Child Murder and British Culture 1720-1900 (review) (original) (raw)

The Theme of Infanticide in Selected Anglo-American Literature

IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science, 2013

The theme of infanticide has been seen as a prominant factor in all these works. I have applied this theme in my five works I have studied. These works cover the anglo american literature from 1859 to 1987.the

Chapter 14 Unnatural Women Reflections on Discourses on Child Murder and Selective Mortal Neglect

The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity, and Agency, 2020

Hogan, S. 2020. Unnatural Women: Reflections on Discourses on Child Murder and Selective Mortal Neglect in LaChance-Adams, S. Cassidy, T., Hogan, S. (eds.) The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity, and Agency. Canada, Ontario: Demeter Press. pp. 247-261. Abstract This chapter reflects on historical ambivalence toward mothers, especially a reluctance to prosecute, or harshly punish, women who murdered their newborn babies. I suggest that in nineteenth and early twentieth century England there was increasing social tolerance towards child murder that ran counter to the polemical and evangelical religious arguments against the crime. In this chapter, I consider the legal perception of cases of intentional child murder and the debates that took place in court, referring to trial records. This ambivalence about convicting women for murder was manifested in an ad hoc manner with a variety of defence strategies in operation as will be illustrated. As one might expect, the cases themselves varied tremendously, from a woman in utter despair attempting to kill herself and her baby simultaneously by drowning, to cases in which the murder might be considered to be quite calculated. While cases in which sickly and possibly unviable infants, are "let go" through a process of selective mortal neglect, are technically murder, they are quite different from putting a newborn to a violent end. I argue that a variety of social practices and attitudes towards childhood illness obscured a high tolerance of child murder, and that the neglect of newborns elicited tacit understanding, if not social acceptance. Lewd Murderers? The Legal Situation in England Modern sensibilities are very different from those in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with respect to how mothers who murdered were regarded and depicted in public domains. This chapter will elucidate these profound differences.

THE USE OF INFANTICIDE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Infanticide seems to dominate literature from the beginning. It has been observed that it started since the use of the Bible. Why does it concern the writers so much? This has to be analyzed here. It refers to any kind of murder of a small infant, even if it is supported by the father and other kin. The use of new terms neonaticide and prolicide have generated throughout the history of infanticide. However murdering of an older child was much complex than the murder of a new born. The reasons behind this discussion are that the historians of England language have avoided using the clear language for the broader study of the infanticide. The historians who work in this field don't prefer to use the exact term "infanticide" as their work has been limited to a particular sphere of neonaticide. Myths seem to be recurrent in this study of infanticide. They are known to be collective and communal and they can be considered to be universal.

INFANTICIDE, RELIGION AND COMMUNITY IN THE BRITISH ISLES, 1720-1920: INTRODUCTION

This special issue focuses on the crime of infanticide in three of the four constituent nations of the British Isles: England, Scotland and Ireland. The papers collectively point to the fact that although families and communities could be a source of support for women in crisis, they were also the route by which many instances of infanticide were revealed. In addition, the evidence here suggests that the significance of religious cohe-siveness to family and community relations may, in some contexts, have encouraged infanticide to occur, due to a pressure to maintain respectability in religiously observant communities. The fact that the crime occurred regardless of the moral climate in each nation suggests that women faced with the reality of bearing a bastard weighed it against the possible consequences of committing infanticide and decided to take the risk. Thus the role of religious belief in the actions of married and unmarried infanticidal women emerges as a unifying contextual theme that is likely to stimulate further research. Social historians of the pre-modern period have tended to offer descriptions of home and family life as being close-knit and affectionate, where families regularly worked together for the benefit of the community in which they lived. Social commentators, religious correspondents and secular authorities alike regarded the family as an essential unit which provided a foundation for the development of morals, manners, and general civility in communities which needed to become socially stable in order to facilitate economic, political and cultural growth. Yet, this notional idyllic picture of how the family should be was often shattered by the reality of domestic relations in Britain throughout the i8th and icjth centuries. Indeed, until the advent of increasingly stringent legal protections for women and children instituted during the zoth century, violence within the family too often tended to escape serious legal sanction (Martin 1978). But although wife battering and child abuse were relatively slow to attract public interest, one form of violence, 'rooted in indifference to infants' (Hoffer and Hull 1984: ix), has long exercised the attention of lawmakers: infanticide, or newborn child murder. This special issue of a journal which addresses family and community history is devoted to a consideration of the circumstances in which this type of crime occurred; when family and community relations could be utterly divided." Violent crimes against children take place mainly within the domestic sphere, the perpetrators most often being a family member, frequently one of the parents. But

