‘Two years in torment’, CG, II: 16 (1888), 25. 72 Mrs. Alfred Gatty, ‘A child’s thought’, Aunt Judy’s Magazine, XVIII (October 1867), 338. 73 Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: England, 1872–1989 (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.  7–8. 74 Horner, ‘A winter’s tale’, 10; Samuel Smith, ‘The industrial training of destitute child­­ ren’, ND, IX: 93 & 94 (1885), 37; A.L.L. and J.W.H., ‘No room for the child?’, OWS, I: 21 (1886), 3; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘A bargain’, ND, XXXV: 261 (1912), 37. 75 ‘The horrors of one-roomed life in London’, War Cry (WC) (1 April 1893), 9. 76 ‘She learnt it from Granny’, OWS, XIV: 331 (1913), 8; ‘Wrecks and rescues’, OWS, XII: 324 (1912), 320. 77 J.J.B., ‘By highway and byway. II – lest we forget’, OWS, XIII: 321 (1912), 248. 78 A.H.H., ‘A plea’, 466. 79 ‘Cheshire and North Wales branches: annual meeting’, OWS, V: 131 (1895), 47. 80 J.W. Horsley, ‘Principles of action’, OWS, XIV: 342 (1914), 279. 81 ‘Crown and sword’, CG, III: 25 (1889), 132. 82 Surr, ‘Child-criminal’, 651. 83 ‘The Bishop of Bath and Wells on the Society’, OWS, V: 129 (1895), 6; Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, p. 45. 84 J.W. Horsley, ‘Enemies of childhood. No. 1 – drink’, OWS, VIII: 202 (1901), 22–3; Rev. T.C. Collings, ‘Enemies of Childhood. No. 2 – common lodging-houses’, OWS, VIII: 214 (1902), 229–30; Rev. W. Wade, ‘The enemies of childhood. No. 3 –overcrowding’, OWS, VIII: 215 (1902), 257–9; Wade, ‘The enemies of childhood. No.  3’, 273–5; Rev. John P. Wright, ‘The enemies of childhood. No. 4 – child vagrancy’, OWS, VIII: 224 (1902), 412–13; Rev. W. Wade, ‘The enemies of childhood. No. 4 – premature wage earning’, OWS, IX: 227 (1903), 45–7; Rev. W. Wade, ‘The enemies of childhood. No.  6 – juvenile street trading’, OWS, IX: 230 (1903), 101–3. 85 Johnson Barker, ‘Juvenile delinquency’, OWS, VI: 163 (1897), 182. 86 A.W. Mager, ‘Juvenile emigration’, HH, VI: 66 (1893), 108. 87 Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, pp. 46–7. 88 T. Holmes, ‘Hooliganism and its cure’, HH, XV (1902), 11. 89 M.E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 1 – out of the darkness’, OWS, V: 133 (1895), 82. 90 ‘Waifs and strays at supper’, ND, VI: 58 & 59 (1882), 32–3; Wade, ‘Enemies of childhood. No. 6’, 101; Barnardo, ‘Rescued for life: the true story of a young thief’, ND, VI: 66 and 67 (1882), 114; ‘Who is to blame?’, 98. 91 ‘London lodging houses: their present condition’, ND, I: 2 (1877), 23. 92 Stephen O’Connor, Orphan trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children he Saved and Failed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), p. 80; T.J. Barnardo, ‘Presentation to the editor’, ND, XIX: 191 (1895), 132. 93 ‘The street arab’s world’, ND, II: 6 (1878), 76. 94 Denis Crane, ‘In the path of the sun: Canadian homes for British boys’, HH, XXVII (1914), 9.

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child, nation, race and empire   95   96   97   98   99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

Wade, ‘The enemies of childhood. No. 4’, 47. Barnardo, ‘Bitter cry’, 142. ‘Annual public meeting’, OWS, 4 (1883), 8. T.J. Barnardo, ‘Child life in East London’, ND, XV: 153 (1891), 82. J.W. Horsley, ‘Why should babies die?’, OWS, XIII: 325 (1912), 347. Rev. Wm Sinclair, ‘A mighty undertaking’, NWM, XXV: 218 (1902), 95. Barnardo, ‘The economics of child rescue’, 2–3. ‘The dangerous classes’, ND, III: 5 (1879), 66. ‘Children in brickfields’, Examiner (15 July 1871), 705. Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, p. 91. Horsley, ‘Why should babies die?’, 347. J.J.B., ‘Lest we forget’, 248. Rev. John Howard B. Masterman, ‘A nation’s children’, HH, XXVI (1913), 146. Rider Haggard, ‘Real wealth’, 75.

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Chapte r f iv e

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The salvation of the race

This is one of God’s children. Is he to have no chance in life? Must he be handed over to evil, fettered more certainly than African slave with chain round his throat?1

Dr Stephenson’s invocation of slavery in an appeal to readers to provide greater resources for his homes was grounded in the language of race, a construct which, Catherine Hall has argued, provided ‘a space in which the English configured their relation to themselves and others … foundational to English forms of classification and relations of power’.2 Hall’s focus is on the role of missionaries, located at the centre of the mutually constitutive process through which metropole and colony constructed meaning and identity.3 Given that the child rescue movement understood itself as central to the social or civilising mission at home it is not surprising to find that it drew heavily upon the ‘images of empire’ that Hall argues filled the imagination of nineteenth-century Englishmen.4 Race provided a readily understood vocabulary. The twofold duty of the English race, Sir Charles Lucas argued, was to replenish and subdue the earth and to rule and administer native races.5 However, such imperial obligations should not divert attention from responsibilities at home. While the nation as a whole was moving forward, a small proportion of the population appeared to be returning to a state of savagery.6 The inner cities offered sights ‘more revolting’ than those reported by travellers amongst ‘the lowest tribes of Bushmen or Andamanese’.7 Unwanted babies were disposed of in a trade ‘fouler … than the crime of the trade in African slaves’, consigned to the care of evil ‘baby farmers’.8 The streets of London were home to children ‘as veritable a heathen as could be found in the Cannibal Isles’, ‘taught almost everything bad that their young minds could take in’.9 ‘Great virago-looking girls’ ran about ‘whooping like Red Indians’ while their older brothers, who sought to survive by street trading, were driven [ 79 ]

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child, nation, race and empire

like ‘niggers’, treated like ‘slaves’ the ‘joy and health’ of whose childhood had been ‘sold’.10 Race functioned to shame and to shock. The suffering of ‘civilised humanity in poverty’ was seen as worse than that ‘of the simple Hottentots and Esquimaux … in their deserts of sand or of snow’.11 A Jew, ‘the mark of Hebrew ancestry … upon [his] features’, offering shelter to a boy, was used to shame Christians who did not offer similar aid. ‘Either Jesus of Nazareth is not what you claim He is, or you, who can pass this houseless young without sympathy and help, have not received Him at all.’12 In a dream, a former missionary imagined himself challenged by an Indian who argued: ‘if Christianity is to make us Indians keen about caring for our children, it ought to make you, who have had the Gospel for so long, keen about yours’.13 English churchgoers, Benjamin Waugh noted, expressed ‘much horror … at the destruction of baby life on the Ganges; and little, if any at all, at the destruction of it on the flabby bosoms of English women whom men have made mothers, and to whom they have given no bread’.14 The Child’s Guardian berated readers for condemning opium use in India while ignoring its widespread use to sedate English babies, and for responding so strongly to reports of an African child eaten by cannibals while taking little interest in the deaths of babies at home.15 The Darkest England / Darkest Africa comparison was as much a reference to race as to geography. Barnardo was quick to engage with the image, inviting readers to listen to the stories of ‘my Pygmies … who have mercifully been delivered from the gloomy Forest of Darkest England into the Sunshine of Loving Kindness and Tender Care’.16 Neglectful parents, it was argued, were worse than foreign savages only in that they were the products of Christian civilisation rather than having been ‘discovered’ by it.17 Britain’s engagement with the Arab world provided a further source of racialised imagery. Youthful street traders, ‘the host of boy Bedouins who roam … by day, and curl themselves up at night, like stray, starving dogs’, were commonly labelled Arabs, ‘tribal’ in their behaviour and ‘like their namesakes of the desert’ able to disappear without a trace.18 Instantly recognisable by his ‘characteristic native costume, and … characteristic native state of mind’ the ‘genuine Arab … like all savages, [had] his virtues’, for in every ‘street Arab’s breast [beats] an English heart’.19 Like the original Ishmael, ‘he was a child unfortunate, the victim of the social conditions of his own time’, but still capable of redemption.20 Brought under the influence of his betters, ‘the Arab of the slums’ could be transformed into ‘a self-supporting, wealth-producing citizen’.21 The racialised discourse of child rescue created an inner city in which race, class and tribe were intertwined, embellished with such negative, [ 80 ]

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the salvation of the race

even threatening descriptors as ‘feeble and famished’, ‘ragged’ and ‘predatory’.22 The use of a similar language to describe working-class Britons and Aboriginal, African or other Indigenous peoples did not mean, however, that they were thought of as the same. The ‘common language of race … employed to map these peoples’ assumed that Anglo-Saxons were marked out by their blood, and racial instincts, ‘as a people who would conquer and propagate, in the name of their superior civilisation and Protestant religion’.23 The child rescue literature consistently argued that outcast children could lay claim, through their inherent whiteness, to this shared heritage. Whiteness has three elements: ‘a location of structural advantage, of race privilege … a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society … [and] a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed’.24 Child rescue literature encoded whiteness practice, designating non-European societies as ‘primitive’ in order to buttress the superiority of the colonising nation.25 While comparisons drawn between the urban poor and the ‘tribes’ and ‘savages’ of foreign lands may appear to point to a form of ‘class racism’, the implicit advantages of whiteness remain.26 The ‘tribes’ or ‘races’ of the inner cities were depicted as ‘rising’ or ‘breeding’, creating a ‘domain of barbarism’ that would need to be ‘invaded’ in the interests of creating a ‘better race’.27 Invoking fears of atavism, Stephenson warned his readers that all Britons were descended from ‘savages not dissimilar to the Maori’ and that savagery was returning amongst those who are not loved and cared for today.28 ‘Overcrowded,’ say the wise ones, ‘how can lives be true and pure, When from baby-cot to coffin want and woe alone are sure? Who dare talk of reformation, while the dens in which they sleep Are as foul and dark and dreadful as the kraals the Caffirs keep?’29

Over time, the discourse took on an additional eugenic strain, arguing that, if degeneracy and deterioration were to be avoided, efforts needed to be made to ‘save the … British breed’.30 The child savers who went amongst the ‘chilling slush of our streets and gutters’ in the interests of the ‘future of the … Empire’, were, a young Winston Churchill declared, the ‘champions of our race’.31 Child rescuers were quick to embrace their new status. A falling birth rate generated alarm about ‘the renewal of the stock’.32 By working to bring ‘the lowest types … up to a certain level’, however, child rescuers were creating a situation in which ‘the race [could] advance together’.33 Race was central to the supposedly mission adventure story, ‘The Little Savages of Nodlon’ (see Figure 8). ‘Missionary books’, its author writes, ‘generally tell amongst the first things about their boys and [ 81 ]

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child, nation, race and empire

Figure 8  One of the little savages of Nodlon

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the salvation of the race

girls, what colour they are’. Yet his answer is far from clear. ‘I never saw two alike; I have seen some nearly white, but not as white as you are, others almost as black as a little nigger, and others with patches of white and black all over, mixed with a little yellow or brown or some other hue.’ But these colours, readers are informed, although ‘laid on very thickly … will wash off ... where can you find many other little heathens who will wash white?’34 The residents of Nodlon / London were thus positioned as ‘of English society though separate from it, related to the middle class but a “race” apart from it, fellow inhabitants of the same city but members of a different “tribe”’.35 Such comparisons did not undermine the implicit advantages of whiteness.36 Rather they pointed to the threat posed to white privilege by urban degeneracy. ‘Whiteness’, Hall writes, ‘should mean order, civilisation, Christianity, separate spheres and domesticity, rationality, modernity and industry. Those moments when whiteness meant something quite other were terrifying.’37 It was the shared whiteness of the targets of rescue which rendered them salvageable, but redemption was dependent on removal. ‘English little ones’ could be transformed by travelling to an improved environment where the advantages attached to whiteness would once again flourish.38 While the ‘tenderhearted Indian child’ living in ‘the land of darkness and oblivion no ray of Gospel light had penetrated’ had no chance of salvation, the ‘tender little creatures, God-given, wafted from the paths of righteousness … in a Christian land and in Christian surroundings’ could be ‘brought back to shelter, to happiness, to God’.39 In their privileging of whiteness the child rescue writers were echoing attitudes implicit in the much broader Evangelical literature, particularly the literature written for children. Popular books such as R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island and Rev. W.J. Wilkins’s Harry’s Trip to India deployed a system of binary opposites, constructing a conflated white / British / Christian identity as superior to the non-white / heathen / other, as an aspect of the natural, God-ordained order.40 Within such stories, the Christian is always enjoined to rescue the children of the ‘other’, but there is never any suggestion that the children so rescued can fully enter into the privileges of whiteness. Adults who had been exposed to such literature as children provided a ready market for child rescue appeals. In Ballantyne’s Coral Island, the subtitle of which is Views of Missionary Endeavour, images of Indigenous people are used to justify imperialism and missionary endeavour. The English travellers, young men and boys, are portrayed as heroes and rescuers, civilised and manly in contrast with the ‘savages’. After being told that the practice of infant sacrifice in the Pacific ceases when missionaries arrive, one of the protagonists declares, ‘God bless and prosper the missionaries [ 83 ]

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child, nation, race and empire

till they get a footing in every island of the sea’.41 In Harry’s Trip to India the non-Christian other is represented as misguided, contemptible, often risible and at times unredeemable. As a missionary, Harry plays his part in rescuing the heathen in far-flung parts of the British empire. The rescue is constructed as both spiritual and corporal, with orphaned Hindu children a particular target. ‘Hinduism finds it easier to allow a child of unknown caste to die than to provide it with a home’, the reader is informed. ‘And so it happens that little helpless children are left to perish until the police find them, and hand them over to Christians to care for. In this way, many have been rescued from death, and have early learnt of a loving father in Heaven.’42 In such writing, imperial subjects constitute the ‘“supporting cast” in the story of Empire’.43 The sentiments of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘Foreign Children’ were often central to the stories and poems for young readers in the child rescue magazines: Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, Little frosty Eskimo, Little Turk or Japanee, O! Don’t you wish that you were me?44

Indigenous children were depicted as objects of pity and lack. The ‘young Kaffir at home’ had ‘no bedsteads, no chairs, no tables … he never washed his face in his life … And he does not comb his hair’.45 A story about an African mother ‘dressed like a heathen’ who had no idea how to feed her ‘unfortunate, unhappy child’ ended with the question: ‘Are you not glad that you are not a Kaffir baby?’46 It was one of many articles questioning non-English mothering practices, alleging that Tahitian and Bechuanaland mothers ‘destroyed their children’, Cubans, Dyaks and Alaskans were careless about their children’s safety, North American Indians ‘stuffed’ their children rather than ‘fondling’ them and the Chinese did not love their daughters at all.47 A second common theme involved the infantilisation of native men. In a piece entitled ‘Recruiting in Africa’, designed to help ‘the reader to understand something of the native character’, the author constructs the African men whom he is trying to enlist as ‘carriers’ as a ‘wild and babbling crowd’, greedy, untrustworthy and manipulative.48 Unlike the young reader, the childlike African will never grow up and be able to manage his own affairs. An 1897 the Brothers and Sisters serial took readers to a series of sites of empire, where they encountered ‘silly creatures’ who ‘howled and shrieked and tore at their woolly hair’, ‘skulking niggers’ who were ‘undoubted cannibals’, ‘blackamoors’ who announced their presence with ‘a bloodcurdling shriek’, ‘black heathens’ and ‘ferocious-looking savages’ all of whom [ 84 ]

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were eventually overcome by the ‘ undaunted British sailors’.49 This triumph did not serve to completely defuse the implied threat of the black male body which surfaced in a second story in which children, sleeping in the fields, woke to find a ‘black man looking at them’. Their fear is ascribed to their nurse, who ‘had told them of black men with bags on their backs to carry off bad boys and girls’, but it is quickly assuaged when ‘the black man laughed, and showed his white teeth’ and they realised that he was their former gardener, temporarily rendered black as a result of working in the mines.50 Much of this writing served to justify the inevitability of empire. Young readers were informed that although Captain John Smith and Pocahontas had attempted to show that ‘Englishmen and Indians could be friends … Sometimes the Indians attacked them in overwhelming force and then there would be a smoking heap of ruins where the camp had been, and fresh scalps adorned the leggings of some Indian braves. But more men took their places, and there would soon be another clearing and another camp, and the Empire pushed on.’51 The ‘vast tracts of prairie-land, formerly almost entirely given up to wild animals, now yield abundant crops of wheat’, and ‘huge towns and … large manufactories’ have sprung up all over the country. ‘The American and Canadian governments are trying hard to make … wandering Red men into good citizens’, readers were assured. ‘They can do little with the grown-up people, but the children they are trying to send to school.’52 The British empire was depicted as benevolent, ‘bringing law and order and peace’ to ‘savage and treacherous peoples’, ‘ruling as fathers rather than as conquerors, and giving up comfort, health and even life itself for the sake of those they are set to govern’.53 The colonial ruler was a man who had ‘learnt to fight and conquer his own temper, so that when he is in Africa or India he can rule his black neighbours with wisdom and gentleness’.54 The racialised assumptions of the child rescuers were confirmed when they travelled to canvass support for their work. Here they had direct encounters with the colonised other, almost uniformly depicted as objects of pity, lacking affection for their children, essentially primitive and inferior, and destined to disappear. The designation of the other as inferior justified the claim of the incoming settlers to be building white nations in ‘empty’ lands.55 Although William Quarrier travelled over two thousand miles during his first trip to Canada his report to his supporters made no mention of encountering any Indigenous people.56 Returning in the following year he ventured further into the interior, where he met ‘squatting on the board-walk a party of Crees or Sioux, with their hair plaited and adorned with feathers, faces painted red or blue, and the inevitable red or white (?) blanket around [ 85 ]

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them’. However, the land on which they ‘squatted’ was described as ‘unoccupied’, awaiting the ‘farms and homesteads’ that ‘civilisation’ would bring.57 In Natal Stephenson observed, ‘outcast London’ could contribute to ‘the salvation of this colony from the ominous consequences of undue disparity between the white and black populations’.58 Australia, he assured his readers, was ‘not … a wild and savage and half-heathen country, but … the home of great and intelligent and prosperous English communities’.59 Canada was an ‘Englishman’s birthright’ and should not be left to the ‘alien and inferior races’.60 In an account of his visit to a Canadian Mohawk reservation, Stephenson wrote of having to teach the children to play.61 In a later instalment he expressed his surprise at encountering an ‘Indian baby … [who] crowed, and smiled, and kicked just as heartily as though his face had been white’. The baby’s father was described as ‘a nobleman, though only an Indian’.62 In South Africa Stephenson reflected, ‘I can’t help feeling, as I see all these strange, heathen people around me, that English boys and girls ought to be thankful ... for their birth in a Christian land’.63 This theme continued when he arrived in Australia, whose Aborigines he described as ‘amongst the very lowest and most degraded races that have ever been found’.64 A final stop in Tasmania allowed him to reflect on the ‘sad’ but inevitable decline of the ‘great tribes and nations of red men and black men … fading away before the white races’. However, readers were assured ‘we cannot stop this; but we can at least have the pleasure of helping the missionary societies, which are endeavouring to save the remnants of these people from destruction, by introducing better habits and customs, and especially by teaching them the Gospel, which, if they must perish from the earth, will open to them a better life hereafter’.65 Barnardo, writing from Manitoba in 1891, adopted a similar tone, commenting on the co-existence of ‘the signs of modern life with proofs of the most advanced civilisation in the shape of the electric light, tramway lines, railways, and fine hotels’ and ‘groups of Red Indians clad in blankets or in grotesque oddments of European culture’.66 Modern Indians, he observed, ‘present a very different picture from the Indian “brave” with whom novelists and writers of a century ago have made us familiar’. Living in ‘vermin-infested wigwams’, they were best compared to ‘our own wandering gypsies … who squat at home in lanes’.67 In later years Barnardo sent parties of boys on international fundraising tours. ‘Before I left England’, wrote one participant, ‘I was under the impression that I was coming to a wild, desolate country, inhabited by a few white people and Indians’, but he found instead a [ 86 ]

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‘nice and sociable’ people.68 The 1891–2 Australasian tour of ‘eight musical boys’ suitably attired in tropical dress met with universal acclaim. Reports began with the assurance that the colonies offered a superior environment to that available to poor children in the ‘Mother Country’. But this was quickly followed by the assertion of whiteness that constituted the pre-eminence of the travelling boys. ‘Some of our meetings were specially memorable’, wrote the deputation secretary, the Reverend Walter J. Mayers, noting particularly ‘that composed of Chinese in Melbourne, and of Maoris at Otaki in New Zealand. Often we invited men, women, and children belonging to the aboriginal tribes, and though they understood but little of the talk, they liked the pictures and applauded the music.’ Although ‘impressed with the advance of Christian work and all movements for the social well-being of the people’, Mayers regretted that he had found ‘the aboriginals in such a low state, and the “drink fiend” so busy among them’.69 Child rescuers did not have to travel to encounter the alien ‘other’. The magazines included photographs which made it clear that, amongst the ‘rescued’ children, there were increasing numbers of those who could not be washed white (see Figure 9). A description of a NCH pageant singled out the ‘negro boy with a curly head on

Figure 9  The children who could not be washed white

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his ­shoulders’. Barnardo constructed a story around the ‘small darkey’ known as ‘Grinning Toby’, because of ‘his red lips, his snow-white teeth, and an immense grin from ear to ear’.70 Most striking, however, is the image of three black children, the only children photographed naked in the entire Barnardo archive, with the accompanying story modified to disguise the fact that their father was white.71 ‘We do not only take poor English children’, Stephenson assured his readers; ‘from far and wide orphan and destitute little ones come to us ... and we gladly receive them’.72 Rudolf noted that ‘amongst the early inmates [of his homes were] a little Persian who had lost his mother, and was brought by his father, a Christian, to be educated in England’ and ‘a little aboriginal native of North Queensland’ rescued by an English naval officer ‘after a massacre of the natives’.73 Romany children, recognisable from their ‘nut-brown’ complexion and distinctive ‘physiognomy’, were depicted as ‘wild’ and untameable’, the victims of lazy parents who provided neither accommodation nor nourishment for their offspring.74 ‘Parents indeed have they – unworthy of the name, / Whose lives, alas, are stained with cruelty and shame.’75 Physiognomy played an important role in the preliminary classification of such children. The eleven-year-old whose ‘features appeared to have been cast in a Jewish mould’ proved to be acceptable because, although his father had been Italian, his mother was Irish, while ‘rescue’ for Italian street performers, depicted as victims brought to the country in order to be used in begging, was government action to prevent their gaining entry.76 The white child threatened with the loss of racial privilege attracted extraordinary rescue efforts. When Billy Biggs’s foster mother applied to have him returned, the WSS was shocked to find that despite her ‘altogether kindly face’ she had ‘the hair and complexion of a West Indian!’ Even more shocking was her intention to take Billy home should she again fall on hard times. ‘You would take this little English boy over there!’ the officer exclaimed. ‘I know he is the dearest thing in the world to you, but to your family he is nothing! You die, and he is left among strangers of another blood!’77 Distributed widely amongst expatriate English-speaking communities, the magazines reported their success in rescuing white children who had already suffered such a fate. Thanks to timely intervention, the English orphan, abandoned and in gaol ‘amongst Chinese, Malays and nondescripts’, and the ‘golden-haired, brown-eyed, sweet-faced girl’ living with her ‘depraved mother’ in a West Indian port, were quickly returned ‘home’.78 A similar sentiment lay behind the reporting of Barnardo’s rescue of the Beni-Zou-Zougs, ‘a number of London boys in the care of an Arab Acrobat’ in Constantinople.79 Keying into one of the tropes of [ 88 ]

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‘imperial’ literature, the mixture of dread and fascination with the ‘other’ embodied in stories of white capture and enslavement, the author promised a thrilling story of rescue from ‘heathenism and misery’ of ‘these innocent little fellows … through the all-powerful influence which England exercises’. ‘Living in a state of slavery’, ‘isolated from the world’, the boys ‘were ill-treated’, ‘not allowed to speak their native language, which most of them had consequently totally forgotten’, ‘had no regular communication with their parents’, ‘received no sort of education’, and ‘had never been inside a Church or a Mosque’, nor ever ‘received wages’.80 Their status as the slaves of a non-white man, performing rather than issuing orders, threatened to undermine whiteness generally; a threat only partially erased by the fact that they had not been reduced to doing the domestic work, a role consigned to Hadj Ali Ben Mahomet’s Arab employees. Similar concerns saw child rescuers take an interest in the fate of white children in the settler colonies. Whiteness brought an identity and a set of accompanying privileges to such children, justifying the oppression and dispossession of Indigenous peoples.81 But, if that justification was to be maintained, the hierarchy between the races had to be sustained; settler children could not be allowed to display behaviour condemned in England as ‘heathen’, ‘savage’ or ‘wild’.82 Concerned with the prevalence of miscegenation in South Africa, the Anglicans offered their support to a home designed to ‘take and train even a few girls to be pure, godly young women, and start them as good servants, good wives, good mothers’ for settler males, and to set an example of purity to ‘every Kaffir woman who lives near’.83 Posted to New Zealand in 1899, Lord and Lady Ranfurly were shocked at the condition of settler children and called on child rescuers to intervene.84 In 1908 the NSPCC reported the formation of a Capetown branch, founded in response to reports of the cross-racial adoption of an illegitimate European child, and the Wesleyans assisted in the opening of a home in the Cape Colony to be operated on ‘purely English, not Colonial’ lines.85 Under the watchful eye of a white sister, ‘the children do the work in the houses, laundry, sewing-room, whilst the bigger boys work on the farm and gardens’ assisted by a ‘Kaffir’ gardener and a ‘Zulu’ laundress. While the children were being prepared to assume the privileges of adult whiteness, ‘all the coloured people are called boys and girls, even if they live to be a hundred’.86 However, it was in Canada and Australia that the gospel of child rescue was to have its greatest impact. Orphanages, founded in the early years of white settlement, had been followed, in Australia, by state children’s departments, most of which had introduced boardingout by the early 1880s, but there were evangelical leaders in both [ 89 ]

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countries who argued that existing provisions did not meet the child rescue need. In Australia, George Ardill (1857–1945) used his umbrella charity, the Sydney Rescue Work Society, to agitate for government support for child rescue work along the lines pioneered by Barnardo and the NSPCC. However, he struggled to gain recognition in the face of a state children’s department which argued that it already operated along child rescue lines. Child rescuers were more successful in the newer and more affluent colony of Victoria where the Scotswoman, Selina Sutherland, established a voluntary child rescue society in 1881, and, in 1887, persuaded the government to include provision for licensed child rescuers in its new Neglected Children’s Act. Anxious to preserve ‘their’ children from proselytism, most denominations, Evangelical and Roman Catholic alike, rushed to establish their own societies, with the result that Victoria had eleven licensed child rescuers by 1907.87 In Canada the Irish-born J.J. Kelso used the skills he had gained as a journalist to propagate the child rescue cause. Having founded the Toronto Humane Society, which rescued both children and animals, in 1887 he worked with the Ontario government on drafting the Children’s Protection Act which passed in the following year. As founding president of the Toronto Children’s Aid Society (CAS) Kelso set out to actively rescue at-risk children and place them in family environments. Following the passage of a new Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to and Better Protection of Children in 1892, Kelso was appointed provincial superintendent of neglected and dependent children in Ontario, a position he held until 1934. In this position he was influential in the foundation of children’s aid societies throughout Ontario and in the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia in the early years of the twentieth century.88 Colonial child rescuers were rarely discursively creative. Rather they read propaganda generated by the movement in Britain and selectively reproduced it in denominational newspapers and magazines promoting their work. Australian journalists had long argued that the emerging urban centres replicated many of the social problems of the great cities of Britain. Some, like Marcus Clarke and John Stanley James (writing as the Vagabond), built a career on identifying and ‘exploring’ the ‘slums’ and ‘rookeries’ of colonial cities. Using London as their reference point and Dickens and Mayhew as their mentors, they constructed thrilling stories of the danger and degradation to be found geographically close to, but clearly separated from, the suburban villas where their readers resided.89 The ‘foul neighbourhoods’ the Vagabond ‘discovered’ in Melbourne’s ‘very heart’ were, he claimed, worse than those in ‘any city of the world’.90 [ 90 ]

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Child rescue propagandists keyed into this alarmist discourse:

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The famished and the naked, The babe that pined for bread, The squalid group that huddled Around that dying bed; All this distress and sorrow Should be in lands afar! Was I suddenly transported To Borrioboola Gha? Ah, no! the poor and wretched Were close beside my door, And I had passed them heedless, A thousand times before. Alas, for the cold and hungry That met me every day, While all my tears were given To the suffering far away!91

‘In sunny New South Wales we hear the cry of the children still’, its capital ‘DARKEST SYDNEY … the most immoral city in the Commonwealth or in England … wrecked family life, the destroyed homes, children left to graduate in crime in the streets … creating an atmosphere swarming with the deadly microbe of immorality. All this, too, in a city so young, so fair, so highly privileged and of comparatively small population.’92 The ‘children running about the streets of Melbourne’ were compared with the ‘dogs in Constantinople, having no owners, cared for by no one, fed by no one, kicked by everybody’.93 Although the city did not have ‘the same forms of cruelty to children, and sacrifice of childlife, to be found in the slums of London … there are plenty of poor, neglected children in Melbourne floating like driftwood on the rough sea of life, and we have many miserable homes’.94 The ‘cases of diabolical cruelty’ were ‘scarcely less horrifying than … [those] recorded by the Rev. Benjamin Waugh, and ‘the baby farmers are no better here than they are in England’.95 The city streets were stained by ‘genuine specimens’ of the ‘city Arab’, and children were ‘worse off than orphans, from the fact of their unnatural parents being steeped in vice’ with ‘no other future before them but to become a burden to the State, and end their unhappy days in our gaols, hospitals, or lunatic asylums’.96 Their plight constituted both ‘a stigma on our Christian civilisation’ and a national emergency, for ‘the Australian children of today form the material out of which a great democratic nation is being constructed; and on their present surroundings and treatment depend … the future character and influence of our rapidly expanding commonwealth’.97 [ 91 ]

