"The fellow said it was not harm and only tricks": The Role of the Father in Suspected Cases of Infanticide in Ireland, 1850-1900

Abstract

In June 1881, Anne Dunne was charged with the murder of her illegitimate infant son. The case had been brought before the Dublin Commission Court in April but the accused had fainted in the dock and the trial had consequently been postponed. The attending doctor, who was also a witness in the case, had informed the court on that occasion that the defendant had suffered from “a bad attack of hysteria and syncope, and her heart's action was remarkably weak.”1 This supposed case of infanticide excited little attention; cases of attempted infant murder, infanticide or concealment of birth were detected on a weekly basis in the latter half of nineteenth-century Ireland. Surviving Irish sources examined for this paper refer to a total of 4,645 such cases.2 The statistics generated from Irish infanticide sources reveal that the case of Anne Dunne was, in many ways, typical of those discovered in post-Famine Ireland. Like the infant victim in this instance, over 84% of the babies were classed as illegitimate, when their status was recorded. Thirty-five-year-old Anne Dunne was somewhat older than the typical suspect accused of the murder or concealment of birth of her own infant. Fragmentary evidence suggests that infanticide suspects were, on average, aged twenty-six years.3 Dunne, like almost 70% of the women whose occupations were documented, worked as a domestic servant and was Roman Catholic, like over 82% of defendants.4