One winter’s day in November of 1792 Mary Roberts was brought before a London magistrate to be examined as to her parish of settlement.1 Mary had been born in St. Helen’s, Abingdon, but had travelled to London and had earned a new parish of settlement by dint of three years’ service with Mr Edwards of Danvers, St. Luke Chelsea. She was visibly pregnant and told the justice that the father was Jonathan Johnson. Nine days’ later Mary entered St. Luke’s workhouse on being ‘With child’ and stayed for twelve days before she ‘Went Out at her Own Request’. The workhouse committee agreed to give her 3s. 6d. per week. She was back a month later; the reason for admission recorded as ‘Faind in Labour’. It seems that this was a false start and a month later her stillborn baby was born in the workhouse. After four weeks lying-in the workhouse committee ordered her out ‘her month being up’ with 2s. It is likely that she returned to service, like so many women in her circumstances. Although many illegitimate infants died, for many other mothers the birth of their infants was just the start of a difficult period in their lives when they had to find the wherewithal to bring up their children.
The focus of this book is poor unmarried mothers in London like Mary Roberts who, by reason of their poverty, became ‘chargeable’ to the parish. The laws against bastardy were aimed squarely at the poor; those who were not chargeable did not come within the scope of the bastardy statutes.2 This system—established in 1576—both held parents financially liable for their illegitimate children and criminalised them. Affiliation under the old poor law offered parish overseers a parallel process whereby they could reclaim the costs of bastardy from the putative fathers. Affiliation therefore singled out unmarried mothers and putative fathers for ‘special’ treatment, which included bastardy examinations, in which mothers named the putative father, and hearings in court, plus bastardy bonds and maintenance orders.3 Unmarried parents were also subject to the systems of punishment: by church courts to perform public penance for fornication and by magistrates who might order them to be whipped or who committed them to houses of correction.4 Moreover, these gaols were established as places for the punishment and reform of the poor convicted, usually summarily, of petty offences.5 The bastardy laws were overhauled in 1834 as part of the new poor law and, despite attempts to stop the system of affiliation, it was retained, but punishment ceased.6
Over the eighteenth century there was a shift in the ecology of plebeian childbirth in the London. The establishment of many parish workhouses from the early part of the century provided unmarried mothers with an alternative place to give birth, as well as a place to reside if necessary, with outdoor relief running in parallel.7 From mid-century a wave of high-profile charitable lying-in hospitals were founded upon pro-natalist agenda, some of which accepted the unmarried mother.8 Single pregnant women could be delivered at home (paid for themselves, by putative fathers via the affiliation system or by the parish) or in an institution. There was a further institutionalisation of child abandonment with the opening of the Foundling Hospital (1741), thus potentially offering poor unmarried mothers with a place for their children while they returned to work.9 Poor unwed women, their pregnant bodies and the process of childbirth became more visible in terms of public, and even political, discourse and social policy.10 And yet, even with these increased avenues of assistance, secret births and infanticides continued.11 This was in the context of changing judicial attitudes to infanticide whereby far fewer women were found guilty in London, while in 1803 the new offence of concealment of birth was introduced.12
By the end of the century there was a reversal: a population explosion and rapidly rising poor rates tilted in favour of political economy, Malthusian fears of over-population and a harshening in attitudes to the poor and to illegitimacy.13 The Revd. Thomas Robert Malthus commented that ‘no person can doubt the general tendency of an illicit intercourse between the sexes to injure the happiness of society’ and he called for the withdrawal of poor relief to illegitimate children, as well as the abolition of the poor law.14 Chargeable bastard children became an increasing concern of the parochial authorities. The Georgians worried about debt, credit, and national prosperity; it is essential to set the rising costs of the administration of the poor laws, as well as the maintenance of chargeable bastards, within this context.15 National expenditure on the poor increased from £1.9 million for the period 1783–1785, to just over £4 in 1803, and to £7.9 million in 1818.16 The dependency and fertility of the poor became key political issues. There were repeated calls for reform of poor relief, culminating in the Poor Law Commission (who sent out the Rural and Town Queries), the Poor Law Report, the resulting Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and its new bastardy clauses outlined above. The Poor Law Report was drenched in the discourse of the sexual double standard and it called for the ‘entire abolition’ of the bastardy laws.17 However, as Nutt has shown, the official discourse put forward by the Commissioners was disconnected from that of parish officers in their responses to the Rural and Town Queries, many of whom did not see the need for the bastardy laws to be overhauled.18 There was a backlash to the reforms proposed in the Bill and affiliation had to be retained (with some alterations). However, the place for destitute single pregnant women and unmarried mothers became the new union workhouse. The bastardy clauses of the new poor law were the harshest of the new code; they were analysed in some depth by Henriques as early as the 1960s.19 In London this marked less of a new departure than elsewhere, given that the capital had embraced the workhouse for more than a century as one part of its welfare provision.20
Over the entire period covered here, attitudes towards illegitimacy were generally negative but the extent to which bastardy was stigmatised and unmarried parents felt shame is more difficult to decipher.21 As Levene, Nutt and Williams note, ‘[T]he shifting incidence and spatial variations of illegitimacy over this period [1700–1920] serve to remind us not only that children born to unmarried parents were often the product of a diverse range of sexual encounters and relationships, but that social norms and accepted standards could also be highly variable across time and space.’22 There is no doubt that there was a variety of attitudes towards the birth of infants outside of wedlock at any given time and that the circumstances in which such thoughts were shaped and articulated changed substantially with the industrialisation and urbanisation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This book explores the making of metropolitan bastardy and the shifting landscape of chargeable bastardy over the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. This is important not only in its own right, since illegitimacy was rising and was costly, but because it also informs wider debates on courtship and sexual practices, marriage, welfare provision, constructions of motherhood and fatherhood, prostitution and criminality, among others. The book also attempts to recover the experience and agency of unmarried parents and, in particular, of mothers.23 The lived experience of being poor has been a focus of recent scholarship on, for instance, vagrancy.24
Historians might think that the history of unmarried motherhood in the metropolis is familiar. Other studies have used London bastardy examinations, petitions to the charitable Foundling Hospital and applications to the lying-in hospitals to good effect to examine aspects of courtship, the occupations of putative fathers, and the survival strategies of unwed mothers, as well as the access of pregnant single women to the new London lying-in hospitals.25 However, little is known about the encounters of pregnant single women and mothers with the workhouse and...