Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867–1917 (review)

Roy Parker’s Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867–1917 is a substantial study, painstakingly researched and chronicled. There is more detailed information on the private and public organizations, agencies, and institutions involved in the moving and receiving of child migrants in this book than was available to historians before this work was published, and for this reason alone, Uprooted makes a solid contribution to the literature. However, it is not an easy read. The body of the book is confusingly organized into a set of eight parts, each of which is further divided into chapters that contain material that frequently overlaps with material offered elsewhere.

At the heart of the book is a review of the work of religiously affiliated (Protestant and Catholic) and ‘Unorganised’ children’s emigration agencies, the efforts of certain individuals and organizations to undermine and/or control these societies’ child emigration work, and the outcomes of these endeavours on the children themselves – especially as indicated by the legal and institutional experiences of the home children post-migration. In writing the book, the author seems to have aimed to ‘explore the various aspects of the inception and evolution of the child emigration movement’ (xiii), to study the politics surrounding home children’s migration (xiv), and to come to some understanding of the long-term impacts – especially psychological – of this emigration on the migrants themselves (see Part VIII: A Review). The book’s central thesis is that the removal of children from all that was familiar to an unfamiliar, frequently hostile, and poorly regulated environment was psychologically damaging. It is clear that, for Parker, outlining the economic and political circumstances and understandings behind the child migration movement only partially explains why people embraced this course of action. ‘With hindsight,’ writes Parker, ‘a damning verdict is inescapable’ (293).

The migration of home children to Canada (and elsewhere) has received significant attention from historians. In 1980, two book-length studies were published on this subject: Kenneth Bagnell’s Little Immigrants: The Orphans Who Came to Canada drew extensively on oral histories to provide a richly descriptive, dramatic exploration of the subject for a general readership; Joy Parr’s Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (1980) used the methods and critical tools of the ‘New Social History’ to make sense of a movement that, in Parr’s words, seemed ‘out of step with time’ (11) – or at least out of step with how historians of social reform had portrayed late-Victorian reform movements by the time she wrote her book. One year later, Gail H. Corbett’s Barnardo Children in Canada was published (revised and now titled Nation Builders [2002]). More recently, Stephen Constantine has offered a thought-provoking exploration of the issue of how home children have been publicly represented – and how they have represented themselves – over the course of the twentieth century (in the British Journal of Canadian Studies, 2003), and Marjorie Kohli examines home children in The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada, 1833–1939 (2003). This list does not include the larger histories of British migration that have also considered the place of child migrants – some of which are referenced in Uprooted. Parker’s book on the migration of home children to Canada before 1917 is thus the most recent contribution to a field of inquiry that has received a substantial amount of comment. Yet Parker does not engage with any of these studies in terms of argument or analysis. In the future, this book will constitute a starting point for historians interested in pursuing new questions relating to the history of home children emigrants to Canada. However, it is a disappointing read for historians interested in historiographical debate or critical analysis.