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‘What are you doing to stop the impurities about you?’ Selina Sutherland challenged Melbourne churchgoers. ‘Impurity, gambling and drink are sapping the foundation of our young life. Brothels, Chinese dens, and low public houses are allowed to continue, and hosts of nameless children are being thrust upon us, and no voice strong and resistless is heard from the Christian Church.’98 The existing child welfare legislation was condemned as inadequate because it ‘herded [children] promiscuously’ into ‘great national institutions’.99 The solution, the Rev. Cherbury argued, was ‘to drain the morass’.100 Child rescuers promised to ‘snatch the babies from the very jaws of infamy’, rescue the ‘little news-vendors, match-sellers, flower-vendors’ from ‘intemperate parents, who, heedless of the moral ruin and degradation that is being wrought day by day, utilise these children as wage-earners while they live idle and dissolute lives’.101 Like their English counterparts, they saw their work as a mission to which they had been individually called – Selina Sutherland, for example, by two street children she encountered on her very first day in the colony, and the Wesleyan Mrs Varcoe either by the infant left on her doorstep or the ‘little barefooted match-selling boy crying as he shivered with the cold’.102 The work, they argued, required a ‘Christ-like soul’, a ‘tender sympathy and interest and insight into child-life’, an ability to ‘track’ street children to ‘discover their true plight’ and unselfishness ‘enough to give up their time, money, and life’. It was the obligation of other Christians to support them in their labours. 103 In Canada, Kelso used every opportunity to propagate a similar message. The ‘prosperous, self-satisfied’ Canadian cities, Kelso and his supporters argued, also had ‘dingy courts and back lanes’, populated by ‘neglected little waifs and strays … face-pinched, ill-clad youngsters’, ‘little city Arabs’ and ‘wild children’ ‘that glare out from the literature of the slums … in the great cities of the United States or of the Old Land’.104 ‘More deeply to be pitied than orphans’, they ‘were driven out into the streets at night, sometimes by drunken and brutalised parents through cruel treatment, or the object of obtaining money with which to feed their debased appetites’, ‘the offspring of weakness and wickedness; the progeny of the sisterhood of shame; the children of parents whom misfortune dogs all down through their hard, sad careers’.105 Such ‘tender childhood … placed among the vicious and worthless … the plastic young nature … entirely helpless in the hands of its criminal educators’, needed to be ‘snatched … like a brand from the burning’.106 ‘Children left under the guardianship of degraded parents … were, in their subsequent wretched and blighted careers, more to be pitied than condemned’. ‘The community, in self-protection, as well as in justice to its minor citizens’, had to intervene.107 [ 92 ]

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Although Kelso was clearly influenced by American models of child saving, he sought to make them Canadian by transplanting working models of reform from Britain.108 ‘Very strict laws’ in England had overridden claims ‘that the rights of parents were supreme … and it was now recognised that the children had rights that must be protected’.109 Following this precedent, Canadian provinces legislated to recognise children’s ‘unquestioned right to be protected, their innocence and helplessness speaking for them with a force mightier than words … because the well-being of the community demands that every prospective citizen should be mentally and morally prepared for the responsibilities of self-government’.110 ‘Under these benign laws, now, not only the citizen who has reached majority, but the citizen a day old has an equal right to the protection which the law affords.’111 The protection to which the child was entitled was mediated, in practice if not in principle, by race. In the colonial child rescue literature, the threat of the alien ‘other’ sat alongside that posed by alcohol or vice. For Kelso, the ‘other’ was primarily the ‘Americans, Russians, Germans, Roumanians, Icelanders’ claiming a bounty which he believed was rightly the entitlement of the Canadian child.112 ‘With New Ontario opening up and affording prospects so bright for the willing worker … it does seem as if we ought to exert every effort in order that our native born children may not be deprived of their heritage.’113 ‘It is not to be expected that Russians’, advocates of empire settlement argued, ‘can ever have that keen attachment to the empire that people who are not merely citizens by adoption, but citizens by birth would have.’114 The children of ‘foreigners’, Kelso noted, were making frequent appearances in the children’s court.115 In Australia the discourse was more overtly racialised. The ‘Chinese camps’ of capital cities and goldfields towns were depicted as ‘dens’ in which ‘young girls, who are merely children, can be kidnapped, drugged, violated, ruined, hidden away’.116 Over time, they came to ‘swarm with children’ like ‘Clement’, the result of a ‘peculiar race mixture’, ‘a mixture of yellow and white’ endangered, not by his father, ‘a good natured Chinese’, but by his irresponsible mother, who ‘has seen fit to absent herself from her marital and maternal duties in search of more amusing and exciting adventure’.117 The attitude of child rescuers towards mixed-race children was conflicted. The suggestion that Chinese fathers could seek to take their children to their homeland led to calls for laws to prevent any ‘native of that empire’ from ‘carrying off persons of British descent before they are old enough to protect themselves’.118 However, when mixed-race children were taken into care, their rescuers were always acutely aware that a ‘darkcomplexioned’ child, ‘evidence that we can’t rub out our yesterdays’, [ 93 ]

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would inevitably be the victim of ‘unevenness in the distribution of Nature’s bounties’.119 Alongside the Chinese lived other non-Europeans like the ‘swarthy Syrian hawker’, his baby a ‘brown atom of humanity’ resembling an ‘Egyptian mummy’, ‘Indians, negroes, half-castes, [and] half-breeds’.120 However, dismissing the task of ‘purifying the morals’ of such ‘visitors … [as] a Herculean one’, child rescuers focused on ‘the white heathen, those of our own country and language, who live in the streets and lanes and rights-of-ways of our great cities … we can only neglect these at our own peril’.121 ‘Enshrouded in moral and spiritual darkness’ greater than that of any ‘South Pacific islander’, such children were ‘crying aloud for succour’.122 In the colonies, the settler population was aware of the ‘savage within’, the Indigenous population that they had displaced. Books for children justified this displacement by depicting Australian Aborigines as the lowest on the Social Darwinist scale, unable to ‘understand even the simplest form of religion’, ‘living and dying apparently soulless, as unthinking as beasts’. White settlers, living a ‘useful, peaceful existence’, were killed by ‘black-skinned fiends’ amongst whom missionaries laboured in vain; Aboriginal peoples were cannibals, although cowardly; they drowned babies ‘like blind kittens’ and did not even bury their dead, leaving them to carrion.123 In Bessie Marchant’s The Black Cockatoo, the white children scare a group of Western Australian Aboriginal men away from the ‘cultivated land’ on the ‘plantation’ belonging to their parents.124 White settlement and this sense of ownership are justified because the incoming settlers ‘use’ land neglected by its original inhabitants. Indigenous adults are infantilised as both an inherent part of, and support for, the dominant white ideology. Central to such constructions was the notion of the Aborigines as a ‘dying race’. This sense of inevitable doom nullified their disruptive potential.125 Remarking on the kindness of the ‘natives’, an early ragged school emigrant wrote: ‘There is nothing in this country that will hurt you unless you hurt them first’.126 Pronouncements of officials responsible for Aboriginal ‘protection’ reinforced this impression, emphasising the failure of efforts to educate and civilise the ‘natives’ whose temperament rendered them incapable ‘of sustained labour, such as is requisite to obtain knowledge to fit them for the business of civilised life’.127 References to ‘black’ or ‘animal nature’, ‘savage habits’ and ‘natural’ indolence suggested that Indigenous peoples were impossible to change.128 ‘You cannot make blacks like us. A black can never become one of us; his colour will not alter, nor his propensities’, argued Board of Protection member, Edward Curr. ‘We have only to deal with the generations we have’, the Rev. F.A. [ 94 ]

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Hagenauer commented. ‘There may not be many following.’129 ‘That they must die out … is a foregone conclusion.’130 ‘They follow employments of civilised people with some regularity – fully as much as can be expected of a race just emerging from barbarism’, a Victorian Royal Commission reported, concluding nevertheless that ‘the race’ was ‘fated to disappear’.131 Success on reserves and mission stations was seen as temporary and contingent on separation, with those who do not accept such containment to be found ‘on the outskirts of civilisation, a disgrace to the colony, and a standing rebuke to those who profess to care for decency and to be offended by the constant exhibition of immorality and vice’.132 Children of mixed descent were excluded from this dying race discourse and, over time, became a clear focus of rescue. Significantly, the first children’s book published in Australia, A Mother’s Offering, dealt with the issue of child removal.133 In the many later books which addressed this theme, Aboriginal behaviour is always judged against the ‘normative’ behaviour of the white colonists and is only deemed to be praiseworthy when it goes some way towards meeting those standards. Aboriginal children who were prepared to reject their culture and their people were rendered redeemable, and their removal was constructed as benevolent.134 After seeing the horror of his mother being killed by a white settler, ‘a little black child was found wandering in the streets of Melbourne’. He was taken in by a clergyman who called him ‘Willy Wimmera’ after the place from which the child said he came and took him to England to be educated.135 By focusing on childhood and whiteness, advocates of removal could attract sympathy for calls for children of mixed descent to be ‘rescued from the unwholesome blacks’ camps and thus removed from their mothers who are usually of a low type’.136 ‘It is sad’, wrote missionary Daniel Matthews, ‘to see so many intelligent and pretty children living in wretchedness and growing up in vice’.137 Later he would be one of the first mission superintendents to take advantage of legislative provisions that enabled children of mixed descent to be transferred to the Victorian Neglected Children’s Department while in the other states protection boards constructed their own arrays of institutions in which children could be trained to enter the white workforce.138 In New South Wales such moves were informed by George Ardill, the only private child rescuer to enter into the debate. As secretary of the Aborigines’ Protection Association, and, later, a long-serving member of the government Board for the Protection of Aborigines, he was the conduit through which child rescue ideology was to have its most direct impact on Indigenous children.139 Despite the willingness of ‘gifted young men and women’ to serve in the Chinese missions, [ 95 ]

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Ardill observed, ‘the heathen at our own door are left to live and die without the offer of a Saviour’s dying love being presented to them … cursed by vicious whites with the presentation of previously unheard vices’.140 ‘Camp life was … miserable in the extreme … the women, utterly debased … the children frequently ruined at a tender age, and many nearly white roaming wild, and totally uncared for through their tribal districts.’141 ‘Prompt action’, he argued, was necessary ‘to prevent the growth of a race that would rapidly increase in number, attain a maturity without education or religion, and become a menace to the morals and health of the community … the desire to obtain cheap labour in the wilds of the federation, or for the indulgence of illicit passion, should not be permitted to block the way of protection and elevation of these unfortunate children’.142 Canadian Indigenous peoples were more clearly positioned within the national psyche, although still confined to a separate existence. Traces of a dying race discourse were tempered by respect for the remnants of ‘a once great people’ whose assistance had been invaluable to the early white settlers.143 Dispossessed of most of their original land, they now found themselves in a world in which their ‘well known improvidence’, ‘naturally indolent character’ and ‘disinclination for constant labor’ left them ill-equipped to survive.144 Despite the assumed benevolence of the colonial government, ‘experience’ had shown that ‘little can be done’.145 Both authors and policy makers focused attention on the young, perceived as being open to change but held back by ‘the indifference and nomadic habits of the parents’.146 The only way ‘of preventing or at least delaying’ such ‘fatal results’, the archbishop of Quebec believed, was ‘to labor to civilise their children’.147 A Missionary Present about the Red Children is a small book published around 1872, with the express purpose of ‘educating’ white children about the customs of First Nations peoples in North America. Instances of twin infanticide were cited as evidence for the importance of missionary intervention, rescuing children from their parents and training them to be ‘useful’ to themselves and others.148 A biography, written for children, of William Bompas, bishop of NorthWest Canada, told readers that Indigenous women were slaves who, knowing what was in store for their girl-children, killed them. ‘During his long years in the North’, readers were told, the bishop ‘had relieved and saved many a little waif’ from ‘cruel’ parents and lives of ‘degradation’.149 Rescue was imperative both for ‘Indian boys and girls … destined to become citizens of Canada’ and the ‘orphans, children of Indian mothers by white or half-breed fathers … waifs and outcasts among the Indians … [with] none to care or provide for them’. Without intervention, they, like the neglected children of the inner cities, were [ 96 ]

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destined to ‘form part of our criminal class in the near future’.150 The failure of so-called ‘half-breed’ children was not the result ‘of blood, but of environment’.151 In arguing for the need for child rescue, colonial activists used the same racialised tactics of shock and shame as their English mentors. ‘Unnatural parents who wilfully banish from their dwellings the tenderness, the simplicity, the winsome dependence of their children’ were depicted as being as much in need of missionaries as the Chinese.152 Bemoaning the rise of juvenile crime, a Sydney judge declared: ‘a spirit has developed in this young community only found in lower races of savage peoples. This indifference to human suffering is a mark of a low nervous organisation, and degradation of the human species’, and a threat to the future of white Australia.153 Child rescuers emphasised the desirable racial characteristics of the children who had been saved. ‘Blue-eyed, fair-haired babies’ and the lad ‘Fair-faced and wistful / Yellow his hair / Sweet blue eyes craving / Somebody’s care’ were favorably compared with the ‘Chinese, Aboriginals, Turks, Hindoos, Samoans, Italians, as well as children of other nationalities’ who came under the various societies’ care but could not be expected to be seen as Australians.154 The ‘little black Aborigine’, Ruby, Ardill assured his readers, was ‘welcomed to the Home as one of God’s little ones … though she suffered persecution at the Public School and even at the Sunday School’, but questions of her acceptability were resolved with her early death ‘and we can safely believe she is now singing in Glory’.155 Kelso’s pamphlets also featured images of white, blond, curly-haired children, and one of his folksy stories recounted the belief of a ‘bright sunny-haired girl’ whose foster mother had warned her against ‘going abroad without the hat’ for fear that she ‘would get tanned and dark like the colored people’.156 Such racialised representations point to one of the core motivations of colonial child rescue: the fear of contamination. Colonial power was one of the privileges of whiteness, but the whiteness of settler children was seen as being under threat. Martha Cox, an illegitimate white child, was a mere seven weeks old when, in May 1870, she rolled from her drunken mother’s lap into the fire burning in the middle of the earthen floor of the family’s shanty. Awakened by screaming, her father found the baby ‘slowly roasting in the smouldering fire. Its eyes … destroyed and its brain … partly consumed’.157 Although the death of an illegitimate child like Cox was unremarkable, the circumstances, in which it took place caused some dis-ease. Under the heading ‘The Real Savages’, a Melbourne satirical journal created a scenario in which ‘an intelligent gentleman of a dark complexion, born in the colony, and whose ancestors, from time immemorial, were also born in the colony’ [ 97 ]

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offered to help ‘to civilise the savages’ who had committed such a crime. ‘The vile shanty … he would replace with a decent gunyah, and he will undertake to send an intelligent lubra to Maria Cox to teach her what are her duties as the mother of a family.’158 Yet the inversion is more complex than this simple paragraph would imply for there was no suggestion that Victoria’s remnant Aboriginal population had something to teach the settler colonists. Rather the story was used to shame Martha’s parents and others like them who had sunk so low that such a comparison could be drawn. Was this evidence that ‘barbarism’ had infected ‘young Australia’?159 The youth and vigour of Australia were seen as fostering a new and stronger racial type, but commentators remained alert for any hints of degeneracy, ‘that decay in vigour which usually wastes northern races when they settle in a soft and enervating climate’.160 The increasing visibility of street children, and the rise of a particular form of juvenile criminal, known locally as the larrikin, played into such debates, read as evidence ‘of a deep-seated and widespread evil, which threatens, if unchecked, to become, through the corruption of children, a fruitful source of wretchedness and ruin to this fair land’.161 While there were some voices pointing to the ‘unhealthy physical and moral conditions which breed degradation, misery, and vice’, it was the moral causes which attracted by far the greater debate.162 ‘If we neglect the children … what hope can we have for the future generations … in what condition will the race of which we are justly proud be unless we take some steps to stem the current of indifference to our responsibilities which is spreading like poison all around?’163 Despite its convict heritage, Australia lacked ‘the degraded masses which drag the wheels of Europe’, but, critics suggested, ‘an absurdly extravagant sense of freedom’ and a climate which ‘helps to the disintegration of the “home”’ had led to a ‘break down [of] order’.164 ‘We have no criminal classes here’, declared New South Wales premier, Sir Henry Parkes. ‘Our little vagrants … are the children of parents who have fallen in their own lives through being removed from the restraints of family and friends, and exposed to ruin and temptation, rather than children of parents who were themselves born to an inheritance of homelessness and crime.’165 Immigration, an Anglican commentator argued, ‘renders the Arab feeling more than ordinarily strong…and it is not surprising that this quality should descend to their children in rather an undue proportion’.166 Australian child rescuers spoke directly to such anxieties. Citing the example of Barnardo and Stephenson, the Wesleyans argued that ‘the child of the gutter is almost sure to grow up into the canker of the State’.167 ‘We are anxious to do our share in saving the innocent [ 98 ]

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and helpless childlife of our colony, and lift it out of the mire of evil surroundings into the sunshine of love and purity.’168 ‘Parental neglect and faithlessness lead myriads of children to grow up in the way they should not go’, added Ardill. ‘Either reformers must undertake the task of rescuing, shielding and training the children of the streets, or the nation must run the risk of social anarchy in the future.’169 The ‘ministering women’ employed by his mission ventured into the ‘wretched dens … the plague spots underlying the embroidered veil of civilisation’ in order to establish ‘the right of the child to its fair share of life’s heritage’, recognising that ‘these neglected children will be the raw material for the making of good citizens and the building up of a new nation’.170 In ‘heathen Rome … a father had a right to do what he pleased with his children, because they are his’, but Australia was ‘a Christian land’ in which ‘a child has rights, as surely as an adult’.171 Support for child rescue would ensure that ‘in this new country’ neglected children were given every chance to ‘grow up successful in life’.172 White settlement has a longer history in Canada than in Australia, but the expansion of the nation following confederation in 1867, and increased rates of immigration, created a ‘young nation’ discourse with which child rescuers were eager to engage.173 Although ‘ragged, barefooted and emaciated children’ were ‘rarely met with’, ‘a low standard of living, drunkenness and degeneracy’, during a period of rapid growth, threatened to replicate the conditions more commonly associated with the old world.174 ‘Our governments are bringing in people in great numbers’, commented Kelso, creating a ‘congestion of population’ in which ‘the evils of child neglect and depravity have their origin’.175 ‘Growing up in such unwholesome conditions’ children would struggle to ‘develop the higher type of civilisation of which we so fondly dream, and which many emigrants coming to our shores hope to find’.176 ‘Unexplored regions’ housing ‘a rubbish pile of wrecked humanity’ ‘extremely dangerous to the health and morals of a city’ were apparent in many urban centres.177 If the new ‘Canadian nationalist’ was to be of a ‘high type’, the ‘“submerged tenth” among our young must assuredly be provided for’ before they joined ‘the vast army of criminals or derelicts which are at the same time a menace and an enormous expense to their country’.178 Kelso created neglected children as simultaneously threat and asset, ‘the future state and nation in embryo’.179 ‘The boys and girls of our wealthy and prominent citizens, as well as the children of the poor, are made out of the same material, and it depends on the moulding they receive in youth what they will become later on.’180 ‘Consigned’ to their fate ‘by neglectful and vicious parents, and by the ­indifference [ 99 ]

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and shortsightedness of the community’, poor children ‘will almost surely be criminals’ constituting a threat to ‘the peace and happiness of our modern civilisation’.181 Redeemed, they would help develop the country and shape its ‘glorious Democracy’.182 The outdoor relief, poorhouses and orphanages on which Canada to this point had relied, ‘infected’ such children with ‘the pauper microbe’, but the more interventionist methods of child rescue could break the cycle of dependency.183 It was time for ‘the State … to interfere and protect itself and save the child’.184 Contesting suggestions that the removal of children was an interference with parental rights, Kelso argued, ‘a man has no more right to grow noxious weeds in his home circle than he has in his garden or field. Society in either case has assumed the right to interfere for its own protection, and this right cannot now be seriously questioned.’185 ‘Every child without suitable or natural protectors is the ward of the State, and for his well-being the State is justly responsible. If you would save a child from being poisoned you would not feed him with deadly nightshade; so if you would correct impure or criminal tendencies you would not place him in the midst of corrupting influences or criminal associations.’186 The before and after photographs preceding Kelso’s eighth report as superintendent of neglected children in Ontario contrasted five ‘wretched, shivering, little outcasts of society’ with the ‘fine, manly boys, with bright and hopeful futures’ which they had later become. The presence of the Union Jack in the second image reminded readers that the work was not only of national importance.187 At a time when ‘the British Empire is deeply concerned about the disposal and future of the coming generation’, child rescuers in metropole and colony were involved in a crusade to uplift the race and build the empire.188 A shared monarch and a common race, they argued, gave Anglo-Saxons ‘flesh and blood’ ties which were now being engaged in constructing an empire in the interests of the child.189 However, for many of the children who were transported in the interests of empire, and for the Indigenous children on whose dispossession the success of the new nations depended, the outcome was far less certain.

Notes   1 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Reject?’, HH, IX: 97 (1896), 13.   2 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 8.   3 Ibid., pp. 12–13.   4 Catherine Hall, ‘Going a-Trolloping: imperial man travels the empire’, in Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 180.   5 ‘Sir Charles Lucas on the empire’, The Times (28 January 1910).

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the salvation of the race   6 ‘A state of savagery’, CG, XVIII: 1 (1904), 6.   7 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’, NWM, XXIV: 211 (1900), 17.   8 ‘Another good example’, CG, II: 24 (1888), 121; Benjamin Waugh, ‘Cannibalism in England’, CG, V: 2 (1891), 9–10.   9 Sister Grace, ‘Waste or worth?’, HH, VII: 78 (1894), 109. 10 ‘Cruelty to a racing stable apprentice: strong remarks of the judge: “nigger-driving”’, CG, XIII: 2 (1899), 13–14; T.J. Barnardo, ‘A thrashing’, ND, I: 8 (1877), 86; Sister Grace, ‘Child pictures from real life: little English heathens’, CH, 37 (1892), 4. Benjamin Waugh, ‘Street children’, CR, 53 (1888), 825. 11 Winston Churchill, ‘The friendless young’, ND, XXXI: 247 (1908), 70. 12 Rev. Geo. C. Lorimer, ‘A lesson in Christian charity’, ND, II: 2 (1878), 25. 13 B.M.H., ‘Why not both?’, OWS, XII: 310 (1910), 462. 14 ‘The angel of the little ones, or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’, Review of Reviews (RR), 4 (1891), 526. 15 ‘Notes’, CG, IX: 5 (1895), 69; ‘Untitled’, CG, V: 1 (1891), 2. 16 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’, ND, XV: 149 (1891), 3. 17 Cardinal Henry Edward Manning and Benjamin Waugh, ‘The child of the English savage’, CR (January–June 1886), 688. 18 ‘Street boys rescued’, ND, I: 9 (1877), 106. ‘How to deal with pauper children: an object lesson from Sheffield’, RR (January–June 1896), 328. ‘The destitute and forsaken children of large towns’, Australian Witness (1853), 72. 19 Mrs H. Grattan Guinness, ‘Let down your nets!: a haul at the “Edinburgh Castle”’, ND, II: 1 (1878), 15; ‘The street arab’, ND, II: 12 (1878), 3171; Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘Barracks of babies’, CG, I: 4 (1887), 31. 20 Rev. C.F. Tonks, ‘A great nation’, OWS, XIV: 334 (1913), 82. 21 W.T. Stead, ‘For all those who love their fellow men: a supplement for Christmas time’, RR, 24 (1901), 677, 86. 22 A., ‘The Ragged School Union: its objects and claims’, RSUM, I: 1 (1849), 4-9; ‘The Late Earl Shaftesbury, K.G.’, ND, IX: 98–103 (1885), 153–7. 23 Catherine Hall, ‘Of gender and empire: reflections on the nineteenth century’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 46–7, 52. 24 Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of White­­ness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 1. 25 Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Inventing the world: transnationalism, transmission and Christian textualities’, in Gareth Griffiths and Jamie S. Scott (eds), Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 33. 26 L. Mahood and B. Littlewood, ‘The “vicious girl” and the “street-corner” boy: sexuality and the gendered delinquent in the Scottish child-saving movement, 1850–1940’, Journal of the History of Sexuality (1994), 552. 27 See for example ‘To our readers’, CG, V: 1 (1891), 1; T.J. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’, ND, XVII: 176 (1893), 89; Lord Brabazon, ‘State-directed emigration: its necessity’, ND, VIII: 92 (1884), 178–80. 28 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘To my little friends’, CA, VII: 75 (1886), 69–70. 29 Millie Sanderson, ‘Canada’s plea for “the waifs and strays”’, ND, VIII: 81–6 (1884), 24. 30 Rev. W. Wade, ‘Physical deterioration’, OWS, XI: 246 (1904), 379. 31 Churchill, ‘The friendless young’, 68–70. 32 Rev. W. Wade, ‘The waste of infant life’, OWS, X: 250 (1905), 21. 33 Owen Seaman, ‘The social aspects of child-saving’, ND, XXXI: 245 (1908), 33. 34 F. Horner, ‘The little savages of Nodlon’, CA (January 1873), 3. 35 Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘The social explorer as anthropologist: Victorian travellers among the urban poor’, in William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (eds), Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 132–3. 36 Mahood and Littlewood, ‘The “vicious girl” and the “street-corner” boy’, 552. 37 Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 212.

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child, nation, race and empire 38 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The church’s care of waifs and strays’, ND, XIX: 190 (1895), 104; Denis Crane, ‘In the path of the sun: Canadian homes for British boys’, HH, XXVII (1914), 24-6. 39 Rev. L.L. Barclay, ‘Do help the little ones’, OWS, IV: 108 (1893), 54. 40 R.M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (London and Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 19?); Rev. W.J. Wilkins, Harry’s Trip to India (London: The Religious Tract Society, n.d). 41 Ballantyne, The Coral Island, p. 124. 42 Ibid., p. 111. 43 Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s Children: Reading Colonialism through Children’s Books and Magazines (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 6, 10. 44 Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses (Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1986), p. 49. 45 ‘For young folks: the little Kaffir at home’, Spectator (12 June 1875), 70. 46 ‘African babies’, Spectator (5 January 1906), 33. 47 J.B., ‘The Tahitian child and his mother’, Juvenile Missionary Magazine, 7: 74 (1850), 158; ‘How they carry the babies’, Spectator (14 September 1900), 1299; ‘That little girl in China’, Spectator (30 January 1914), 201. Anon., ‘South African Children’, CT, 89 (1876), 10; R.M. Ballantyne, ‘A northern waif’, OWS, I: 14 (1885), 5. 48 Anon., ‘Recruiting in Africa’, Young England, 12: 112–23 (1891), 365. 49 Arthur Lee Knight, ‘Old Tom Hardy’s yarns; No. 1. My first slaver’, BS, 49 (1897), 37; ‘No. 2. Adventure with cannibals (cont)’, BS, 52 (1897), 78; ‘No. 3. It was a narrow squeak’, BS, 55 (1897), 117–18, BS, 56 (1897), 130–2, BS, 57 (1897), 147–8. 50 Margaret Beresford, ‘Among the leaves’, BS, 28 (1895), 52. 51 Dorothea Moore, ‘For the empire’, BS, 238 (1913), 13. 52 ‘Children of other lands: American Indians’, Spectator (12 January 1906), 70–1. ‘The North-American Indians’, CH, 25 (1891), 4. 53 A Scoutmaster, ‘The empire’, BS, 218 (1911), 180. 54 Winifred Spurling, ‘The cousins and I’, BS, 66 (1898), 131. 55 Ruth Frankenberg (ed.), Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 6, 8–9. 56 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: George Gallie & Son, 1878), p. 11. 57 Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: George Gallie & Son, 1879), p. 26. 58 ‘Emigration of children to South Africa’, CA, III: 34 (1882), 150–2. 59 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Letters to my little friends, No. XV’, CT, IV: 44 (1883), 115–17. 60 Denis Crane, ‘In the path of the sun: Canadian homes for British boys’, HH, XXVI (1913), 156. 61 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Letters to my little friends, No. III’, CA, III: 28 (1882), 21–2. 62 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Letters to my little friends, No. III’, CA, III: 27 (1882), 35. 63 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Letters to my little friends, No IX’, CA, III: 35 (1882), 161–3. 64 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Letters to my little friends, No. XI’, CA, IV: 38 (1883), 19–21. 65 T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Letters to my little friends, No. XIII’, CA, IV: 41 (1883), 66–8. 66 T.J. Barnardo, ‘My colony over the sea: the golden bridge’, ND, XV: 149 (1891), 12. 67 T. J. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’, ND, IX: 93 & 94 (1885), 24-5. 68 Various, ‘Our literary improvement society’, Ups and Downs, IV: 2 (1899), 58. 69 Rev. W.J. Mayers, ‘My tour in “Brighter Britain”’, ND, XVI: 165–8 (1892), 97. 70 ‘Dr. Stephenson’s festival’, Spectator (26 March 1897), 265; T.J. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’, ND, XVIII: 178 (1894), 8. 71 Caroline Bressey, ‘Forgotten histories: three stories of black girls from Barnardo’s Victorian archive’, Women’s History Review, 11: 3 (2002), 359. 72 ‘From Bonnie Scotland’, CH, 122 (1899), 4. 73 ‘A round of visits. XXIV – St Michael’s Orphanage, Chislehurst’, OWS, V: 139 (1895), 177.

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the salvation of the race 74 One of the crowd, ‘Transplanted’, ND, VI: 58 & 59 (1882), 20; ‘Children of tramps’, CLPP, IX: 11 (1902), 158–9. 75 Marian Isabel Hurrell, ‘Young tent-dwellers’, YHLM (1900), 183. 76 Barnardo, ‘London lodging houses: boys found in them’, ND, I: 5 (1877), 66; ‘Poor little foreigners’, CA, 6: 6 (1876), 47–8; ‘Italian children’, CG, V: 10 (1891), 106. 77 ‘Thy going out and thy coming in’, OWS, XIV: 345 (1914), 359–60. 78 Ibid., 360–1; T.J. Barnardo, ‘A rescue across the sea’, ND, XVI: 163 (1892), 62. 79 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The Beni-Zou-Zougs’, ND, 5: 56 (1881), 215–21. 80 Ibid., 216. 81 Hall, ‘Of gender and empire: reflections on the nineteenth century’, pp. 48–9. 82 ‘From national to imperial: an appeal to British colonies, paper 1’, CG, XII: 10 (1898), 117–18. 83 Margaret West, ‘Work at Grahamstown’, OWS, I: 15 (1885), 6. 84 ‘The Society abroad: protection of children in New Zealand’, CG, XIII: 9 (1899), 105. 85 ‘Items of interest’, CG, XXII: 7 (1908), 83. 86 Sister Emilie Trueman, ‘From South Africa’, HH, XVI (1903), 145. 87 Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain, Confronting Cruelty: Historical Perspectives on Child Abuse (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002), pp. 11–32. 88 Ewan Macintyre, ‘The historical context of child welfare in Canada’, in Brian Wharf (ed.), Rethinking Child Welfare in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1993), pp. 27–9. 89 G. Davison and D. Dunstan, ‘“This moral pandemonium”: images of low life’, in G. Davison, D. Dunstan and C. McConville (eds), The Outcasts of Melbourne (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 42–3. 90 J. S. James, The Vagabond Papers (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1969), p.  30. 91 ‘Borrioboola Gha’, Rescue, VIII: 4 (1902), 3. 92 ‘Editorial’, Sydney City Mission Herald (SCMH), VI: 11 (1903), 9; ‘The cry of the children’, Australian Christian World (ACW) (12 February 1891), 8. 93 ‘Untitled’, Argus (10 May 1872), 4. 94 ‘The cry of the children’, Australian Herald (AH) (August 1898), 239. 95 ‘The massacre of the innocents’, Spectator (17 May 1889), 93. 96 ‘Central Dorcas Help and Rescue Society’, Spectator (21 December 1888), 607; ‘A home for little children: a new and deserving charity’, Advocate (20 April 1889), 17; ‘The new Livingstone House’, Spectator (27 March 1891), 297. 97 ‘Untitled’, Argus (12 November 1873), 6; ‘Protection for the children’, Spectator (21 November 1884), 343. 98 ‘Pulpit and platform (by one who was there)’, Spectator (9 August 1895), 541. 99 ‘Untitled’, Spectator (9 October 1875), 267. 100 ‘Child rescue’, Spectator (24 July 1891), 699. 101 ‘The Army rescue corps: our chances with the little larrikins’, WC (21 November 1896), 11; ‘Work among neglected children’, Rescue, VIII: 9 (1902), 1. 102 Shurlee Swain, ‘Selina Sutherland: child rescuer’ in Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (eds), Double Time: Women in Victoria – 150 Years (Ringwood: Penguin, 1985), p.  110; ‘Untitled’, Spectator (17 August 1888), 391; ‘The Rescued Children’s Home, Cheltenham’, Spectator (20 November 20 1891), 1119. 103 ‘The lambs, the vultures – the angel!’, Spectator (22 January 1904), 116; ‘Prevention of cruelty to children’, Rescue, VII: 4 (1900), 4; ‘Untitled’, In Our Midst (IOM), 3: 8 (1898), 2; ‘Archdiocese of Melbourne: opening of St. Joseph’s Home for destitute children’, Advocate (20 December 1890), 16. 104 Library and Archives of Canada (LAC), MG30 C97 Volume 24 Newspaper Clippings Fresh Air Fund Folder, ‘A sail with the children: the pleasant time seven hundred children had’, Toronto World (July 1889); ‘A successful experiment in home-mission work’, HH, IV: 37 (1891), 15–16; LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Third report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, Ontario, for the year ending December 31, 1895’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1896), p. 5.

