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Muffled Voices: Recovering Children’s Voices from England’s Social Margins

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Children’s Voices from the Past

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood ((PSHC))

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Abstract

Britain’s first purpose-built institution for children deemed at risk of becoming habituated criminals was established in London in 1788. Named the Philanthropic Society, it evolved over the next century into an exemplary institution for the treatment of juvenile delinquents. While the Society’s administrators produced promotional materials which praised its achievements, the opinions of the admitted children themselves were only latterly solicited and reported. In its early years, the voices of the children it took in and their attitudes towards their circumstances of care were rarely recorded directly. This contrasts with later attempts to solicit feedback from successfully reformed boys who emigrated to the British Empire. This chapter compares both direct and indirect voices of children who experienced this unique institution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The exception is Heather Shore, Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London (London: Boydell Press, 1999). Also, see the essays in Pamela Cox and Heather Shore, eds., Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650–1950 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002).

  2. 2.

    A similar approach to analysing the records of a parallel institution in Belgium is found in Jenneke Christiaens, “Testing the Limits: Redefining Resistance in a Belgian Boys’ Prison, 1895–1905,” in Becoming Delinquent, eds. Cox and Shore, 88–104. Christiaens builds on the classic theoretical work of James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

  3. 3.

    I recognize the contested nature of the term “care” in the context of institutions established for custodial care, wardship, or guardianship of children as more historical research and care leavers themselves expose evidence of institutions that were at times unable to provide “careing” environments or failed to fully address charges of neglect or systemic abuse. For one example from a modern context, see Lynn Abrams, “Lost Childhoods: Recovering Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Scotland,” in Childhood in Question: Children,Parentsand the State, eds. Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Husssey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 152–171.

  4. 4.

    Peter N. Stearns, “Challenges in the History of Childhood,” Journal of History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 35–42.

  5. 5.

    Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 10 September 2018), April 1798, trial of WILLIAM STINSON (t17980418-2).

  6. 6.

    J.M. Beattie, Crimeand the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 444–445; Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 284, 290, 295, 305–306; Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, eds. Douglas Hay et al. (London: Pantheon, 1975), 45.

  7. 7.

    “Ordered that Mary Stenson [sic] aged 9 years the Daughter of William Stenson who was executed for coining and left a widow with seven Children be put on the List for Admission.” Surrey History Centre (hereafter SHC) 2271/2/2 General Court and General Committee minute book, 26 April 1799, fo. 476.

  8. 8.

    Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996); Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); M.J.D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  9. 9.

    An Account of the Nature and Present State of thePhilanthropic Society (London, 1846), 19.

  10. 10.

    A Short Account of thePhilanthropic Society, Instituted September 1788, for the Promotion of Industry, and the Reform of the Criminal Poor (London, 1791), 2.

  11. 11.

    Julius Carlebach, Caring for Children in Trouble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); Muriel Whitten, Nipping Crime in the Bud: How the Philanthropic Quest Was Put into Law (Hampshire, UK: Waterside Press, 2011). As Lydia Murdoch has found for the later Victorian period, there was a similar ‘disjunction’ in the eighteenth century between popular notions of the orphan and the realities of institutions like the Philanthropic filling itinerant roles of care in loco parentis but as a result of the failings and hardships suffered by living parents to the ‘orphans’ rather than because of their actual loss. Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families,Child Welfare, and ContestedCitizenshipin London (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 2.

  12. 12.

    An Address to the Public from thePhilanthropic Society, Instituted in MDCCLXXXVIII, for the Promotion of Industry, and the Reform of the Criminal Poor (London, 1791), 29.

  13. 13.

    Address to the Public, 25.

  14. 14.

    For a useful summary, see John O’Neill, “The Disciplinary Society: From Weber to Foucault,” The British Journal of Sociology 37, no. 1 (1986): 42–60. On the value of “diverse and fragmentary evidence” found in case files drawn from a range of sources, see Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson, eds., On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Mark Peel, Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  15. 15.

    “Philanthropic Society,” The Times, 23 April 1793, 3.

  16. 16.

    See, for example, Public Advertiser, 20 March 1790; The Times, 8 June 1801, 3.

  17. 17.

    SHC 2271/18/2 Girls’ Registers, fo. 1.

  18. 18.

    SHC 2271/2/2, General Court and General Committee Minute Book, ff. 34–35.

  19. 19.

    SHC 2271/10/1, Registers of Admissions, fo. 3, fo. 28.

  20. 20.

    While similar data exists for the admitted girls, the total numbers are smaller and I want to make a comparison with boys’ experiences in the other set of records I discuss below.

  21. 21.

    The event sparked an internal review of the future ability of the Society to cater to both girls and boys and began the transition to a boys’ only institution. See Carlebach, Children in Trouble, 14–15.

  22. 22.

    Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child RescueDiscourse, England, Canadaand Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 159.

  23. 23.

    Whitten, Nipping Crime in the Bud, 185–186. I will treat this story more fully in a forthcoming study.

  24. 24.

    Charlotte Neff, “Youth in Canada West: A Case Study of Red Hill Farm School Emigrants, 1854–1868,” Journal of Family History 25, no. 4 (October 2000): 432–490.

  25. 25.

    Saheed Aderinto, “‘O! Sir I Do Not Know Either to Kill Myself or to Stay’: Childhood Emotion, Poverty, and Literary Culture in Nigeria, 1900–1960,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8, no. 2 (2015): 273–294.

  26. 26.

    For another discussion of the validity question in child-authored letters, see Claire L. Halstead, “‘Dear Mummy and Daddy’: Reading Wartime Letters from British Children Evacuated to Canada During the Second World War,” in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World, eds. Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 92–108.

  27. 27.

    The Philanthropic Society’s Farm School, Red Hill, Surrey (n.p., 1862), 35.

  28. 28.

    Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communitiesin the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

  29. 29.

    The Philanthropic Society’s Farm School, Red Hill, Surrey (n.p., 1860), 31. The Society’s annual report used variations of the same title. I have included the publication year to differentiate the sources identified by the footnote.

  30. 30.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1860), 37.

  31. 31.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1860), 42.

  32. 32.

    SHC 2271/1/11, p. 27, 8 June 1859.

  33. 33.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1862), 37.

  34. 34.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1862), 44.

  35. 35.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (n.p., 1871), 43.

  36. 36.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (n.p., 1861), 36.

  37. 37.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1862), 31.

  38. 38.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1862), 53.

  39. 39.

    Neff, “Youth in Canada West,” 445–446.

  40. 40.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1861), 34.

  41. 41.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1861), 31.

  42. 42.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1862), 39.

  43. 43.

    Philanthropic Society’s Farm School (1861), 37.

References

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  1. Department of History, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

    Greg T. Smith

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  1. Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia

    Kristine Moruzi

  2. Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, VIC, Australia

    Nell Musgrove

  3. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Carla Pascoe Leahy

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Smith, G.T. (2019). Muffled Voices: Recovering Children’s Voices from England’s Social Margins. In: Moruzi, K., Musgrove, N., Pascoe Leahy, C. (eds) Children’s Voices from the Past. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11896-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11896-9_11

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