Women, Infanticide and the Press, 1822–1922: News Narratives in England and Australia by Nicola Goc (review)

In this thoughtful and nuanced book, Nicola Goc examines selected news narratives about infanticide published in London and penal Australia between 1822 and 1922 to reveal their interconnection with discourses on the regulation of women through the family, through law and justice, and through welfare and medicine. Newspapers were integral, she argues, in framing and influencing public opinion on infanticide as a political issue, in reporting on dramatic cases of individual infanticidal women, and in “providing a potent and shocking symbol of maternal power and a mother’s ability to subvert blood relation” (5).

Goc uses the Foucauldian tools of critical discourse analysis to analyze newspaper accounts for what they reveal about power relations and the production of knowledge and Foucault’s concepts of the 18^th-century and 19^th-century European “society of blood,” which zealously sought to preserve a man’s lineage. Both the demands of mothers of illegitimate children and the killing of illegitimate infants were threats to this society. Goc traces how the Bastardy Clause of the 1834 Poor Law, which denied women any maintenance from the fathers of their illegitimate children, led to a rise in infanticides by desperate women. The injustice of this law led the Times, under the editorships of Thomas Barnes and John Delane, to use examples of individual infanticides and the 1841 investigation into deplorable conditions in the lying-in room of the Seven Oaks Workhouse to campaign for reform of the law. Goc also examines the importance of 19^th-century medical discourse to the political debates on infanticide, in particular, the publication of medical texts such as William Hutchinson’s A Dissertation on Infanticide and Its Relations to Physiology and Jurisprudence (1820) and Dr William Burke Ryan’s Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention, and History (1862) as well as the testimony of medical witnesses, which provided crucial evidence to determine the infant’s cause of death and the mother’s guilt. Goc also details at length in Chapter 3 the debates sparked by controversial Middlesex coroner Edwin Lankester. A surgeon who held the post from 1862 to 1874, he claimed that London was experiencing an epidemic of infanticide by unsupervised servants and used dubious statistics to claim that 16,000 women in London had killed their babies (87).

The great strength of Goc’s book is her close textual readings of the news stories, in particular, her recovery of the silenced voices of 19^th-century infanticidal women, whose unmediated voices rarely appear in court reports and news narratives. Goc has done a masterful job of uncovering the individual motivations and personalities of cases that were reported in depth, such as that of Mary Smith in 1833 in Staffordshire Crown Court and Mary McLauchlan in Van Diemen’s Land in 1830. Like most women who appeared in the courts accused of infanticide, both women were working-class servants (Mary McLauchlan was also a convict prisoner), and neither testified in their own defence. Goc traces the story of Mary Smith as reported in the Times – that she had had a child by her master, James Harrison, and that the baby, named Mary Ann, had been well cared for. Succumbing to an idea “that came into her head all at once,” she drowned the baby in the canal. When the body was discovered, she expressed great remorse, said the devil “must have put it in her head” and that the father was innocent. Found guilty, her sentence was not reported.

Mary McLauchlan was a Scottish convict who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1829. Assigned to wealthy merchant Charles Ross Nairne as a servant for his pregnant wife, within two months Mary was also pregnant and was dismissed from Nairne’s service shortly thereafter for “misconduct” in asking for her allotted quantity of clothing. Sent to the Cascades Female Factory, a workhouse for female convicts, she strangled her infant at...