Class Analysis and the Killing of the Newborn Child: Manchester, 1790–1860

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the practice of neonaticide – the killing of an infant at the moment of birth – in Manchester during the first decades of the industrial revolution. Using a set of previously unexamined pre-trial witness statements, the author makes the case that newborn-killing was practised by working-class women in the town as a known and even accepted form of birth control. There is quite suggestive evidence that women had a language for this practice, shielded other women from having it reported, and in certain circumstances, assisted one another in carrying it out. This finding resonates with similar moral frameworks that have been studied from high-medieval England to early colonial Mexico. Nonetheless, it has also been well established that middle-class people throughout the nineteenth century in Britain abhorred infant killing, associated it strongly with stigmatized stereotypes of working-class maternity, and sought to suppress it using the punitive weight of the law. Period diaries and publications show that this ‘moral panic’ was as potent in Manchester as anywhere else. Taking these contrary patterns together, the author suggests that neonaticide and practices like it allow historians to observe the profound cultural divisions and frictions along class lines which structured life in the early industrial city.