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

Lydia Murdoch's Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London attempts to restore agency to the impoverished parents whose children spent time in state or private welfare institutions. Murdoch argues that the parents' pursuit of legal means and use of the press to ensure better care for or proper access to their children was active citizenship. To this end, she primarily focuses on the charitable institutions run by Thomas Barnardo and the state provision in London, namely the Poor Law institutions but also covers Dr T. Bowman Stephenson's National Children's Home, Edward de Montjoie Rudolf's Church of England Waifs and Strays Society, and Reverend Benjamin Waugh's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Imagined Orphans's thesis contests most work in the field: it counteracts Frank Crompton's Workhouse Children: Infant and Child Paupers under the Worcestershire Poor Law, 1780–1871 (1997), the only book-length study of children and the Poor Law and Norman Longmate's The Workhouse: A Social History (1974), which both argue for the power of institutions over individuals, especially the poor. Murdoch also contests Michel Foucault's and Jacques Donzelot's theories that the poor, among others, were disciplined within these "total institutions." In trying to recover the lost experiences of families who were involved with welfare institutions, Murdoch argues that the facilities available for the poor enabled the survival of the family unit, rather than serving as depositories for the unwanted children of depraved parents.

While recovering the lost histories of agency within the poor community is a valuable project, balance remains important. Tens of thousands of children were involved with Poor Law institutions, but Murdoch identifies very few examples of parental agency and active citizenship. Imagined Orphans tends to imply the possibility and practicality of such agency on a much larger scale. The range of scholarship on children of the poor that argues otherwise would seem to prove that such widespread parental agency did not in fact exist. It is also important to remember that there were structures that removed agency and excoriated the poor; it was the existence of these structures that produced the necessity for reform.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution Imagined Orphans makes to the study of Victorian child welfare is its thorough consideration of Barnardo and his charitable institutions. Murdoch reads the construction of before-and-after photographs in Barnardo's periodical Night and Day: A Monthly Record of Christian Missions and Practical Philanthropy as telling a larger physiognomical narrative of degeneration and social inferiority to an audience well-versed in reading such images. Murdoch, however, could have profitably expanded her thorough analysis by considering the relationship between these images and contemporary evolution and degeneration theory. This would have been valuable, particularly as she later shows how narratives of British identity in the face of the racial and cultural differences of empire—especially the case of Barnardo's intervention to rescue the Beni-Zou-Zougs—became more appealing to late-Victorian audiences than narratives of class difference. The analysis also suffers from its focus on the demonisation of parents through the "savage" appearance of the "rescued" children in the photographs which, as one parent complained, perpetuated a "systematic fraud upon a benevolent public" (42). In this, Murdoch neglects the fact that middle-class Victorian society also perceived the existence of these children as both a source of anxiety (society was failing these children) and as a threat.

After tracing the move from Barrack Schools to Family Cottages and considering the causes of poverty through an examination of family backgrounds, Murdoch explores the rights of parents as enshrined within the notion of English freeborn citizens. In arguing that parents invoked this in order to oversee the care of their institutionalised children, Murdoch might lay too great a claim for the active assumption of parenting roles: parental queries about faith teaching or...