Abstract
This chapter explores how infanticide cases were interpreted through an explicitly gendered lens in nineteenth-century England and Wales. It focuses in particular on three key aspects: the spectre of the death penalty, the issue of poverty and deprivation, and mental illness. Drawing on a range of sources including archival criminal justice records, newspapers, Parliamentary Papers, and medical and legal texts, Grey demonstrates how a crime which might have been understood as an especially heinous and deviant act became, instead, stereotyped as a killing committed almost exclusively by “normal” and “respectable” women who were then invariably recipients of both official and popular sympathy. It concludes that nineteenth-century attitudes and ideas still resonate strongly in the reportage and judicial treatment of infanticide in the twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, April 18, 1828, 4.
- 2.
Interestingly, a very full report of the trial in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers made no mention of any such recommendation by the jury; see “Trial of Catherine Welch” (t18280410-17), Old Bailey Proceedings Online, version 7∙2, April 1828, www.oldbaileyonline.org (accessed December 9, 2017).
- 3.
Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, 4; see note 1.
- 4.
On the broader context of nineteenth-century ideas relating to parenthood or illegitimacy in the period covered by this chapter, see especially Ann Rowell Higginbotham, “The Unmarried Mother and Her Child in Victorian London, 1834–1914” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1985); Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Emma Griffin, “Sex, Illegitimacy and Social Change in Industrializing Britain,” Social History 38, no. 2 (May 2013): 139–61; Ginger S. Frost, Illegitimacy in England Law and Society, 1860–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
- 5.
For how broadsides depicted child killing, see Margaret L. Arnot, “Perceptions of Parental Child Homicide in English Popular Visual Culture, 1800–1850,” Law, Crime and History 7 (2017): 16–74.
- 6.
Margaret L. Arnot, “Understanding Women Committing Newborn Child Murder in Victorian England,” in Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850–1950: Gender & Class, ed. Shani D’Cruze (London: Longman, 2000), 55–69; Aeron Hunt, “Calculations and Concealments: Infanticide in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 1 (2006): 71–94; Daniel J. R. Grey, “Discourses of Infanticide in England, 1880–1922” (PhD diss., Roehampton University, 2008); Anne-Marie Kilday, A History of Infanticide in Britain c. 1600 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 111–50; Shirley A. Smith, “‘A crying sin’: Infanticide in South–West Wales, 1870–1922” (PhD diss., Aberystwyth University, 2015).
- 7.
1922 12 & 13 Geo. V c. 18. This law was only very slightly altered by the amending Infanticide Act 1938 (1938 1 & 2 Geo. 6 c.36) that still remains in force today.
- 8.
Daniel J. R. Grey, “Parenting, Infanticide, and the State in England and Wales, 1870–1950,” in Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, 1870–1950: Raising the Nation, ed. Hester Barron and Claudia Siebrecht (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 73–92.
- 9.
Letter from Judge George Hardinge to the Bishop of St Asaph, reprinted in John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. Consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons; and Intended as a Sequel to The Literary Anecdotes by John Nichols F. S. A, Volume III (London: Nichols, Son and Bentley, 1818), 126.
- 10.
Margaret L. Arnot, “Gender in Focus: Infanticide in England 1840–1880” (PhD diss., University of Essex, 1994), 138.
- 11.
For the very different discourses that were applied to female sex workers, see Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Madisson Brown, “Transatlantic Reformers: Politics, Gender and Prostitution in the British and American Women’s Movements, 1830–1900” (PhD diss., University of London, 2016).
- 12.
See Arnot, “Understanding Women,” 58–59. In one documented case of infanticide by a middle-class single woman in the 1870s, the accused committed suicide before she could be charged. See Daniel J. R. Grey, “‘What woman is safe…?’: Coerced Medical Examinations, Suspected Infanticide, and the Response of the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1871–1881,” Women’s History Review 22, no. 3 (2013): 405–6.
- 13.
For allegations of infanticide perceived as specifically a “colonial crime” committed by indigenous peoples, see key context in Pamela Scully, “Narratives of Infanticide in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue canadienne des études africaines 30, no. 1 (1996): 88–105; Michelle T. King, Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Liz Conor, Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2016), 152–238; and Padma Anagol, “Languages of Injustice: The Culture of ‘Prize-Giving’ and Information Gathering on Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century India,” Cultural and Social History 14, no. 4 (2017): 429–45.
- 14.
