Child Murder & British Culture 1720-1900 (review)

Josephine McDonagh draws on a wide and multifarious context for her subject – child murder. For this "extensive and complex" topic, McDonagh has chosen to concentrate on "discussions of commercial society from the 1720s; anthropological debates about the nature of man in the 1770s ...; debates about the social order following the French Revolution in 1798; the explosive responses to the New Poor Law at the end of the 1830s; and the so-called epidemic of child murder in England around 1859." In each of these contexts, McDonagh demonstrates, "child murder emerges as a motif in which debates of serious nature about key issues in Britain's self-imaginings are conducted" (9–10). Included in these wide-ranging primary sources are also allusions to various contemporary journals such as Illustrated London News, the National, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, National Reformer, Northern Liberator, Northern Star, Pall Mall Gazette.

Beginning with Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees and Swift's Modest Proposal, McDonagh reads infanticide in these texts as vehicles of discussing "the modes and manners of commercial life, the pleasures and pains of luxury, the pitfalls of colonial policies, the corruptions of the state" (15). In Swift's perspective, commerce creates vanity, avarice, dishonesty, vices "tantamount to killing babies" (17–18). Luxury and unlicensed passions for commodities turn "civilized people" into child-eating savages. For Mandeville, "modest" women would not flinch at killing their children if they were unwanted, while "common Whores ... are full of motherly tenderness" (26). Infanticide is an act that "paradoxically contributes to the national good by sustaining the economy of public benefit and private vice" (28).

Burke's influential Reflections on the Revolution in France "emblematized social and political disorder in revolutionary France" through the figure of the "the sexually voracious woman" (68). For Burke, the French Revolution was associated with sexual excess and violence. Mary Wollstonecraft was seen as a dangerous persona of the French Revolution, "a mother without being a wife" (84). Wordsworth and Malthus both "respond to the political risks posed by women at the end of the eighteenth century by absorbing dissident femininity into nature" (71). From that time on child murder is usually associated with "the horror of femininity." Malthus added the possibility that child murder could be one of the "preventive checks" that could help regulate population growth (88). The unmarried mother in "The Thorn" is represented as a "pathetic but traditional and indigenous form of deviancy"(80).

Chapter Four discusses the Anti-Malthusian polemics prevalent in the contemporary press. By 1839 Chartists began to blame infanticide and early childhood death on the industrial culture. A series of articles attack the so-called "Marcus pamphlets," satirizing Malthusian politics as justifications for infanticide. These pamphlets illustrate "the way in which ideas ... circulated within the culture, and were co-opted by different individuals and groups to support widely different political positions: in this case, child murder is incorporated in the rhetoric of people of party and opinion as different as the Tory Radical, Baxter, Chartists of various complexion ... as well as the Owenite, Mudie" (112).

The 1860s saw an epidemic of child murder cases – 12,000 women in London were estimated to be murderers (123). Despite "the tenor of much of the literature on female infanticide in India, the child-murder outbreak in Britain in the late 1850s and 1860s shared many characteristics with its occurrence in India" (144). The most famous child murder in the literature of the period appears in Adam Bede, the genesis of which was based on a story of child murder. In this case McDonagh carefully aligns dates in Eliot's notebooks with sociopolitical events and legislative acts related to child murder. Child murder in Adam Bede, she contends, functions "as the bearer of memories that have to be forgotten for the perpetuation of the nation." However, "the figure of forgetting is also the bearer of those memories that must be forgotten, so that to forget...