Abstract
Informal adoption had always existed in all social classes. Neighbours might take in the children next door when they were left orphans to save them from the workhouse. Or relatives would look after children left motherless, while their father went off to look for work. Medieval pages and Tudor apprentices grew up in families not their own; aunts, uncles, grandparents and neighbours brought up orphaned relatives and friends’ children. Middle- and upper-class families might assimilate nieces and nephews whose parents died or simply could not afford to give them a good start in life — one of Jane Austen’s brothers was adopted by a distant cousin and his wife who were wealthy and had no children.’ Nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literature abounds with ‘adoption’ stories — Silas Marner and Eppie, Miss Havisham and Estella, Mr Carrisford and Sara Crewe to mention but a few.2 But with the exception of the Poor Law adoptions described in the last chapter, there were no organised programmes of widespread domestic adoption prior to the First World War except for the limited examples described here.
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Notes
Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Viking, 1997), pp. 25, 37.
Pat Turner and Jenny Elliott, Adoption: Reviewing the Record (London: NCH Ashwood Project, 1992), p. 7; Mary E. Crutcher, ‘Eighty-Seven Years of Adoption Work’, Child Adoption, no. 19 (Summer 1956).
Pinchbeck and Hewitt quote a girl telling Andrew Doyle, a government inspector who was sent out to Canada in 1874 to investigate the situation of the emigrated children, that: “Doption, sir, is when folks get a girl to work without wages’. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, Vol 2, From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948 (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 568.
Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 88.
Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 234.
Ibid., p. 241. For more information about the child migrant schemes see Parr and Wagner op. cit.; also Gillian Wagner, Barnardo (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979);
J. Wesley Bready, Doctor Barnardo: Physician, Pioneer, Prophet (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1st ed. 1930);
P. Bean and J. Melville, Lost Children of the Empire: The Untold Story o fBritain’s Child Migrants (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989);
Margaret Humphreys, Empty Cradles (London: Doubleday, 1994).
There are also useful articles by Geoffrey Sherington, Patrick A. Dunae, Shurlee Swain and Kathleen Paul on child migration to Canada and Australia, in Jon Lawrence and Pat Starkey (eds), Child Welfare and Social Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001).
June Rose, Inside Barnardos: 120 Years of Caring for Children (London: Futura, 1987), p. 199.
Princess Alice came from the heart of the royal establishment (see Biographical Notes). In her autobiography she says she joined the NCAA ‘soon after its foundation in 1917 at the instance of Lady Northcote, herself an adopted child of Lord and Lady Mountstephen’. Princess Alice, For My Grandchildren: Some Reminiscences of Her Royal Highness Princess Alice (London: Evans Bros, 1966), p. 211.
Gwyneth Roberts, ‘Social and Legal Policy in Child Adoption in England and Wales 1913–1958’, PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 1973, p. 32.
E. W. Hope, Report on the Physical Welfare of Mothers and Children: England and Wales, Volume 1 (Liverpool: The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1917), p. 48. This was a comprehensive contemporary report on the condition of mothers and children, discussing the available services, and making recommendations for improvements and reform. The first volume was written by Hope, the Medical Officer of Health (MOH) for Liverpool; the second by Janet M. Campbell, a Senior Medical Officer at the Board of Education.
Kathleen Kiernan, Hilary Land and Jane Lewis, Lone Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Britain: From Footnote to Front Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 74.
Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), pp. 148, 221.
Lettice Fisher, Twenty-One Years and After, 1918–1946: The Story of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (London: NCUMC, 2nd ed, 1946), p. 9.
For more information about the NCUMC see Sue Graham-Dixon, Never Darken My Door: Working for Single Parents and Their Children 1918–1978 (London, 1981);
Hilary Mackaskill, From the Workhouse to the Workplace: 75 Years of One-Parent Family Life 1918–1993 (London: NCOPF, 1993); also see a forthcoming book by Pat Thane and Tanya Evans provisionally entitled Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Modern England.
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© 2009 Jenny Keating
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Keating, J. (2009). Developments in the Voluntary Sector. In: A Child for Keeps. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582842_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582842_3
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