Daniel J. R. Grey, “‘The Agony of Despair’: Pain and the Cultural Script of Infanticide in England and Wales, 1860–1960,” in Pain and Emotion in Modern History, ed. Robert Gregory Boddice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 204–19.
- 15.
1624 21 Jac. I c. 27.
- 16.
On infanticide in this period, see especially Laura Gowing, “Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 156 (1997): 87–115; and Garthine Walker, “Child-Killing and Emotion in Early Modern England and Wales,” in Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe, ed. Katie Barclay, Kimberley Reynolds and Ciara Rawnsley (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 151–71.
- 17.
For discussion of the 1690 Act, see Barbara Leonardi’s second chapter “Motherhood, Mother Country, and Migrant Maternity” in this volume.
- 18.
Mark Jackson, New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996); Nicholas Woodward, “Infanticide in Wales, 1770–1830,” Welsh History Review 23, no. 3 (2007): 94–125; Mary Clayton, “Changes in Old Bailey Trials for the Murder of Newborn Babies, 1674–1803,” Continuity and Change 24, no. 2 (2009): 337–59; Kilday, A History of Infanticide, 40–50; Katherine D. Watson, “Women, Violent Crime and Criminal Justice in Georgian Wales,” Continuity and Change 28, no. 2 (2013), 245–72.
- 19.
1803 43 Geo. III c. 58.
- 20.
1828 Geo. IV, c. 34.
- 21.
1861 24 & 25 Vict, c. 100.
- 22.
See, for example, United Kingdom, “Return of Inquests on Children Supposed to be Illegitimate, and Women Convicted of Murder of Illegitimate Children, 1832–37,” Parliamentary Papers [henceforth PP] 44, no. 371 (1837–38): 329–39.
- 23.
National Library of Wales 4/533/3.
- 24.
Kilday, A History of Infanticide, 125–31.
- 25.
The Cambrian, April 27, 1805, 4, Italics in original.
- 26.
Kilday, A History of Infanticide, 129.
- 27.
Watson, “Women,” 263.
- 28.
Theodric Romeyn Beck, Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, 2nd edn (London: John Anderson, 1825), 127–94; Alfred Swaine Taylor, The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: J & A Churchill, 1883), see vol. 2, 330–49.
- 29.
The National Archives [henceforth TNA], PL 27/15. R. v. Conlan, Deposition of Joseph Allen.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Liverpool Daily Post, March 28, 1859, 3.
- 32.
Elaine Farrell, “Interrogating the Charge of Concealment of Birth in Nineteenth-Century Irish Courts,” in Law and the Family in Ireland 1800–1950, ed. Niamh Howlin and Kevin Costello (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 181–94.
- 33.
William Feilden Craies and Guy Stephenson, Archbold’s Pleading, Evidence, and Practice in Criminal Cases, 23rd edn (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1905), 825.
- 34.
Although there is insufficient space to analyse these three named cases in depth here, see detailed discussion of each respective woman’s circumstances in Katherine D. Watson, “Religion, Community and the Infanticidal Mother: Evidence from 1840s Rural Wiltshire,” Family & Community History 11, no. 2 (2008): 116–33; Tamar Hager, “Justice, Morality or Politics: Why Did the British Legal System Execute Selina Wadge?” Women’s History Review 26, no. 3 (2017): 455–76; and Anette Ballinger, Dead Woman Walking: Executed Women in England and Wales, 1900–1955 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 103–28.
- 35.
TNA ASSI 36/12. R. v. Jarrott.
- 36.
Morning Advertiser, April 16, 1866, 7.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Windsor and Eton Express, April 14, 1866, 2.
- 39.
Bedfordshire Mercury, August 4, 1866, 6.
- 40.
Windsor and Eton Express, 2.
- 41.
Morning Advertiser, 7.
- 42.
Bucks Herald, April 21, 1866, 5.
- 43.
Oxford Chronicle and Reading Gazette, July 28, 1866, 7.
- 44.
Bedfordshire Mercury, 6.
- 45.
United Kingdom, “Royal Commission on Capital Punishment,” PP 21, no. 3590 (1866): 49.
- 46.
See, for example, J. I. Ikin, “On the Undue Mortality of Infants and Children, in Connection with the Question of Early Marriage, Drugging Children, Bad Nursing, Death Clubs, and Certificates of Death, &c.,” in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1864), 509–11; Mrs M. A. Baines, “A Few Thoughts Concerning Infanticide,” Journal of Social Science: Including the Sessional Papers of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science 10 (August 1866): 535–40; Edwin Lankester, “Infanticide, with Reference to the Best Means of its Prevention,” Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1866), 216–24; Edwin Lankester, “Can Infanticide be Diminished by Legislative Enactment?” Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1869), 205–17; Frederick Walter Lowndes, “Infanticide in Liverpool,” National Association for the Promotion of Social Science Sessional Papers (1872–73), 397–412; Frederick Walter Lowndes, “The Destruction of Infants Shortly after Birth. In What Manner May It Be Prevented?” Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1876), 586–93.
