Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 by Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel (review)

This is a book about the Victorians with a message for today. Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel argue that the discourse of child rescue, originating in Britain, spread to Australia and Canada, and there extended to indigenous children. Widely disseminated in the bid to raise money, the discourse constructed the children in largely negative and often racially offensive ways. The consequence, the authors feel, was that the children themselves were often badly treated and abused to such an extent that in 2008 the prime ministers of both Australia and Canada apologised for their policies toward indigenous children, and in Britain much evidence has accumulated of the mistreatment of child emigrants.

Swain and Hillel tell a story familiar in its outlines. They start with the mid-century ragged schools, showing the way the schools set in place an enduring language for describing children at risk, though they conclude, somewhat implausibly, that by the 1870s, when the ragged school impetus was burning out, “the potential notion of the child as citizen had been clearly articulated” (12). Rights for children, it’s true, were beginning to be articulated, but citizenship was not a concept that contemporaries would have used. The succeeding “gospel of child rescue,” “a discursive creation” (35), is seen as deriving primarily from the work of four men: Thomas Barnardo, Thomas Stephenson, Edward Rudolf, and Benjamin Waugh. They had a common inspiration in Johann Wichern, whose Rauhes Haus, founded in 1833, became a model for the rescue of children who were a danger both to themselves and to society. Pity and fear jostled with each other in the rescue discourse, the pity heightened by the romantic view of what childhood ought to be, the fear residing in the consequences of doing nothing. In contrast to the ragged schools, the common policy became the removal of children from their parents, the latter depicted as the prime cause of problems. Central to the discourse was a close focus on the body and clothing of the child: ragged, dirty, often blackened, thin, and famished, there was nevertheless to the discerning eye an underlying beauty. Cleansed and re-clothed the child was reborn with fair hair and blue eyes. That was the promise. Even a disabled child—the focus of much attention in the late nineteenth century—might have “the face of an unwashed angel” in her “attenuated body” (55).

It was not only individual children who needed to be rescued. The fate of the nation was also at stake. Fear of the consequences of urban living for children, a fear that intensified in the later nineteenth century when racial degeneration loomed so large, demanded in response bold and decisive action, the removal of children from their families and surroundings to the countryside or to the supposedly empty lands of the Empire. These children were white Anglo-Saxons and their rescue was crucial for the future of the race. Alarmingly, the same conditions that had bred the so-called street arabs of London reemerged among immigrant communities in Sydney, Melbourne, and Toronto. In response, the colonists began to copy the rescue policies of the metropole. There was a further problem in the colonies: mixed race children and the children of the indigenous population, members of so-called races which it was assumed were in terminal decline, needed to be rescued. The only way to do it was to separate them too from their environments. This, say Swain and Hillel, became the “new orthodoxy in child protection,” and they document how far the grim reality in such homes was from the idealised narratives and pictures of the rescue discourse.

The authors bring to their analysis an imposing and impressive weight of research—they have immersed themselves deeply in the prose, poetry, and pictures of the rescue narrative, and establish the key elements in...