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

In Imagined Orphans, Lydia Murdoch sets out to reconnect poor parents with the picture of children taken into charity and poor law institutions in nineteenth-century London. Her central theme is the definition of citizenship and parental rights for the poor, and her main thesis is that poor children were not, in fact, the orphans of the charity literature, but firmly connected to their natal families in many cases. They frequently returned to their families after temporary stays in institutions, they were visited by parents, and their parents attempted to negotiate with authorities over the terms of their temporary relinquishment. It was not until World War I that the rights of poor parents were reconceptualized to allow the importance of the link with their children to be maintained. Prior to that, “citizenship” for the poor was couched in quite different terms by those in authority and by parents themselves. The notion of rights is central and provides a strong core for a series of wider links between parenting and changing conceptions of the national stock.

Murdoch keeps two arenas for childcare in view throughout her book: charities (the Dr. Barnardo homes) and the poor law (in particular, several case study poor law schools). Her chapters are thematic in focus, and although some focus predominately on one sector or the other, this illustrates how certain ideas on parenting and poverty did emerge across the board. She begins with an illustrated discussion of how poor children were represented, in particular focusing on the well-known Dr. Barnardo “before” and “after” pictures of children taken in. She offers a new context for these photos by tying them to the familiar contemporary genre of melodrama. Murdoch then moves on to discuss the changing forms of institutional delivery over the course of the nineteenth century—large schools versus smaller cottage communities—and how this relates to a notion of domesticity and desirable character traits among the poor. This is also well-contextualised in terms of developments in the poor law, education, and child welfare legislation. From top-down perceptions of poverty she then discusses the reasons for parental deprivation and the giving up of children—mainly sickness, poor housing and pressures from family size—and analyzes how we can interpret these findings in the light of notions of empire, citizenship, and parental rights.

The book is lent strength by this theoretical underpinning, and Murdoch links her sources skilfully to provide both an analytical basis and an interpretive framework. She also creates a more coherent view of poverty and parenting by keeping both voluntary and state sectors in view. The use of photographs as supporting evidence (many are reproduced in the text) is particularly skillful and effective for illustrating how poor childhood was projected to the public. This tying together of sources is another strength of the study, although its remit could be more clearly set out at the start. In fact, despite its London focus, a strong sense of location is lacking, and useful comments might have been made about the distinctiveness (or otherwise) of London. Similarly, the representativeness of the selected schools within the poor law system would be helpful to set the themes in a wider framework, even the reason behind the choice of Barnardo’s charity rather than others. Nonetheless, Murdoch is correct to state the necessity of joining up poor law and charity provision for childcare, and the approach draws out an interesting set of similarities and contrasts. It seems that in general, Barnardo was able to exert more control over the delivery of childcare, for example, ignoring parental requests as to religious provision and visiting rights. The extent to which Barnardo built up a largely fictional image of his children as orphans, waifs, and street Arabs comes out very strongly. The poor law, in contrast, was more amenable to accommodating the wishes of parents, who were able to manipulate rules on schooling...