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Reviewed by:
  • Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900
  • Joel Peter Eigen (bio)
Josephine McDonagh. Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 278pp. US$65. ISBN 0–521–78193–0.

Drawing upon a rich canvas of novels, poems, and plays, and then turning to contemporary scientific and political tracts, Josephine McDonagh explores eighteenth- and nineteenth-century child murder as a metonymic representation of changing cultural sentiments and sensibilities. At one moment child murder may stand for the lamentable, if not unexpected, result of a rapidly commercializing society; at another, infanticide represents civic sacrifice and even personal redemption. According to the author, the spectacle of child murder as cultural motif was sufficiently protean to stand for anxieties associated with colonization, emerging national identity, or disquiet regarding social progress. One of the singular accomplishments of this volume is that McDonagh has focused her attention on the consumers of these literary works and philosophical treatises, speculating on the likely transformative effect that engagement with these motifs could produce.

Clearly, the meaning that child murder carried, rather than the event itself, has captured McDonagh's interest. She has found vivid representations of child murder associated with the "seduction narrative" (119), Malthusian musings regarding "surplus population" (118), and even contradictory sentiments in which the crime could reveal both an "idle savage and the product of sensuous indulgence" and civic virtue: the necessary sacrifice of one's children for a higher, political goal (23). She has been particularly skilful in her textural interpretation of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, providing a provocative reading of the motif of child murder employed in Adam Bede, in which burial of the infant symbolizes the cultural memories that "must be forgotten for the perpetuation of the nation" (145), and Jude the Obscure, where death is stripped of all cultural meaning and, in consequence, stands only for nihilism. [End Page 373]

The focus on cultural meanings and shifting value sentiments does not, however, extend to the legal significance of the term murder in her title. Although McDonagh includes a description of the notorious statute of l624 that branded concealment of pregnancy as evidence of the mother's intent to murder, and a discussion of its eventual repeal in l803, the legal elements of guilt fastening in court fall conspicuously outside the author's interest in the spectacle, rather than the act, of child murder. It is, of course, the author's prerogative to tell the story she considers worth telling, but an attempt to illuminate the meanings inscribed in a specific act of interpersonal violence and the likely effect these meanings had on spectators ignores at its peril the many Londoners who crowded into the gallery at the Old Bailey to witness the adjudication of these crimes. The dramas that unfolded daily at the city's central criminal court have long been referred to as London's longest-running morality play, with lurid tales of both the crime and the trial spreading throughout the populace within minutes of courtroom testimony. Child murder was not a cultural motif there; it was the desperate act of a mother suffering the ravages of puerperal mania, or a servant girl trying to evade scandal and ensure employment, or the tragic, unintentional act of "overlaying" an infant. Doubtless these cases could carry larger social meanings for the jury and the gallery, but first they had to be explained to the court.

With the exception of the fate of the fictional Hetty Sorel, McDonagh's study is curiously silent on the courtroom dynamics that assigned culpability to—or conversely, absolved from responsibility—the domestic servants, honest wives, or actual Hetty Sorels who frequented the Old Bailey throughout the period covered in this study. Rich materials exist in the form of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers that reveal infanticide to have been presented and perceived as a matter of physiological exhaustion following delivery, or hallucinatory compulsions launched by the Evil One, or sheer destitution: throwing one's children into the Thames to avoid their slow death from starvation. The lack of forensic medical views on the reasons behind child murder is therefore a regrettable omission; the effort to infer shifts in the "spectacle...

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