Abstract
This invocation, published first in a newspaper in San Francisco, and so widely circulated that it was reprinted in a newspaper in regional New South Wales, captures precisely the way in which, by the end of her reign, the narrative which Hugh Cunningham has called the ‘heroic story of child rescue’ became attached to the body and person of the Queen.2 It was a sentiment that resonated across the Empire, reaching its apotheosis in 1897, the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Declaring it ‘strange that the world had been Christian for so long yet no law had been passed to protect women and children’, a New Zealand newspaper reassured its readers that ‘all that had been stopped by Act of Parliament during Victoria’s reign’.3 The local magistrate in Bunbury, Western Australia, went one step further, personally crediting the Queen with the changes that had occurred. Addressing local school children at the jubilee demonstration, Mr W.H. Timberley asserted that:
the Queen and her Government had taken the children out of those mines and factories and sent them to school…because they desired that children should have the advantages of education in order that they might be trained to be good and loyal men and women…and had created hospitals and homes in the United Kingdom and in various parts of the Australian colonies where children found homeless were taken in and brought up to be respectable men and women.4
In all the advance that the world has made during the past half century and more, charity, goodness, and loving kindness owe more to Queen Victoria than any other person. Nearly all the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, children and women drew their inspiration from…Queen Victoria [who] made kindness fashionable.1
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Notes
Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 9.
George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982);
Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: England, 1872–1989 (London: Routledge, 1994).
See for example: A. Allen and A. Morton, This Is Your Child: The Story of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961);
Gillian Wagner, Barnardo (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979);
June Rose, For the Sake of the Children: Inside Dr. Barnardo’s, 120 Years of Caring for Children (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987).
Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
See for example: Gail H. Corbett, Nation Builders: Barnardo Children in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2002);
Alan Gill, Orphans of the Empire: The Shocking Story of Child Migration to Australia (Alexandria, NSW: Millennium Books, 1997);
David Hill, The Forgotten Children: Fairbridge Farm School and Its Betrayal of Australia’s Child Emigrants (North Sydney, NSW: Random House, 2007);
Marjorie Kohli, The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada, 1833–1939 (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2003);
Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1879–1924 (London: Croom Helm, 1980).
Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
Mark S. Looker, ‘God Save the Queen: Victoria’s Jubilees and the Religious Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 21, no. 3 (1988), 115–18.
W. Clarke Hall, The Queen’s Reign for Children (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897).
R.J.T., ‘Victoria, Our Queen 1837–1901’, Brothers and Sisters, no. 96 (1901), 37–8.
Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1.
Elizabeth Langland, ‘Nation and Nationality: Queen Victoria in the Developing Narrative of Englishness’, in Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (eds), Remaking Queen Victoria, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 23.
Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1921).
Adrienne Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 210.
Andrea Bobotis, ‘Rival Maternities: Maud Gonne, Queen Victoria, and the Reign of the Political Mother’, Victorian Studies, vol. 49, no. 1 (2006), 74.
Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–76 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 5.
For a fuller discussion of judgements of Queen Victoria as Mother see: Yvonne Ward, ‘The Womanly Garb of Queen Victoria’s Early Motherhood, 1840–2’, Women’s History Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (1999), 277–94.
S. Lang, ‘Saving India through Its Women’, History Today, vol. 55, no. 9 (2005), 45–46.
Walter L. Arnstein, ‘HISTORY: Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee’, The American Scholar, vol. 66, no. 4 (1997), 594.
G.A. Sala, ‘Our Society’s Deserts’, The Child’s Guardian, vol. 1, no. 8 (1887), 60.
Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich, ‘Introduction’, in Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (eds), Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4.
T.J. Barnardo, ‘The Queen’s Diamond Year: How to Commemorate It’, Night and Day, vol. 21, no. 198 (1897). For a similar article directed at child emigrants in Canada, see ‘A Jubilee of Jubilees’, Ups and Downs, vol. 2, no. 11 (1 June 1897), 4.
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© 2016 Shurlee Swain
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Swain, S. (2016). A Motherly Concern for Children: Invocations of Queen Victoria in Imperial Child Rescue Literature. In: Robinson, S., Sleight, S. (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_2
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