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child, nation, race and empire 105 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 18, Observer, ‘Observations’, 1892, p. 222. 106 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 18, ‘Neglected and dependent children’, Mail-Empire (20 March 1900). 107 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 4, Ontario – Child-Saving Work Conference, 1894 Folder, John Joseph Kelso, ‘Child-saving, some impressions of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, held in Nashville, Tenn, May 23–28, 1894’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1894), p. 7. 108 Patricia Rooke and R.L. Schnell, Discarding the Asylum: From Child Rescue to the Welfare State in English-Canada (1800–1950) (Lanham, NY and London: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 15–16. 109 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, ‘Neglected children: methods of rescuing them from lives of infamy’, Ottawa Daily (29 September 1893). 110 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 27, ‘Second report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, 1893’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1895), p. 17. 111 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 26, ‘Eighth annual report of the Toronto Children’s Aid Society’ (Toronto: Toronto Children’s Aid Society, 1899), p. 11. 112 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, ‘For of such is the kingdom: the Society for Befriending Friendless Children’, Daily Examiner (3 November 1893). 113 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Tenth report of superintendent, neglected and dependent children of Ontario, 1902’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1903), p. 9. 114 Professor Sir J.J. Thomson, ‘A question of vital importance’, ND, XXXII: 251 (1909), 69. 115 J.J. Kelso, The Children’s Court: An Outline of the Work It Is Intended to Accom­ plish (Toronto: s.n., 1893), p. 21. 116 ‘The Chinese question’, WC (8 March 1884), 2; ‘Chinese camp work: save the children!’, WC (20 September 1884), 1. 117 ‘What about the children?’, WC (1 March 1884), 2; ‘People we have met’, IOM (1915), 6–7. 118 ‘Untitled’, Spectator (22 December 1877), 399. 119 Margaret Holliday, ‘The babies’ home’, Rescue, X: 7 (1905), 4. 120 ‘A trifling episode in slum life’, Mission Notes (MN), 1: 2 (1895), 6. ‘Sydney’s slums’, SCMH, XII: 10 (1909), 14. 121 ‘Victorian notes’, Victorian Independent (1 October 1870), 97; ‘Untitled’, MN, 1: 2 (1895), 1. 122 ‘The work of a mission sister: some social sidelights’, Collingwood Mission Magazine (1 June 1907), 5. 123 ‘In the Australian police force: or, the story of Kaloonga. Founded on fact’, Young England, 76 (1888), 30, 72, 80, 82, 123. 124 Bessie Marchant, The Black Cockatoo: A Story of Western Australia (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1910), p. 65. 125 Helen McDonald, ‘Perish the thought: populating White Australia and the role of child removal policies’, Journal of Australian Studies, 91 (2007), 4. 126 ‘The boys and girls who went to Australia’, RSUM, 2: 15 (1850), 53. 127 ‘First report of the Central Board appointed to watch over the interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’, in Votes and Proceedings of the Victorian Legislative Assembly (VPP) 1861–2, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1861–2), pp. 494–5. 128 ‘Royal Commission on the Aborigines: report of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the present condition of the Aborigines of this colony, and to advise as to the best means of caring for, and dealing with them, in the future; together with the minutes of evidence and appendices’, VPP 1877–8, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1878), pp. 35, 50; ‘Twenty-fourth report of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’, VPP 1888, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1888), 8; Travelling Correspondent,

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‘The Plenty District: from Healesville to Melbourne’, Advocate (7 May 1887), p. 18. ‘Royal Commission on the Aborigines’, p. 36. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., pp. viii, xvii. ‘Fifth report of the Central Board Appointed to watch of the interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’, VPP 1866, vol. II (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1866), p. 507. Charlotte Barton, A Mother’s Offering to Her Children: By a Lady Long Resident in New South Wales (1841). Facsimile edn. Rosemary Wighton (Sydney: Jacaranda Press, 1979). Marchant, Black Cockatoo, p. 281. Anon., ‘Jim Crow and Pepper, the Australian Blacks’, Juvenile Missionary Herald, 16: 8 (1878), 116. Clare Bradford, ‘Fading to Black: Aboriginal children in colonial texts’, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 9: 1 (1999), 17. ‘The half-caste problem’, ACW (22 November 1912), 10. Public Record Office, Victoria (PROV), VPRS 1694, P0000, Unit 15, Daniel Matthews, ‘Fifth report of the Maloga Aboriginal Mission School, Murray River, New South Wales’ (Echuca, 1880), p. 7. ‘Thirty-seventh report of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines’, VPP 1901, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1901), p. 1113. ‘Brief mention’, Rescue, XIV: 12 (1910), 9. Aborigines Protection Association, The Rightful Owners. Our Duty to Them. Being the Annual Report of the Aborigines Protection Association for 1890 (Sydney: William Brooks, 1891), pp. 9–10. New South Wales Aborigines Protection Association, Report of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Association, June 30th 1881 (Sydney: Jarrett & Co, 1881), p. 2. ‘Aboriginal Children’, Rescue, XVII: 2 (1912), 7. Argyll Saxby, The Call of Honour: A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian Prairies (London: S.W. Partridge and Co. Ltd, 1912), p. 162. LAC, RG10 Volume 6001 File 1–1–1, Part 1, Reel 8134, L. Vankoughnet to Sir John A. McDonald, 26 August 1887; Department of Indian Affairs, The Indian Affairs, Province of Canada. Report for the Half-Year Ended 30th June, 1864 (Quebec: Hunter, Rose and Co., 1864), 5; Department of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Department of the Interior for the Year Ended 30th June, 1874 (Ottawa: 1875), pp.  5–6. Department of Indian Affairs, Report of the Indian Branch of the Department of the Secretary of State for the Provinces (Ottawa: I.B. Taylor, 1872), 16; LAC, RG10 Volume 6001 File 1–1–1, Part 1, Reel C-8134, ‘Report on industrial schools for Indians and half-breeds’ (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs, 1879), p. 2. Department of Indian Affairs, Report of the Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs (Ottawa: 1877), p. 8. LAC, RG10 Volume 3674, File 11422, Reel 10118, Archbishop of Quebec to Sir John A. Macdonald, February 1883. Anon., A Missionary Present about the Red Children (London: Wesleyan Missionary Society, c. 1872), pp. 31–2. H.A. Cody, On Trail and Rapid By Dog-sled and Canoe. The Story of Bishop Bompas’s Life Amongst the Red Indians and Eskimos. Told for Boys and Girls (Toronto: The Musson Book Co., 1911), p. 89. LAC, RG10 Volume 6001 File 1–1–1, Part 1, Reel C-8134, Katherine Hughes, ‘The Association for Befriending Indian School Graduates’ (1901), p. 4. LAC, RG10 Volume 6039 File 160–1, Part 1, Reel C-8152, ‘Memorandum for Robert Rogers from faithful servants at Saskatchewan’ (1911), p. 10. ‘Notes of the Month’, Victorian Independent, V: 54 (4 September 1874), 681. ‘Sydney Larrikinism’, ACW, VI: 276 (9 July 1891), 1; R. W., ‘Parental control’, Spectator (1 August 1902), 1107. Mary A. Tuckfield, ‘Methodist homes for children’, Spectator (24 May 1912),

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155 156

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157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178

179 180 181

182

840; ‘Nobody’s darling’, Rescue, VII: 6 (1900), 7. ‘Society for Providing Homes for Neglected Children’, Rescue, IX: 8 (1903), 11. ‘Ruby’, Rescue, VIII: 2 (1901), 8. LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 36 Folder 281, ‘Heart-hunger’ (n.d.); LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 34 Folder 231, John Joseph Kelso, ‘A child’s cleverness’ (1896). Argus (3 May 1870). ‘The real savages’, Touchstone (14 May 1870), 194. An Australian Sister, ‘A peep behind the curtain’, AH (March 1890), 116. ‘Young Australia’, Advocate (1 August 1868), 8. ‘Protection for the children’, 1. Charles Strong, ‘The sign of Jonah’, AH (February 1891), 95–6; ‘The weakling: how he comes – what to do with him’, Collingwood Mission Magazine (1 July 1907), 4. ‘Untitled’, MN, 1: 7 (1896), 1–2. ‘Australian Character’, Spectator (3 September 1886), 415; ‘Larrikinism’, Spectator (19 September 1879), 246; ‘Youthful criminals’, Spectator (15 June 1883), 79; ‘The curfew law, or voices from the city’, Rescue, VIII: 2 (1901), 3. ‘The boarding-out system’, Spectator (2 December 1876), 990. ‘Larrikinism and larrikins’, CEM (3 November 1879), 2–3. ‘Child rescue’, Spectator (17 June 1892), 551. Mary E. Waugh, ‘Wesleyan Neglected Children’s Aid Society, Livingstone Home: twelfth annual report’, in Home Missions: Twenty-Fifth Report of the Wesleyan Home Missions in Victoria (Melbourne: Wesleyan Home Missions, 1899), p. 39. ‘Our little ones’, SCMH, VIII: 2 (1904), 7. Una, ‘Save the children’, Rescue, IX: 6 (1903), 8–9. ‘The rights of children’, Spectator (16 December 1904), 2014. Lily de Leon, ‘The Sutherland Home’, From Dark to Dawn (FDD), 2: 22 (1908), 11. LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 25, ‘Report of the proceedings of the sixteenth annual meeting of the Hamilton Children’s Aid Society’ (Hamilton: Children’s Aid Society, 1910). LAC, MG30 C97 Box 17, John Joseph Kelso, ‘Child-welfare work’ (1914), pp. 2–3. LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Twenty-first report of superintendent, neglected and dependent children of Ontario’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1914), p. 23. LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Seventeenth report, neglected and dependent children of Ontario’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1910), p. 43. LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 25, ‘Report of the proceedings of the fourteenth annual meeting of the Hamilton Children’s Aid Society’ (Hamilton: Children’s Aid Society, 1908); ‘Seventeenth report, neglected and dependent children of Ontario’, p. 41. LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 25, ‘Fourth annual report of the Children’s Aid Society, of the City of London, Ontario’ (London, Ontario: Children’s Aid Society, 1897), pp.  1–2; LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 26, ‘The Children’s Aid Society, Owen Sound and County of Grey, thirteenth annual report’ (Owen Sound: Children’s Aid Society, 1908), pp. 8–9. LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 4, Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, ‘Neglected! One of the products of a selfish system’ (n.d.). LAC, MG 30 C97 Volume 1, John Joseph Kelso, ‘Reforming delinquent children’ (1903), p. 7. LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, John Joseph Kelso, ‘Cradled in crime: a plea for neglected children of the people’, Brantford Expositor (16 January 1894); LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 4, ‘The least of these’ (1894); LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Sixth report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, Ontario, for the year ending November 30th, 1898’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1899), p. 6. LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Seventh report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, Ontario, for the year ending December 15, 1899’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1900), 12: Kelso,

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the salvation of the race ‘Child-welfare work’, p. 2. 183 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 36, John Joseph Kelso, ‘Some thoughts on poorhouses and “charity”’ (Toronto, 1905), p. 6. 184 ‘Second report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, 1893’, p. 18. 185 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, ‘Neglected children’, Brantford Expositor (2 February 1894). 186 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 4, John Joseph Kelso, ‘Child-saving: purpose and methods of a Boys and Girls Aid Society’ (1890), p. 1. 187 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Eighth report on work for neglected and dependent children of Ontario, during the year 1900’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1901), p. 4. 188 ‘Shall we let the children join them?’, WC (24 August 1912), 2. 189 ‘From national to imperial’, 117–18.

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The salvation of the empire

Arter I’d bin there a time, sir, the Doctor comes to me, And sez, ‘Would you like, my laddie, a better place to see?’ ‘I begs yer parding, Doctor, but where can sich a place be?’ And the Doctor said with a smile, sir, ‘My boy, it’s over the sea’. Well, to finish my story quickly, I and a lot o’ lads more, On a bright September mornin’ sailed for Canada shore. And here I am alive, sir – alive and a doin’ well; And wherever I goes, this story I’ll never forget to tell.1

Emigration provided the means through which child rescuers were able to transform their work from the national to the imperial. Depicted as a gift from a mother to a daughter, it was seen as a way of strengthening family and hence racial ties.2 In the short term the advantage to the colonies was understood in terms of an increased labour supply but by building settler populations, one supporter argued, they would make their major contribution at a future time, when ‘white men may be the hunted’.3 Child rescuers did not pioneer the concept of child emigration. Pauper children had been dispatched to the colonies from the early years of British imperial expansion, but the practice intensified in the nineteenth century as the numbers of poor children increased. During the 1830s the Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy (later renamed the Children’s Friend Society) began co-operating with poor law authorities to send children away, initially to the Cape Colony but later to Western Australia and Canada as well. The Ragged School Union followed this example in the following decade, sending former students to the Australian colonies, before turning to Canada when the gold rush made passages to Australia too expensive.4 Emigration, it was argued, was beneficial to both sending and receiving countries, slackening ‘the supply of the home labour-market’ and answering ‘the crying demand of the colonies’ while ‘permanently benefit[ing] [ 108 ]

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the intending emigrant’.5 Anxious to differentiate the practice from convict transportation its advocates argued that it was ‘better … to transport these lads as free emigrants to a flourishing colony where their arrival is hailed as a boon to society … than suffering them to remain in the mother country, a social evil and a moral disgrace … until at length … they are transported to a distant colony, where their presence is an evil and a disgrace’.6 By 1855 the Children’s Friend Society had been discredited because of its failure to provide the supervision necessary to protect the children from abuse, but the idea would later be revived by two English women, Maria Rye and Annie Macpherson. Believing that they were called to the work, they established receiving homes in England, and recruited children both from poor law authorities and on their own account to proceed to placements, primarily in Canada. Rye accompanied her first group of child emigrants to Canada in 1869, transferring over five thousand children to her distributing home at Niagara-on-the-lake, Ontario, between that date and her retirement in 1896. Macpherson commenced her work in 1870, establishing her distributing home at Belleville, Ontario. She was assisted by other members of her family who continued the work after ill health forced her to retire in 1902.7 Quarrier, Stephenson, Barnardo and Rudolf built on these foundations, Quarrier working with Macpherson to take children to Canada from 1871, Stephenson sending his first group with Francis Horner in 1873, Barnardo emigrating children through Macpherson’s scheme from 1875 before establishing his own programme in 1882, and Rudolf co-operating with Rye from 1885 and taking over her distributing home when she retired.8 Although isolated groups went to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, proximity and economics meant that Canada remained the major destination.9 In nineteenth-century children’s literature emigration was celebrated within a broader narrative of imperial adventure. From such stories white-settler boys learnt that ‘the empire proffered an amazing array of exciting places where they could test their mettle’.10 Promin­ent authors such as Captain Frederick Marryat, G.A. Henty, R.M. Ballantyne and Ernest Favenc positioned the English ‘at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of races and nations’, depicting emigration and settlement as being good both for the ‘new’ land and the ‘old’.11 The queen was ‘good, wise and generous’, the empire ‘the first and greatest of all Christian lands’ and the nineteenth century the most ‘brilliant’ in history. Young readers were encouraged to see themselves as citizens of the empire, fighting the selfishness and greed of those who ‘don’t want the Empire to keep good and great and glorious’.12 Emigration stories contrasted the squalor of conditions in British cities with the open, health-giving [ 109 ]

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life in the colonies. A binary opposition depicted the old country as a place of stunted growth, weakness and danger – both physical and moral – for the poor living in its cities, while the new country was a place of opportunity and redemption.13 Child rescuers keyed into this enthusiasm, constructing child emigration as a core focus of their work, the ultimate proof that environment could triumph over heredity. Environmental change was always central to the promise of child rescue, but a rising interest in heredity and eugenics in the latter years of the nineteenth century compelled its advocates to refine their claim to be able to bring about change. In the early years they had relied upon a simple story of environment overcoming heredity. ‘The evils of early neglect’ had been ‘eradicated’, allowing ‘the wild, passionate, unformed nature’ to take on ‘all the energy of a strong character’.14 However, by the 1880s the ‘taint of heredity’ had to be more directly confronted. Its power, particularly in relation to intemperance, could no longer be denied, but, supporters were reminded, young children were ‘plastic for good or ill to the moulding forces of their environment’.15 Heredity, J.W. Horsley argued, was ‘a force for good as well as for evil’. Through early intervention children could be shaped to maximise their positive inheritance.16 By the end of the century heredity was being described as an ‘awful burden’, but one that would only be added to by leaving children in a noxious environment.17 A ‘new and healthy environment’, however, had a greater power ‘to transform and renovate than even heredity has been in planting and evolving taint. Change and purify the former early enough, and the latter will disappear in a generation.’18 ‘Many of Nature’s laws counteract each other’, wrote Barnardo, arguing that ‘properly selected environment is a much more potent life factor than heredity … although we cannot root out or un-create hereditary influence, we can give and maintain a new environment, and so neutralise the former’.19 In the early years of the twentieth century the child rescuers consolidated their position. In the face of increasing references to the need to preserve children from temptations which could awaken their ‘inherited tendencies’, and stories of the multi-generational damage caused by one ‘defective’ who had been allowed to reproduce, they constructed elaborate arguments for the primacy of environment (see Figure 10).20 ‘The cold and unsympathetic man of the world will tell you that as is the parent, so will be the child; a thief will beget a thief, and a drunkard a drunkard’, an OWS writer observed, before citing the ‘many, very many cases dealt with by this and kindred societies’ as evidence to the contrary.21 Horsley admitted that character was ‘chiefly [due] to heredity’, but environment was a powerful ‘moulding [ 110 ]

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Figure 10  Photographic evidence that environment could overcome heredity

force’.22 ‘The deeply embedded taint of heredity cannot be eradicated in a day, nor even in a lifetime’ but the work of the societies proved that children removed early ‘acquired none of the traits’ of their elder [ 111 ]

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unrescued siblings.23 ‘The brain of a child can by a changed environment be diverted from hereditary tendencies.’24

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The flower has not been quite wilted by the frost. The fruit has not been altogether blighted by the miasmatic taint … There is, of course, the taint of heredity, which may break out like some fell disease as life matures; but still, everything is done that can be done by love, by the inducing of good habits and by Christian teaching, to sow the antidote where the nettle may spring, or to supply a sufficient corrective to the evil bias.25

‘Good training’, ‘before the inherited tendencies are strengthened by environment and before the habit of evil doing becomes second nature’, allowed the child to ‘grow away from the evil past, and … reach out to a better future’.26 Offering ‘A MESSAGE OF HOPE FOR THE RACE’, Barnardo declared: ‘there is no inherent tendency in any boy or girl, no matter how descended, or how surrounded, which may not be eradicated, or at least subjugated, under favourable conditions’.27 ‘Surround a child with love, with pure lips, with order, with truth, and he will respond to their suggestion, just as surely as before he responded to the suggestion of drunkenness, vice, and squalor.’28 Emigration provided the laboratory in which child rescuers could demonstrate their theories as to the power of environmental change. Relocating children in the colonies and dominions, they argued, provided both the distance and the opportunity that ensured their success in the future. In order to make this solution acceptable in the receiving countries child rescuers blended such welfarist arguments with the instrumentalist one, that the children would relieve labour shortages and help build the population.29 Barnardo argued that emigration was ‘the final stage of child rescue’. It took children who were ‘potential loafers’ in Britain and ‘entered [them] on the profit side of the world’s Social Ledger’.30 Initially employed only for children ‘threatened [by the] interference of criminal or vicious relatives, or by considerations of health’ it came to be seen as the solution to wider problems associated with the nation’s ‘surplus juvenile population’.31 The colonies could succeed where the home country failed, providing the ‘pure air, good food, [and] kind oversight’ needed if children were to ‘attain to at least the average in physique, in intelligence, and in general usefulness’. Where earlier emigration schemes had focused on older children, the child rescuers’ growing concern with the influence of heredity saw them argue for early removal where possible.32 In England, according to Stephenson, children had to fight against odds ‘of which they know nothing in the Far West’, and Canada, in turn, was ‘the richer for their presence and citizenship’.33 [ 112 ]

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The early images of children redeemed by being transposed from the city to the country were increasingly replaced by the grand drama of emigration. This practice, the legality of which was often questioned in the early years, was strengthened with the passage of the Custody of Children Act in 1891 which allowed child rescuers to dispense with the consent of parents who had been shown to be unfit. As the emigration season began, large parties were farewelled at widely reported ceremonies at which the children were reminded of their mission and blessed for their journey. ‘Wither, pilgrims are you going, / Going each with staff in hand’, sang the party gathered at the wharf to farewell Quarrier’s emigrants, who were carefully trained to sing in response: ‘We are going on a journey, / Going at our King’s command, / Over hills and plains, and valleys; / We are going to his palace – Going to the better land’.34 The crowd that gathered at such ceremonies, ‘peering with curious eyes at the small people who were thus making a new start in life’, were joined by scores of ‘anxious-looking’ relatives catching a last glimpse of their children.35 ‘The most callous begin to look serious as they are told the parting time is near’, reported Quarrier in a rare acknowledgment of the parents’ distress. Stifled sobs are heard from some of the women; one, miserably clad… hears nothing of the hymn or prayer; she only hears her boy’s voice, and sees him parting from her for ever … There is a rush at the door of the shed, a hundred anxious faces crowd around, and press to go in with the children. Some cries are heard. ‘Gie Willie and Jamie this sixpence, sir, from feyther. It’s all I can gie them.’36

More commonly the presence of parents was ignored as each child stood to be acknowledged by the crowd as a summary of their case history was read.37 They were assured that whatever they might have been, they now represented ‘the best of the stock’, ‘picked lads, “sound in wind and limb,” well fitted to become citizens of the great “Dominion beyond the seas”’, where they could look forward to ‘driving their own teams and ploughing their own broad lands’.38 In response the children sang hymns which expressed both gratitude for their rescue and hopes for the life ahead. Far, far upon the sea, With the sunshine on our lee, We forget not all the blessings of the past; And remember, though we roam, What we owe to our good Home, In whose shelt’ring care our childhood’s lot was cast: …

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To a warm Canadian welcome we’ll repair; Still ’neath the banner brave, That can ne’er float oe’r a slave, Oh! gaily goes the ship when the wind blows fair.39

The celebratory tone of the departure ceremony was echoed in children’s literature, which was quick to incorporate child emigration stories. Ballantyne’s Dusty Diamonds tells the story of the slum boy, Bobby, determined to go to Canada to escape from the hand-to-mouth existence of his family and the influence of his drunken father. Introduced by his sister to ‘the Home of Industry’, the ‘ragged, friendless, penniless London waif, clothed and in his right mind’ is sent ‘to a new land of bright and hopeful prospects’.40 In contrast to the squalor of Whitechapel, Canada is a place of ‘rolling prairies, illimitable pastureland, ocean-like lakes and numerous rivers … thriving and growing fast’, populated by ‘waifs and strays’ who have ‘made good’.41 The landscape itself thus becomes a metaphor for opportunity, allowing the child emigrant to prosper and, in many cases, to make a temporary return to England, often to arrange for the family, redeemed through his example, to emigrate as well. Emigration offered adventure as well as prosperity. Hal Hungerford: or, the Strange Adventures of a Boy Emigrant, first published in 1891, focuses on a Barnardo boy sent to Canada, where even ‘the meanest might become great and the poorest rich’.42 Initially warm and welcoming, the weather turns cold, challenging Hal’s strength and determination. Thrown onto his own resources, he steals a boat to escape from his farm placement and proves his worth by facing ‘tempest’, smugglers and Indians.43 Having triumphed over these challenges, he finds a new job, where he saves his wages and is able to buy his own farm by the time he is twenty-one. On his wedding day, cheers are given for ‘Squire Hal and his wife’.44 However, Hal never forgets those less well-off than himself, living by a maxim of self-help and charity: ‘Make money … make all you can – but above all make it do good’.45 Details of the immigration process are integrated into the story. The ‘immigration agent’ is introduced on the first page; the way the boys are assigned to particular farmers and other employers is outlined (with the aside from one farmer that ‘Nardo boys never know nothin’ about farmin’).46 Readers are told that Hal’s mother had died before he was ten, leaving him to subsist ‘as best he could in the London streets until rescued by benevolent hands and placed in Dr Barnardo’s famous East-end Home’.47 Because of the training given in the homes he was able to handle tools very well, standing him in good stead when he ran away from the cruel farmer who later realises [ 114 ]

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that his punishment of the Barnardo boys has often been unjust and destroys the strap he has used to inflict corporal punishment. The discourse promoting child emigration occupied an increasing proportion of the promotional literature. Central to this discourse was the potential for hyper-environmental change, illustrated through the binary oppositions to which readers of children’s literature had already been introduced. ‘The forlorn, helpless child, tossed about in the waves of suffering and moral peril’, became ‘the happy woman in her Canadian home, with a bright and joyous future before her’; ‘a large class of abandoned, or “drift” children, have … been for all time placed in the ranks of self-respecting, honourable and industrious citizenship’.48 ‘Old things have passed away – and the pleasures and excitements of a new life make all things new.’49 Take them away! Take them away! Out of the gutter, the ooze, and slime, Where the little vermin paddle and crawl Till they grow and ripen into crime. … Take them away! Away! away! The bountiful earth is wide and free, The New shall repair the wrongs of the Old – Take them away o’er the rolling sea!50

The environmental threat was both moral and familial. Children whose future was threatened by ‘relations and connections in this country’ could ‘go to a colony where they would be free from that which would hamper their welfare’, ‘saved from the vast refuse-heap of our country’s vice’.51 ‘Blood is thicker than water’, the Anglicans argued, and the ‘yearnings of a daughter after a mother’ could draw her back if left ‘within distance of the vicious surroundings from which they were originally drawn’.52 ‘The maelstrom of wretchedness and suffering’ in the inner cities functioned as a nursery of pauperism, ‘a standing menace to the social fabric of the State’, but emigration showed that such pauperism was habitual rather than hereditary. 53 Emigration saves the boy, delivering him for ever from the perils of his former lot … it relieves our overcrowded cities, the labour-markets of which are hopelessly congested … it supplies Canada’s greatest need: additions to her population of the choicest materials – honest, industrious and piously-trained youths, who, by God’s blessing, will grow into the successful citizens of the future.54

The receiving nations were uniformly depicted as ‘empty’ spaces waiting to be filled, rather than the homelands of Indigenous peoples only recently removed. Readers were invited to ‘contemplate … the [ 115 ]

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vast continents which in distant parts of the globe fly the tri-coloured flag of the British empire’ and ask: ‘How are these lands being peopled?’55 ‘While in England we have 416 persons to the square mile’, Barnardo informed his supporters, ‘in Canada the population is but 4 persons to the square mile, and there are still 5,000,000 acres of land upon which it might almost be said that the foot of man has scarcely trod.’ 56 The ‘magnificent steam-ships’ that allowed the English ‘to bridge the ocean and to span the intervening space to vast colonies and continents’ were described as ‘designs … of a beneficent Providence’ determined to bring land under ‘the remunerative husbandry of spade and plough’.57 ‘Canadian soil’, one of Stephenson’s old boys wrote, had come ‘to be recognised as belonging to the white man’.58 Colonisation by ‘thrifty, industrious, sober, God-fearing, British colonists’ was a fulfilment of the ‘Divine command’ to ‘replenish the earth and subdue it’.59 The redemptive value of farm labour had been central to child rescue since the early experimentation at Wichern’s Rauhe Haus. New York child saver Charles Loring Brace had shown that North America pro­­­ vided an extensive field in which it could be practised. For British child rescuers Canada, and to a lesser extent the other white settler colonies, came to constitute the highly romanticised environment in which their ‘young plants’ could be nurtured and could grow.60 Colonial land was no longer a wilderness, but an undeveloped resource waiting to be ploughed. ‘If the soil in these countries could speak’, readers were assured, ‘it would say “come”.’ 61 Other writers expressed this calling in verse: Overcrowded! mother England, if the homestead’s grown too small, And the servants’ little children are too many for the hall, We have acres broad and fruitful, stretching westward to the sun, Prairie-lands and sunny hillsides from the forest to be won. And our hearts are large and kindly as the acres that we till, Though we make no boast of grandeur, nor of ancient artist skill. We have Nature’s royal largess of rich beauty, wild and free, Mountain, stream, and forest grandeur, lake and plain from sea to sea.62

‘Land is very cheap, the climates are mild and healthy’, and local governments were keen to increase the population, readers were assured.63 In ‘the backwoods of Canada’ where ‘the air is pure … the scenery fine … [and] crops and fruit trees grow fast and yield good returns … if any are willing to work, let them come … there is room for all’.64 The ‘lands of unthinkable vastness, and wondrous richness in timber and all kinds of minerals’ were being developed by ‘a human enterprise which is mainly British, and which advances proudly under [ 116 ]

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the British flag’, offering newcomers a ‘voice and welcome [that] have the true British ring’.65 All that was needed was a ‘golden bridge that shall stretch from our evil slums and poverty-stricken alleys to the fair verdant lands of far-off Canada, where there is abundance of ­elbow-room, fresh air and wholesome food’, a nation in which even ‘quite humble people have houses that would seem almost palaces to many a labourer in England’.66 This ‘marvellous structure’, Barnardo declared, would ‘span the ocean with its Highway of Hope, one pier of which rests amidst the gloom of Darkest England, and the other is set among the glorious plains and limitless possibilities of our great Colonial Empire’.67 ‘Canadian subjects are exactly what Canada has made them’, one OWS writer declared, but while ‘failures in Canada are hopeless in England … failures in England are not hopeless in Canada’.68 Proponents of child emigration depicted Canada as a society without class distinctions where piety, morality and temperance, rather than birth, determined an individual’s potential.69 ‘The farm hand receives high wages and has unrivalled opportunities of acquiring land of his own, while the domestic suffers from no social stigma.’70 ‘Boys received into the farmers’ homes are practically considered as one of the family’ and ‘girls … have a more comfortable and respectable social position’ and good prospects of ‘marrying well and settling in life respectably’.71 Children placed as servants could expect to ‘eat at the same table, and occupy the same sitting-room’ as other members of the family and ‘share with the farmer’s own children [in] work and food, school and play’.72 ‘In Canada our youth at once breathe the air of freedom; there the youthful labourer is worthy of his hire; he is not bound by such social ties and customs as prevail here.’ 73 A poem purportedly written by a recent emigrant celebrated this egalitarian ethos: ‘He is his own landlord – this country is free, / Far better than England for you and for me! / The good wood here in plenty makes fire burn bright. / A creek through our farmyard is quite a delight!’74 The settler colonies, readers were told, rewarded ‘industry and perseverance’.75 In ‘the fair land of Canada … almost every industrious, sober man has a chance of independence and respectability’.76 Children’s books emphasised that poor emigrants, used to hard work, were more likely to succeed than those who have been ‘brought up too comfortably at home’. ‘A Christ’s Hospital boy, who has made his own bed and cleaned his own shoes, is a man to make a good emigrant in the North-West.’77 ‘There is no room for a lazy boy in Canada’, Highways and Hedge readers were assured: ‘the Canadian farmer is a hustler from sunrise to sunset; his industry is unabating, and in consequence his success is always assured’.78 [ 117 ]

