Depicting Canada’s Children

The Raw Materials of Empire Building: Depicting Canada's Home Children

T he term “artistic fiction”1 is often used to discuss the creative licence child welfare agencies employed to dramatize promotional imagery circulated in Great Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More commonly, this term refers to the subtle alterations and theatrical staging used to form emotionally charged, highly symbolic photographs that functioned as both documentation and advertising for philanthropic organizations. Reflecting not only the goals of the child welfare movement but also larger imperialistic aspirations, a wide variety of literature, composed of descriptive imagery and powerful metaphors, was used to paint a picture of the destitute child. R.M. Ballantyne’s children’s adventure novel Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished: A Tale of City-Arab Life and Adventure is an excellent example of the ways in which both visual and literary imagery and fact and fiction combined in the cultural consciousness of the time. The “artistic fiction” used to depict the transformation of Great Britain’s“orphans, waifs, and strays”to Canada’s home children extends beyond the use of creative contextualization to reveal how children were actively imagined as the raw materials of empire building. Between 1869 and 1930, over one hundred thousand children were “rescued” from the orphanages, workhouses, and streets of London, Glasgow, Manchester, and other industrialized cities to be shipped off to start a better life in Canada. Initiated by philanthropists such Maria Susan Rye (1829–1903) and Annie Macpherson (1825–1904), and soon adopted by many organizations such as the National Children’s Home and Orphanage of London, the Orphan Homes of Scotland, the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society, Fegan Homes, and Barnardo Homes, the mass emigration of orphaned and destitute children was viewed as a rather simple solution to social, economic , and moral problems that had developed in overcrowded urban areas. Initially, the development of child emigration programs functioned as “a safety valve to tide over the troubles”2 within Great Britain. Rapid industrialization and urban THE RAW MATERIALS OF EMPIRE BUILDING Depicting Canada’s Home Children ALENA M. BUIS 133 expansion had resulted in congested cities and overburdened government agencies. It became far more cost efficient to “export” the children that had accumulated in workhouses and children’s homes than to support them as dependants of the state. Once sent to the colonies, the“British home children,”as they were called, were either adopted or apprenticed as labourers. According to many organizations, their mandate was simple: We permanently save the children from relapsing into the misery of their former lot. We relieve our own overcrowded population, where the struggle for existence grows fiercer every day. We supply our own colony with her greatest need, healthy honest labor.3 As child emigration increased, images and language appeared that reflected colonial aspirations and epitomized notions of “imperial philanthropy.”4 Almost completely dependent on public donations and community support, child welfare organizations actively promoted child emigration schemes as an ideal solution to a wide variety of social ills perceived to have been created by poverty. Children of lower-class families were forced to work as chimney sweeps, scavengers, rag pickers, beggars, and miners, for long hours and under horrendous conditions. Orphans and runaways were not protected from the elements or from the dangers of life on the streets. Faced with the “inadequate and sometimes inhuman methods” developed in the wake of reforms to laws dealing with the poor, many philanthropists were responsible for adapting rather radical alternative solutions for destitute, homeless, and orphaned children .5 In 1869 Rye, one of the first facilitators of organized child emigration, wrote a letter to the London Times publicizing her organization, Maria Rye’s Emigration Home for Destitute Little Girls, by asking the British public,“Why not take the‘gutter children’ of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool and emigrate them to Canada and the Western States of America?”6 Outspoken leaders of organizations, such as Thomas Bowman Stephenson (1839–1912), John Throgmorton Middlemore (1844–1924), William Quarrier (1829–1903), and Thomas John Barnardo (1845–1905), relentlessly published their accounts of child rescues and emigration success stories to garner community support on both sides of the Atlantic. Editorials, magazines, leaflets, and photographs that appealed for donations from the wealthy and for co-operation from the middle class went beyond fundraising to reveal a greater public fascination with the caricatures presented of the poor. The outpouring of philanthropic literature published by child welfare organizations reflected“the ubiquity of ragged children in the urban landscape and...