Child-Killing and Emotion in Early Modern England and Wales

Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe, 2016

This chapter explores emotional responses to child-killing in early modern England and Wales. 1 Of unnatural infant deaths, newborn child murder has received the greatest attention in historical scholarship, particularly neonatal infanticide prosecuted under the 1624 Concealment Act. 2 The premise of this statute was that unmarried women who concealed their pregnancies, murdered their newborn infants, and secretly disposed of the bodies avoided conviction by claiming stillbirth. Concealment of death rather than homicide thus became the fact to be determined in law. 3 The infanticidal mother's story-or, at least, the unfolding of events that culminated in prosecution under the Concealment Act-is well known. It is a tale in which emotions are central: shame, isolation and fear on her part and disapproval and contempt on that of neighbours and legal officials. It is also a story of progress in which again emotions play a key role. An increased acquittal rate in the eighteenth century is explained in terms of the development of modern sensibilities, which led juries to

Too Common and Most Unnatural: Rewriting the Infanticidal Woman in Britain, 1764-1859

1999

This study uncovers the traces of the labouring-class woman, described here as the "infanticidal woman," through a series of texts, notably, ballads, broadsides, novels, and press accounts published between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. It is about class and gender and how they are refracted through discourses, and about the labouring-class female subject, generally absent from history and literature. This study is also about the ways in which we read different media, and the ways in which different forms, genres, and discourses position the reader. Women who commit child-murder represent a force both oppositional and threatening. In print culture they can articulate labouring-class anxiety about poverty, violence, regulation, and the criminal justice system, as well as middle-class anxiety about labouring-class sexuality and criminality. They are the antithesis of respectable femininity as they actively and forcefully reject the motherhood that is the crowning achievement of middle-class womanhood. They are the location of the double-message sent to labouring-class women, who were told to be "good" even while they were apprehended as bestial. After an initial historical chapter, chapter two traces the relationship of the “infanticidal woman” and the criminal-justice system in the ballads “The Cruel Mother” (Child 20) and “Mary Hamilton” (Child 173). Chapter three explores how, because they present such a contradictory pastiche of voice and genre, broadsides offer the largely labouring-class reader the possibility of sympathy for and understanding of the accused woman, even while being highly regulatory. Chapter four indicates how Walter Scott, popularizer of Scottish culture, recuperates ballad tropes and subsumes them in the conservative The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818); how his position as collector provides a paradigm for his use of infanticidal women as source material; and how markers of class are elided in the characterization of Effie Deans. Chapter five situates George Eliot's realist novel Adam Bede (1859) in relation to middle-class anxiety about infanticide and the labouring-classes more generally, and examines its relationship to popular texts.

Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England

2019

Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England explores one of society’s darkest crimes using archival sources and discussing its representation in the drama, pamphlets and broadside ballads of the early modern period. It takes the reader on a journey through the streets and taverns where street literature was hawked, to the playhouses where the crime was dramatized, and the courts where it was tried and punished. Using a regional microstudy of coroners’ inquests and churchwardens’ presentments, coupled with theories of liminality, marginality and rites of passage, it reveals complex and contradictory attitudes to infants, women and the crime. As well as considering unwed women, the most common perpetrators of infanticide, the study shows that married women, men and the local community were also culpable, and the many reasons for this. Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England is set in its European and historical contexts, revealing surprising continuities across time.