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The colonies, where ‘squalor and want … are unknown’, and ‘waifs, as we know them, simply do not exist’, transformed both bodies and fortunes.79 Here ‘the boy of the railway arch’ became ‘a lad no longer – strong, thick set, with every muscle developed’, ‘a farmer with his own acres under his feet’.80 ‘Antecedents’ were no longer relevant as children achieved success well beyond anything that was possible in the mother country. Vignettes published in the magazines told of children adopted into wealthy families, boys who became farmers, landowners, graduates and professionals.81 Those who, on adulthood, left Canada to seek their fortune in the United States reached even greater heights. HH told and retold the story of one of their boys: the ‘foreman of large works in America’, ‘an active Christian worker’ whose ‘eight children are being brought up in the fear of the Lord’.82 ‘Lifted from the dunghill’, he had been ‘set amongst the princes of God’s people’.83 OWS readers were entertained with the unlikely story of Jack Rigby, who returned to England after fifteen years in Australia, where he had become the ‘owner of one of the largest ranches in the world, and controller of a gold-mine’, to propose to the girl with whom he had been rescued so many years before. When she made it a condition of her acceptance that he give half of his income each year to the homes he laughingly replied: ‘For ten years I’ve paid that dividend. Fifty percent of every penny I’ve made has gone home to Liverpool to help rescue the poor little wretches from the streets – the little wretches like you and me.’ 84 Long after Canada had lost its frontier status, readers were reassured that the demand for child emigrants, trained in rural skills, survived. ‘Farmers’ sons and daughters’ pursuing careers in the cities or taking up their own land in ‘the great North-West’, and the predominance amongst adult immigrants of people who ‘have neither the physique, training nor inclination for farm life’, threatened Ontario’s economic future to such a degree, Maria Rye was shocked to observe, that suggestions had been made ‘that Indian children of the Far West shall be brought, after a short training in the government Schools, into Eastern Canada’.85 Rye’s shock points to the second justification offered for child migration programmes: the contribution they made to the salvation of the race. Like the heroes of such books as C.L. Johnstone’s The Young Emigrants: A Story for Boys, child migrants qualified to become colonial pioneers by virtue of their Britishness.86 Migration of white children was designed in part to make ‘there’ more like ‘here’, populating the colonies with increasing numbers of white settlers who reinforced alliances to the metropole. Race was deployed by advocates of emigration in both the sending and receiving countries. The future of both ‘race and Empire’, Winston [ 118 ]

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Figure 11  Canada: Rescued children as empire loyalists (image is reversed in original)

Churchill argued, depended on ‘the care and … the development of the young’ (see Figure 11).87 Given that it was God’s plan that AngloSaxons should purify the earth through colonisation, who better than young English children to dedicate to the task?88 Canada should not be thought about as foreign, Stephenson assured his children: ‘Our good Queen sure and true / Rules the old land and the new / And the same untarnished freedom can each boast’.89 Barnardo’s emigration parties were farewelled in stirring fashion: Yours is the happier fate, ye rising race – Though for the instant parting’s pang be sore; To laugh to scorn the impotence of space, And with Affection’s links bind shore to shore. … A vaster Britain doth through you arise, For Britain’s hearts and Britain’s sons are one. God keep ye still, Your homes, your lives from ill!90

On embarkation, supporters claimed, ‘our youngsters, ruddy, healthy, clean, well-disciplined’ contrasted sharply with the ‘Russians [ 119 ]

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and Germans and Jews and black people’ representative of the ‘alien and, in some cases, inferior races’ from whom Canada needed to be preserved.91 ‘There can be no two opinions’, a Barnardo worker observed, ‘as to which class is best deserving of government aid and encouragement.’92 Only child emigrants could be trusted to ‘maintain the traditions of the British race’.93 They may have been poor but they were ‘British poor … not the most virtuous … but certainly – the least vicious, the least given to criminal practices, in the world’.94 Inviting Stephenson to send his children to Canada, the Rev. Monty Punshon insisted that the country did not want drifters, but rather people who would ‘adher[e] to British institutions, and attach themselves to the British flag’.95 Defending emigrant children against later attacks, Kelso argued: ‘These boys and girls are not foreigners, but are as much a part of our blood and race as though they had been born within our borders.’96 The shared racial heritage gave the work of child rescue imperial status. In London for a conference in 1907, the premiers of Natal, New Zealand and Victoria included a visit to the NSPCC on their itinerary.97 Speaking at the opening of a hospital, funded by Barnardo’s Australian supporters, New South Wales premier Sir George Reid demanded: ‘Is it not a grand thing that the children of this great Mother of Nations shall, in the most distant hemisphere, at the farthest outposts of civilisation and enterprise, respond freely to the noble inspirations which have created these marvellous Institutions?’98 The magazines of the child rescue organisations circulated across the empire, and subscription lists show a readiness of British settlers abroad to support the work at ‘home’. At NCH’s Edgworth farm one of the cottages was funded by a donor from South Australia and another by a South African.99 By the early years of the twentieth century children’s fund-raising ­auxiliaries were reporting in from the colonies and dominions, Rudolf’s Children’s Union boasting branches in Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa and Australia, and Barnardo’s Young Helpers’ League becoming a major children’s organisation across New Zealand.100 Child emigration was positioned within this familial / imperial dis­­­­­course, with child rescuers forming alliances with politicians and policy makers dedicated to the imperial cause, transforming themselves from philanthropists to empire builders ‘weaving a web of brotherhood, sisterhood and fellowship’ between the motherland and her colonies.101 By the end of the nineteenth century, Murdoch has argued, the hopes of reintegrating children into the nation through a return to the land were increasingly overshadowed by arguments which ­reimagined them as the raw material of empire.102 The ‘practical Christianity’ of child rescue was recast as a ‘nobler’ form of imperi[ 120 ]

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alism. This new discourse reflected both a pride in the empire and a fear for future. ‘Colonies’, a Barnardo supporter argued, ‘are not merely possessions but a part of England.’ 104 The ‘outward glory of a mighty Empire … its permanency and well-being’ were dependent on the health of the ‘domestic lives of the individual members of its different branches’.105 ‘Each part’ of the empire ‘reacts upon every other part, whether in prosperity or adversity’. Undeveloped land in the colonies was a threat to the prosperity of Britain, just as the persistence of child poverty and youth unemployment in Britain should be understood as a threat across all of her possessions.106 Child supporters, in particular, were reminded that as members of the empire they had a responsibility to maintain it. 107 A lack of concern about child-life, the NSPCC warned, could be the first indication of an empire sinking into decline.108 Rescued children, in this discourse, were transformed from a liability to a resource. Through emigration they could be ‘lifted out of the shadows of Darkest England’ to ‘become good citizens in the country of their adoption … and consumers and importers of English manufactures’.109 They represented an ‘advantageous investment of British capital’, contributing their labour to the development of natural resources and ‘adding to the wealth of the Empire by their industry’.110 ‘Honest, sober, clean-living, law-abiding members of society’, they could be trusted to fear God and ‘do their duty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call them’.111 Vignettes personalised such claims. At a cost of a mere £17 Charlie had been ‘lifted from a life of tramping and idleness, of suffering and of temptation’ to become a ‘fine citizen’ contributing to national and imperial prosperity.112 A song sung at DBH reunions celebrated the achievements of the ‘five thousand brawny boys’ who had made ‘prairie flowers smile’, ‘each dollar double’, and were ready to heed the ‘clarion’ should nation or empire call.113 The willingness to defend the nation was tested in both the South African and the First World Wars and the magazines were quick to publicise the contributions their ‘boys’ had made.114 It was in the neglected children and ‘unbefriended youth’ sent to ‘untilled places’ to ‘bring honour to God and to their country … that our Colonial Empire finds its strength’; called to ‘the King’s service’ they had shown themselves to be ‘second to none in loyalty, devotion and sacrifice’.115 The readers of the magazines, people ‘of the same stock as the heroes who made the Empire’, could help ensure its survival by contributing to the work of the homes.116 However, there were voices both at home and abroad which chal­­ lenged the child emigration programme. Occasionally supporters of the homes expressed doubts as to the need to remove the ‘flower of [ 121 ]

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the population’ from ‘our shores’, anxious that the supply of servants was being diminished and the country as a whole would be impoverished.117 ‘I do not feel that this country is so rich in manhood that we can afford to lose any of them’, said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, calling instead for a determination ‘to rebuild that yeoman stock which was the very finest thing this country ever produced’.118 Many in the colonies proved harder to convince. In 1851, when the Poor Law authorities were the major players in the child migration field, one writer had observed: ‘The other hemisphere shrinks from many of our emigrants almost as much as from our convicts.’119 As the programme expanded into Canada opposition grew, centred around three themes: inadequate inspection and supervision; the potential, if not actual, criminality and dependency of the children; their contribution to the problems of ‘urban drift’.120 As Stephen Constantine has observed child migrants were doubly condemned. Ejected from their own country, all too often they faced rejection in Canada as well.121 Unlike ‘ill-trained Canadian children … those coming from the old country … usually have three or four generations of vicious ancestry’, one critic observed.122 An official report, released in 1875, added to this disquiet, suggesting that the children were being used as a cheap labour, and recommending that future schemes concentrate on migrating younger children who, because they would have to be adopted rather than employed, would truly become one of the family.123 Using the language of child rescue to condemn emigration, an Ottawa newspaper declared: ‘Many of these children are nothing but white slaves, made to get up long before day light and to work till late at night and deprived of all the pleasures and advantages of childhood.’124 ‘We have enough of our own to provide for’, representatives of Ontario labour organisations argued, ‘and we have no right to be taxed even for the bad fraction of the number who are imported.’125 Only when all the local children at risk had been provided for would Canadians ‘be in a position to extend our missionary labors to other countries’.126 Unlike Quarrier, who suspended his emigration programme in 1897 when the Ontario government passed what he saw as ‘anti-British’ and ‘alien’ legislation designed to bring such schemes under official control, Stephenson, Barnardo, Rudolf and their supporters recognised the validity of such critique.127 Previous schemes, they admitted, had been poorly administered, leaving Canada at risk of being ‘looked upon too much as a Van Dieman’s Land’.128 They, too, declared a preference for sending children while they were still young enough to fit easily into the new environment, but regretted that they struggled to find enough homes ‘willing to give the required guarantees for Church training’.129 Hence they continued to focus on older children but argued that their [ 122 ]

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schemes were different, exporting ‘well-trained children’ rather than ‘the dregs of our pauper population’.130 They followed the advice of Canadian officials, only selecting for emigration children who had ‘their full mental faculties’ and had been ‘thoroughly tested for trustworthiness’ before departure.131 While local child rescuer J.J. Kelso declined to support plans to increase the number of young children exported, largely because it made his task of finding homes for ‘native born children’ more difficult, he was a staunch defender of the older children who continued to arrive.132 ‘The comparatively few’ children who had been taken before the court, he argued, ‘blinded the eyes of many people to the immense number of children who have done well’.133 Many of the cases featured in the newspapers did not relate to child emigrants at all.134 Both Kelso’s defence and qualifications of child emigration practice reflect the degree to which local work, in all colonial outposts, relied on a similar practice of relocation. The practice of boarding children out in their own communities was well-established in various European countries, but child rescuers added another dimension. Beginning with Charles Loring Brace in the United States, they argued that redemption relied not simply on removal but on relocation.135 In Australia, where state boarding-out schemes preceded the rise of child rescue, and in Canada, where Kelso was appointed to head a state children’s department built on child rescue lines, child rescuers developed internal child migration schemes, relocating city children to the supposedly purer rural environments. For Kelso the challenge was to persuade local families to take his children rather than the readily available child migrants. ‘Are we receiving these children from outside at the expense of our own?’ a supportive journalist asked.136 Perhaps ‘our energies could be directed to saving [local] children from becoming criminals in the community, and saving them from the cruelty of parental neglect and abuse’.137 In establishing his new scheme, Kelso struggled to reconcile the need to place children ‘a long way off from the district in which they lived’, and yet still accessible for the regular supervision that was necessary to preserve them from abuse.138 Rural areas offered ‘more elbow room in the country, more chance for a young life to develop in the right direction’ and Canada had such areas in abundance.139 ‘Native born children’, he argued, were entitled to a share in ‘their heritage’ in the new lands opening up in the more remote areas of the province, but should not be allowed to join the rush to the north-west where they would be beyond his supervision and control.140 Instead he hoped to persuade ‘good homes … without children’ to opt for local rather than immigrant youth.141 [ 123 ]

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Faced with little such direct competition, Australian child rescuers were far less equivocal in engaging with their imperial heritage. At the commencement of their local child rescue work, Melbourne Wesleyans directly invoked Dr Stephenson’s example. Just as he ‘trained’ the children he had ‘rescued’ and ‘shipped’ them to Canada, so they hoped to see ‘in our own land stalwart Australian farmers who will owe their start in life to our Rescue work’.142 Although few of the societies had the resources to extend their rescue activities beyond the inner city, their denominational affiliations provided a network of clergymen across the colony who could put them in touch with farmers in search of labour, and childless families seeking to adopt. In the case of the Wesleyans, this network extended to the British colony of Fiji, where expatriate Australians were seen as offering a ‘good opportunity’ and a ‘good home’.143 Removal from the city allowed for children ‘once lost’ to now be ‘saved’, a transformation that would benefit both nation and empire, each of which had an interest in ‘the rising generation throughout these colonies’. 144 Child rescue, as an imperial endeavour, involved the transportation of ideas as well as children, establishing new norms for both the definition and the solution of the problems of child abuse and neglect across Britain and the colonies. It provided the language in which the problems were described, and the structures for both legislative and institutional responses. Yet it was a language which assumed that the child at risk was both white and Anglo-Saxon, and as such entitled to a share in the racial and imperial privilege that this status involved, even though, in practical terms, that privilege was always moderated by class. For children who did not share this heritage, however, the consequences of the triumph of the gospel of child rescue were going to be particularly dire.

Notes   1 Charles W. Barker, ‘Told in Canada’, ND, XI: 120 (1887), 75.   2 ‘Why emigrate?’, OWS, XIII: 323 (1912), 294-5.   3 Vanoc, ‘Our handbook: the new emigration: the Oxford movement’, Referee (8 May 1910).   4 ‘Emigration’, RSUM, 5: 53 (1853), 93.   5 ‘The impulse of emigration needed to carry on the ragged school movement’, RSUM, 2: 14 (1850), 38.   6 ‘Emigration of eighteen ragged school boys’, RSUM, 9: 101 (1857), 83.   7 Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1879–1924 (London: Croom Helm,1980), pp. 28, 30; Marjorie Kohli, The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada, 1833–1939 (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2003), ch. 4.   8 Kohli, The Golden Bridge, ch. 5.   9 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Our boys in Australia’, ND, XX: 197 (1896), 97–8. 10 Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p.  60.

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the salvation of the empire 11 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 68; Daphne M. Kutzer, Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 138; Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 203. 12 ‘An M.A. of Cambridge’, English History in Rhyme (Manchester: John Heywood, 1873?), unpaginated; Amy Le Feuvre, Us, and Our Empire: A Sequel To ‘Us, and Our Donkey’ (London: Religious Tract Society, 1911), p. 34. 13 Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives, p. 203. 14 ‘Sparkle’, CA (February 1873), 31. 15 A.L.L. and J.W.H., ‘No room for the child?’, OWS, I: 21 (1886),3; ‘From the streets’, ND, XI: 117 & 118 (1887), 32. 16 J.W. Horsley, ‘The mightiness of mites’, OWS, I: 45 (1888), 5. 17 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’, ND, XIV: 148 (1890), 197. 18 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Child life in East London’, ND, XV: 153 (1891), 82. 19 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’, ND, XVIII: 178 (1894), 10. 20 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 23 – a deserter?’, OWS, VIII: 220 (1902), 351; Mary A. Tuckfield, ‘Methodist homes for children’, Spectator (26 June 1914), 1038. 21 R., ‘Environment’, OWS, VIII: 202 (1901), 17. 22 J.W. Horsley, ‘Enemies of childhood. No. 1 – ‘drink’, OWS, VIII: 202 (1901), 23. 23 D.M.D., ‘Nobody’s child am I’, OWS, XI: 280 (1907), 226; LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 25, ‘Seventh annual report of the Children’s Aid Society, of the city of London’ (London, Ontario: Children’s Aid Society, 1901), p. 4. 24 Denis Crane, ‘In the path of the sun: Canadian homes for British boys’, HH, XXVII (1914), 146. 25 Rev. F.B. Meyer, ‘An appreciation’, NWM, XXV: 221 (1902), 156. 26 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Ninth report of superintendent, neglected and dependent children of Ontario, 1901’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1902), p. 39; T.J. Barnardo, ‘One of my failures’, NWM, XXV: 219 (1902), 118. 27 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Heredity versus environment’, NWM, XXV: 222 (1902), 176. 28 Mrs W.F. Lofthouse, ‘The child character and its development’, HH, XXIV (1911), 102. 29 John Eekelaar, ‘“The chief glory”: the export of children from the United Kingdom’, Journal of Law and Society, 21: 4 (1994), 487. 30 ‘The final stage: our Spring emigrants’, ND (March 1910), 14; ‘Notes’, CG, XVII: 10 (1903), 115. 31 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Our first emigration party’, ND, VI: 62–5 (1882), 100. 32 Crane, ‘In the path of the sun’, 25. 33 H.K., ‘The children’s home: the story of the home, X’, Spectator (16 October 1891), 993. 34 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: George Gallie & Son, 1873), p. 14. 35 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Westward ho!’, ND, X: 109 & 110 (1886), 85. 36 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: George Gallie & Son, 1874), p. 13. 37 ‘Emigration notes’, ND, X: 113 & 114 (1886), 174. 38 F. Horner, ‘Diversities of ministrations’, HH, XXI (1908), 117; Archdeacon Farrar, ‘The church’s duty and the children’s cry’, ND, XV: 153 (1891), 70. 39 Charles Mackay and T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Far, far upon the sea’, CA, 31 (1874), 99. 40 R.M. Ballantyne, Dusty Diamond Cut and Polished: A Story of City Arab Life and Adventure (Project Gutenberg [Ebook #21729] 2007), p. 22. 41 Ibid., p. 257. 42 J.R. Hutchinson, Hal Hungerford: or, the Strange Adventures of a Boy Emigrant (London: Blackie, 1905), p. 8. 43 Ibid., p. 134. 44 Ibid., p. 224.

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Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 59. ‘Lights and shadows of child-life: a striking contrast’, HH, III: 34 (1890), 202; Rev. W. Wade, ‘Canada and the children’, OWS, IX: 240 (1904), 278. Report of the Executive Committee of the Church of England Central Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays (London: Church of England, 1885), p. 10. ‘The departure of the innocents’, OWS, I: 40 (1887), 3. Earl Cairns, ‘Earl Cairns at Bournemouth’, ND, VII: 70–2 (1883), 31; F.D. How, ‘Emigration branch’, OWS, VII: 200 (1900), 407. ‘Our emigrants’, OWS, XII: 304 (1910), 320. ‘Eighth report on work for neglected and dependent children of Ontario’, p. 81; ‘Annual public meeting’, 8; LAC, MG30 C97 Box 17, ‘Child immigration’, Star (July 1910). T.J. Barnardo, ‘England’s door of hope’, ND, XVII: 171–2 (1893), 18. Rev. C.F. Tonks, ‘A great nation’, OWS, XIV: 334 (1913), 82. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’ (1894), 8. A.W. Mager, ‘Juvenile emigration’, HH, VI: 67 (1893), 123. A.R., ‘Our letter bag’, CA, VI: 70 (1885), 190–1. Barnardo, ‘England’s door of hope’, 18. Parr, Labouring Children, pp. 45–6. George Bell, ‘Emigration in connection with ragged and industrial schools’, RSUM, 4: 46 (1852), 184. Millie Sanderson, ‘Canada’s plea for “the new waifs and strays”’, ND, VIII: 81–6 (1884), 24. ‘A new scheme for emigration’, ND, VI: 66 & 67 (1882), 124. T.J. Barnardo, ‘Our home in the backwoods of Canada’, OD, 97 (1883), 366. Rev. H.D. Barrett, ‘Emigration and our emigrants’, OWS, 65 (1889), 8. T.J. Barnardo, ‘Westward ho!’, ND, XIII: 132–3 (1889), 35–6; Cousin Tom, ‘Notes from Canada’, BS, 163 (1906), 245. T.J. Barnardo, ‘My colony over the sea: the golden bridge’, ND, XV: 149 (1891), 5. J.C. Maillard, ‘A trip to Canada with our young colonials’, OWS, X: 263 (1906), 220. Parr, Labouring Children, pp. 46–7. Crane, ‘In the path of the sun’, 133. ‘Dr Stephenson’s children’s homes’, London Quarterly Review, 70 (1888), 145–6. T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Report of a visit to Canada in the interests of the children’s home’, CA (August 1872), 2. Mager, ‘Juvenile emigration’, 128. University of Liverpool Archives, D630 / 2 / 7, Maria Rye’s Emigration Home for Destitute Little Girls, S.N., Untitled poem (1872). Anon., ‘A voyage to New Zealand’, CT, 275 (1880), 158. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’ (1894), 8. C.L. Johnstone, The Young Emigrants: A Story for Boys (London: Thomas Nelson, 1898), p. 64. Frank Hills, ‘I was hungry, sir’, HH, XIV: 159 (1901), 66. ‘Emigration of children to South Africa’, CA, III: 34 (1882), 150–2; ‘Our Australasian deputation’, ND, XVI: 162 (1892), 45. T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘The children’s home: two pictures from one life’, OBG, II (1878), 20. Arthur E. Copping, ‘True stories from Canada – II. Passing it on’, ND, XXXVII: 268 (1914), 12; ‘Lord Lorne on juvenile emigration’, OWS, 1: 1 (1884), 6. Frank Hills, ‘Canada’, HH, XVI (1903), 143. A.E.G., ‘Thirty years after: an old boy’s story’, HH, XV (1902), 207. W.M., ‘A man from Australia’, OWS, XII: 303 (1910), 299–301. ‘Child immigration’; LAC, MG30 C97 Box 15, ‘Our work and its limitations’ (n.d.), 3–4; LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 18, ‘An interesting talk on the subject of child

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immigration’, Herald (17 March 1899); Maria Rye, ‘Emigration’, OWS, VII: 197 (1900), 362. Johnstone, The Young Emigrants, p. 53. Winston Churchill, ‘The friendless young’, ND, XXXI: 247 (1908), 68. ‘Going forth unto the springs’, OWS, VII: 185 (1899), 150–1. T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘Far, far, upon the sea’, CA, 31 (July 1874), 99. W.M.A., ‘Untitled’, ND, XVIII: 180 (1894), 53–4. Denis Crane, ‘In the path of the sun: Canadian homes for British boys’, HH, XXVI (1913), 156. A.B. Owen, ‘Training and environment’, Ups and Downs, IX: 4 (1903), 5; Rev. H.B. Hunt, ‘Off to ...’, BS, 150 (1905), 191. Lord Bishop of Knaresborough, ‘Why it appeals to us’, ND, XXXV: 263 (1912), 69–70. Crane, ‘In the path of the sun’ (1914), 26. Rev. W.M. Punshon, ‘The Rev. W. M. Punshon on “the children’s home”’, CA (August 1871), 1. LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Fifth report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, Ontario, for the year ending November 30, 1897’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1897), p. 12. ‘Notes’, CG, XXI: 6 (1907), 67. Sir George Reid, ‘The new Australasian hospital’, ND, XXXIII: 254 (1910), 53. ‘A children’s colony’, HH, VIII: 91 (1895), 127. Beatrix Wilkinson, ‘The President’s new year message’, BS, 226 (1912), 3; Isabel S. Robson, ‘Letter to young helpers’, Young People’s Union (in conjunction with the Homes for Little Boys) (October 1912), 1; Mary Collie-Holmes, Where the Heart Is: A History of Barnardo’s New Zealand 1866–1991 (Barnardo’s New Zealand, 1991), p. 12. Parr, Labouring Children, p. 143; Rev. F.B. Meyer, ‘The empire-builders’, ND, XXXV: 260 (1912), 18. Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), pp. 121, 35. Dean of Norwich, ‘True imperialism’, NWM, XXVII: 231 (1904), 106. Lord Brabazon, ‘State-directed emigration: its necessity’, ND, VIII: 92 (1884), 178–9. J.J.B., ‘By highway and byway. XVI – thinking imperially’, OWS, XIV: 343 (1914) 304–5. Crane, ‘In the path of the sun’, 133. Fitz-James Sawyer, ‘The British empire: how the British dependencies were acquired. V. The empire in the south’, BS, 168 (1907), 82. ‘Wanted, friends of sorrowing children’, CG, IV (1890), 118. Barnardo, ‘Personal notes’ (1890), 198. Anon., ‘Personal notes’, Ups and Downs, IV: 1 (1898), 3. Ibid., 4. T.J. Barnardo, ‘Tales of two young lives’, NWM, XXV: 215 (1902), 33–4. William T. James, ‘Barnardo boys’, Ups and Downs (1898), 1. ‘The northern C.U. conference at York’, BS, 158 (1906), 106. ‘Granary, heart, soul and rudder of the empire: some notes on emigration’, ND, XXXIII: 253 (1910), 32–3. A Scoutmaster, ‘The empire’, BS, 218 (1911), 180–1. Samuel Smith, ‘The industrial training of destitute children’, ND, IX: 93 & 94 (1885), 37; Mager, ‘Juvenile emigration’, 127; Sir John Gorst, ‘A review and an estimate’, ND, XXVIII: 236 (1906), 34. Sir A. Conan Doyle, ‘The seed and the tree’, ND, XXXI: 247 (1908), 78. ‘Emigration: industrial schools’, Australasian (April 1851), 391. Patricia Rooke and R.L. Schnell, Discarding the Asylum: From Child Rescue to the Welfare State in English-Canada (Lanham, NY and London: University Press of America, 1983), p. 186.

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child, nation, race and empire 121 Stephen Constantine, ‘Children as ancestors: child migrants and identity in Canada’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 16 (2003), 151. 122 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 18, ‘Children’s aid societies’ (11 June 1899). 123 Eekelaar, ‘“The chief glory”’, 491. 124 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, ‘Neglected children: methods of rescuing them from lives of infamy’, Ottawa Daily (29 September 1893). 125 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 27, ‘Second report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, 1893’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario,1895), p. 33. 126 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, ‘Toronto letter: a social problem – our neglected children’ (n.d.). 127 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: George Gallie & Son, 1897), pp. 48, 73. The programme was resumed in 1904, shortly after the death of Quarrier and his wife. 128 Wade, ‘Canada and the children’, 278–9. 129 Church of England Central Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays, Sixth Annual Report for the Year Ended March 31st, 1887 (London: Church of England, 1887), p. 207. 130 Stephenson, ‘Report of a visit to Canada’, 2. 131 LAC, A-2090, George Jackson to the Clerk to the Guardians (5 January 1905). 132 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, John Joseph Kelso, ‘Fifteenth report, neglected and dependent children of Ontario’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1908), p. 97. 133 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘First report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, 1893’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1894), p. 33. 134 ‘Fifth report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, Ontario’, p. 10. 135 ‘The child vagrant’, CA, II: 22 (1881), 159–60. 136 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, ‘Wayward children’, Toronto Globe (November 1892). 137 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, ‘For of such is the kingdom: the Society for Befriending Friendless Children’, Daily Examiner (3 November 1893). 138 ‘Ninth report of superintendent, neglected and dependent children of Ontario, 1901’, p. 16. 139 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Eleventh report of superintendent, neglected and dependent children of Ontario, for the year 1903’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1904), p. 7. 140 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Tenth report of superintendent, neglected and dependent children of Ontario, 1902’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1903), p. 9; LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Sixth report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, Ontario, 1898’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1899), p. 29. 141 Kelso, ‘Fifteenth report, neglected and dependent children of Ontario’, p. 10. 142 ‘Untitled’, Spectator (10 August 1888), 379. 143 ‘Livingstone Home: monthly letter’, Spectator (28 October 1892), 924; ‘Livingstone Home’, Spectator (23 December 1892), 1092. 144 ‘The children of the streets’, WC (23 May 1891), 4; ‘The children’s evening’, IOM, 2: 3 (1896), 3.