- 47.
Grey, “Parenting, Infanticide,” 80.
- 48.
1834, 4 & 5 Will. IV. c. 76. For more on these changes, their impact and context, see Lorie Charlesworth, Welfare’s Forgotten Past: A Socio-Legal History of the Poor Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Kim Price, Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain: The Crisis of Care under the English Poor Law, c. 1834–1900 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Samantha Shave, Pauper Policies: Poor Law Practice in England, 1780–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).
- 49.
United Kingdom, “Royal Commission of Inquiry into Administration and Practical Operation of Poor Laws,” PP 27–39, no. 44 (1834): 1–8323.
- 50.
Arnot, “Gender in Focus,” 21–51; Higginbotham, “The Unmarried Mother,” 1–35.
- 51.
1926 16 & 17 Geo 5 c. 60. See key context in Ginger Frost, “‘Revolting to Humanity’: Oversights, Limitations, and Complications of the Legitimacy Act of 1926,” Women’s History Review 20, no. 1 (2011): 31–46.
- 52.
U. R. Q. Henriques, “Bastardy and the New Poor Law,” Past and Present 37 (1967): 103–29; Lisa Forman Cody, “The Politics of Illegitimacy in an Age of Reform: Women, Reproduction, and Political Economy in England’s New Poor Law of 1834,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 131–56; Nicola Goc, Women, Infanticide and the Press, 1822–1922: News Narratives in England and Australia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 47–70.
- 53.
Samantha Williams, “‘I was Forced to Leave my Place to Hide my Shame’: The Living Arrangements of Unmarried Mothers in London in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850, ed. Joanne McEwan and Pamela J. Sharpe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 101–219.
- 54.
Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 97–122.
- 55.
Marcus, The Book of Murder! A Vade-Mecum for the Commissioners and Guardians of the New Poor Law throughout Great Britain and Ireland, being an exact reprint of the infamous Essay on the possibility of limiting populousness, by Marcus, one of the three. With a refutation of the Malthusian doctrine, 2nd edn (London: Printed for John Hill, 1839).
- 56.
Arnot, “Gender in Focus,” 52–104.
- 57.
1872 35 & 36 Vict, c. 65; 1873 36 & 37 Vict. c. 9.
- 58.
National Council of Public Morals, Problems of Population and Parenthood (London: Chapman and Hall, 1920), p. lix.
- 59.
United Kingdom, “Twelfth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners,” PP 21 (1846): 10–12, Cmd. 704.
- 60.
Vivienne Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 191.
- 61.
“Twelfth Annual Report,” 10–11.
- 62.
The jury at the Hereford Assizes found Harriet guilty of unlawful abandonment, rather than murder: she was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment. See Worcester Journal, April 9, 1846, 4.
- 63.
The Standard, March 14, 1846, 4.
- 64.
“Twelfth Annual Report,” 11.
- 65.
Richmond, Clothing the Poor, 192.
- 66.
“Twelfth Annual Report,” 12.
- 67.
Grey, “The Agony of Despair.”
- 68.
Robert Gooch, Observations on Puerperal Insanity (London: G. Woodfall, 1820).
- 69.
Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
- 70.
Hilary Marland, “‘Destined to a Perfect Recovery’: The Confinement of Puerperal Insanity in the Nineteenth Century,” in Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914, ed. Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe (London: Routledge, 1999), 137–56.
- 71.
Although the relevant Oxford Circuit Crown Minute Book tersely noted the names of three witnesses due to be called at the trial of Sarah Crates in March 1834 (as they do for other assize cases listed here), the following pages did not actually list her trial as was the case for other defendants, or record any outcome. It is unclear why the standard procedure was departed from in this case by the clerk of assizes. See TNA ASSI 2/32, Gloucestershire Lent Assizes 1834, n.p. The most detailed account of the trial (still only a couple of sentences) was published in the Hereford Journal, April 16, 1834, 4. A terse account in the Bristol Mercury even managed to leave out that the verdict had not simply been “not guilty,” but not guilty by reason of insanity, the formal judgement read out during this period in any case where the prisoner was convicted but judged to be suffering from mental illness that meant they had not been in control of themselves during the crime. Missing this out meant that Mercury article readers would have assumed she had been acquitted unless they saw another newspaper: Bristol Mercury, April 12, 1834, 2.
