Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722-1859

Today, infanticide—or, more often in the period under discussion, “child-murder”—has a substantial amount of writing attached to it. In recognition of this fact, Jennifer Thorn, in her cogent and thoughtful introduction, insists that “Writing British Infanticide takes as its purview not child-murder per se but the ways that writing about it credentialed and differentiated writers in different (but often overlapping) genres and moments in this period of print’s exponential boom and subsequent specialization” (33). The ten essays gathered here—including her own introduction—Thorn suggests, “pose a common question. How are we to understand the proliferation of writing about child-murder in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the overlap of an expanding print culture with the widely evident narration of this particular crime? Further, what are we to make of the recurrent and remarkably consistent representation of child-murder as a special province of unmarried, desperate women?” (17) Thorn’s suggestion of a common purpose arguably owes more to editorial aspiration than the reality of a collection that at times strays well beyond the question(s) indicated. Many of the writers here draw on Thomas Laqueur’s influential 1989 essay, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” with its perception of the emergence of a new “humanitarian narrative” in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This in itself might have suggested the possible value of narrowing somewhat the focus of a volume that declares itself to deal with child-murder, gender, and print in Britain between 1722 and 1859, and indeed there are problems with the ground covered in the collection, its coherence, and some of the larger claims made within it.

Writing British Infanticide has been a while in the making. Its origins, Professor Thorn tells us, lie in a 1994 North-Eastern ASECS conference seminar on “Infanticide and Social Order,” and the process of enlargement to its final form has involved both the incorporation of four essays extracted from published monographs and a degree of arbitrariness. So, the opening and closing dates mark nothing more (or perhaps less) significant than the first publication of Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Eliot’s Adam Bede, the subjects of previously published work by Toni Bowers and Laura C. Berry respectively. Elsewhere, this chronological span is strained, and not always to the advantage of the collection as a whole. It is not helpful, for instance, that Melissa Valiska Gregory in “‘Most Revolting Murder by a Father’: The Violent Rhetoric of Paternal Child-Murder in The Times (London), 1826-1848” (70-90) often moves beyond her own suggested dates to include material on cases as early as 1817, especially when, as is often the case, she wishes to made large claims about “Victorian” culture. One work Gregory deploys is Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, published in 1818, almost two decades before Victoria ascended the throne. This is the more disconcerting as the same Scott novel is discussed much more pertinently as Romantic (and specifically Scottish) fiction by Julie Kipp in “Naturally Bad or Dangerously Good: Romantic-Era Narratives of Murderous Motherhood” (235-64). In an excellent chapter extracted from her Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic (2002), Kipp probes the “simultaneous naturalization of murderous mothers and demonization of loving mothers” in narratives which respectively “function as a means of establishing the credentials” of those physicians and social theorists who suppose themselves best placed to monitor the reproductive patterns of the mothers in question and vilify “overly sympathetic mothers.” These latter narratives, Kipp indicates, are frequently authored by women “whose writings extend the arguments of medical experts and political theorists in order to establish their own rhetorical authority” (238).

If there is some chronological fudge in the collection, then there is also notable geographical slippage. In drawing on accounts of child-murder in The Times, Gregory elides English, Irish, and even continental European cases in ways that lead one to wonder whether class considerations really do entirely override all questions of nationality—a pity since Gregory’s treatment of paternal infanticide is a useful corrective in context. One might go further and suggest that Laura Henigman’s “‘I would be a Witness against my self’: Infanticide and Communion in Colonial New England” has no place whatever in a book on British infanticide—though its omission would have resulted in the loss of one of the very best essays in the collection, a searching yet humane investigation into the relationship between individual and community in 1730s New England, which really does attend to the theme of writing infanticide in a nuanced examination of the pamphlet accounts of the very different cases of Rebekah Chamblit, Katherine Garret, and Patience Boston. What might justify the inclusion of this essay on the book’s own terms is the fact that the 1624 English Act “to prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children” was formally instituted in the Massachusetts Code in 1696; if so, though, it was perhaps a missed opportunity not to have clarified the Scottish and Irish situations here (the 1624 Act was approved verbatim by the Irish parliament in 1707).

