Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England: Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC (review)

The foundation of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, long before there came into being a merely National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in 1889, is often taken to indicate the lack of concern in England over cruelty to children. Monica Flegel, in her meticulously careful untangling of the web of influences that came to constitute “cruelty,” has little time for this particular narrative: adults were frequently before the courts in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries for cruelties inflicted on children. Other narratives, however, some competing, some layered one on top of another, form the meat of her analysis. Her end point is the foundation of the NSPCC and its very rapid development to the point where, by the early twentieth century, it was instrumental in passing laws to protect children and had established itself as the institution trusted by government and by the public to seek out and deal with what had become understood as cruelty to children. Through the NSPCC and its inspectors the response to cruelty became professionalized.

It is not Flegel’s intention to write a history of the early years of the NSPCC. George K. Behlmer did that in Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (1982), and beyond an interesting focus on the figure of the inspector, Flegel has little to add to that admirable book. What she is interested in is the long process, reaching back into the early eighteenth century, whereby cruelty to children came to be thought of as something inflicted by adults on defenceless and innocent victims. Flegel traces this process in successive chapters on children and animals, children as performers in pantomimes and circuses, children in the labour market, and juvenile delinquents.

The narratives constructed around these topics were often full of unresolved tensions. On the one hand children and animals might be portrayed as equals in need of protection; on the other it might be the cruelty that children were all too likely to inflict on animals that sprung to mind. Children, like Sissy Jupe in Hard Times (1854), might symbolize, in contrast to the Gradgrind children, many of the prized qualities of childhood, but Charles Dickens could not pretend that a circus life was really suitable for a child. Child performers in pantomimes might in many ways entrance audiences, but their work conditions cried out for reform. Children making a living in the street might be enterprising if irritating entrepreneurs, or they might be poor exploited waifs in need of rescue. Those labelled as “ juvenile delinquents” posed a particular problem, for it was difficult to argue that all were wholly innocent: was it entirely environment that had led them astray, or were some of them at least not innocent but bad?

Flegel argues that all of these competing narratives coalesced in the NSPCC propaganda and its leading figure, Benjamin Waugh. The NSPCC, she argues, gained a kind of monopoly on the discourse of cruelty, shifting attention from case studies to the casework carried out by its trained personnel.

No one will read this book without admiring the skill and insight with which Flegel has built up a picture of these narratives. Although she is rather too inclined to rely on and quote the work of previous scholars as support for her argument—and the breadth of her reading is exemplary—she does on many occasions complicate if not directly challenge our understanding, particularly in the chapter on animals. The book nevertheless raises questions that Flegel doesn’t really address. The first of these is the selection of sources on which she depends. Fiction, poetry, contemporary comment, and The Child’s Guardian are used without much discrimination or any assessment of the writer: words are what Flegel deals with and in the construction of these narratives one person’s words have as much weight as another’s...