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Chapte r seve n

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So Jock and Jeanie had found a place in the Children’s Home and this last Christmas they had such a happy time as they never dreamed of in their miserable hovel.1

Where the rescue narrative was constructed as melodrama, the model for the story of the children’s afterlives was a fairy tale in which the darkness of the past was erased by a rosy future. Transplantation returned the child to the garden of innocence. Yet underneath such idealised imagery lay a harsher reality, a regime of training designed to produce a subservient workforce, tolerating strict discipline which had the potential to veer into abuse. Such abuse was not an aberration but intrinsic to a system which had conceptualised children as threats as well as victims. As Harry Ferguson has argued, because they were victims of cruelty or neglect children had to be subjected to harsh treatment if the threat they posed to the nation was to be defused.2 Johann Wichern’s Rauhe Haus, which served as a model to child savers across the western world, was founded not to redress social inequality but to persuade the poor to turn away from envy of their betters and instead be embraced by their love.3 While the rich had done much to provoke the civil disturbances that had begun in France and threatened to spread across Europe, it was proletarian vice and violence that had to be defused. The Rauhe Haus was the laboratory in which this change could be achieved.4 Rescued from ‘temporal and eternal ruin’, ‘the orphan, the homeless, [and] the outcast’ were taken to a place where ‘the past was forgiven and forgotten’.5 ‘Not massed in barracks but grouped in small houses’, where ‘their intercourse was made like that of a family’, they were ‘set to work’ surrounded by the ‘joyous and natural life of home and religion’.6 The institutional regimes established by child rescuers in Britain and her colonies owed much to the Wichern model. The ‘families’ and ‘homes’ they created were constructed as the antithesis of the [ 129 ]

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environments from which the children had been removed, with their success dependent on a complete erasure of the past, a breaking of any affective bonds that may have existed between the child and its family of origin. The children were taught ‘to forget their past histories’ including the mothers who, readers were assured, had been shown to be able to ‘forget’ them.7 ‘Got away from the surroundings of their unblessed lives, and transferred to a new set of conditions’ the children would be able to ‘lead orderly lives and be prepared for a useful future’.8 At a time when veneration of the Victorian home and family was at its height, the bonds existing within poor families were to be destroyed or denied, and the children confined in ‘isolating’ institutions in which their lives could be remade.9 In such controlled and controlling environments, the threat posed by the child at risk could be removed.10 Despite their common debt to Wichern, the nature of the substitute families constructed by child rescuers varied. All would have agreed with Stephenson’s claim that ‘God’s way is not to bring up children in flocks, but families’, but the concept of family proved highly flexible.11 Wichern favoured the village model, gathering no more than a hundred children in groups of twelve in sex-segregated cottages. Boys, cared for by male staff (often theological students), worked in the gardens or the workshops which rendered such communities largely self-supporting. The much smaller number of girls, cared for by female staff, did the domestic work and laundry.12 Stephenson claimed to have improved upon the Wichern model. The English home, he argued, was not simply a shelter or lodging, but a place of comfort in which a child was an individual not a number.13 Central to its power for good was the presence of women who, working under male supervision, acted ‘a true mother’s part’, taking primary responsibility for child care.14 For reasons of economy, he increased the size of the ‘family’ to twenty but limited the numbers on each site to three hundred, beyond which, he argued, ‘the Home would become an institution’.15 Despite such economies of scale, Stephenson believed that he was creating new Christian communities filled with ‘busy children, loving one another as brothers, cared for by fatherly and motherly love … helped to help themselves by helping one another and helping those who are over them in the Lord’.16 Each house was to function as a ‘family’ home ‘with a sister, or mother, or brother at its head’ and children ranging in age from ‘mere infants to … fourteen or fifteen’. Older children, ‘the boys … initiated into the workshops as carpenters, engineers, shoemakers, printers and painters’ and the girls attending … to kitchen and domestic duties’, lived nearby.17 By this means, Stephenson argued, the children’s home was able ‘to give back family life to those who have lost it, and to give it for the first time to [ 130 ]

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those who have never known it … He who declared Himself the “God of the families of the whole earth,” surely smiles upon an attempt to rear the orphan or wastrel child amid influences such as would have surrounded him, if death had spared the parent, or if the parent had been all that a parent should be.’18 Having begun his work with a night shelter in central Glasgow, Quarrier too became an advocate of the family model, opening the first of the cottages in his children’s village at Bridge-on-Weir in 1872.19 He, however, favoured concentration, eventually combining all of his work on the site, which accommodated 1300 children by the time of his death. Alongside the family cottages, each headed by a ‘father’ charged with training the boys in his trade and a ‘mother’ to perform the domestic work, the site contained a training ship and a home for invalid children, as well as Scotland’s first specialist institutions for adult epileptics and consumptives.20 Barnardo, initially, was less committed to the family model. His first shelters were far more institutional, designed to ‘tame’ and train adolescent and pre-adolescent boys who were quickly returned to the workforce. However, when he set up his first institution for girls, he soon discovered that ‘in what we thought was our happy little Christian Home … hidden forces of evil [were] at work’.21 The solution, he claimed, came to him in a dream: ‘The family is God’s way: that and no other for such young girls as these’.22 ‘The large institution’, he now realised, was ‘fatal’. It was only in ‘houses grouped together so as to form little VILLAGES’ that the necessary ‘family life and family love might be reproduced’.23 Barnardo’s dream produced a system remarkably similar to Stephenson’s adaptation of the Wichern model. Groups of cottages for younger children, presided over by ‘refined’ Christian women, were augmented later by specialist homes for children with special needs, and training schools that prepared adolescents to enter the workforce.24 From 1886 he also developed boarding-out schemes, freeing more beds for children accepted through his ‘ever-open door’, although it was 1902 before this aspect of his work was disclosed to supporters.25 Rudolf drew freely on both Stephenson’s and Barnardo’s experience. Affirming at the outset that ‘family life would be preferable to the institutional life’, he set out to establish small receiving homes in each diocese, from which children could be boarded out in village homes.26 Although he rejected the voting system through which children gained admission to the existing church orphanages, supporters who wanted to have a child accepted into his homes were encouraged to collect pledges towards the cost of ongoing care.27 Through boarding-out, he argued, a child could become ‘one of the family’ and childless women [ 131 ]

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could attain the status of mother.28 Such individual placements, Rudolf believed, avoided the ‘evils’ of the ‘collective system’ and provided for each child ‘early associations of brightness and tenderness to form the background of its memory in after years’. Boarded-out children would later be brought back to join the ‘rough and neglected’ children, unsuitable for family placement, in one of the society’s homes where they could be trained to take their place in the workforce.29 In their search for support, each of the founders romanticised the notion of out-of-home care. At pageants, open days and anniversaries large numbers of children were assembled to ‘perform’ aspects of their lives in the homes, singing happily of their new families and acting out the various tasks they undertook in what was presented as a typical day.30 Described as ‘havens of the Church which God allows kind people to build for the fatherless and orphan’, the cottage homes were seen as offering an environment of hope.31 In the ‘factory’ of ‘Homelife’, declared one of the NCH sisters, ‘Industry, and Religion are the great wheels which move the machinery, and the motive power of the whole is Love’.32 ‘Every child … is like … [a] rough key-board, and it is linked to the very bells of heaven, and every touch of service, of love, of prayer, is like a touch of the great keyboard. It rings to heaven, and makes the music sweeter there.’33 The little ones, refreshed and fed, Winning such loving care; Their childish footsteps God has led To this dear Home. Who would not share The happiness of making glad Such orphan’d lives – so wrecked and sad!34

In Mary Lester’s story ‘David and Jonathan’, Peter is dismayed when an orphaned friend is taken to one of the Waifs and Strays Society homes. However, when he hears a description of the home he changes his mind. ‘I whisht I was an orphan’, he said, ‘if mother could come wi’ me.’ Within a short time Peter’s parents die and he is able to join his friend at the home, declaring: ‘I’m an orphant now as good as you … how nice it is … to be an orphant boy’.35 Such descriptions were designed to calm any doubts amongst both child and adult readers about the child removal project. ‘We do just the same in my home as we did in my father’s house’, Stephenson’s daughter reassured a reporter visiting the cottage in which she was now a sister.36 Despite the numerical evidence to the contrary, the cottages were persistently described as ‘small’ and ‘homelike’.37 ‘With God’s air and sunlight around them’ children experienced ‘a freedom and happiness they have never known’ in an environment in which [ 132 ]

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‘their characters and dispositions are gradually transformed’.38 A little street singer was persuaded to surrender her independence when ‘told about a village … Where nearly six hundred children / Were happy as birds in May’.39 The ‘snow-white cots so clean and bright’ in the ‘neat and clean’ cottages of the ‘picturesque’ rural villages stood in stark contrast to the depictions of the environments from which the children had been removed.40 ‘The green fields and hedges and sweetsmelling damp earth of the country were very different from the sights and scents … in some dirty slum.’41 The uncertainties and risks of the old life, readers were assured, were erased in an environment in which children ‘are always sure of food when they are hungry, and … need never wonder where their next meal is to come from’.42 A vision rose before me Of daisied meadows fair, Down in the pleasant country, And children playing there. … Within, each house was cheery – Two rooms for work and play, Adjoining ‘mother’s’ parlour, And kitchens neat had they.43

The substitute families were depicted as being suffused with a love capable of transforming the ‘forlorn little one … into something human and childlike’.44 In the ‘sacred circle of Home life’ the ‘wild’ child could be ‘tamed’.45 ‘Petted and caressed’ in ‘love’s sweet bower’, children thrived in their cottage mother’s care.46 Gathered with her sisters around ‘a cosy fire’ burning ‘cheerily and warm’, the baby of a reconstructed family lisped: ‘I love ’oo, muvver; does ’oo love me too?’47 Boarding-out, advocates argued, held even greater transformative power. ‘Placed in an ordinary village home amidst the duties and responsibilities of family life … the child by degrees lost consciousness of the fact that he was a pauper, his origin was soon forgotten, he became indistinguishable from other members of the general population.’48 Poems in the voice of the children provided a further endorsement of their new environments. Barnardo’s Stepney shelter was depicted as a welcoming sanctuary, but for which ‘in the streets they might ha’ died’.49 Asked what he would do for children like himself a ‘street arab’ replied: ‘I’d build a great house for them all, / I’d feed them, I’d clothe them – and then? / Why, I’d make them all work for their bread, / And teach them to be honest men.’50 Worthy parents, too, were shown as welcoming the ‘opportunities’ which placement offered to their children. ‘I know about God’, one widowed mother declares, ‘but I never heard of Church [ 133 ]

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caring about people or fatherless children.’51 Acknowledging the fatherhood of God, the founders positioned themselves as his representatives on earth, welcoming children into their ever-growing families, with all the privileges that such a relationship involved.52 Central to their charisma was an ability to personalise that relationship. In the early years they were a very visible presence in the homes, conveying to the children a personal interest in their progress. As the organisations grew this personal element was preserved through newsletters and gatherings at which former residents were able to bring their partners and children back to the ‘home’ in which they had been raised.53 However, even within the promotional magazines, there is evidence that this idyllic vision did not represent the reality of life in the homes. Issues of class were rigorously avoided, yet, despite their middleclass veneer, the main function of the cottages was to prepare the children for their future role as domestics and labourers.54 Indeed, where children of higher birth did find their ways into the homes, arrangements were immediately made to release them from such institutional regimes, with wealthy supporters enlisted to provide for them in boarding schools.55 Not for them the ‘training’ which the homes were designed to provide for children of the working class. The utility of such training in relation to the future labour needs of the nation was repeatedly emphasised. ‘Wanted – a good plain cook is the agonising demand of the British matron’, declared Dr Barnardo. ‘We will show you how we try to meet it.’56 Indeed, the frequent descriptions of the tasks the children performed in the homes were used to encourage supporters to consider offering them employment. ‘We should like to remind mothers of families how handy it is sometimes and what a rest it would be to them sometimes to have a little maiden to take care of the baby’, an article in Ups and Downs commented. ‘We think many a little girl of twelve or thirteen ... ought to be quite a help in this way.’57 The training was seen as providing for the children a work ethic which their failed parents had lacked. Drawing on residual fears about the dangers of the ‘idle poor’, child rescue publications assured their readers that the children were kept busy. ‘A sustained and interesting employment occupies the mind. When evil is expelled, or in the process of expulsion there must be a good tenant ready to occupy the mind and guide its activities, lest the old enemy return to find it “empty, swept and garnished”.’58 Training was designed to ‘fit’ the children ‘far better to do the work and withstand the temptations of their future life’.59 ‘Oh, happy are the children / Who there for Christ are trained, / For service in His kingdom, / From want and misery gained.’60 The goal of such training was to instil in children ‘habit[s] of steady, useful industry, the ability [ 134 ]

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to turn their hands readily to any useful calling, and the power to fit themselves for a decent life’.61 Not for these children the broad, basic education provided in board schools. ‘They are taught from the commencement’, wrote Stephenson, ‘that their success in life must depend upon their own hands and heads, and all of them are trained to practical usefulness by the performance of daily tasks.’62 ‘Knowledge … without handicraft’, Rudolf argued, would not equip children to earn ‘an honest livelihood for themselves’.63 The training also had a strong moral component designed to lead children to an acceptance of ‘the light and power of the Gospel of Christ’.64 Attendants in the homes were enjoined to ‘Show them what God meant they should be; clear a pathway for their feet. / Make them feel that work is noble; teach them what their lives may be.’65 Although the situation was more fluid where children joined emigration parties, the supposed openness of the colonies allowing a social mobility apparently unimaginable in the mother country, their training in the homes prior to departure was seen as laying the basis for their future success.66 Training was strictly gendered. The ‘little maids’ in Barnardo’s Girls’ Village at Ilford were preparing to be domestics in their adult life. In these ‘family’ homes, ‘the mother, of course, does no menial work’ but rather instructs her many ‘willing hands’ in the skills they would need to become ‘housemaids, maids-of-all-work, and plain cooks’.67 ‘Comfortable dinners’ were prepared ‘with economy … soup should … be good, dishes savoury, and pastry light’. ‘Girls whose habits were once thriftless and dirty’ were ‘now clever, careful and scrupulously clean’ having learnt ‘that by serving their masters and mistresses well, they are also serving the Lord’.68 Within the ‘family’ the sick were ‘nursed’ and younger children cared for.69 Outside the cottage, older girls were drafted into the laundry, the sewing room or the communal kitchen, or assigned to perform domestic duties in the offices and homes of the senior officials (see Figure 12).70 For boys, a wider range of training was available. Where, in the early years, the focus was on organising boys involved in the existing street trades, controlling their earnings and providing them with food and shelter at nights, each of the organisations quickly developed a range of workshops which came close to rendering the homes self-supporting while providing the boys with skills they could supposedly take into their adult lives.71 Stephenson’s Bonner Road complex boasted a carpentry and shoemaker’s shop, preparing and repairing materials for all of the homes, as well as the printing office which produced the magazines and other fund-raising materials.72 Visitors to Barnardo’s ‘brushmakers’ room’ were reportedly delighted to see ‘some forty boys … so interested in their trade, scarcely looking up, unless when spoken to, but [ 135 ]

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Figure 12  Mending day at Barnardo’s Girls’ Village

quietly proceeding with their work … determined to discharge their responsibilities’.73 At Stephenson’s Edgworth training farm, the first boys were employed in quarrying the stone from which the cottages were to be built.74 Others were trained to farm the rather unpromising land, producing food which could be transported to NCH branches across the country. The farm also provided accommodation and training for a smaller number of older girls, who worked as dairy maids and gardeners as well as undertaking all the domestic work around the property. There were also knitting machines on which girls produced socks and stockings for the other children, and [ 136 ]

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the ‘most dainty little garments … [which] earn quite a nice large sum’.75 The Waifs and Strays Society trained ‘girls who are lame or crippled’ to do this work, because ‘they will never be fit for servants’.76 The movement which traced its origins to the great parliamentary campaigns against child labour was, from its beginnings, dependent on the labour of children for its financial survival. By ‘making themselves useful’ children kept wages and provisioning costs low and produced materials which were sold to benefit the homes.77 Even the disabled, Stephenson argued, had to be trained for work if the homes were to survive.78 Some children were clearly able to use this training to build future careers. Stephenson reported several who had become sisters, workshop foremen or clerical assistants or had accepted more menial positions within the homes, and a smaller number who had found skilled employment in the outside workforce. However, he admitted that most followed ‘the ordinary courses of life’.79 The training regimen responded primarily to the demands of the homes rather than the changing late-Victorian and Edwardian industrial economy.80 Very few children were offered an education beyond the basic standard, and at fourteen each was drafted into full-time training in the ‘trade … for which not only his peculiar bent, but his physique and aptitude especially fit him’.81 The children were depicted as willing labourers, able to work ‘day and night, and enjoy it’ ‘if need arises’, but the skills with which they were equipped were often in decline.82 In retrospect the confident assurance that ‘there are often good openings to be found for girls who are clever and industrious with their needles’, because ‘dressmakers will always be wanted as long as the world lasts’, seems sadly misplaced.83 The successful graduates were those who worked ‘diligently and punctually for others’ in preparation for their future as working-class breadwinners or mothers rather than entrepreneurial or independent tradesmen.84 The appeal of child rescue to many of its supporters was its promise that such training could diminish working-class militancy. The very conditions which rendered children pitiable also positioned them as a risk to social stability.85 ‘The child, whose heart not unreasonably rankles with a sense of injustice develops into a man whose aim is to subvert all existing institutions, no matter at what cost’, but ‘Christian charity properly administered’ could eliminate the threat.86 Rescued children, having been removed from neighbourhoods ‘steeped in the disaffection, vice and lawlessness … Nihilists, Socialists, Communists or Anarchists … have had a good, healthy, sensible, English training … [and] have been taught to have the fear of God before their eyes, and to do their duty in that state of life to which it shall please God [ 137 ]

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87

to call them’. The children’s home, declared the Rev. W.J. Dawson, was an ‘antidote to anarchy threatening London’.88 This message was echoed in Australia, where supporters were warned that the abused child would ‘rebel against pain it does not deserve; the agony of terror into which it is thrown by the approach of the torturer frightens its senses out of their use; and the poor little creature is punished again and again each time more severely for the apparent obstinacy born of fear and consciousness of helplessness’.89 Left unattended they would grow to become ‘reckless voters for reckless legislators, and all the evils, and probably more than all the evils, of the most debased democracy and plutocracy, mob government and purse government will be rife among us’.90 The homes, Barnardo argued, were ‘NURSERIES FOR HEAVEN’ where children could be transformed into ‘useful citizens while on earth, and, some day, as heavenly citizens in God’s eternal kingdom’.91 Central to such usefulness was subservience: ‘St. Paul used to say to people who were in the most embarrassing situations – slaves and women married to heathen husbands – stay where you are, but have God abiding with you … There is no legitimate trade or calling in which a man or woman may not find that which will nourish their conscience, their reason, their faith in God, their general spiritual forces.’92 ‘Train us, try us; days slide onward’, the children were imagined to be calling: ‘They can ne’er be ours again, / Save us! save from our undoing, / Save from ignorance and ruin. / Help us to be worthy men!’ 93 Poems and songs urged the young workers to see God in their menial labour and work to earn his approval. Stories celebrated the virtues of domestic service, even while admitting that the work was monotonous and the wages were low.94 Servants were enjoined to be ‘honest’, ‘steady’, ‘upright’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘good-tempered’, ‘neat’, ‘clean’ and ‘civil’, ‘never pert or mean’ and to work with no expectation of praise.95 Barnardo’s ‘little maids’ were taught that their ‘hands’ were their ‘fortune’ and that they should cheerfully set them to ‘washing and knitting’.96 Boys were reminded that an employer would expect them ‘to work, and work hard … to learn his business and earn his living by his patient, steady industry’.97 The value of such compliant workers to supporters was openly acknowledged. ‘In these days of the servantdearth’, one of Mary Lester’s characters declared, ‘I should always take little maidens from bad parents in the slums, and have them trained for the domestic army if possible.’98 The girl so trained would be an ideal employee because she had ‘not been pampered and surrounded by unsuitable luxuries’ and had learnt ‘to perform all the little commonplace duties which are likely to fall to her lot in service’.99 The need to produce compliance led to a tolerance of punishments [ 138 ]

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well beyond what regulations allowed. Although Barnardo was officially reprimanded for the use of solitary confinement and corporal punishment, both practices continued to be used.100 Stephenson’s publications sanctioned physical punishment while simultaneously denouncing it. Bessie, readers were told, was ‘saved’ by ‘Mother’s slipper’, even though such treatment was against regulations. ‘She became a true Christian and a clever worker in the Folding Room … [and] was indeed a new creature.’101 In this way a movement that drew much of its early strength from its claim to protect children from parental abuse became complicit in similar behaviour at an institutional level. To the outside world, however, the child rescuers projected an image of a superior system which was setting new standards in child care. Their implicit point of comparison was the workhouse, in particular the barrack schools introduced in 1853 to separate children from the ‘pauperising’ influence of adult inmates.102 The barrack schools had failed, child rescuers argued, because they had rejected the family model, gathering children in large institutions, under male management, where their lives had no chance of being remade.103 ‘Workhouse orphans’ were described as ‘England’s curse– / Bound by the law of sloth to awful fate / To deep contamination – tenfold worse’.104 ‘If the Christianity of England is a real thing’, OWS readers were told: it will discountenance and gradually bring to an end the system of collecting together large masses of children in schools where they can enjoy no breath of home atmosphere, no taste of family life, no individual love or care, and little to break the monotony of their joyless lives except the visits of fresh comers, who too often import a terrible knowledge of evil, and are the greatest hindrance to the efforts of the teachers to keep up a good moral tone.105

As they moved into boarding-out, child rescuers berated poor law officials for not following a similar plan, citing Scotland and the Australian colonies as evidence that such schemes offered a cheaper and healthier solution to the problem of destitute children.106 Taking advantage of 1862 legislation allowing boards of guardians to place their children in voluntary institutions, both Rudolf and Stephenson developed fund-raising campaigns designed to ‘rescue’ their denominations’ children from the ‘horrors’ of the workhouse.107 Readers, ‘touched by the dispirited, unchildlike faces, yearning for a love that may still be theirs in paradise, but is theirs no longer on earth; broken-hearted little mourners yearning for their mother’s loving arms, for the dear home that will never be theirs again’, were assured that their donations would enable the homes to ‘find room for those unoffending and helpless little things’.108 Through such [ 139 ]

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campaigns child rescue organisations were able to construct additional buildings to accommodate children for whom a line of support was guaranteed.109 However, poor law officials were also experimenting with alternative models of care. Although they changed too slowly for many of their critics, individual unions did move into boarding-out on a wider and more systematic scale than the child rescue organisations, which needed to maintain the visible institutions on which they depended for public support.110 Others experimented with the village or scattered cottages model.111 An inquiry in 1894 recommended that these experiments become mandatory, making ‘boarding-out the primary system, supplemented by small training homes, technical schools and a central hospital’.112 Although poor law reformers did acknowledge a debt to the child rescue movement, over time the scope of their operation allowed for the development of professional standards in relation to child care that the voluntary organisations, dependent on the charisma of the founders, often lacked.113 By the early years of the twentieth century local authorities were setting standards in child care which voluntary societies struggled to meet.114 The positive legacy of the child rescue movement is more apparent in the late nineteenth-century legislation that articulated a status for children separate from their parents, establishing the conditions in which a child’s rights to care and protection overrode parental rights over the child as property. Industrial School Acts, first passed in 1857, had authorised the removal of children whose parents were teaching them to be ‘depraved and disorderly’.115 ‘If the child suffered nearly to the point of death, the Guardians – but not the police nor the public – were empowered to interfere. But’, child rescue advocates argued, ‘the Guardians did not take it to be their business.’116 It was this reluctance that Stephenson, Barnardo and Rudolf set out to address, acting without legal sanction, but using their activities to draw attention to the need for legal reform. However, it was the NSPCC which made legislative change its particular mission, arguing that philanthropy alone could not guarantee the rights of the child.117 It lobbied parliament to give children the same protection as the law extended to animals, allow wives to give evidence against ‘cruel’ husbands and ‘limit the hours during which children – veritable slaves – are allowed to sell in the streets’.118 Such legislation, it argued, would complete the revolution begun with the child labour reforms half a century before, extending its application to ‘the school, the theatre, the street, the home’.119 The ‘street holocaust to this pre-eminent Moloch of “parental right”’, argued Waugh, ‘has been offered all too long already’.120 ‘We must reverse the antiquated and unjust practice of regarding the little [ 140 ]

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vagrant as the law-breaker. The charge must, in future, be against the parent.’121 The NSPCC had its first success in 1889 with the passage of the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, popularly called the Children’s Charter. For the first time this act made explicit the limits of parental power over their children, limits which the society’s inspectors were empowered to enforce.122 The NSPCC thus became the policing wing of the child rescue movement, investigating reports of abuse, working with parents to reform, but removing children where necessary, maintaining temporary shelters but relying on the other societies for longer-term placements.123 However, this legislation did not protect child rescuers should parents dispute the removal of their children. Barnardo confessed to frequently finding himself in this situation, ‘abducting’, ‘buying’ and ‘smuggling’ children away ‘in the face of angry opposition’, and called for parents to be ‘deprived forthwith … of their hitherto unalienable right to their children, body and soul’.124 He argued for legislation to protect the children he had removed from parents who had ‘declined to concern themselves with their education’ but now had ‘the power to step in, take them away, and undo all the good that has been done’.125 This problem was solved with the passage of the Custody of Children Act in 1891, which strengthened the child rescuers’ position, making it the responsibility of the parent to prove their fitness to resume custody of children that had been removed.126 Child rescue publications repeatedly celebrated such legislative success. The Children’s and Young Persons Act, passed in 1908, which amended the original Industrial Schools Act to oblige rather than allow local authorities to intervene in cases of child neglect and abuse, was claimed by the Salvation Army as its personal triumph.127 ‘The magnitude of the blot, the blackness of the stain’ had been removed, reported OWS: ‘the nation’s conscience is happier and its children are at last on the way to come into and hold, their own’.128 In Canada and Australia, child rescue advocates were quick to follow the English lead. Existing legislation allowed for the establishment of industrial reformatory schools, with responsibility vested in voluntary organisations in the Canadian colonies but in state children’s departments in Australia. Child rescuers argued that these organisations were reactive rather than pro-active, accommodating the children that were presented to them but not engaging in active rescue.129 Drawing on NSPCC propaganda, they lobbied local parliaments for legislative change. Beginning with South Australia in 1886, Australian parliaments passed variously named legislation that incorporated the major elements of the Children’s Charter, although only in Victoria was the power of removal vested in voluntary child rescuers who were to be [ 141 ]

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licensed under the act.130 While NSW’s George Ardill celebrated the passage of legislation which brought his state ‘into harmony with legislation in England and America’, making ‘it possible to intervene on behalf of the child before his morals have been effectually corrupted’, he was never able to persuade the government that the cause would be better served ‘by men and women engaged in the work from Christian and philanthropic motives’.131 Ontario’s first response to Kelso’s agitation was the 1888 Children’s Protection Act, which required local authorities to assume maintenance costs of wards and facilitated the use of foster care. This was followed five years later by an Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to and Better Protection of Children which vested responsibility for active intervention and placement in local Children’s Aid Societies, supervised by an Office for Neglected and Dependent Children, of which Kelso was the superintendent.132 This act set the pattern for child welfare services across the nation.133 The English child rescue movement was less influential in relation to the design of services, with most colonies, at least initially, opting for boarding-out rather than the cottage home as the best alternative family care. Australian child rescuers positioned themselves as improving upon state boarding-out schemes which had been operating since the 1870s. Although they cited Wichern, Stephenson and Barnardo as mentors, most established only one small receiving home. ‘Our plan’, wrote the Wesleyans, ‘is not to build a barracks; this system is doomed in so far as this country is concerned. We receive the children into the Home, and care for them for a few months, when they are transferred into homes in the country.’134 Removed completely from their district of origin, the children were placed with families who, the child rescuers argued, were motivated by love rather than money. The ‘respectable and well-disposed’, readers were assured ‘come and ask if we have any children to be adopted, and then, of course, they are let to choose one of our family’.135 However, despite their best attempts to persuade childless couples of the ‘sunshine and gladness’ which a child could bring to their home, the supply of adoptive homes never met the demand.136 Although, increasingly, they presided over growing institutions, child rescuers continued to argue for the superiority of their system over both state boarding-out schemes and the older denominational orphanages. State children, they argued, ‘have often been rather exploited than cared for’; ‘when Bumble is in charge the children are to be pitied’.137 ‘Successful child rescue requires that spirit of Christian love which a State department cannot be sure of commanding.’138 In Sydney, George Ardill boasted that his one remaining institution offered ‘family life’ and ‘Christian training’ which the state department could not guarantee.139 [ 142 ]

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‘This place is not an institution, said the Wesleyan Rev. E. S. Bickford when opening a new building in Melbourne. ‘It is a Home … with a father and a mother at the head of it, the children in it are brothers and sisters, and Christ is over them all.’140 The concentration of children in the receiving homes allowed for the introduction of displays in which children as young as three won ‘all hearts by their pretty behaviour’.141 A visitor to the Wesleyan Home ‘stooped to fondle two tiny tots who wanted her shiny bangle. “You can see these children are in the right setting,” she added; “they are perfectly free and happy; no institution brand upon them.”’142 However, these institutions soon replicated the harsher aspects of their English models. Once again education took second place to training. ‘The good nuns’ at the Catholic St Joseph’s Home, readers were told, tried to increase the pleasure of their charges by joining ‘with the little ones in their games’. Nonetheless, they also made sure that the older children were ‘taught domestic economy. They scrub out their rooms, make the beds, and help their foster mothers in every way. The boys do gardening outside school hours, whilst the girls are taught all the branches of housekeeping, including laundry work.’143 The Salvation Army emphasised that, in its homes, training was uppermost, with boys ‘being instructed in the art of cultivation, which required skill, knowledge and experience’ and ‘girls … taught … how to make home happier’.144 To see the girls at their work, making all kinds of fancy and useful articles; to hear the humming of machines manufacturing guernseys, stockings and such like; to look at the poultry yards and farming, and to watch the girls at their play and drills, is indeed a treat. While the discipline is strict, at the same time no one visiting the home would come to any other conclusion but that the inmates are thoroughly happy and cared for in every sense of the word.145

Training, readers were assured, kept the sins of ‘idleness and laziness’ at bay, and gave the children the ‘start’ they needed to assume their set place in the future nation.146 As with the English institutions, the work performed by the children under the guise of training also reduced the wages bill, the Anglican Sister Esther boasting that her home was ‘kept in exquisite order … without hired help, except an occasional washerwoman’.147 ‘Who does the work of the house? ... Why! the children … We are not bringing them up to be young ladies … but useful little domestic servants and wives. They are competent little housewives by the time they leave here.’148 The servants produced by such training were depicted as being compliant as well as competent. ‘Unhappy and discontented’ in the Christian home in which she had been placed, a [ 143 ]

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young servant ‘picked up a little book … and read: “If you are unhappy or in any trouble, tell Jesus”’. Following this instruction, supporters were told, ‘she read on a little more, and found out the great secret of true happiness’.149 Secure in a position within government Kelso constructed his network of boarding-out homes in opposition to existing denominational and community orphanages. ‘No child should be kept permanently in an institution, however good’, he argued.150 ‘The consensus of opinion amongst those who are devoting attention to the neglected and dependent child problem the world over … is that foster homes should be provided for these State children rather than institutions … the … best place for the child is in a Christian family, where a kind, motherly heart will accord them the care and protection which their homeless condition calls for.’151 The best homes were those where children were ‘received and cared for from motives of love and compassion’ and ‘treated as equals, dining at the family table, attending day and Sabbath school, and afforded opportunities of enjoyment and recreation in common with other children’.152 Only in such conditions would the child be trained to take advantage of what the ‘young country’ had to offer, taking part in the ‘daily strife’ and facing ‘the problem of true living’ so that they would be ‘sterling, self-reliant men and women’ when they entered the workforce at twelve or fourteen.153 Neither the foster parents nor the children should expect to be paid for their services. Guaranteed undisturbed custody of the child, the foster parents would derive their reward from both its affection and the labour it contributed to the farm.154 The children were to be ­satisfied that ‘the teaching of industrious habits’ was ‘worth more than money’.155 Had they spent two or three years in an institution they would doubtless have had a better education, but I doubt if they would have had as good a practical preparation for the duties and work of life. A fine education has the unfortunate tendency to create a dislike to country life, and in a Province that is so essentially agricultural it seems to me wise public policy that we should at least endeavour to interest our dependent children in agricultural pursuits.156

‘The great majority of the children’, Kelso believed, ‘cannot … be expected to rise far above their lowly origin. And yet as laborers and servants they may be just as useful in the community as the more ambitious and talented few.’157 Kelso shared with his fellow child rescuers the belief that all contact between the child and its parents should be brought to an end.158 However, increasingly, this orthodoxy came to be challenged both from poor law officials and the institutions, which had always created [ 144 ]

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a greater space for parents to continue to take some responsibility for their children. Initially this approach was largely punitive, based on the assumption that compelling parents to contribute towards the cost of their children’s care acted as a deterrent to pauperism.159 Relieving a mother of her child, it was argued, took away the one motive she had for striving for good, freeing her ‘to spend all the money she earned on her own evil habits’.160 The NSPCC consistently argued for the need to ‘reform rather than relieve parents’.161 Waugh believed that the existence of such a society deterred parents from neglecting their responsibilities, but, where deterrence failed, laws should be enacted to compel them to provide for their children.162 In working with single mothers, Barnardo adopted a similar approach, arguing that to accept a child without cost to the mother ‘would often be simply to remove the rightful responsibilities of maternity, and perhaps to put a premium upon a reckless and even vicious career’.163 However, over time, the officers charged with administering such punitive policies came to recognise that some mothers had the potential to offer their children more than any substitute care giver. When the Melbourne orphanage decided to introduce boarding-out in 1879, members of the ladies’ committee asked whether mothers could be paid to care for their own children. Despite suggestions that such a practice could lead to abuse, the committee introduced the payments under strict conditions and on a limited scale.164 By the early years of the twentieth century, state children’s departments had followed suit, with most wards now supported in their family homes.165 Selina Sutherland argued that even this practice did not go far enough, the continuing supervision stigmatising the ‘poor woman, bereft of husband’ who had always been a good mother to her child.166 Wherever SPCCs were established they removed only a small proportion of the children called to their attention, preferring to co-ordinate a range of services to ensure that a mother had the assistance she needed to support her family.167 Kelso insisted that his Children’s Aid Societies followed a similar practice, aiming to preserve the home wherever possible.168 ‘The aim is not to steal children from their parents … but by every available means to make the home and family relationship all that it ought to be.’169 By the end of the nineteenth century, the English child rescue publications were beginning to reflect similar beliefs. In 1891 Our Waifs and Strays reprinted an American article which warned that removing children from their parents could cause ‘almost irreparable injury by attempting to sever what should be the most holy and sacred relation in human life’.170 In response to publicity about a widow’s baby that had died of starvation, Barnardo introduced a new service to assist [ 145 ]

