Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900 (review)

Josephine McDonagh begins her ambitious study of the representation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British infanticide with a familiar anecdotal gesture: "On the evening of 2 February 1774, a small, injured body was discovered in the 'necessary' at the home of Paul Cauldwell, a soap-maker of Cow Cross, East London. The baby, whose cries had been heard by the servants, had been dropped in the privy and pushed down with a stick, sustaining a half-inch wound in his belly" (1). This opening not only echoes the famous passage that launches Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975), but, as anyone who has fished even briefly in these waters will recognize, countless essays and books inspired by new historicism. Others have written about the role of the anecdote; I only want to underline the way in which the anecdote inscribes history as central by way of a rigid placement in space and time even as it undertakes an erasure of history in the sweeping gesture that informs the rest of this book—namely, the sweeping of lived experience under the rug of history-as-text.

For, rather quickly in this volume, as in many of its kind (including my own work, I hasten to acknowledge), the vivid outlines of the image of the "injured body" as described by McDonagh are blurred by the implicit assertion that the facts of the case—this case—are unknowable. McDonagh says that "[e]ven though historians have used the documentary evidence effectively to imagine the events at and around the scene of the crime by using a probabilistic calculus, such endeavours often overlook the extent to which the exact nature of the events was always obscured to contemporary commentators" (3). The phrase "probabilistic calculus" functions here as a marker for innocence and opens the way, a few pages later, for a statement of theoretical intent founded on a greater sophistication than "standard" history can offer: "My purpose is not to establish what happened—the whens, wheres, and whys. I am interested less in individual cases of murder, like that of poor Cornforth junior, who in any case receded from public purview as quickly and unceremoniously as he entered it, than in the murder of any child, in the idea of child murder as it circulated in society and through time, far beyond the scene of the crime" (5–6). Historians objected from the beginning to the new historicist refusal of materiality; it is an objection some literary critics scoffed at as relying too securely on certainty, taboo in our poststructuralist climate. Now, however, as scholars actively reconsider unquestioned new historical theoretical practices, and as we pass the twenty-year anniversary of the birth of Representations, it might be worth interrogating the idea that ideas are somehow more knowable than facts.

Make no mistake: this is an excellent study of its kind. It is almost encyclopedic in scope, including a tremendous trove of historical material meticulously documented and winningly presented. McDonagh covers every literary text one might imagine including in such a study (the list would cite Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal [1729], probably; William Wordsworth's "The Thorn" [1798], certainly; and Adam Bede [1859], of course), as well as some surprising entries, such as the discussion of Irish fairy changeling stories that closes the book. Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1714) does not immediately come to mind as a text of infanticide, but placed alongside A Modest Proposal (and a host of other texts), and read as a narrative of appetite and consumption, offering ways of "talking about other matters: the modes and manners of commercial life, the pleasures and pains of luxury, the pitfalls of colonial policies, the corruptions of the state" (15), Mandeville's text begins to seem an obvious or inevitable choice, especially once one swallows the premise that substitution is the rule that governs all writing. It is this premise that animates the chapters...