Of the remaining essays, Dana Rabin’s “‘Beyond ‘Lewd Women’ and ‘Wanton Wenches’: Infanticide and Child Murder in the Long Eighteenth Century” is well placed to introduce the notion of infanticide as, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century understandings, a woman’s crime, though the argument becomes diffuse and, in part, shaky; so, the idea that women’s stories were told in indirect discourse, while men’s alleged infanticides “always” include “exact” words attributed to the male defendant, is undermined both by the harrowing case of John Sutcliffe quoted two pages later, which is in reported speech (58), and conversely by the female examples from New England cited by Laura Henigman. Like Henigman, Miriam Jones achieves more in her essay, “Fractured Narratives of Infanticide in the Crime and Execution Broadside in Britain, 1780-1850” (112-42), by appearing to attempt less, concentrating on detailed contextualized readings of broadside ballads seen finally as “articulat[ing] the concerns, dreams, and aspirations of their audience, and in the case of the ‘goodnight’ and the infanticidal woman, they articulate the preoccupations of working and poor people with the machinations of the ever-present criminal justice system, with sexuality and its repercussions, with the vulnerability of women and children, with poverty, and with the violence that many lived with and witnessed in their lives, all within the framework of the carnivalesque execution” (136).

Three essays consider canonical fiction. Lisa Zunshine’s thoughtful “Gender Dynamics of the Infanticide Prevention Campaign in Eighteenth-Century England and Richardson’s History of Sir Charles Grandison” (145-171) investigates the private female instigation of public male philanthropy, with reference to the London Foundling Hospital. In “‘I wou’d not murder my Child’: Maternity and the Necessity of Infanticide in Two Novels by Daniel Defoe” (172-195), Toni Bowers pursues her thesis that “Defoe feels it necessary to reduce the cacophonous power of agents at work in the complex maternal stories he tells, and to assign maternal agency to a stable place outside of complicating historical conditions—the supremely fictional place of the isolated, individual psyche” (190). The argument is plausible, but a failure to consider Defoe’s non-fictional writings possibly undermines the thesis (though this work perhaps suffers more than most by being excerpted from a monograph, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680-1760 (1996). The finest of the three essays, however, is Laura C. Berry’s “Confession and Profession: Adam Bede, Infanticide, and the New Coroner” (196-217)—taken from her The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel (2000)—which is too nuanced to summarize briefly but which details the mid-nineteenth-century shift away from “sentimental” late-eighteenth century accounts of child-murder and notes the way in which, via the institution of the medically-qualified coroner, medicine “recriminalized the infanticidal mother and medicalized her trial.” Judith Moore’s “Whose Story Is This, and Who May Tell It? Medical Evidence versus ‘Common Capacity’ in the Framing of the Elizabeth Canning case” (218-35), meanwhile, is an exemplary treatment of written accounts of the Canning affair—the finest original essay in this collection—which more than justifies its conclusion that “To tell [Canning’s] story was to define her nature and the character of the society in which she occurred, and the contest for the control of the definition was both fierce and inconclusive, fought along the boundaries of the human and challenging the scope of humanitarian narrative” (233-4).

To the merits of her introduction, Jennifer Thorn adds fine editorial skills, though the combination of new and already-published material inevitably gives an awkwardly disparate feel to the volume read through as a whole. The odd mistake has slipped in: The Smollett novel with the “famously unloving mother” (172) is Peregrine Pickle and not Roderick Random, while the name of the late Paul-Gabriel Boucé should have been given thus. Finally, the bibliography—even if continental works were to be excluded—should have found space for James Kelly’s pioneering “Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Ireland” (Irish Economic History, XIX [1992]: 5-26).