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women with food for their children, unless their poverty was drinkrelated.171 Mary Lester reflected this new sensibility when she had one of her characters declare that ‘Waiferstray’ homes were run by ‘ladies … as ’as feeling hearts and don’t learn [the children to] … forget their mammies’.172 In Melbourne, the Wesleyans argued that their goal was to help the widow ‘left with young children … Her love for the children is such that she cannot give them up. We take the children into the Homes on the understanding that she gets them back when she can provide for them.’173 However, the deep suspicion of parents remained, and the official publications of the child rescue movement continued to position separation as critical, criticising plans for structural changes to relieve the poor parent’s lot. Most parents, the NSPCC argued, would have to be compelled to change their behaviour if their children were to be relieved.174 Poor law officials were able to take a far more sympathetic approach to widows with young children. Echoing the sentiments endorsed at the White House Conference on Dependent Children in the United States, the authors of the 1909 Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission recommended ‘adequate home aliment’ for respectable ‘widows or other mothers in distress, having the care of young children’.175 Four years later Eleanor Rathbone’s report on the conditions faced by such women argued that rather than being stigmatised for losing their husbands they should be rewarded for their mothering. ‘The widow who is doing her duty by her young children, tending them, washing, sewing and cooking for them, is not a pensioner upon the bounty of the state, but is earning the money she draws from it by services just as valuable to the community as those of a dock-labourer, a plumber, or a soldier.’176 The mother, who, in child rescue discourse, had been positioned as the enemy of her child, was now reimagined as the state’s greatest ally in ensuring the safety of its future citizens. Located within the bureaucracy, Kelso was able to negotiate this discursive shift, looking forward to a time ‘when public aid should be given to widows with young children so that they may remain at home as the natural guardians and protectors of these future potential citizens’.177 While child rescuers in the voluntary sector also changed their patterns of operation, abandoning active rescue in favour of accepting children who came with parental consent, this shift was rarely acknowledged. Publicity material continued to depict the children in the homes as having been rescued from evil parents, an image that was far more conducive to maintaining public support. In the former colonies there was another arena in which the older child rescue ideas continued to thrive. As the tide turned against the [ 146 ]

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removal of children in the settler population, Indigenous child removal schemes began to expand (see Figure 13). For George Ardill, the transition was personal. Having been shut out by the state children’s department, he turned his attention to the Aborigines Protection Board where his expertise in child welfare received the recognition he believed it deserved. By the time he was forced off the board in February 1916, a child removal policy embodying the key features of child rescue philosophy was firmly in place.178 The moral disapproval previously attached to all poor working-class families was now focused on Aborigines.179 Ardill’s initial engagement with Indigenous issues came through his membership of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Association. Appointed as secretary in 1886 he injected new energy into the association’s campaigns. The Aborigines Protection Board, established in 1883, had no legislative power to remove children, but intervened nevertheless, suggesting an experiment with boarding-out.180 The Pro­­tection Association was far more assertive, arguing that ‘half-caste mothers’ would ‘willingly part’ with their ‘quadroon’ children ‘if assured that it would be for their benefit’.181 Boarding-out, not only of mixed descent children but ‘those also of full aboriginal blood, when

Figure 13  Australian Indigenous children at the Koonibba mission station

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practicable’, would enable them to be ‘trained as to fit them to take their places as domestic servants, or amongst the industrial classes’.182 The association opened its first training home in 1889, initially on a mission station but with plans to relocate closer to the city, where ‘half-caste girls between the ages of ten and fourteen years from the several stations and camp life’ could be trained for domestic service.183 Although these plans came to naught, Ardill used his position to call for the board to be given the power to immediately remove ‘all orphans and neglected children who are now attached to the camps’, and to urge supporters to donate towards the establishment of training homes in which both boys and girls could be rendered ‘useful’.184 Although the board was not authorised to remove children until 1910, it was transferring ‘orphans’ to the State Children’s Relief Department before that date, using the success of the children’s training to argue for an extension of its powers.185 Once its new powers were secured the board moved quickly, dismissing the opposition of the parents by arguing that removal and training constituted the children’s ‘only chance’, and expressing an intention of ‘bringing all orphan and neglected children’ into ‘homes’.186 Ardill volunteered the services of a range of institutions associated with his Rescue Work Society, as ideally suited to ‘improve’ the children’s ‘moral welfare’ and help them ‘merge’ into the white population.187 In Victoria, the dying race discourse had always co-existed with a call to rescue, particularly for children of mixed descent. Education slipped into training as missionaries, and later board officials, sought to render the survivors ‘useful’ to the settler population.188 When Aboriginal parents proved ‘reluctant to give up their children … jealous of any interference with them by the whites’, missionaries called on Parliament to give the Aboriginal Protection Board the power of removal.189 Armed with this power from the early 1870s, the board was initially content to leave children on the reserves, although often confined in dormitories apart from their families.190 Witnesses before the 1877–8 Royal Commission on Aborigines tended to support this approach. Some recognised that the kinship structure in Aboriginal societies left no child an orphan, but used concerns about the negative impact of the elders to justify their belief that separation, within the station, was the best solution.191 Boarding-out was rejected, except for ‘quadroons’ whose racial origins were visible only to ‘experts’.192 The commission’s final report accepted such views but recommended that ‘both male and female half-castes and quadroons over thirteen years of age should be encouraged to hire themselves out, under proper ­supervision’.193 Enthusiasm for removal and training grew as appreciation of Aboriginal familial ties declined. Rather than hiring children [ 148 ]

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out at thirteen, board officials began to canvass the possibility of transferring them at a younger age to the ‘Orphanage or Industrial Schools … [which] have already proper machinery to look after the children when they are boarded-out’, accustoming them ‘to regard themselves as members of the community at large’ and breaking their attachment to the ‘indolent habits and manners of their original black friends’.194 By 1900 the Aborigines Act had been amended to allow such transfers to take place, but few Aboriginal wards were included in the boardingout scheme. Most were sent immediately to Salvation Army training homes, the harshest of the facilities the Neglected Children’s Department had available.195 The naturalisation of child removal in children’s literature helped dull any awareness of such inequities amongst the settler population. The Little Black Princess by Mrs Aeneas (Jeannie) Gunn, which was published in 1905, sold 125,000 copies by 1948 (see Figure 14). It told the story of Bett-Bett, who was found, apparently alone, in the bush and taken back to the homestead. Gunn treats the Aborigines on her station with a kind of patronising amusement, making it easy to justify keeping Bett-Bett for her ‘own good’. Depicted as being grateful for what she is offered, Bett-Bett makes no claim for equality. Removed

Figure 14  Bett-Bett and Sue – ‘Me plenty savey Engliss, Missus’

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from a state of nature and superficially ‘civilised’, she remains ‘other’ to the white household.196 Residential schools were central to the ‘civilising’ project in Canada from 1860, when responsibility for Indian affairs was transferred to the self-governing colonies.197 Combining ‘the ordinary branches of education’ with training, their goal was to enable the children ‘to procure their own subsistence upon leaving the establishment’, a coded reference to the supposed indolence of the families from which they had been separated.198 ‘Industrial pursuits’, it was argued, were ‘the foundation of civilisation in every Christian and progressive community’. Hence the future development of Indigenous children demanded that they be taken away from ‘the irregular habits and nomadic pursuits incident to wild life in the canoe and wigwam’.199 Authorised by government but managed by religious organisations, the residential schools were dedicated to the disruption of Aboriginal parenting in the interests of the promotion of assimilation.200 Although the promoters of residential schools repeatedly engaged with the language of rescue, they were immune to the discursive shift which saw settler children boarded out and, eventually, assisted to remain within their families. Residential schools remained isolated and under-resourced, providing their pupils with an education which fitted them only for the very lowest rungs of the Canadian economy. Yet their supporters consistently argued that the schools placed students under ‘the most favorable influences’, and lobbied for legislative changes that would compel more parents to part with their children.201 ‘If the Provinces of Canada find it advisable and expedient, as a matter of self-interest, to provide for the compulsory elementary education of all the children who are to become their future citizens’, asked the Toronto Baptists, ‘ought not the Dominion … do no less for the children of the Indians who are her wards?’202 Unlike Aboriginal Australians, Indigenous Canadians had avenues through which they could question the treatment to which their children were being subjected. Parents of the pupils were quick to protest, refusing to allow them to return to the schools while the conditions of which they disapproved remained unchanged.203 Agents on the west coast queried the need for children to be removed and trained for service in settler households when by attending day schools on the reserve they could receive an education and be prepared by their parents to earn their living in the ‘native industries’ of sealing and fishing. This way they would avoid developing ‘the feeling of dependence and unreliance that life in a boarding school engenders’.204 In the schools, another agent argued, the children are ‘taught to work [and] made to work’ but never understand ‘the dignity of labour’.205 The [ 150 ]

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health of the students was poor, and most, on leaving, showed little inclination to work once the compulsion was removed.206 The space for such arguments diminished as the internal economy on Indian reserves declined. The assumed inevitability of full citizenship created a demand that Indians be ‘prepared’ for their future role.207 ‘The rising generation’ had to be brought under ‘civilising influences’ in order to avoid the ‘dependency’ of their parents.208 The schools were not an obligation which Canada owed to the people whom it had dispossessed but a means of preventing the perpetuation on reserves of ‘an uneducated and barbarous class’.209 Parents who resisted were threatened with removal of rations.210 Suggestions that ‘half-breeds’ should be integrated into mainstream schooling were dismissed with arguments that their home environments threatened their ‘mental and moral development’.211 ‘Indian children’ had to be ‘caught young’ if they were to be ‘saved’. The founders of the child rescue movement successfully used the notion of childhood lost to argue that it was in the best interests of the child to be removed from parents or guardians found wanting, but the solution they offered left children disempowered. Cut off from their families and communities and trained for a life of servitude, their childhoods were shaped primarily by labour, with love dependent on chance or good fortune. This was even more the fate for the Indigenous children of both Canada and Australia, for whom child rescue ideology remained influential long after its power began to ebb amongst mainstream child welfare workers. Nationwide state-sponsored child removal programmes impacted on a far greater proportion of the Indigenous population, tearing families apart and disrupting parenting skills across succeeding generations. 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 is still having a negative impact in Indigenous communities.

Notes   1 ‘From Bonnie Scotland’, CH, 122 (1899), 4.   2 Harry Ferguson, ‘Abused and looked after children as “moral dirt”: child abuse and institutional care in historical perspective,’ Journal of Social Policy, 36: 1 (2007), 129–30.   3 Philip Schaff, Germany; Its Universities, Theology and Religion (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1857), p. 410.   4 Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Pietism and nationalism: the relationship between Protestant revivalism and national renewal in nineteenth-century Germany’, Church History 51: 1 (1982), 49; C.R. Henderson, ‘The German inner mission. II. The experimental stage’, American Journal of Sociology, 1: 6 (1896), 681.

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child, nation, race and empire   5 Schaff, Germany, pp. 407–8.   6 Henderson, ‘The German inner mission’, 678.   7 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Preventive homes’, ND, I: 1 (1877), 4; J. Pendlebury, ‘Stories of our work: Lotty’, CA, 5: 44 (1875), 86–7.   8 ‘A children’s colony’, HH, VIII: 91 (1895), 124.   9 Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 65. Timothy Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 55–6. 10 Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, pp. 45–6. 11 ‘Dr. Bowman Stephenson and the children’s home’, Spectator (20 October 1882), 294. 12 ‘Germany: the juvenile reformatory institution at the Rough House, Horn, near Hamburgh [sic]’, Evangelical Christendom: Its State and Prospects, VI (1852), 175–6; Charles Loring Brace, Home Life in Germany (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853), pp. 93–5. 13 ‘A home once more’, HH, IX: 98 (1896), 25. Arthur E. Gregory, ‘Aims and methods in child saving and child training’, HH, XXIV (1911), 108. 14 ‘Dr Stephenson’s children’s homes’, London Quarterly Review, 70 (1888), 142. 15 H. K., ‘The children’s home: the story of the home II’, Spectator (24 July 1891), 705. T. Bowman Stephenson, ‘The family system’, CA (May 1871), 2. 16 ‘History of the children’s home Ch.III’, HH, I: 3 (1888), 45. Stephenson, ‘The family system’, 1–2. 17 ‘The children’s home, London’, Spectator (23 June 1882), 92. 18 ‘A home once more’, 26. 19 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: George Gallie & Son, 1892), p. 30 20 William Quarrier, Narrative of Facts (Glasgow: George Gallie & Son, 1872–1903), passim. 21 T.J. Barnardo, ‘How I retrieved a blunder: thirty years ago – and today!’, NWM, XXVI: 225 (1903), 57–8. 22 Gillian Wagner, Barnardo (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979), pp. 79–82; Barnardo, ‘How I retrieved a blunder’, 56. 23 Barnardo, ‘Preventive homes’, 4; Barnardo, ‘How I retrieved a blunder’, 58. 24 Sir John Gorst, ‘A review and an estimate’, ND, XXVIII: 236 (1906), 31–3. 25 Wagner, Barnardo, pp. 191–2. 26 Edward de M. Rudolf, The First Forty Years: A Chronicle of the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society 1881–1920 (London: Church of England Waifs & Strays Society, Kennington), p. 4. 27 The Church of England Central Home for Waifs and Strays, First Annual Report (London: Church of England Central Home for Waifs and Strays, 1882), p. 8. 28 ‘Editor’s notes’, OWS, 2 (1883), 2. 29 ‘Church of England Central Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays’, OWS, 7 (1884), 2; Report of the Executive Committee of the Church of England Central Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays (1885), pp. 8–9. 30 ‘Dr. Barnardo’s homes: twenty-seventh anniversary’, Spectator (20 July 1893), 552; ‘Dr. Stephenson’s festival’, Spectator (26 March 1897), 265. 31 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 16. – heads, hands, and hearts’, OWS, VII: 198 (1900), 376. 32 Sister Grace, ‘Waste or worth?’, HH, VII: 78 (1894), 109. 33 Rev. D. Fitchett, ‘Children’s home conference meeting’, HH, XII: 141 (1899), 207. 34 Mrs Robinson King, ‘Just yesterday!’, OWS, I: 100 (1892), 2. 35 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 44. David and Jonathan’, OWS, XII: 293 (1909), 58. 36 H.K., ‘The children’s home: the story of the home, IX’, Spectator (9 October 1891), 969. 37 J.R.I., ‘A plea for small church homes’, OWS, new series: ­­­­75 (1890), 6. 38 R., ‘Environment’, OWS, VIII: 202 (1901), 17–18.

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a new orthodoxy in child protection 39 Millie Sanderson, ‘The little street singer: a Bible reader’s story’, ND, IX: 104–6 (1885), 172. 40 ‘Instructions and advices to the officers’, CA, 5 (1871), 4; ‘Annual public meeting’, OWS, 4 (1883), 7. 41 C.E.V., ‘S. Nicholas Home, Byfleet’, BS, 126 (1903), 145. 42 ‘A peep at a boys’ dining table’, CH, 56 (1893), 4. 43 J.T. Torr, ‘A contrast’, ND, I: 9 (1877), 108. 44 An independent witness, ‘A “village home”’, ND, I: 7 & 8 (1877), 101. 45 Rev. Theodore Johnson, ‘God’s sparrows’, OWS, I: 94 (1892), 6. 46 Millie Sanderson, ‘Our fire baby’, ND, VIII: 81–6 (1884), 33. 47 Millie Sanderson, ‘A peep in a cottage: a story of our village home’, ND, VII: 79 & 80 (1883), 148. 48 Charles Jones, ‘The boarding-out system’, OWS, V: 138 (1895), 163. 49 Charles W. Barker, ‘Told in Canada’, ND, XI: 120 (1887), 75. 50 ‘A street-arab’s reverie’, CA, 6: 8 (1876), 63. 51 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 18 – a larger heart, the kindlier hand’, OWS, VIII: 204 (1901), 66. 52 Arthur E. Gregory, ‘Our Canadian work: children sent to us by poor law guardians’, HH (1906), 114. 53 H.K., ‘The children’s home: IX’, Spectator and Methodist Chronicle (9 October 1891), 969. Gordon E. Barritt, Thomas Bowman Stephenson (Peterborough: Found­ ery Press, 1996), p. 19. 54 Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, p. 61. 55 T.J. Barnardo, ‘A thrilling tale’, Spectator (15 January 1892), 57; T.J. Barnardo, ‘A romance of the slums’, ND, XXII: 206 (1898), 166–7. 56 ‘Dr. Barnardo’s homes: twenty-seventh anniversary’, 552. 57 Anon., ‘Our picture gallery’, Ups and Downs, III: 1 (1897), 40–1. 58 ‘Our eighth anniversary’, OWS, 59 (1889), 13. 59 Mary E. Mayo, ‘A suggestion with regard to the training of pauper children’, OWS, 5 (1883), 2. 60 Torr, ‘A contrast’, 108. 61 Samuel Smith, ‘The industrial training of destitute children’, ND, IX: 93 & 94 (1885), 37. 62 ‘Dr Stephenson’s children’s homes’, 144. 63 Church of England Central Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays, p. 2. 64 Earl Cairns, ‘Earl Cairns at Bournemouth’, ND, VII: 70–2 (1883), 31. 65 Millie Sanderson, ‘Canada’s plea for the “waifs and strays”’, ND, VIII: 81–6 (1884), 24. 66 ‘Dr Stephenson’s children’s homes’, 145–6. 67 One of the crowd, ‘Transplanted’, ND, VI: 58 & 59 (1882), 18. 68 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Young cooks’, CT, 267 (1880), 62. 69 Anon., ‘The kind nurse’, CT, 276 (1880), 177. 70 ‘Dr. Bowman Stephenson and the children’s home’, 294. 71 ‘Our crossing sweepers’, 60–2. 72 ‘Dr. Bowman Stephenson and the children’s home’, 294. 73 T.J. Barnardo, ‘A busy hive’, OD, 104 (1883), 418. 74 H.K., ‘The children’s home, XI: Edgworth’, Spectator (23 October 1891), 1017. 75 Aunt Nancie, ‘Aunt Nancie’s letter to her nephews and nieces’, CH (1889), 2. 76 M.E.J., ‘S. Chad’s Home, Far Headingley, Leeds’, BS, 57 (1897), 155. 77 ‘Some inmates of the children’s home’, CH, 57 (1893), 1. 78 Arthur E. Gregory, ‘A message to all who love the children’, HH, XXIII (1910), 172–3. 79 H. K., ‘The children’s home: the story of the home, VII’, Spectator (11 September 1891), 873; H.K., ‘The children’s home: the story of the home, VIII’, Spectator (2 October 1891), 945. 80 Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, p. 121. 81 Anon., ‘No blind alley for Farningham and Swanley Boys’, Our Little Lads, 64 (1911), 6–9.

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child, nation, race and empire 82 H. K., ‘The children’s home: the story of the home’, Spectator (17 July 1891), 681. 83 ‘S. Chad’s Home, Far Headingley, Leeds’, BS, 111 (1902), 92. 84 Ferguson, ‘Abused and looked after children’, 135. 85 Ibid., 132. 86 ‘Cheshire and North Wales branches: annual meeting’, OWS, V: 131 (1895), 46–7. 87 Anon., ‘Personal notes’, Ups amd Downs, IV: 1 (1893), 4. 88 Rev. W.J. Dawson, ‘The desolations of childhood’, CA, VIII: 86 (1887), 46–7. 89 ‘Protection of children’, Advocate (13 June 1903), 20. 90 ‘How to promote the daily reading of God’s word among children’, Church of England Messenger (11 November 1886), 4. 91 T.J. Barnardo, ‘The drunkard’s child’, ND, I: 12 (1877), 162. ‘The Bishop of Bath and Wells on the Society’, OWS, V: 129 (1875), 6. 92 Rev. R. Bevan Shepherd, ‘Some essentials to our work’, HH, XV (1902), 168. 93 Mary Howitt, ‘The prayer of the children’, HH, VI: 69 (1893), 172. 94 Edith Surtees Raine, ‘Grannie’s waif’, OWS, IV: 123 (1894), 302; S. Owen, ‘Domestic versus factory life’, Ups and Downs, VI: 2 (1901), 60. 95 ‘Song for our little servants’, ND (June 1878), unpaginated. 96 E.J.M. Miles, ‘Where are you going?’, ND, X: 115 & 116 (1886), 227. 97 Anon., ‘Roll of honour’, Ups and Downs, III: 4 (1897), 190–1. 98 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 14. Quartettes’, OWS, VII: 195 (1900), 326. 99 Barnardo, ‘Preventive homes’, 4. 100 Wagner, Barnardo, p. 139. 101 ‘The children’s home, XII’, Spectator (30 October 1891), 1041. 102 Henrietta Barnett, ‘The home or the barrack for the children of the state’, CR, 66 (1894), 244. 103 Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, p. 57. 104 Frank Leyton, ‘The children of the state’, OWS, IV: 108 (1893), 58. 105 Mayo, ‘A suggestion with regard to the training of pauper children’, 3. 106 ‘Our pauper children’, OWS, I: 6 (1884), 4; J.W. Horsley, ‘Advance Australia! wake up England!’, OWS, I: 23 (1886): 6; J.W. Horsley, ‘The mightiness of mites’, OWS, I: 45 (1888), 5. 107 Rudolf, The First Forty Years, p. 20. 108 M.S., ‘A workhouse orphan’, OWS, I: 11 (1885), 4; Jas. O. Bevan, ‘The lost and the found’, OWS, I: 18 (1885), 2. 109 Gregory, ‘A message to all who love the children’, 171. 110 Francis Peek, ‘The boarding-out of pauper children’, Examiner (16 March 1872), 283. 111 Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, p. 43; Barnett, ‘Home or the barrack’, 257; ‘How to deal with pauper children: an object lesson from Sheffield’, RR, 13 (1896), 328. 112 Elizabeth Lidgett, ‘Poor law children and the Departmental Committee’, CR, 71 (1897), 217. 113 Barnett, ‘Home or the barrack’, 255. 114 Arthur E. Gregory, ‘The Children’s Act’, HH, XXII (1909), 71. 115 George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 11. 116 ‘The angel of the little ones, or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’, RR, 4 (1891), 527. 117 Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform, p. 78. 118 Cardinal Henry Edward Manning and Benjamin Waugh, ‘The child of the English savage’, CR (January–June 1886), 698–9. 119 Benjamin Waugh, ‘Street children’, CR, 53 (1888), 826. 120 Ibid., 827. 121 Ibid., 831. 122 Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform, p. 109. ‘The State in loco parentis’, London Quarterly Review, 75 (1890–1), 257. 123 ‘The police and ill-used children: a new departure for London’, CG, III: 28 (1889), 53–4.

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a new orthodoxy in child protection 124 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Is philanthropic abduction ever justifiable?’, ND, IX: 98–103 (1885), 149–51. 125 ‘Notes by the way: Dr. Barnardo’s appeal’, Spectator (9 September 1892), 797. 126 Wagner, Barnardo, p. 234. 127 ‘“The abandoned child:” government accepts the principles of the Army’s Bill’, War Cry (25 July 1908), 6. 128 ‘For the children’s sake’, OWS, XII: 294 (1909), 77. 129 ‘Protection for the children’, Spectator (21 November 1884), 343. 130 Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain, Confronting Cruelty: Historical Perspectives on Child Abuse (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002), pp. 6, 25. 131 ‘The Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders’ Act’, Rescue, XI: 2 (1905): 3; ‘The Infant Protection Bill’, Rescue, IX: 2 (1903), 1. 132 Cassandra Brade, ‘Have we really come that far? Child welfare legislation in Ontario’, OACAS Journal, 51: 4 (2007), 8. 133 Ewan Macintyre, ‘The historical context of child welfare in Canada’, in Brian Wharf (ed.), Rethinking Child Welfare in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1993), p. 28. 134 ‘The Rescued Children’s Home: an historical outline’, in Home Missions: Sixteenth Report of the Wesleyan Home Missions of Victoria (Melbourne: Wesleyan Home Missions, 1890), p. 35. 135 ‘Goodbye to Jessie at the children’s home’, IOM, 6: 3 (1900): 7. 136 Mary A. Tuckfield, ‘Methodist homes for children’, Spectator (25 April 1913), 679; ‘At the children’s home’, IOM (1914), 4–5. 137 ‘Boys of the state’, Spectator (10 February 1905), 209; ‘Save the boys’, Spectator (27 October 1905), 1745. 138 ‘Neglected children’, Spectator (29 November 1907), 1959. 139 ‘Special mission to waifs and strays’, Rescue (1896), 14. 140 ‘Child rescue work’, Spectator (15 January 1892), 61. 141 ‘Notes of the month’, IOM, 3: 4 (1897), 2. 142 A Bystander, ‘Visit to Livingstone Home’, Spectator (30 October 1914), 1700. 143 ‘St. Joseph’s Home for Destitute Children, Surrey Hills’, Advocate (14 September 1901), 10. 144 ‘Bayswater the beautiful: a vice-regal visit of inspection’, WC (1 July 1899), 6. 145 ‘Our girls and boys: four hundred and ninety-five under the Army’s wing: the most hopeful work of all’, WC (31 May 1902), 16. 146 Brigadier Kyle, ‘Our boys: the true inwardness of the Army’s preventative work’, WC (17 June 1899), 4; Fannie E. Webb, ‘Livingstone Home letter’, Spectator (22 October 1903), 1612. 147 John D. Robertson, ‘Church of England Home for Neglected Children’, CEM (4 September 1908), 276. 148 One Who Saw, ‘The subjugation of Selina’, IOM (1911), 2. 140 Mary A. Tuckfield, ‘Methodist homes for children’, Spectator (27 March 1914), 518. 150 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, John Joseph Kelso, ‘Cradled in crime: a plea for neglected children of the people’, Brantford Expositor (16 January 1894). 151 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, ‘Dependent children’ (July 1893). 152 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 4, J.J. Kelso, ‘To the members of children’s visiting committees’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children, 1893), 3; LAC, MG30 C97 Box 18, ‘For of such is the kingdom’, Daily Examiner (3 November 1893). 153 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 4, Ontario – Child Saving Work Conference, 1894 Folder John Joseph Kelso, ‘Child-saving, some impressions of the National Conference of Charities and Correction’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children, 1894), pp. 7–8; LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘First report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, 1893’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children, 1894), pp. 20, 27; LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 36 Folder 268, Hon. J. M. Gibson, ‘The Children’s Act’ (1894), p. 7. 154 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 11, A.B.C., ‘Bird’s eye views’, Truth (10 November 1900).

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child, nation, race and empire 155 LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 27, ‘Second report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, 1893’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children, 1895), p. 19; Gibson, ‘The Children’s Act’, p. 6; LAC, MG30 C97 Volume 36 Folder 252, ‘Placing out children’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children, 1894), pp. 1–2. 156 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, John Joseph Kelso, ‘Fifteenth report, neglected and dependent children of Ontario’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children, 1908), pp. 14–15. 157 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, J.J. Kelso, ‘Sixteenth report, neglected and dependent children of Ontario’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1909), p. 14. 158 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 17, ‘Returning children to parents’ (n.d.). 159 Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, ch. 4. 160 ‘Reformatory and industrial schools’, OWS, I: 6 (1884), 2. 161 ‘Christmas’, CG, IV (1890), 141. 162 Waugh, ‘Street children’, 832; ‘Cruelty can be put down’, CG, III: 26 (1889), 17–18. 163 T.J. Barnardo, ‘A problem solved’, ND, XV: 158 (1891), 159. 164 ‘Untitled’, Argus (6 November 1876). 165 ‘Child rescue and legal control’, Australian Weekly (7 December 1894), 118; ‘State children’, SCMH, IV: 2 (1900), 12. 166 ‘Pulpit and platform (by one who was there)’, Spectator (9 August 1895), 541. 167 J.W. Horsley, ‘Co-operative charity’, OWS, I: 23 (1886), 1–2. 168 Kelso, ‘Child-saving, some impressions of the National Conference of Charities and Correction’, p. 12. 169 ‘Second report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, 1893’, p. 18. 170 Anna T. Wilson, ‘The care of mother and child’, OWS, I: 91 (1891), 12. 171 T.J. Barnardo, ‘First aid to starving infants’, ND, XVI: 169 (1892), 117. 172 Mary E. Lester, ‘Cameos from life. No. 30 – the tram-guard’s box; or, told in a tram’, OWS, IX: 245 (1904), 363. 173 Elza M. Presley, ‘Methodist homes for children’, Spectator (26 January 1906), 145. 174 ‘Underfed children’, CG, XVIII: 10 (1904), 114; ‘No place like home’, CG, XVIII: 12 (1904), 133. 175 Cited in T. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 425; S.P. Breckinridge, ‘Neglected widowhood in the juvenile court’, American Journal of Sociology, 16: 1 (1910), 55. 176 Quoted in S. Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.  141–2. 177 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Twenty-first report of Superintendent, Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children, 1914), p. 132. 178 Naomi Parry, ‘“Such a longing”: black and white children in welfare in New South Wales and Tasmania, 1880–1940’ (PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 2007), pp. 297–8. 179 Robert van Krieken, Children and the State: Social Control and the Formation of Australian Child Welfare (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), p. 97. 180 ‘Report of the Board for Protection of the Aborigines’, Votes and Proceedings of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (NSWPP) 1883–4, vol. 2 (Sydney: New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 1884), p. 4. 181 New South Wales Aborigines Protection Association, New South Wales Aborigines Protection Association Report (Sydney: 1883), p. 3. 182 Ibid., p. 4. 183 ‘Report of the Board for Protection of Aborigines for 1889’, NSWPP 1890, vol. 7 (Sydney: New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 1890), p. 10. 184 Aborigines Protection Association, The Rightful Owners. Our Duty to Them. Being the Annual Report of the Aborigines Protection Association for 1890 (Sydney:

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William Brooks, 1891), pp. 1–2, 5; Aborigines Protection Association, The Heathen at Our Doors. Being the Annual Report of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Association for 1893 (Sydney: F.S. Dyer & Co., 1894), pp. 11–12. ‘Aborigines Protection Board, report of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines for the year 1905’, NSWPP 1907, vol. 2 (Sydney: New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 1907), p. 5; ‘Report of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines for the year 1906’, NSWPP 1907, vol. 2 (Sydney: New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 1907), p. 5; ‘Report of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines for the year 1907, NSWPP 1908, vol. 2 (Sydney: New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 1908), p. 4. ‘Report of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines for the year 1910’, NSWPP 1911–12, vol. 2 (Sydney: New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 1912), p. 4. ‘Report of Board for the Protection of Aborigines for the year 1914’, NSWPP 1915–16, vol. 1 (Sydney: New South Wales Legislative Assembly, 1915), p. 6. ‘First report of the Central Board appointed to watch over the interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’, VPP 1861–2, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1861–2), pp. 10–11; PROV, VPRS 1694, P0000, Unit 15, ‘Further facts relating to Moravian missions in Australia, paper no. 6’ (Melbourne: Victorian Association in Aid of Moravian Missions to the Aborigines of Australia, 1867), p. 15. ‘Fourth report of the Central Board appointed to watch over the interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’, VPP 1864–5, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1865), p. 10; ‘First report of the Central Board appointed to watch over the interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’, p. 11; ‘Sixth report of the Central Board appointed to watch over the interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’, VPP 1869, vol. IV (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1869), p. 8. ‘Ninth report of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’, VPP 1873, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1873), p. 4; ‘Eleventh Report of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines’, VPP 1875–6, vol. II (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1876), p. 5. ‘Royal Commission on the Aborigines: report of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the present condition of the Aborigines of this Colony, and to advise as to the best means of caring for, and dealing with them, in the future; together with the minutes of evidence and appendices’, VPP 1877–8, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1877–8), pp. 3, 49. Ibid., p. 82. ‘Coranderrk Aboriginal Station: report of the board appointed to enquire into, and report upon, the present condition and management of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, together with minutes of evidence’, VPP 1882–3, vol. II (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1883), p. iii. ‘Twentieth report of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’ VPP 1884, vol. IV (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1884), p. 5. ‘Thirty-sixth report of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines’, VPP 1900, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1900), p. 4; ‘Thirty-seventh report of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines’,VPP 1901, vol. III (Melbourne: Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1901), p. 5. Mrs Aeneas Gunn, The Little Black Princess (Sydney: Robertson and Mullens, 1948), p. 198. John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian government and the Residential Schools System, 1879–1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999), p. 20. Department of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Department of the Interior for the Year Ended 30th June, 1874 (Ottawa, 1875), pt 2, 4. Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 31st December, 1880 (Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1880), p. 12. Department of Indian Affairs, Report of the Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs (Ottawa, 1877), p. 49.