- 72.
Bristol Mercury, March 8, 1834, 3.
- 73.
Hereford Journal, April 16, 1834, 4.
- 74.
TNA HO 17/28/24. Letter from William Goodrich to the Home Office, April 24, 1834.
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
“Trial of Emma Elizabeth Aston” (t18880319–407), Old Bailey Proceedings Online, version 7∙2, March 1888, www.oldbaileyonline.org (last accessed December 9, 2017). Although given the ages of the child victims this case would not be understood as “infanticide” in the twentieth or twenty-first century, as late as 1908 the Home Office still included the case of a woman who had killed her eleven-year-old child on an official list of all those English and Welsh “infanticide cases” that had resulted in a murder conviction since 1865. Before the changes in the law of 1922 and 1938 that created the separate criminal offence of “infanticide,” the term was often used quite loosely by the authorities, press, and the general public and was sometimes seen as interchangeable with “child murder.” The Aston case is important in that it was both represented and dealt with in a similar fashion to the overtly sympathetic treatment of those killings we would more immediately recognise as “infanticide,” rather than invoking the harsher depictions and punishments that I have noted as sometimes bestowed on mothers of older children..
- 77.
TNA, CRIM 1/29/4. See deposition of Alice Jones.
- 78.
TNA, HO 144/212/A48578. Copy of confidential police report, February 29, 1888. The same report noted that two days after the deaths of the children, their father had left for work as normal but then seemingly vanished, as had the woman who was staying at the Blackfriars lodgings he had recently paid for.
- 79.
TNA, CRIM 1/29/4.
- 80.
TNA, HO 144/212/A48578: March 22, 1888.
- 81.
Alison Pedley, “‘A painful case of a woman in a temporary fit of insanity’: A Study of Women Admitted to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum between 1863 and 1884 for the Murder of their Children” (MA diss., University of Roehampton, 2012).
- 82.
TNA, HO 144/212/A48578: February 18, 1892.
- 83.
TNA, HO 144/212/A48578: Note on file, April 17, 1897.
- 84.
Jonathan Andrews, “The Boundaries of Her Majesty’s Pleasure: Discharging Child-Murderers from Broadmoor and Perth Criminal Lunatic Department c 1860–1920,” in Infanticide: Historical Perspective on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000, ed. Mark Jackson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 216–48.
- 85.
TNA, HO 144/212/A48578.
- 86.
On twenty-first-century infanticide and concealment of birth cases in England and Wales, see Emma Milne, “Suspicious Perinatal Death and the Law: Criminalising Mothers Who Do Not Conform” (PhD diss., University of Essex, 2017).
- 87.
See especially Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?: Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 140–208.
- 88.
Sylvia Murphy Tighe and Joan G. Lalor, “Concealed Pregnancy: A Concept Analysis,” Journal of Advanced Nursing, 72 (2015): 50–61.
- 89.
Jackie Turton and Emma Milne, “Courts Must Stop Judging Women Who Kill their Babies as Morally ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’,” The Conversation, May 3, 2016, accessed March 11, 2017, https://theconversation.com/courts-must-stop-judging-women-who-kill-their-babies-as-morally-good-or-bad-57829. See also Fiona Brookman and Jane Nolan, “The Dark Figure of Infanticide in England and Wales: Complexities of Diagnosis,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21 (2006): 869–89.
- 90.
Richard Griffiths, “Dealing with Incidents of Feticide and Infanticide in England and Wales,” British Journal of Midwifery 23, no. 5 (2015): 371.
- 91.
Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers Monsters Whores: Thinking about Women’s Violence in Global Politics, 2nd edn (London: Zed Books, 2015).
- 92.
Arlie Loughnan, “The Strange Case of the Infanticide Doctrine,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 32, no. 4 (2012): 709.
- 93.
Grey, “Parenting, Infanticide,” 83.
- 94.
Loughnan, “Infanticide Doctrine,” 709–10.
- 95.
Siobhan Weare, “Bad, Mad or Sad? Legal Language, Narratives, and Identity Constructions of Women Who Kill their Children in England and Wales,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law/Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 30 (2017): 201–22.
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Grey, D.J.R. (2018). “No Crime to Kill a Bastard–Child”: Stereotypes of Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales. In: Leonardi, B. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_3
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