Imagined Orphans - Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London

Abstract

442 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 21 No. 2 (Winter 2011) ISSN: 1546-2250 Imagined Orphans – Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London Murdoch, Lydia (2006). New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press; 252 pages. $44.95. ISBN 9780813537221. As Victorian studies scholars are aware, the century between the early 1800s and the early 1900s was fraught with massive social, political, economic and geographic changes. In her academic treatise, Imagined Orphans, Lydia Murdoch examines a topic that touches on many of those issues. Her account of the underlying story of child welfare in 19th century London is a fascinating look at the complex array of societal issues that were at play during the Industrial Era. Murdoch, an historian on the faculty of Vassar College, writes of the various events and trends in child welfare by conducting a narrative and visual analysis of a wide-range of sources, both primary and secondary. She examines photographs, advocacy pamphlets, flyers, books, legislation, writings of child welfare activists, accounts of children who utilized the “poor law” system and philanthropic institutions, and accounts of parents of children who utilized those systems. The stories told by these sources help illuminate some of the history of our modern institutions of child welfare and protection. They also peel away many of the layers of mythology surrounding the experiences of poor children in London during the 19th century. According to Murdoch’s research, the commonly held belief that poor urban children in 19th century London’s child welfare systems were almost always orphaned or abandoned is inaccurate in many cases and purely fictional in others. She unearths examples of situations that were misrepresented by child welfare providers and activists, as well as examples of children who were presented as orphaned, when in actuality their parents had placed them in the poor law or philanthropic systems as a means of obtaining social 443 service aid when they most needed it. However, while Murdoch’s introduction to the text suggests that this is the main point of her findings, I would argue that the book is broader than that. Only two of the book’s six chapters directly deal with the issue of parental agency in the child welfare systems of Victorian London. In those two chapters, Murdoch makes a fine case for her argument that contrary to the mythologized views of London’s poor children being orphans and waifs with no adult guidance, parents and other guardians were actually very involved in their children’s welfare. Parents turned to the child welfare systems, both the government-controlled poor law system and private philanthropic organizations, in times of great economic and family hardship. However, this did not mean that they abandoned their offspring at the doors to the facilities. There is ample historic documentation to show that many parents remained active in their children’s lives and welfare even after the children were admitted to residential facilities for child welfare; this documentation gives a much fuller picture of the lives of the urban poor in London at that time. Beyond this, Murdoch’s main thesis, are four additional chapters that provide a chronicle of how the child welfare practices and discourse related to the larger issues of class, citizenship, religion, and gender. In the course of the book we learn that: the Victorian penchant for melodrama in literature leaked into the way poor children were portrayed by philanthropists and others working with them; the burgeoning middle-class values and expectations significantly impacted ideas about the appropriate physical environments for raising children and housing them in institutions; the trends in women’s rights included movements to give women more control over the nation’s child welfare system and practices; religion impacted the structure of philanthropic child welfare facilities; and training for citizenship and employment became a central driving force in the programming of child welfare institutions. These various descriptions and interrelationships are key to what I feel is actually the central theme of the book: the genesis of modern Western child welfare practices. It is amply clear from Murdoch’s work how many of our modern practices and 444 difficulties developed, and where we still struggle with certain issues over...