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child, nation, race and empire 200 Milloy, A National Crime, p. 23. 201 Department of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 31st December 1881 (Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1881), p. 87; LAC, RG10 Volume 3676 File 11422–5, F. Clarke to Indian Commissioner (15 May 1885). 202 LAC, RG10 Volume 6039 File 160–1, Members of the Baptist Ministerial Association of the City of Toronto, ‘Memorial’ (1892). 203 LAC, RG10 Volume 3931 File 117377–1C, J. Prince to Indian Commissioner (18 December 1902). 204 LAC, RG10, Volume 6430 File 876–1, Martin Benson to Secretary of the Indian Department (29 November 1901). 205 LAC, RG10 Volume 6040 File 160–3A, Martin Brown to Secretary General of Indian Affairs (23 December 1901). 206 LAC, RG10 Volume 6267 File 580–1, Martin Benson to Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs (17 October 1907). 207 LAC, RG10 Volume 6001 File 1-1-1, Part 1, Reel C-8134, Katherine Hughes, ‘The Association for Befriending Indian School Graduates’ (1901), p. 4. 208 LAC, RG10 Volume 6267 File 580–1, Indians of the Pas Band to Superintendent General of Indian Affairs (18 August 1903). 209 Memorandum to the Deputy Superintendent General (1906), NAC, RG10 Volume 6320 File 658–1, Part 1, Reel C-9802, Onion Lake Agency, Onion Lake Church of England Residential School, General Administration, 1893–9, 1906–36. 210 LAC, RG10 Volume 6320 File 658–1, D. Laird to W. Sibbald (24 February 1906). 211 LAC, RG10 Volume 6039 File 160–1, Faithful servants at Saskatchewan, ‘Memorandum for Robert Rogers’ (24 November 1911).

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Chapte r EIGH T

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Lost, stolen or forgotten: the legacy of the survivors

B.O.B.S, Bobs! And what does it mean? It means that in union is strength, and communion whene’er we shall convene. And thus we own the brand the foe employs: So up with the Bobs, and down with the snobs, and hurrah for Barnardo boys!1

The final verse of this poem, written for members of the Barnardo Old Boys’ Society, provides a rare insight into the ambivalence common amongst care leavers, capturing both a pride in their achievements and a resentment of the stigma which often accompanied an institutional childhood. The celebratory child rescue literature provided little space for doubts as to the value and impact of the work, yet the outcome of rescue was more complex than the vignettes and poems would have readers believe. Survivor narratives, in family histories, published autobiographies and autobiographical novels, and evidence before government enquiries, all testify to the vulnerability of the ‘rescued’ child and the prevalence of physical and sexual abuse in the cottage, foster or adoptive homes in which they were placed. The struggle to reconcile the narratives of darkness and light that surround child rescue has bedevilled many of the recent enquiries into the legacy of out-of-home care. Despite what child rescuers may have believed, children did not ask to be rescued. The decision to sever the parent–child bond was made by others claiming to be acting in their interests, and yet, while the substitute homes in which they were placed may have been able to provide them with significant life skills, all too often they proved unable to protect them from further harm.2 Attempts to isolate the abuse to a small number of poorly managed institutions or deviant individuals fail when the prevalence of the phenomenon becomes apparent. As former residential school supervisor, Bishop David Ashdown, now believes: ‘Twenty years ago, [ 159 ]

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I would have said it was a good system with some bad people. Now I realize it was a bad system with a lot of good people in it.’3 Although there is no evidence to suggest that all children were subjected to abuse, abuse in its various manifestations was, and is, endemic in all forms of out-of-home care.4 Advocates of child removal, Australian survivor Joanna Penglase has argued, proved unable to put themselves ‘in the shoes of these children and ask, “What would it be like to be treated as if I were not a human being with the same feelings as other human beings?”’5 By the end of the nineteenth century, the editor of Brothers and Sisters was becoming aware that child rescue propaganda failed this test. Her solution was to ask supporters ‘to be careful never to mention’ the magazine’s ‘sad stories’ when they visited the homes.6 Overall, however, the message was determinedly optimistic with stories of graduates of the homes happily settled in professions or on farms, establishing families of their own, in relation to whom child rescuers claimed the status of grandparents.7 At his wedding, a former resident of the Victorian Wesleyan Homes embraced the former matron and declared: ‘This is the only mother I ever knew, and I am what I am through her training’.8 This sense of gratitude was widely shared. Queensland parliamentarian James Page credited Barnardo with saving him from becoming a criminal. ‘I feel sure had he not got hold of me at the time he did I should have certainly developed into a thief. On looking back in after years I could see nothing else for it.’9 Reporting a meeting with a boy ‘inclined to nurse a grievance’, Kelso was pleased to observe that ‘after a talk he saw the matter in an entirely different light and agreed that after all the work on the farm had probably saved him from greater evil’.10 The belief that the homes offered a superior standard of care gave former residents a sense of pride. ‘There is no taint of the workhouse attached to a Barnardo Boy’, declared Owen. ‘He feels, when he has learnt the trade he chooses, that he can face the world.’11 That sense of pride reached its peak during World War I, when old boys wrote, reporting on the achievements of others they had met and expressing their gratitude that through the magazine they could keep in touch with the homes and each other ‘even in the thick of battle’.12 Writing from the Dardenelles an Australian soldier assured his rescuer: ‘there is not a happier boy in the camp than I, and … if the worst should come, you will have the pleasure of knowing that one of your boys was following the path that he had been taught to follow in his younger days while at the Home’.13 The letter home had a long tradition in child rescue literature. From the early ragged school days, letters were published celebrating the opportunities awaiting the ready worker in the colonies. Written [ 160 ]

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in perfect English, they mimicked the conventional emigrant letter, beginning with an account of the voyage before going on to describe wages and living conditions in the receiving country. ‘Things are very cheap here’, a letter from Australia commented. ‘You can buy meat, and the best of it, at the best butchers’ shops … I am very comfortable. I am getting twelve shillings a week, board and lodging, and that is called very bad.’14 Child rescue magazines used such emigrant letters, suitably edited, as testimonials to the importance of their work. From Australia came a letter written by a young man who had not been considered a success in the homes. Converted by a travelling evangelist he was anxious to tell Barnardo of his transformation. ‘I was the prodigal and Jesus received me back … I have been often wanting to write, but could not. I know you prayed for me, and now I can pray too for you and for the boys.’15 But success did not always require transplantation. Having recently left one of the WSS cripples’ homes, Louie wrote to report: ‘I have had some sewing to do … for which I made 1s., and if only a very small beginning, it may lead to better … I feel very glad I was taught while with you how to mend well. I have some large nightgowns and white work to do now.’16 Letters published by Australian societies emphasised the rural skills the children had acquired and the money they were making through their labour.17 In a combination of pride and gratitude, Jack wrote sending money to cover his former foster mother’s debts: ‘I wish I could do more for dear mother, but I hope to do so some day.’18 Reading across the grain, however, there are hints, even in these sanitised letters, that all was not well. ‘Many newcomers go cranky’, a ragged school boy wrote from Australia.19 A letter from another gave more concrete details, although the blame for failure was placed on the emigrants. ‘Daniel C … would get on better than he does if it were not for being often ill’, he wrote. ‘John B … drinks, and so loses his money as fast as he gets it.’20 A later correspondent detailed his trials in South Australia. His first employer would not pay his wages, and his second ‘was never satisfied’ despite the fact that he worked from ‘three hours before sunrise to sunset’. Although expressing himself satisfied in his current situation the final plea ‘to write as soon as possible’ suggests that he was lonely.21 A letter from a former state ward, published in the Melbourne press in 1878, gives a rare insight into one woman’s experiences of rescue. It offered no criticism of the initial removal. Taken ‘half-starved, covered with filth and dirt, from such a wretched, dreadful home, when eight years old’, the author nostalgically recalled ‘the sweet, nice feeling that came over me when they did put clean clothes on me, and when I could eat in peace, and did not always feel hungry’.22 However, she was critical of the failure [ 161 ]

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to adequately provide for girls sent to service, left unprotected and ill-prepared to deal with the challenges they faced.23 ‘Of about fifteen who were hired out at about the same time as me, I have seen ten walking Bourke-street at night … I cannot blame them for when they fell they were mere children … with no home, no protection … Why has God been so good to me and left others wretched?’24 The sense of abandonment echoes through many of the surviving letters from children at service. ‘I have all the work to do and no one to help me’, a South Australian ward wrote in 1901. ‘You can think how miserable it must be to have no one to speak to only the daughter and mistress growling at me all the time.’25 Life in service was lonely for children who had lived in congregate care. ‘I like the country very much’, wrote a Victorian girl. ‘I would not like to go back to Melbourne again, though it is very hard to be away from my brothers and sisters … Please write and tell me how the children in the Home are getting on.’26 Throughout such letters there is a yearning for family. ‘Does father ever ask about me, and do you hear about my little brothers?’ wrote an Australian child.27 Hearing that his former foster mother was about to travel to England, John made a request suggesting that migration to Canada had not broken all of his family ties. ‘If you should happen to run across a little town called Huddersfield on your way to York just run in and say “Good-morning” to my sister … She might seem different from what you would expect, but she has had no College behind her, and I make no apology for her; she needs none, for she is a hard-working, upright-hearted girl.’28 The magazines published by child rescue organisations rarely mentioned instances of failure or abuse, but traces have survived in newspaper articles and official reports. A generally complimentary article describing conditions at Victoria’s St Joseph’s Home noted that the nuns conducted the institution as a faith mission, ‘begging’ for contributions from door to door. The consequences for the children were harsh. With ‘bread and tea … the usual fare’, the ‘youngsters troop in to their tea ... and when they had finished the regulation two slices searched the bricked floor for any stray crumb’.29 A series of articles published in a Melbourne newspaper in 1905 revealed cases of ‘cruelty and overwork’ amongst boarded-out children, who all too often were being treated as ‘cheap little drudges’.30 Similar accusations in relation to child emigrants in Canada forced Barnardo to respond. The problem, he argued, lay with ‘the failure on the part of many Canadian mistresses to recognise the obligations under which they lie’ towards the children in their care, citing instances in which girls left ‘unprotected’ had been seduced by ‘some hired boy or man or some male relative’.31 Kelso agreed, observing that some children were [ 162 ]

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‘driven to desperation by constant ill-treatment’ and ‘the wholesome abuse and misrepresentation to which they are subject’.32 The knowledge of such widespread ill-treatment even permeated the generally celebratory children’s literature, with Hal, the Barnardo emigrant at the centre of Hal Hungerford, being regularly and often quite savagely beaten by his employer.33 Kelso would later admit that the problems were not confined to emigrant children. His observation that ‘young men who have been helped by the Children’s Aid Society do not marry early in life’ indicates that they too felt the impact of loneliness and isolation.34 Canadian Indigenous parents complained publicly about the ‘rotten food’ and harsh punishments administered in the schools and threatened legal action in response.35 Changing trends in publishing have, from the latter part of the twen­­ tieth century, created an opportunity for the survivors of out-of-home care to tell their stories. Although most are too young to have been subject to the original child rescue regime, all lived in settings which owed much to the philosophy that the best interest of the child lay in complete separation from its family. In their testimonies the longterm consequences of that philosophy are clear. Although survivors are proud of the lives they have made, they are also acutely aware of the damage wrought by a system which rendered them ­simultaneously objects of pity who should be grateful for whatever help they received and potentially threats who needed to be trained and disciplined. The oldest of such narrators do not dispute the circumstances of their ‘rescue’. William Gwilliam, for example, accepts that his widowed mother had little choice, as she was employed as a servant and unable to provide a home for her children.36 George Sears describes himself as an ‘unfortunate’ child, left at the mercy of a ‘drunken father’ after his mother ‘worn out by drudgery … went to an early grave’.37 Ian ‘Smiley’ Bayliff remembers with relief arriving at Fairbridge’s Knockholt home because ‘there was food, there was three meals a day … there was room to move … It was warm; you always had plenty of clothes’.38 Later child migrants and Indigenous children, removed both geographically and culturally from their families, are more critical of the decision to take them into ‘care’. Gwen Miller was unable to forgive her father who, left with ten children after the death of his wife, agreed to their emigration. ‘We had wonderful family support … There was no need to send us away … we weren’t poor yet he still gave us away.’39 ‘Paris’, an Aboriginal Australian, sees his removal as having ‘robbed’ him of ‘the love of his parents’ and the opportunity of being ‘brought up in a proper family’.40 The image of the ‘proper family’ haunts many survivor accounts. Despite their adherence to the family model, few settings were able to [ 163 ]

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reproduce the affective ties that the children were seeking. However, the camaraderie that developed amongst the children did reproduce some elements of a sibling relationship. To Mike Barnett, who came to Australia with the Fairbridge organisation in 1958, the children became his family. ‘Well-treated or not well-treated, it didn’t affect this relationship; we were like brothers and sisters.’41 A similar atmosphere prevailed amongst the Aboriginal girls in South Australia’s Colebrook home. ‘This was our home and we respected it. We were happy in our own way, laughing and crying, and just being an extended family with a lot of love.’42 Dorothy Watt, who was placed with her sisters in Barnardo’s Girls’ Village in 1934, described her new environment as a ‘very good boarding school’ where she felt ‘happy’ and ‘secure’.43 After a holiday with his cousins during which he ‘was alone most of the time, tied down by something that prevented me making friends’, Leslie Thomas enjoyed the camaraderie in the dormitory at Barnardo’s, saying ‘I was back again … this was where I belonged’.44 There were few caregivers, however, who saw their role as parental rather than custodial. Recalling her stay in an English institution, Maureen Bollinger remembered it as ‘a sad and lonely time’, but retained ‘a wonderful memory of good and dedicated people, who looked after the abandoned and unwanted children’.45 Lilian Elmer, who came to Australia with Barnardo’s in the 1930s, found, for the first time, a cottage mother who ‘was so kind to us all ... at last I knew what real home life was like’.46 Shirley Ronge was less fortunate, remembering the matrons at her Barnardo’s home as ‘loving’ when compared with the ‘two dreadful women’ who ran the home in which she was placed after migrating to Australia.47 To Frank Norman the Barnardo’s homes were ‘more reminiscent of Dotheboys Hall than the delightful pretty cottage collection boxes’.48 Yet within this harsh environment he found one carer, known in his autobiography as Miss Love, who ‘had an undefinable magic, a sort of aura of love and understanding’.49 Many boarded-out children lacked even this consolation, growing up ‘without companionship and, worse still, without parental love’.50 In 1920s Victoria, Walter Jacobsen had no sense of ‘what the word “Mother” meant’, moving through a succession of placements which he regarded as ‘never [a] home, but always the house or the place where I lived’.51 Placed in an English foster home, Lionel Pearce felt that he could never live up to expectations: ‘Mother wanted to treat me like a doll: to beat me one minute, and curl my hair the next, without any apprehension of my feelings. Father wanted to recruit me to his all male world … They could not accept me as I was.’52 Running through all such accounts is the assumption that children should be loved. While child rescuers saw their work as an example of [ 164 ]

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Christian love, this was not the love for which the children yearned. The matrons at the NSW Burnside homes looked after the children ‘in a tradition that was proudly Christian and whose purpose was, first and foremost, to save our souls’.53 It was a similar attitude that transformed the ‘cosy homes for children where love, affection and understanding were the watchwords’ into institutions marked by a complete lack of love.54 ‘Chronically enslaved to the need for affection’, Lionel Pearce came to derive a ‘secret pleasure from the intimacy involved’ with his foster father’s beatings, ‘the only time he embraced me’.55 It was this lack of physical intimacy that Fairbridge children saw as the core of their unhappiness. ‘There wasn’t anyone to pick you up and give you a cuddle and say it was all right.’ ‘No one ever put their arm around you or touched your arm or your hand. The word “love” was never mentioned.’56 ‘I was sent to … an orphanage … in Brisbane’, one of the characters in Us Mob says: ‘It was a tough place run by nuns. I don’t remember much love there’.57 The absence of affection led many to question the validity of their initial rescue. ‘Little boys need love’, reflected Lennie Magee. ‘I would have been happier in a tent in a sea of mud. If I had a mother.’58 ‘We were fed, clothed, had a roof over our heads, but was that enough?’ asked South Australian Indigenous woman, Ruth Hegarty. ‘Could this system ever take the place of loving, caring parents?’59 The lack of love led many to emerge from the system with low self-esteem. The way in which child rescue discourse had constructed children in need of care created an image of ‘little urchins’ that ‘no-one wanted to own’.60 Allan Moore resented the way in which ­Barnardo’s used personal stories to raise money for their cause, but ‘being a “Homes kid” meant having no right to object to anything one’s benefactors wanted to do, even when it involved publicly exposing one’s personal background’.61 ‘Home kids’ inhabited a different universe from children in the surrounding villages, and soon learnt to keep themselves separate.62 On church parades, Frank Norman recalled, ‘the other pedestrians always stood aside for us as we ambled by, gawping at us and whispering to one another in sympathetic tones: “Poor little perishers, don’t they look sad?”’63 Emigrants to Canada found that they were ‘looked upon as scum’.64 ‘It didn’t matter much about what happened to us’, George Mackie recalled. ‘We were of no importance.’65 ‘We were never allowed to forget that we were lucky to be alive’, wrote another. ‘You were really a nobody.’66 In adulthood many tried to ‘bury the orphan skeleton’, bringing a further isolation by cutting connections with anyone who could betray their secret.67 Emigrants to Australia fared little better. On arrival Shirley Ronge’s group ‘were lined up and told we were [ 165 ]

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not English any more. All our new clothes and treasures, mainly farewell gifts, were taken from us never to be seen again.’68 The boys at Fairbridge, NSW, came to understand that their ‘little segregated mob’ was ‘basically waste’, ‘just little bits of flotsam’ without ‘any intrinsic value’.69 ‘They called me scum’, Janet Ellis writes, ‘they said I was dirty. They said I was the lowest form of life.’70 Living in St Joseph’s Home, in Queensland, Ann Peters was repeatedly rebuked by the nuns, with the comment, ‘No wonder nobody wanted you’.71 Left unprotected at the harsh Christian Brothers’ institution, Bindoon, successive groups of immigrants ‘were treated as urchins cast upon the earth, a nuisance that happened to be alive’.72 Hugh McConnell felt little relief when he left the institution to take work on a farm. He lived ‘in a shed away from the house and [was] not allowed to associate with the family except for meals and going to church. Once again I was very lonely.’73 Another ‘home’ boy described the joy he felt on Sundays, when, after a lonely week with a farmer who was ‘always cranky’, he could talk to other Barnardo boys at church. The level of misery some of them felt can be seen in the almost laconic comment that ‘Billy hanged himself and Johnnie was found … his stomach full of strychnine’.74 Children rescued within Australia found themselves similarly despised. ‘I do not think that because I am a State Girl I should be trampled on as I am’, a South Australian ward wrote in 1897. ‘I am flesh and Blood … and have got feelings.’75 ‘Boys from the Homes were thought to be different from other boys’, Walter Jacobsen noted. ‘We were not expected to have the same food or clothes … Everyone … expected these boys to be dirtier than others and physically undesirable with warts and misshapen bodies, to be mentally dull and aggressive. But worst of all, boys from the home were supposed to be sex mad.’76 Labelled an ‘unfortunate wretch’, Karl Davies ‘accepted his fate, and thought that this was the way all children were treated in Homes’.77 Living in the Melbourne orphanage in the 1940s, Doug McNeil was called ‘filth ... filthy guttersnipes ... loathsome swine ... and vermin’.78 Rather than fight against such accusations, Ryszard Szablicki came to accept that that was indeed the identity of ‘an orphanage boy’.79 For Indigenous children verbal assaults were laced with an endemic racism. Children at a British Columbia residential school were ‘treated like dirt, and made to believe that we weren’t as good as other people … the constant message [was] that because you are Native you are part of a weak, defective race, unworthy of a distinguished place in society. That is the reason you have to be looked after.’80 Another residential school survivor recalled that all he learnt was ‘to pray for forgiveness for being Indian’.81 Labelled a ‘dirty savage’, Dorothy Joseph looked [ 166 ]

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with envy at the nuns who seemed ‘so pure and clean’.82 Taken to a West Australian mission Rene Powell found that the sisters ‘were forever putting Aboriginal people down, as heathens, and children of the devil … No wonder everyone was confused about where they belonged’.83 Pauline McLeod was constantly reminded by her foster parents that ‘Aboriginals are drunk, they don’t work hard, they go walkabout, they never seem to achieve much … We weren’t never to be like that: we were different. We were the lucky ones, chosen to help our people.’84 However, when Nancy de Vries was taken by her foster mother to look at the ‘all dirty, all drunk’ residents of a nearby Aboriginal settlement, all she wanted to do was ‘to run up to them and say, ‘“Do you know Ruby, my mother?”’85 Child rescue’s emphasis on the need for discipline added to the harshness of institutional life. Discipline was seen as a necessary antidote to the disorder of the homes from which the children had been removed, but it was also an efficient way to manage institutions which were chronically understaffed, and offered little support or training to their employees. Although he was never physically abused, Ed Cousins found the way of life at Barnardo’s ‘so foreign’ in comparison to the home he had left behind.86 ‘We led a militarised life’, Ted Burns noted, ‘but with such a large number of kids, what else could they do?’87 The staff ruled with ‘the rod and the good book’, Frank Norman recalled. ‘They chastised us unmercifully, the Bible in one hand and a cane in the other.’88 ‘To misbehave invariably resulted in a whipping or at best some arduous task such as scrubbing floors or peeling potatoes.’89 This pattern continued at Barnardo’s, NSW, where the ‘headmaster and one other male teacher were not backward in giving both boys and girls the cane for the slightest infringement’.90 On arriving at Pinjarra, WA, Lionel Pearce found ‘three hundred boys and girls … performing as one’, ‘bludgeoned into submission … by the rankling image of the descending fist’ administered by fellow residents as well as staff, with each boy imposing ‘what dominion he could over his fellows … converting his own shameful oppression into a vain tyranny’.91 The reliance on strict discipline created an atmosphere in which perverted individuals could justify physical and sexual abuse. John Bryant’s experience at Melbourne’s Tally Ho captures this slide well. Taken to the superintendent’s office: For corrective punishment – for what I know not. He took me on his knee and spoke gently as a daddy. Then came the punishment – ten strokes of the cane being prescribed. But for every stroke on my bare posterior … there was a resounding stroke for the chair – so that no listener could say I got less than the prescribed punishment. As a prelude

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to the punishment the Captain would observe: ‘My dear boy, this hurts me as much as it hurts you.’ I found this hard to believe.92

At the Melbourne orphanage Doug McNeil encountered a female staff member who stripped the boys naked and jerking ‘with rage, her face contorted … began slashing indiscriminately with her cordlike strap, grasping an arm to better deliver a cut, or pulling hair to keep a cowering shape upright’.93 After its founders had left, Ruby Hegarty found that Colebrook became ‘a haven for sexual deviants … As children we were robbed of our personal rights. The promiscuity of the staff was inflicted on some of the children.’94 Canadian Indigenous children in the residential schools had a similar experience. ‘If you did any simple little thing … then you got beat. Anywhere they could hit you … Most of the [sexual abuse] happened at night in the dark in the big, crowded room or when you went to the bathroom. When you’re six years old, you’d go to the bathroom several times a night.’95 This sense of powerlessness and vulnerability was shared by Liz Sharp, who was sexually abused at Fairbridge, NSW. ‘Who do you tell? Because no-one wants to know anyway. And then they don’t believe you and then you’re accused of being a liar.’96 After their stories of abuse had not been believed, the girls in one school decided that they would always stay in a group as a form of protection.97 Douglas Coverdale had an early introduction to the randomness of institutional violence when the woman who was taking him to his new home ‘reached over and slapped me across the face … I wondered “Are all people like this”’.98 The supervisor of the Kamloops residential school used to ‘come out of nowhere and just give us a smack with the broom. What the heck was that about?’99 The endemic nature of the violence meant that many children lived in fear. Placed in a NSW institution by her mother while her father was away at war, Ivy ‘would shake from head to foot and would scream with fear before the strap even neared her bare bottom. By the time the punishment was at its end she would be hysterical.’100 At the Christian Brothers Western Australian farm school, Bindoon, Karl Davies was ‘absolutely terrified … [He] didn’t have the time or the energy for hatred or revenge. His entire life and being was centred around survival.’101 Despite witnessing frequent ‘floggings’ at Kalumbura, Ambrose Chalarimeri ‘said nothing. We were scared it might happen to us like that, we were frightened. I could only think of being scared, nothing else.’102 Absconder Monty Walgar was ‘flogged with [a] diver’s hose [three to four inches in diameter, with a hole down the middle that was full of lead] … and … couldn’t sit down for a week’.103 At the Canadian Kamloops, ‘there was big line up of us … I could hear them in there [ 168 ]

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Figure 15  Fairbridge boys (bare-footed) being trained in blacksmithing

crying or screaming … we got strapped for running away’.104 The more isolated the child, the more likely they were to be abused. There was, Joanna Penglase observed, ‘a sort of hierarchy of treatment. The holiday and the shorter-term children … were unlikely to be hit … Children of “common” or “lower-class” parents, parents who spoke “badly”, were poor, sent cheap clothing with their children, and had few worldly achievements or possessions, got the worst deal.’105 Children in foster care or in service were even less likely to be protected. In 1910 South Australian ward Florence Wright had to fight to defend herself from the sexual approaches of her employer’s nephew, who had said: ‘I have a right to come when I like’.106 Training always took precedence over education, particularly in institutions with internal schools where teaching hours were often shortened to enable children to work at sewing, cleaning or gardening.107 Barnardo’s, Frank Norman argues, blatantly under-estimated ‘the intelligence of just about every boy and girl in their care, as a result of which they set their sights low’.108 The trades they offered benefited the homes but left the children with few usable skills when the time came for them to leave (see Figure 15).109 Despite the official rhetoric, [ 169 ]

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they were promoted to prospective employers as servile labourers, ready to fill the gaps in the lowest echelons of the workforce. ‘Conditioned to think … that Canada was one big apple tree, and our worries were over for life,’ one emigrant soon found that he had ‘picked the wormy apple’.110 A residential school pupil who expressed the desire to become a teacher was told: ‘Indian girls aren’t teachers … Indian girls learn to mop the floor and cook potatoes’.111 Irrespective of whether they had emigrated or were placed out in their country of origin, the children came to see themselves as ‘slave labour’, ‘chattels’ doomed by their inadequate education.112 ‘All on our hands and knees’ polishing the wooden floors of the cottage at Barnardo’s Australian farm, Dennis Underwood realised that they were being trained as ‘cheap labour for the Aussie farmer’.113 In retrospect, John Lane came to understand himself as ‘a marionette dangling at the end of a string … held in an all-embracing grip … On any given command I performed instantly and obediently. My subjugation had been complete.’114 For Indigenous children, this regime continued far longer than it did in the non-indigenous community, the dormitories of reserves, residential schools and training homes being used to instil ‘respect [for] authority, discipline and order, and the importance of neatness and cleanliness. This was to prepare us for our entry into the wider community, to become farm labourers and domestic servants.’115 On a mission where ‘the whole community seemed ordered or summoned by the bell’, ‘the girls and women laundered and ironed tons of nuns’ habits and … were taught to sew and make … frocks, underwear and children’s clothing’.116 Iris Clayton uses her poem ‘Kidnappers’, a bitter parody of a well-known children’s rhyme, to contrast a life of freedom with the restrictions of institutional life: There were nine little blackfellas having fun and running free along came the Welfare said this just cannot be he grabbed the little blackfellas sent them all to the homes to train them all as servants to slave in gubbars’ homes.117

The authors of all such narratives construct themselves as survivors rather than victims.118 William Gwilliam, who arrived in Canada in 1902 with only a shilling to his name, grew up to be a successful orchardist.119 ‘We had to make it on our own’, another Canadian emigrant recalled. ‘But I am proud to be an orphan. I feel I have done well in Canada, that I have become a good citizen and can look back [ 170 ]

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and say I have risen above all the hurts and loneliness of life.’120 ‘After many years of hardship and worry’, Tasmanian Frederick Coppleman concludes, ‘with hard work, determination and a large amount of help from my children, I have proved you can make something of yourself and your character.’121 Survival is also a theme in literature for children and young adults which, having played such an important role in normalising child removal, has, in more recent years, created a space for care leavers to tell their stories. The blurb for Leslie Thomas’s This Time Next Week suggests a kind of boys’ own adventure. ‘Gay as a lark-song, as brave as a bugle call, with heart-warming adventures and brilliantly observed cameos of boys’, the book presents as the story of a Barnardo’s boy made good, but there are undercurrents of problems and unhappiness. Thomas’s brief description of the parting from his mother, newly widowed and ill, indicates an underlying and ongoing distress: ‘One minute – or one hour anyway – we were ordinary kids at home – and then we were packed and leaving … And that was the last we ever saw of her.’122 No one at the homes ever ‘got round to telling’ his younger brother that their mother had died.123 The Aboriginal children gathered into the mission and orphanage in Broome felt ‘like lost souls, plucked out from loved ones’ arms, herded like cattle into holding yards and then dumped with ­strangers in a frightening environment’.124 Monty Walgar, sent to Tardun Mission ‘against my will, and against my mother’s will’, makes no secret of the unhappiness he suffered. Given the lack of individuality, poor food, the brutality and ‘the hurtful feelings … separation from relatives and nearest kin … the love that we once knew … the family unity that they destroyed’, Walgar is convinced that if he had stayed with his mother he would have had a better life.125 ‘This kind of experience in your life’, a Canadian residential school survivor writes, ‘twists you up so that sometimes you can’t see when you are doing yourself wrong’.126 My Name is Seepeetza, an autobiographical novel by Canadian writer Shirley Sterling, is based on her own experiences at a residential school. Stripped of her Indian name on arrival, she soon learns to mistrust and even to fear her cultural and ethnic identity.127 The children were all given ‘basin’ haircuts, because ‘Sister Theo says that long straight hair makes us look like wild Indians’.128 At night they live in fear of the ‘devils’ which they are told are waiting under their beds ‘with chains … to drag us into the fires of hell if we got up and left our beds during the night’.129 Like other institutional survivors, Seepeetza often contrasts the life of fear, lack of love, physical violence and poor food in the school with her memories of her loving home, but there was no opportunity to complain. ‘Sister Theo checks our letters [ 171 ]

