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

Lydia Murdoch's fascinating study sheds the light of recent cultural and social history on child welfare organizations in the period from 1870 to 1918. In the historiography these institutions have been written about within the context of administrative history and of philanthropic endeavour. Murdoch tries to see them from the point of view of the users of them, poor parents, and, though to a lesser extent, the inhabitants of their institutions, poor children.

In popular, and especially fund-raising, discourse, the children were orphans, their parents having died or abandoned them. They were portrayed as victims, thoroughly deserving sympathy. Studies of North American and European 'orphanages' have shown that one generalization holds true for all of them: only a minority of their inmates were orphans. Murdoch's study of Barnardo's and of Poor Law institutions confirms this. Only about a quarter of those residing in them were orphans. Some of them had both parents living, but the biggest single category of inmates, half or more of the total, were the children of lone mothers who lacked the resources to bring them up. Murdoch also punctures another myth propagated by fundraisers: for them, the children had been rescued from resisting parents, Barnardo famously indulging in what he called 'philanthropic abduction'; or they had simply been abandoned by their parents, and were found living in the streets. On the contrary, in Poor Law institutions a high proportion of children were ins and outs, the bane of Poor Law officials, but testimony that any abandonment by parents was strictly short-term. And the majority of those who ended up in a Barnardo's institution came there after parental discussions with Barnardo's officials, were often quite short-term residents, and frequently returned thereafter to the parental home. Murdoch places these findings in the context of a mixed economy of welfare where those in receipt of help negotiated their way through a thicket of voluntary and state organizations looking for the best outcome for their children. They were not abandoning their children, and they retained a strong sense of parental rights, complaining about any alleged mistreatment, and sometimes using the police courts to support their claims.

These findings, and the interpretation put upon them, are both convincing and in line with much recent work on the history of welfare. Why, then, was there such a gap between what was actually happening and the representation of what was happening by officials? Murdoch is clear on the gap, but perhaps less so on its causes. Partly this is because she doesn't touch, except obliquely, on the fund-raising that was so much part of Barnardo's business. What she argues – and here again she is in rapport with much recent cultural history – is the overwhelming importance of a melodramatic mode of interpretation in the nineteenth century, one in particular where there was a clear contrast between good (the 'orphans') and evil (poor parents). She supports this line of argument with some telling analysis of the photography for which Barnardo was notorious. She goes on to suggest that by the time of the First World War the melodramatic mode had been replaced by social realism, an argument that perhaps needs more sustenance than she gives it. It is interesting, nevertheless, for historians have been keener to focus on the prevalence of melodrama in its heyday than to analyse the timing, causes and consequences of its decline.

Murdoch's selection of her period, taken together with her emphasis on 'contested citizenship', raises some important issues. She starts in the 1870s when, as is well attested, there was a tightening up in the Poor Law with an end to much outdoor relief. For Murdoch this increased the demand for institutional places for the children of parents too poor to keep all their children at home without outdoor relief. She goes on...