Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (review)

Lydia Murdoch's well-researched, well-illustrated, and clearly argued study makes three key points about child welfare in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London: the real lives of children in charitable and Poor Law institutions were far different from the discourses representing them to the public; institutional records demonstrate that poor children and their parents resisted the practices and policies of child-welfare workers; and, most importantly, conflicting ideas about citizenship were central to the gap between reality and representation, and to the understandings of poor parents' place in their children's lives. Murdoch's book takes its place alongside recent studies of welfare and institutions in which historians privilege the voices of the recipients of welfare and see welfare as a negotiated process. It also contributes to scholarship on citizenship, and on the relationship of the poor to national belonging and the state.

Murdoch is a cultural and social historian, using analysis of written and visual representations alongside careful reconstruction of family histories in institutional records. Her argument relies predominantly on sources from London Poor Law institutions for children and Thomas Barnardo's charitable homes for children. She convincingly demonstrates that while philanthropists such as Barnardo were invested in the melodramatic representation of poor children as "waifs and strays" (p. 1)—alone in the world, not fully racially or culturally British—institutional documents show that the majority of institutionalized children were not orphans: most had parents who used child-welfare institutions to get through temporary economic crises. Chapters juxtapose the image and the reality, contrasting philanthropists' public claims about poor London children with the experiences of impoverished families themselves.

According to Murdoch, child-welfare reformers situated commitment to employment and middle-class notions of domesticity at the heart of citizenship. Poor parents, whose jobs and homes did not live up to expectations, were regarded as obstacles to their children's becoming responsible citizens. In this view, children needed to be removed from their immoral homes, placed in child-welfare institutions, and denied contact with their contaminating relatives. Family was to be re-created in the domestic—rather than jail-like—institutional settings encouraged by female philanthropists. For zealots like Barnardo, rescuing children from their previous lives—even to the point of "philanthropic abduction" (p. 23)—and rehabilitating them were fundamental to maintaining a healthy Britain. Murdoch tellingly relates how this rehabilitation was based on learning discipline through military drills and a less-than-useful focus on artisanal labor. By the 1890s, an imperial notion of citizenship increasingly stressed the need for soldiers, and child-welfare institutions aimed to lead the training of new Britons.

For working-class parents, however, citizenship meant the liberty of the individual, including the right to parent no matter what the economic or domestic circumstances might be. Poor London parents fought welfare workers' efforts to deny them access to their children. Murdoch also shows that children, in running away to their parents from their supposedly superior institutional settings, strove to sustain family ties and rebelled against the improvements being foisted upon them. Interestingly, Poor Law institutions were much more flexible than Barnardo's homes in recognizing the rights of parents—for example, informing parents about children's medical conditions, or gaining consent for vaccination. This point suggests that historians may need to further complicate understandings about poor people's relative willingness to utilize charitable versus Poor Law relief.

World War I settled the struggle over poor parents' rights to their children's welfare. As Nicoletta Gullace has argued with reference to women ("The Blood of Our Sons," 2002), Murdoch claims that service to the state trumped other ideas about citizenship, reincorporating the poor into the nation. Yet this optimistic conclusion to her story was only temporary: as the history of welfare in more recent times has shown, the...