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home. We’re not allowed to say anything about the school. I might get the strap, or worse.’130 The impression created by autobiographies and other literary accounts has been reinforced, in recent years, by a series of public enquiries which have broken through the thin veneer of benevolence to expose the dark underside of out-of-home care. Enquiries in Britain have investigated allegations of abuse in various areas of the country as well as the experiences of child emigrants.131 In Canada the initial focus was on children in local institutions, but attention shifted to Indigenous children in the wake of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, culminating in the recent decision to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.132 In Australia the order was reversed, with the enquiry into the removal of Aboriginal children being followed by an investigation of the plight of child migrants, and finally of former state wards and other children who had experienced out-of-home care.133 The common purpose of all of these enquiries was to allow survivors, or care leavers, to give voice to their experience of adoption or foster, cottage or congregate care. The testimonies that emerged were overwhelmingly negative. ‘Confused, angry, frightened’ children, British enquiries have concluded, were open to abuse both because of their emotional vulnerability and because of societal attitudes which continued to see them as ‘orphans and criminals’ rather than children in need of care.134 ‘Rescued’ from danger, children found themselves utterly powerless and, all too often, exposed to further harm. There is a remarkable consistency in the findings of all such enquiries. They dismiss suggestions that abuse was consistent with disciplinary practices of the day, or the result of individual psychopathologies, and argue instead that it was systemic. ‘Only a small handful described their experience as having been a happy one’, the British enquiry into child migration concluded. The harm came in several interrelated forms: physical and sexual assault, emotional and psychological abuse, neglect and exploitation.135 Such treatment stood in direct contradiction to the Christian ethos of the homes. A resident of Victoria’s Kilmany Park recalled: ‘We went to church every Sunday and were told of this God of love and understanding who was watching over us. I could not understand, because I thought: “Jeez, what’s happening? He’s not watching over me”.’136 Framing their testimony in opposition to notions of an idealised childhood, witnesses spoke of the dehumanising impact of institutional life: ‘You were just a number on the book … But as far as a person goes, I could have been some dog that wandered in off the street.’137 ‘Systematic degradation’ left a feeling of nothingness, ‘a nobody. Worse [ 172 ]

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than dog shit ... I went away believing it, I think’.138 ‘I have come to realise that we were never children. We were an unpaid workforce, with no reward just punishment.’139 For Victorian Indigenous children, removal did not constitute rescue but deprivation. ‘Many have felt their chances were taken away – chances given only by growing up in a loving environment, not by being institutionalised as a child!’140 ‘I’d see other families, you know, and they were together’, recalled Joy, ‘they grow up together, they’d be happy, they’d be sharing things. And I’d be sitting somewhere ... watching. So the family unit is the main thing I think we lost.’141 The impact of an institutionalised childhood carried over into adult life. ‘Because of being constantly told I was nothing and would end up in the gutter and no one wanted me or ever would, the core negative beliefs I have are my reality’, a witness before the Forgotten Australians enquiry testified. ‘They are the deepest most profound assumptions and expectations I have of myself, and therefore I find it hard to function as a “normal” human being, beyond my front door.’142 ‘I could not be the mother I wanted to be to my children’, said another. The orphanage ‘took away my childhood. It left me with no hope.’143 ‘Why did they do it?’ asked former Fairbridge resident Christina Murray. ‘They were there to look after children and they didn’t.’144 The answer to this question lies in the way in which child rescue agencies and their descendants constructed the child at risk. Coming from marginalised families, the children were depicted as dangerous as well as vulnerable, justifying a treatment regime which was cold, harsh and uncaring, and categorising any complaints as ingratitude.145 Because risk was defined in relation to a ‘romanticised (Victorian) middle-class notion of childhood innocence’, treatment was framed in terms of a return to the state which they had lost. ‘Children … were not worked with in terms of what they were … but what they were going to be.’146 The increasing ‘success’ of the NSPCC and like organisations in reforming and reintegrating ‘recalcitrant’ families led the children for whom this recourse failed to be further marginalised. Harry Ferguson has argued that they were depicted as ‘moral dirt’ from whom ‘other children and good citizens needed to be protected’.147 Often it was the treatment regimes designed to ensure such protection that justified institutional abuse.148 The disclosure of widespread institutional abuse has led to some caution amongst child welfare authorities, but it has done little to suppress the urge to rescue amongst a public confronted with stories of family dysfunction. It is an appeal which agencies with a history of involvement in child removal continue to exploit, long after most have ceased to provide residential care. In its centenary appeal the NSPCC [ 173 ]

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drew on images of abused children from 1884 and 1984, using the caption: ‘The faces change. The bruises don’t.’149 Barnardo’s continues to use images of single children, whose vulnerability is instantly recognisable in a culture in which notions of childhoods lost and children saved are so deeply embedded.150 In western countries popular media reacts to instances of horrific abuse with a call for a return to adoption, demonising the parents, or more usually the mother, who allowed her child to be placed at risk. Advocates of inter-country adoption extend this argument beyond national boundaries, constructing their motivation as benevolent, ‘saving’ children from neglect, starvation and death while ignoring the poverty and injustice that compels families in the sending countries to relinquish their offspring. They are often the first on the scene in the aftermath of disaster, offering individual child removal as a solution to a community problem. This solution is frequently, perhaps unwittingly, endorsed by aid agencies which, aware of the appeal of the individual ‘abandoned’ child, often make such children the focus of their advertising. There will always be families that fail, and children in need of substitute care, but the testimonies of those who survived earlier child rescue programmes give cause for caution. Too often a parent’s poverty has been read as culpability, with child removal rather than family support the preferred response. Yet child removal has repeatedly failed to produce the ‘happy ending’ that the romanticised story of child rescue promised. Depicted as innocent victims, disempowered children have been rendered passive and often subject to further abuse. Nor is this a story that can be safely confined to the past. Rising rates of child removal, in response to continued concerns about the impact of parental substance abuse and mental illness, suggest that the urge to rescue remains strong. While the large institutions that arose out of the nineteenth-century child rescue movement have been dismantled, children now ‘churn’ through multiple foster care placements where the potential for abuse remains high. The suggestion that the problem of churning could be overcome by an earlier cessation of parental rights, to facilitate a rapid transition to adoption, is constructed on a denial of the potential for harm in this most closed form of substitute care. As the Canadian enquiry, Restoring Dignity, concluded, such denial is dangerous. ‘The goal must be to understand the situations that may give rise to abusive behaviour, and what combination of circumstances and attitudes may permit such behavior to flourish. If, as a society, we shy away from these inquiries, the same mistakes will continue to be made, but in different contexts and under different guises.’151 While the nineteenth-century child rescue movement, which began in England and spread across and beyond her settler colonies, drew [ 174 ]

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much-needed attention to the plight of children and made an unequalled contribution to the public and statutory recognition of their status as future citizens, the more negative aspects of its legacy should lead us to be wary of the quick solution in what is a very complex area. The image of the lonely, abandoned child at risk, however appealing, has been carefully constructed upon a denial or victimisation of the family and kin who, properly supported, are most likely to ensure its safety. The future of those children for whom this recourse fails can only be guaranteed if romantic notions of substitute care are similarly deconstructed. Through its analysis of child rescue discourse embodied in the publicity material generated by the movement and the associated literature written for children, this book is one contribution to that necessary process of deconstruction.

Notes   1 William T. James, ‘Bobs and snobs’, Ups and Downs, VII: 3 (1902), 14.   2 Law Commission of Canada, Restoring Dignity: Responding to Child Abuse in Canadian Institutions (Ottawa: Ministry of Public Works and Government Services, 2000), p. 1.   3 Jamie Komarnicki, ‘Voices: a personal history of life in the residential schools’, Globe and Mail (11 June 2008).   4 Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Lost Innocents: Righting the Record on Child Migration (Canberra: Senate Printing Unit, 2001), p.  77; J. Penglase, Orphans of the Living: Growing up in ‘Care’ in TwentiethCentury Australia (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2005), p. 145.   5 Penglase, Orphans of the Living, p. 59.   6 M.E.J., ‘S. Chad’s Home, Far Headingley, Leeds’, BS, 66 (1898), 137.   7 T.J. Barnardo, ‘My children and grandchildren’, NWM, XXVI: 225 (1903), 52; ‘Once a little cripple boy’, BS, 168 (1907), 70.   8 Mary A. Tuckfield, ‘President’s monthly letter: Methodist Homes for Children’, Spectator (24 April 1914), 678.   9 ‘The member for Maranoa’, ND, XXXII: 249 (1909), 39. 10 J.J. Kelso, ‘Sixteenth report, neglected and dependant children of Ontario’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1909), p. 13. 11 ‘Leaves from two lives’, ND, XXXI: 245 (1908), 36–7. 12 Anon., ‘Barnardo boys in the war’, YHLM (1915), 217. 13 ‘Methodist Homes for Children’, Spectator (27 August 1915), 1244. 14 ‘The boys and girls who went to Australia’, RSUM 2: 15 (1850), 51. 15 T.J. Barnardo, ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’, ND, 5: 46 & 47 (1881), 46. 16 Louie K., ‘Letter from a S. Nicholas girl’, BS, 74 (1899), 80. 17 ‘Our letter bag: a letter to Mrs. Varcoe from W. Seddon’, Spectator (11 September 1891), 883. 18 ‘A grateful waif’, Spectator (12 January 1894), 20. 19 ‘The boys and girls who went to Australia’, 52. 20 ‘The ragged school emigrants’, RSUM, 3: 31 (1851), 146. 21 ‘Another batch of emigrants’ letters’, RSUM, 3: 31 (1851), 159–60. 22 ‘Untitled’, Argus (21 September 1878). 23 ‘The industrial school girls’, Spectator (27 September 1878), 258. 24 ‘Untitled’, Argus (21 September 1878).

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child, nation, race and empire 25 Margaret Barbalet, Far from a Low Gutter Girl: The Forgotten World of State Wards: South Australia 1887–1940 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983), p.  30. 26 Scots Church Archives, Melbourne, ‘Presbyterian and Scots Church Neglected Child­­­­­­ ren’s Aid Society’, in The Scots Church Melbourne, Reports and Financial Statements for Year Ending 30th June 1896 (Melbourne: The Scots Church, 1896), pp. 21–2. 27 Scots Church Archives, Melbourne, ‘Scots Church Neglected Children’s Aid Society’, in The Scots Church Melbourne, Reports and Financial Statements for Year Ending 30th June 1894 (Melbourne: The Scots Church, 1894), p. 17. 28 ‘Leaves from two lives’, 38. 29 Argus (10 October 1895). 30 ‘Boys of the state’, Spectator (10 February 1905), 209. 31 Barnardo, ‘My colony over the sea: the golden bridge’, ND, XV: 149 (1891), 9. 32 LAC, MG30 C97 Box 27, ‘Fifth report of work under the Children’s Protection Act, Ontario, for the year ending November 30, 1897’ (Toronto: Office of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children of Ontario, 1897), p. 11. 33 J.R. Hutchinson, Hal Hungerford: or, the Strange Adventures of a Boy Emigrant (London: Blackie, 1905), p. 27. 34 Kelso, ‘Sixteenth report, neglected and dependent children of Ontario’, p. 13. 35 LAC, RG10 Volume 6436 File 878–1, John Haines, ‘Sworn information of witness, Alkali Lake, B.C.’(28 February 1902); LAC, RG10 Volume 2771 File 154,845, Kelly and Porter solicitors to Superintendent of Department of Indian Affairs (29 September 1913). 36 Phyllis Harrison, The Home Children: Their Personal Stories (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1979), p. 63. 37 Ibid., p. 64. 38 David Hill, The Forgotten Children: Fairbridge Farm School and Its Betrayal of Australia’s Child Emigrants (North Sydney, NSW: Random House, 2007), pp.  13–14. 39 Ibid., p. 90. 40 Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia, Telling Our Story: A Report on the Removal of Aboriginal Children in Western Australia (Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia, 1995), p. 3. 41 Alan Gill, Orphans of the Empire: The Shocking Story of Child Migration to Australia (Alexandria, NSW: Millennium Books, 1997), p. 161. 42 Doris Kartinyeri, Kick the Tin (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2000), p. 14. 43 June Rose, For the Sake of the Children: Inside Dr. Barnardo’s, 120 Years of Caring for Children (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987), p. 79. 44 Leslie Thomas, This Time Next Week (London: The Companion Book Club, 1964), p. 177. 45 Maureen Bollinger, Children of Stainsbridge House (Normanville, South Australia: Maureen Bollinger, 2006), p. 2. 46 Allan Moore, Growing up with Barnardo’s (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1990), p.  65. 47 Gill, Orphans of the Empire, p. 109. 48 Frank Norman, Banana Boy (London: Hogarth, 1987), p. 3. 49 Ibid., p. 30. 50 Harrison, The Home Children, p. 155. 51 Walter Jacobsen, Dussa and the Maiden’s Prayer (Melbourne: Victoria Press, 1994), pp. 3, 12. 52 Lionel Pearce, Feathers of a Snow Angel: Memories of a Child in Exile (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002), pp. 59–60. 53 Kate Shayler, The Long Way Home: The Story of a Homes Kid (Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2001), p. 9. 54 Norman, Banana Boy, p. 18; Rose, For the Sake of the Children, p. 174. 55 Pearce, Feathers of a Snow Angel, p. 61. 56 Hill, The Forgotten Children, p. 293. 57 David Spillman and Lisa Wilyuka, Us Mob Walawurru (Broome: Magabala Books, 2006), p. 133.

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lost, stolen or forgotten 58 Hill, The Forgotten Children, p. 104. 59 Ruth Hegarty, Is That You Ruthie? (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), p. 92. 60 Hill, The Forgotten Children, p. 91. 61 Moore, Growing up with Barnardo’s, pp. 110–11. 62 Evelyn Stemp, Home Kids (Brighton: The Book Guild Ltd., 2003), p. 11; Barbara Kahan, Growing up in Care: Ten People Talking (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 44. 63 Norman, Banana Boy, pp. 24-5. 64 Harrison, The Home Children, p. 64. 65 Ibid., p. 81. 66 Rose, For the Sake of the Children, p. 96. 67 Harrison, The Home Children, p. 234. 68 Gill, Orphans of the Empire, p. 109. 69 Hill, The Forgotten Children, pp. 161, 91. 70 Ibid., p. 293. 71 Gill, Orphans of the Empire, p. 261. 72 Ibid., p. 348. 73 Ibid., p. 359. 74 Gail H. Corbett, Nation Builders: Barnardo Children in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2002), p. 83. 75 Barbalet, Far from a Low Gutter Girl, p. 159. 76 Jacobsen, Dussa and the Maiden’s Prayer, p. 47. 77 Kate Davies, When Innocence Trembles: The Christian Brothers Orphanage Tragedy (Sydney: Angus and Robertson / Harper Collins, 1994), p. 52. 78 Doug McNeil, Order of Things (Bentleigh, Victoria: Doug McNeil, 1995), p. 17. 79 Ryszard Szablicki, Orphanage Boy: Through the Eyes of Innocence (Frenchs Forest, NSW: New Holland Publishers, 2007), p. 165. 80 Bev Sellers quoted in Jean Barman, ‘School for inequality: the education of British Columbia Aboriginal children’ in Nancy Janovicek and Joy Parr (eds), Histories of Canadian Children and Youth (Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 229. 81 Sylvia Olsen with Rita Morris and Ann Sam, No Time to Say Goodbye: Children’s Stories of Kuper Island Residential School (Victoria, BC: Sono Nis Press, 2001), p.  101. 82 Dorothy Joseph in Behind Closed Doors: Stories from the Kamloops Indian Residen­­tial School (Kamloops, Canada: Secwepemc Cultural Education Society, 2000), p. 85. 83 Rene Powell and Bernadette Kennedy, Rene Baker File #28 / E.D.P. (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), p. 54. 84 Coral Edwards and Peter Read, The Lost Children: Thirteen Australians Taken from Their Aboriginal Families Tell of the Struggle to Find Their Natural Parents (Moorebank, NSW: Doubleday, 1989), pp. 14–15. 85 Ibid., p. 84. 86 Rose, For the Sake of the Children, p. 174. 87 Ann Howard and Eric Leonard, After Barnardo: The Phenomenon of Child Migration from Tilbury to Sydney from 1921–1965 (Dangar Island, NSW.: Tarka Publishing, 1999), p. 78. 88 Norman, Banana Boy, p. 7. 89 Ibid., p. 18. 90 Moore, Growing up with Barnardo’s, p. 65. 91 Pearce, Feathers of a Snow Angel, pp. 94, 103. 92 John Bryant, There Was a Man Whose Name Was John: An Autobiography (Perth: John Bryant, 1982), p. 5. 93 McNeil, Order of Things, p. 17. 94 Kartinyeri, Kick the Tin, p. 54. 95 Komarnicki, ‘Voices’. 96 Hill, The Forgotten Children, p. 183. 97 Behind Closed Doors, p. 63.

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child, nation, race and empire 98 Douglas Coverdale, ‘It All Turns out for the Better’: One Man’s Story of His Time in an Australian Boys’ Home, 1928–1935, and His Life Thereafter (Melbourne, Victoria: Action Research Issues Association, 1995),p. 3.   99 Eddy Jules in Behind Closed Doors, p. 75. 100 Laura Todd and Amanda Midlam, A Place Like Home: Growing up in the School of Industry 1915–1922 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1987), p. 48. 101 Davies, When Innocence Trembles, p. 100. 102 Ambrose Mungala Chalarimeri, The Man from the Sunrise Side (Broome: Magabala Books, 2001), p. 25. 103 Monty Walgar, Jinangga (Broome: Magabala Books, 1999), pp. 32–3. 104 Behind Closed Doors, p. 79. 105 Penglase, Orphans of the Living, p. 23. 106 Barbalet, Far from a Low Gutter Girl, p. 92. 107 Todd and Midlam, A Place Like Home, p. 102. 108 Norman, Banana Boy, p. 105. 109 Ibid., p. 106. 110 Harrison, The Home Children, p. 135. 111 Olsen, No Time to Say Goodbye, p. 121. 112 Harrison, The Home Children, pp. 81, 142; Rose, For the Sake of the Children, p. 96. 113 Moore, Growing up with Barnardo’s, p. 72. 114 John Lane, Fairbridge Kid (Fremantle Arts Centre Press: Fremantle, 1990), p. 13. 115 Hegarty, Is That You Ruthie?, p. 55. 116 Betty Lockyer, ‘War baby’ in Holding Up the Sky: Aboriginal Women Speak (Broome: Magabala Books, 1999), p. 34. 117 Iris Clayton, ‘Kidnappers’ in Lorraine Mafi-Williams (ed.), Spirit Song: A Collection of Aboriginal Poetry (Norwood, South Australia: Omnibus Books, 1993), p. 32. 118 Stephen Constantine, ‘Children as ancestors: child migrants and identity in Canada’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 16 (2003), 155. 119 Harrison, The Home Children, p. 63. 120 Ibid., p. 234. 121 Frederick A. Coppleman, Not of My Choice (West Tamar, Tasmania: F.A. Coppleman, 1994), 162. 122 Thomas, This Time Next Week, p. 31. 123 Ibid., p. 46. 124 Lockyer, ‘War baby’, p. 25. 125 Walgar, Jinangga, pp. 34, 36. 126 Robert Simon in Behind Closed Doors, p. 108. 127 Shirley Sterling, My Name is Seepeetza (Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1992), pp.  18, 27. 128 Ibid., p. 32. 129 Ibid., p. 19. 130 Ibid., p. 12. 131 Mike Stein, ‘Missing years of abuse in children’s homes’, Child and Family Social Work, 11 (2006), 12; Health Committee, House of Commons, The Welfare of Former British Child Migrants. 132 Law Commission of Canada, Restoring Dignity. 133 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home. A Report of the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney: HREOC, 1997); Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Lost Innocents; Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians. A Report on Australians who Experienced Instutional or Out-of-Home Care as Children (Can­­­ berra: Senate Printing Unit, 2004). 134 Stein, ‘Missing years’, 13. 135 Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Lost Innocents, pp. 72–3; Forgotten Australians, p. 410.

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lost, stolen or forgotten 136 Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians. , p. 46. 137 Leneene Forde, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions (Brisbane: The Inquiry, 1999), p. 78. 138 Ibid., p. 284. 139 Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians, p. 41. 140 HREOC, Bringing Them Home, p. 10. 141 Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia, Telling Our Story, pp. 134–5. 142 Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians, p. 92. 143 Forde, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions, pp. 284-5. 144 Hill, The Forgotten Children, p. 314. 145 Law Commission of Canada, Restoring Dignity, p. 4. 146 Harry Ferguson, ‘Abused and looked after children as “moral dirt”: child abuse and institutional care in historical perspective’, Journal of Social Policy, 36: 1 (2007), 132. 147 Ibid., 133. 148 Ibid., 134. 149 Monica Flegel, ‘Changing faces: the NSPCC and the use of photography in the construction of cruelty to children’, Victorian Periodical Review, 39: 1 (2006), 1. 150 Lindsay O’Dell, ‘Representations of the “damaged child”: “child saving” in a British children’s charity ad campaign’, Children and Society, 22 (2008), 386. 151 Law Commission of Canada, Restoring Dignity, p. 3.

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b ib liogra phy

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Library and Archives Canada Colonial Office (United Kingdom) – Child migration to Canada (LAC) R219– 109–2–E, Volume RG25–B-1–b 188 Department of Indian Affairs records (LAC) MG29 E106 Volume 12, 16–8, RG10 Volumes 2771, 3674, 3676, 3920, 3930–1, 6001, 6027, 6039–41, 6267–8, 6307, 6320, 6430, 6436, 6451–2 Kelso papers (LAC) MG30 C97 Volumes 1, 2, 4-6, 11, 14-5, 18, 24-7, 34 & 36, Boxes 11–15, 17, 18, 27, 32–3

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INDEX

Aborigines’ Protection Association (NSW) 95, 147 adoption 122, 142, 174 Africa 67, 79–80, 84–6 alcohol 45, 49–50, 72–3, 87 Arabs 80, 88–9 Ardill, George 90, 95–6, 97, 99, 142, 147–8 Australia 86–7, 89–92, 93–6, 97–9, 108–9, 118, 120, 123–4, 139, 141–4, 146–51, 160–2 baby farming 49, 79, 91 Ballantyne, R. M. 31–3, 83–4, 109, 114 Barnardo, Thomas 17–18, 20–2, 27, 28, 33–5, 46, 52, 53, 67, 69, 70, 73–4, 86, 88–9, 109, 112, 116–17, 121, 131, 134, 138–9, 140–1, 142, 145–6, 162 Bindoon, WA 166, 168 blackness 44, 84–5, 87–8, 120 Blake, William 5 board schools 12, 33 boarding-out 89, 123, 131–2, 139, 140, 142, 144, 147–8, 164 Bosanquet, Mary 7 Brabazon, Lord 73–4 Brace, Charles Loring 73, 116, 123 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 5 Burch, Florence 53 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 42 Canada 1–3, 85–7, 89–90, 92–3, 96–7, 99–100, 108–9, 112–18, 120, 122–4, 141–2, 150–1, 159–60, 162–3, 165 Catholicism 34, 90 Charlesworth, Maria 4 child abduction 31, 45–6

child emigration 7, 11–12, 47, 108–10, 112–24, 135, 172 see also child migrants child labour 7, 72–3, 122, 135–7, 138, 140, 143, 162–3, 169–70 chimney sweeps 5 child migrants 3, 12, 113–14, 117–20, 123, 160–1, 162–3, 164, 165–6, 170–1 child removal 13, 23, 25, 30, 74, 132–3, 141–2 Indigenous 1–3, 95–7, 147–51, 163, 166–7, 170, 171–3 child welfare legislation 140–2 Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to and Better Protection of Children (Ontario), 1892 90, 142 Children’s Charter (UK), 1889 141 Children’s Protection Act (Ontario), 1888 90, 142 Custody of Children Act (UK), 1891 113, 141 Industrial School Act (UK), 1857 140 Neglected Children’s Act (Victoria), 1887 90 childhood 3–4, 19, 41, 49–51, 53, 63, 70, 72–3, 151, 174–5 Children’s Aid Societies 142, 145 children’s auxiliaries Children’s League of Pity 21 Children’s Union 21, 31, 52, 67, 120 Young Helpers’ League 21, 51, 52, 120 Children’s Friend Society 108–9 children’s literature 4–5, 19, 42–3, 52–3, 83–5, 94–5, 109–10, 114–15, 117, 149–50, 163, 171–2

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children’s rights 16, 35, 71, 72, 93, 99, 140–1 Chinese 84, 87, 92, 93–4, 97 Church of England Waifs’ and Strays’ Society 3, 19, 131–2, 137 Churchill, Winston 81, 118–19 citizenship 12–13, 74, 92–3, 96, 99–100, 150–1 civilisation 69, 80, 99, 148–9 class 44–6, 51, 72–3, 81, 117, 129, 134, 138 clothing 42–3 Colebrook Home, South Australia 164, 168 contagion 12, 67–8, 70–3, 97–9 cottage homes 130–3 crime 73–4 cruelty 31, 33, 49–52, 54–5, 74, 91, 139 Darkest England 17, 67–9, 80, 117, 121 Dawbarn, Elizabeth 7 death 6, 10, 56–7 see also baby farming; infanticide degeneration 70–1, 73, 81, 97–100 Dickens, Charles 6, 31, 53, 69, 90 dirt 46, 64 disabled children 31, 52–7, 137, 161 discipline 129, 138–9, 167–9, 172–3 Dr Barnardo’s Homes 3, 17–18, 34, 131, 133, 134–6, 164, 165, 167, 169–70, 171, 174 education 135, 137, 142, 144, 150–1 empire 79, 81, 85, 89–100, 109–10, 116–17, 120–1, 124 employment 134–7, 161 domestic service 89, 117, 134–5, 138, 143–4, 162–3 farm labour 117, 136–7, 144, 162–3, 166, 170 workshops 130, 135–7 Englishness 72, 84–5, 88–9, 118–19 environment 63–6, 72–3, 97, 110–12, 113–15 Evangelical movement 4–5, 7–8, 26,

40, 56–7, 67–8 Everett-Green, Evelyn 44 eugenics 81, 110–12 exploitation 49, 51–2, 55 Fairbridge Society 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 173 Falk, John 7, 17 family model 130–3, 163–4 Farrar, Evelyn 44 Favenc, Ernest 109 fear 70–2, 129 Fiji 124 Fry, S.M. 53 fund-raising 21–2, 30–1, 34–5, 40, 57, 86–7, 120, 121, 165, 173–4 Germans 93, 120 Greenwood, James 5–6 Gunn, Mrs Aeneas (Jeannie) 149 Guthrie, Dr Thomas 7–8 gypsies 31, 44, 86, 88 Harper, Stephen 2 heathenism 7, 9, 17, 67, 79, 84–5 Henty, G.A. 109 heredity 70, 110–12, 122 Hopkins, Ellice 44 Horner, Francis 17, 109 Horsley, J.W. 110–12 Howard, John 1, 2 Hurrell, Marian Isabel 66 imagery biblical 25–7 garden 4, 24–5, 46, 55, 66, 100, 112, 129 nautical 25–6 romantic 3–4, 24 rural 64–7, 133 visual 19, 23, 48–9, 100, 174 imperialism 67, 70–1, 74–5, 79, 85, 89, 100, 120–1 India 80, 83, 84, 94, 97, 120 Indigenous peoples 81, 83–7, 89, 115, 147–51 Australia 1–3, 86–7, 94–8, 147–50,

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163, 165, 167, 168–9, 171, 172–3 Canada 79–80, 84–7, 96–7, 118, 150–1, 163, 166–7, 168–9 see also residential schools New Zealand 81, 87 industrial schools 11, 140, 141 industrialisation 64, 66, 73 infanticide 79, 96 Inner Mission 8, 18 institutional abuse 129, 159–60, 162–3, 164–5, 167–9, 171–2, 173 institutional care 11, 23, 33, 129–39, 140, 142–3, 163–5, 166–70, 173 see also boarding out; cottage homes Italians 88

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Jews 80, 88, 120 Johnson, J. 56 Johnstone, C.L. 118 Kelso, J.J. 90, 92–3, 97, 99–100, 120, 123, 142, 144–5, 146, 160, 162–3 Kingsley, Charles 6 Lester, Mary 73, 132, 138, 146 lodging houses 28, 69 London 62–3, 68 Lucas, Sir Charles 79 Macpherson, Annie 109 magazines 20–3, 33–5, 50–1, 120, 121 Mager, Alfred 17, 72 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward 18, 69 Marchant, Bessie 94 Marryat, Captain F. 109 Mayers, (Reverand) Walter J. 87 Melbourne Orphanage 145, 166, 168 melodrama 19, 23–4 metaphor 24–6 missions 7–8, 67–9, 79–84, 86, 94–6 moral impurity 64, 67–71, 173 mothering 53, 84

mothers’ payments 145–6 Muller, George 7, 30 National Children’s Homes 3, 16, 17, 34, 53, 54, 89, 130–1, 135–7 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children 3, 18, 20, 27, 33, 49–51, 54, 72, 89, 120–1, 140–1, 145, 173–4 neglect 33, 41, 74, 98 New Zealand 109, 120 official apologies 1–3 orphans 28–30, 33, 132 Osborn, Maria 44 Osborne, (Reverend Lord) Sydney Godolphin 67 Owen, Robert 7 parents 10–11,13, 24, 28–30, 49–50, 54–5, 64–6, 72–3, 92–3, 99–100, 113, 130, 133–4, 140–1, 144–6, 150 see also mothering; widows Parkes, Sir Henry 98 pauperism 11, 70, 100, 115, 139 pity 10, 12, 43, 55, 165 poor law children 108–9, 122, 139–40, 146 Pounds, John 7 poverty 23, 42, 174 Quarrier, William 7, 20, 30, 33, 68–9, 85–6, 113, 122, 131 Queen Victoria 34–5, 109 race 9–10, 44–5, 74–5, 79–83, 87–9, 93–8, 108, 112, 118–20, 166–7 see also blackness; Indigenous peoples; whiteness Ragged School Union 8–11, 108–9 ragged schools 7–12 Rathbone, Eleanor 146 Rauhe Haus 8, 116, 129 Redemption 10, 17, 46–9, 51–2, 66, 83, 123 Reformatory and Refuge Union 7, 17

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Religious Tract Society 20 residential schools 1–3, 150–1, 159–60, 166–7, 168–9, 170, 171–2 Rossetti, Christina 4–5 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Canada 1, 172 Rudd, Kevin 1, 2 Rudolf, Edward de Montjoie 17, 18–19, 20–1, 23, 27, 28, 33, 34, 52, 55, 67, 68, 88, 109, 122, 131–2, 135, 139 Russians 93, 119 Rye, Maria 109, 118 St Joseph’s Home, Melbourne 143, 162 Salvation Army 67, 141, 143, 149 savagery 79–81, 83–4, 94–5, 97–8 Senior, (Reverend) Walter 19–20 Shaftesbury, earl of 7–9, 12, 74 sin 17, 49, 69–70, 72 slavery 31, 79–80, 89 slums 68–70, 90 Smith, George 7 socialism 74, 137–8 South Africa 11, 81, 86, 89, 108, 109, 120 Stephenson, Thomas Bowman 17, 20–3, 27, 30, 34, 54, 79, 86, 88, 109, 112, 119, 122, 124, 130–1, 135–7, 139, 140, 142 Stevenson, Robert Louis 84 street children 30–2, 42–3, 46, 53, 72, 73, 135 beggars 31, 45

crossing sweepers 10, 11, 30 flower sellers 30–1, 66 matchsellers 30 newsboys 30–1 shoe blacks 11 Stretton, Hesba 18, 19, 51 subservience 137–9, 143–4 success 117–18, 121, 135, 137, 160–1, 170–1 survivor narratives 159, 161–2, 163–73 Sutherland, Selina 90, 92, 145 Sydney Rescue Work Society 90, 148 training 57, 72, 129–30, 134–9, 142–4, 147–9, 150–1, 169–70 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada 2, 172 voyeurism 68 waif hunting 27–9, 68–9 waif novels 19–20, 23 war service 121, 160 Watts, Isaac 4 Waugh, Benjamin 17, 18, 27, 69, 80, 91, 140–1, 145 West Indians 88 whiteness 44–5, 81–3, 87–9, 97, 116–17, 124 Wichern, Johann 8, 17, 18, 67, 116, 129–30, 142 widows 11, 30, 145–6 Wilkins, (Reverend) W.J. 83–4 Williams, William 7

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