"The Black Lamb of the Black Sheep": Illegitimacy in the English Working Class, 1850-1939

Abstract

Illegitimate children in the respectable working class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced numerous obstacles in their childhoods, including violence, poverty, state intervention, and identity crises. Though most illegitimates were folded into the maternal family, their home lives were complicated by the hostile reaction of some relatives and neighbors to their births, and many such informal adoptions were unstable. Children discovered their real parents without preparation, or they felt constrained to keep the family secret without ever quite knowing why. They were also often shuttled between family members and into and out of state care. In addition, social and legal discrimination survived well into the twentieth century, leading to feelings of inferiority. Although some children reported happy childhoods, the majority never felt secure, and tended to blame their illegitimacy for all problems. In particular, their relationships with their mothers suffered, but they could also have difficulties with siblings and extended kin. The experience of these outsiders revises several historical interpretations of the working-class family, as well as showing the influence of Victorian sexual attitudes into the mid-twentieth century.