Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England

Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC

Monica Flegel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317162339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Moving nimbly between literary and historical texts, Monica Flegel provides a much-needed interpretive framework for understanding the specific formulation of child cruelty popularized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the late nineteenth century. Flegel considers a wide range of well-known and more obscure texts from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth, including philosophical writings by Locke and Rousseau, poetry by Coleridge, Blake, and Caroline Norton, works by journalists and reformers like Henry Mayhew and Mary Carpenter, and novels by Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Morrison. Taking up crucial topics such as the linking of children with animals, the figure of the child performer, the relationship between commerce and child endangerment, and the problem of juvenile delinquency, Flegel examines the emergence of child abuse as a subject of legal and social concern in England, and its connection to earlier, primarily literary representations of endangered children. With the emergence of the NSPCC and the new crime of cruelty to children, new professions and genres, such as child protection and social casework, supplanted literary works as the authoritative voices in the definition of social ills and their cure. Flegel argues that this development had material effects on the lives of children, as well as profound implications for the role of class in representations of suffering and abused children. Combining nuanced close readings of individual texts with persuasive interpretations of their influences and limitations, Flegel's book makes a significant contribution to the history of childhood, social welfare, the family, and Victorian philanthropy.

Chapter 1
Creating Cruelty to Children: Genre, Authority, and the Endangered Child

In a study that purports to trace the ways in which a broadly imagined narrative becomes more narrowly defined once encapsulated within the modern welfare state, it might seem problematic to focus so intensely on one institution, and a private charity at that. It is my contention, however, that the emergence of the NSPCC represents a key transitional moment in the cultural imagining of child endangerment. While child-protection agencies pre-existed (and co-existed with) the NSPCC,1 none played so central a role in the definition of cruelty to children, in the production of propaganda that made it a recognized concept, and in the development of laws that made it a crime. Furthermore, in its desire to professionalize and in its battle on behalf of the national, rather than the local, the NSPCC presents us with an early precursor of twentieth-century child-protection agencies. But perhaps most importantly for this study, the NSPCC’s changing use of narrative in its construction of cruelty to children provides a clear illustration of the relationship between genre, authority, and the delineation of social ills and their amelioration so central to this project.

In its very early years, the Society presented its work as primarily informative: drawing upon the genre of the case study, which had been used before by reformers such as Mary Carpenter and Frances Power Cobbe, for example, the NSPCC sought to create a connection between the readers of its journals and the suffering children of London. Such a connection, I argue, relied upon a sympathy “ready-made” (in George Eliot’s words), upon cultural narratives of child endangerment that had been developing throughout the nineteenth century. But within a few years of its emergence, the NSPCC’s narrative shifted. No longer merely informative, the NSPCC’s narratives of abuse instead underlined and supported the singular authority of the Society itself. That authority, however, was not entirely stable, for the very narratives of child endangerment upon which the NSPCC based its own construction of the abused child remained within and worked to contradict the logic of “child protection” as effective ameliorative action.

Social Control, Faultlines, and the Child

In 1897, William Clarke Hall, the NSPCC’s barrister, wrote The Queen’s Reign for Children, which outlined the various changes that had taken place in child life in England during Victoria’s reign. This history was, ostensibly, a means of showing gratitude to a Queen who had done so much to protect “the most helpless of her subjects” in her 60 years on the throne, but it also served to place the NSPCC within a larger history of child endangerment in the nineteenth century. As Waugh states in his introduction to the text,

Could we bring to the sympathetic imagination of the inhabitants of these Islands a picture of the condition under which children lived in the year 1837, when the Royal lady, now in the golden ripe of her reign, a tender girl, ascended the throne, the result of the contrast would be a mingled incredulity, amazement, and thankfulness such as no other contrast of the reign could inspire.2

While the thankfulness this narrative is meant to inspire is owed to England’s Queen, it is important to note that Waugh identifies the “great awakening of the nation to a true and full recognition of the rights of children”3 with the passage of the Children’s Charter in 1889. By placing the Society at the end of a glorious reign marked by increasing care and concern for children, Waugh and Hall’s history depicts the NSPCC as the sole inheritor of a grand tradition, begun with the anti–child labor activism of the 1830s and 40s, continued in the work on behalf of juvenile delinquents, and finally brought to fruition in the NSPCC’s work on behalf of children.

The narrative of The Queen’s Reign is compelling, not least because it is so familiar. As late as the 1980s, theorists such as Lloyd DeMause would refer to the “evolution” of human society as something that could be measured in its progressively more humane and caring treatment of children.4 However, the story of the emergence of the abused child as a legal subject, and of the NSPCC as a centralized body responsible for the surveillance of and legal intervention on behalf of that child and its home, is also the familiar story of the rise of social control in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The use of case studies, statistics, and categorization as a means of combating real and imagined social ills was not unique to the NSPCC, and has indeed become the primary method of monitoring and controlling populations in contemporary society. Instead of reading the emergence of child protection as the triumph of compassion over cruelty, or as a narrative of progress in the treatment of children in Western society, therefore, it can and is read as emblematic of disciplinary tactics.5 In Policing Gender, Class, and Family: Britain, 1850–1940, Linda Mahood identifies “the late nineteenth-century child-saving movement” as “part of a massive intervention into private life” by government and charitable institutions.6 Such an intervention can be seen as part of what Michel Foucault identifies as the rise of “discipline”—that is, the construction of new forms of information, and new ways of ordering and controlling space and bodies as a means of domination—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Foucault argues that “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations,”7 and in terms of this study, it would certainly be possible to identify the emergence of the NSPCC and its development of casework, by which it first “created” and then identified and prosecuted the crime of cruelty to children, as one such example of a “field of knowledge” that came to constitute a particular set of “power relations” in England: as representative of what Jacques Donzelot identifies as the transition from “a government of families to a government through the family.”8

