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  • Sweet Childhood Lost:Idealized Images of Childhood in the British Child Rescue Literature
  • Shurlee Swain (bio)
But still in our teeming cities. Oh sisters! shall we let the children perish?
Though the highways be paved with gold, Lambs of the Shepherd's fold so weak and
Do they not wander with aimless feet, tender,
Children whose childhood was never Sweet childhood lost 'midst paths of sin and
sweet, pain,
Stifled in alley and crowded street— With but a few their deeds of love to render,
Hungry, neglected, cold?1 To rescue such from lives of darkest stain!2

A series of six articles published in Our Waifs and Strays, a magazine for supporters of the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society, in 1901–3 set out to identify the "enemies of childhood." For readers familiar with the propaganda distributed by the British child-rescue movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, the list of villains would have been familiar: drink, that "foetid and infectious river of crime";3 common lodging houses, the "modern Babylon" where children are forced into crime to survive;4 overcrowding, which forced children to "perambulate the streets";5 "perpetuating and intensifying the evil" of child neglect;6 child vagrancy, which resulted from "vicious and criminal parents" bringing up children "ignorant of everything but evil";7 premature wage earning;8 and juvenile street trading, where children looking for freedom opted to work on the "soul-destroying streets" unaware of the moral dangers involved.9 Two years later the magazine returned to the theme, invoking the greatest enemy of all: infant mortality.10 But what did child rescuers understand as the joys of childhood, and to what extent did they believe that these joys were accessible, or even desirable, for the children who came into their care?

This paper aims to interrogate notions of an idealized childhood through the publications of the international child rescue movement which spread from [End Page 198] Britain to its former colonies in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.11 By identifying just what it was that the children targeted for rescue were seen as lacking, the paper creates the basis for a new and more textured understanding of the origins of the concept underlying much subsequent child welfare practice: "the best interests of the child." It argues that while emotive images of a "childhood lost" were highly effective in bringing supporters and resources to the cause, there is little evidence that child rescuers believed that the children amongst whom they worked could, or should, aspire to the idealized childhood which was depicted in much of the fictional, juvenile, and guidance literature of the time.

The origins of the British child rescue movement can be found in the evangelical outreach to the inner cities, feared lost to Christianity in the wake of the rapid urbanization which accompanied the Industrial Revolution. It was first apparent in the Ragged Schools Union, founded under the patronage of Lord Ashley (later Earl Shaftesbury) in 1844, which sought to provide a basic education to poor children excluded from the existing system. The teachers attracted to the new schools, many of whom saw their involvement as a preparation for, or an alternative to, work in the foreign missions, were encouraged to provide more than a basic education to their students by visiting their homes and encouraging their families to embrace Christianity.12 The founders of the child rescue movement all had experience in such evangelical outreach, experience which led them to conclude that more was needed if children were indeed to be saved. Thomas Barnardo (1854–1905), founder of Dr. Barnardo's Homes (1868), had moved to London to prepare for the China Mission but claimed that his life goal was changed through an encounter with boys who had no home to go to and no parents to whom they could look for guidance and care. Thomas Bowman Stephenson (1838–1912), founder of the Wesleyan National Children's Homes (1869), cited a similar encounter with so-called street Arabs, while engaged in outdoor preaching, as the motivation behind what became his life's work. Edward de Montjoie Rudolf (1852–1933), founder of the Anglican Waifs...

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