While the NSPCC and its discursive and policing strategies can be understood as one instance of “a complex system of production and distribution of knowledge which, once in circulation, acquires a truth value placing it in a position of domination,” it is important to recognize that this position was far from absolute.9 As Louise Jackson has pointed out, “Despite the high profile role of the NSPCC on a national level, it should not be assumed that the society monopolized child welfare work … The NSPCC was simply the largest society of many”10—and as such, the Society faced competition in its efforts to define the endangered child, while also continually asserting the authority of its singular vision. Furthermore, the NSPCC faced attacks from other quarters: from working-class parents who accused the NSPCC of targeting lower class families; from other SPCCs who resented the NSPCC’s failure to respect local cultures and politics; and from organizations such as the Charity Organisation Society, which accused the Society of mismanaging its funds.11 These many assaults upon the NSPCC speak, in part, to the controversial nature of its work: work that, as Lord Shaftesbury famously declared, was of so “private, internal and domestic a character as to be beyond the reach of legislation.”12 I would further argue, however, that what allowed so many attacks upon the fledgling organization were the contradictions at work within the Society’s own narratives of abuse. In examining the emergence of the NSPCC, therefore, I am interested not so much in simply identifying the NSPCC as a means of discipline and surveillance, as I am in tracing the residual narratives, tactics, and strategies that persist within and problematize the NSPCC’s own understanding of cruelty to children, and of child protection as a discourse and as a practice.

A crucial theoretical concept for understanding the displacement of some of the multiple representations of child endangerment with the somewhat unified (if still unstable) representation of the abused child is what Mary Poovey identifies as the “disaggregation” of epistemological domains. In Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864, Poovey describes the process by which epistemological domains—such as “the social”—emerge and eventually become separated from pre-existing domains, such as the “political” and the “economic.” These emergent domains do not “immediately replace their predecessors, however, but [are] mapped onto them in a process that entail[s] the negotiation and eventual redrawing of the boundaries between kinds of knowledge, kinds of practice, and kinds of institutions.”13 Importantly, Poovey emphasizes the “incoherence that results from the uneven process of disaggregation itself”: “Because emergent domains develop out of and retain a constitutive relationship to preexistent, or residual, domains, the rationalities and forms of calculation that are involved in new domains tend to carry with them traces of the rationality specific to the domain in which they arise.”14 These traces of a pre-existing rationality create contradictions, irrationalities, or “faultlines” in the emergent domain, a condition that, Poovey argues, “explodes the idea that power could ever be monolithic or merely repressive.”15

The instability of the construction of cruelty to children, here represented in the discourse of the NSPCC, results, in part, from the instability of its object—childhood itself. The conceptualization of the abused child in the 1880s was in part the result of a model of childhood that came into its own in the nineteenth century: specifically, that of childhood as, ideally, a protected, carefree time and space that should be enjoyed by all children, regardless of class. In The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth Century, Hugh Cunningham argues that the distance between the children of the rich and the children of the poor was “emphasized and celebrated” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but “came to be deplored” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.16 English society increasingly began to believe that “all children were … entitled to enjoyment of the experiences of what constituted a ‘proper childhood,’” or “the kind of childhood which was being constructed in the middle-class world.”17 This “proper” childhood was constructed around issues of dependence, and “Autonomy, both economic and social, was now an adult prerogative. Children’s right was to a ‘natural’ childhood state of innocence and irresponsibility: any whose knowledge and responsibility were ‘adult’ needed rescue.”18 A child enjoying an appropriate childhood was therefore, ideally, excluded from supporting the family financially, because childhood, it was increasingly believed, should be a space free from excessive labor.19 Instead, the child became “the repository for certain valued and post-Enlightenment traits such as innocence, liberty, and naturalness.”20 The emergence of childhood as a protected time and space to be shared by all children, therefore, resulted in the transformation of the child from an economically useful member of a household to an “economically ‘worthless’ but emotionally ‘priceless’” figure in society.21

The emergence of “childhood” as a new domain overwrote existing epistemological frameworks for understanding youth and infancy, and as such, retained residual narratives about, most importantly for this stu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Creating Cruelty to Children: Genre, Authority, and the Endangered Child
• 2 “Animals and Children”: Savages, Innocents, and Cruelty
• 3 “What Eyes Should See”: Child Performance and Peeping Behind the Scenes
• 4 “Cannibalism in England”: Commerce, Consumption, and Endangered Childhood
• 5 The Dangerous Child: Juvenile Delinquents, Criminality, and the NSPCC
• Conclusion: Inspector Stories: The Inspector’s Directory and the Cruelty Man
• Bibliography
• Index