Women, Infanticide and the Press, 1822-1922

News Narratives in England and Australia

Nicola Goc

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134778706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie des médias et des communications

In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart of the British Empire, in regional Leicester, and in the penal colony of Australia, Nicola Goc uses Critical Discourse Analysis to reveal both the broader patterns and the particular rhetorical strategies journalists used to report on young women who killed their babies. Her study takes Foucault's perspective that the production of knowledge, of 'facts' and truth claims, and the exercise of power, are inextricably connected to discourse. Newspaper discourses provide a way to investigate the discursive practices that brought the nineteenth-century infanticidal woman - known as 'the Infanticide' - into being. The actions of the infanticidal mother were understood as a fundamental threat to society, not only because they subverted the ideal of Victorian womanhood but also because a woman's actions destroyed a man's lineage. For these reasons, Goc demonstrates, infanticide narratives were politicised in the press and woven into interconnected narratives about the regulation of women, women's rights, the family, the law, welfare, and medicine that dominated nineteenth-century discourse. For example, the Times used individual stories of infanticide to argue against the Bastardy Clause in the Poor Law that denied unmarried women and their children relief. Infanticide narratives often adopted the conventions of the courtroom drama, with the young transgressive female positioned against a body of male authoritarian figures, a juxtaposition that reinforced male authority over women. Alive to the marked differences between various types of newspapers, Goc's study offers a rich and nuanced discussion of the Victorian press's fascination with infanticide. At the same time, infanticide news stories shaped how women who killed their babies were known and understood in ways that pathologised their actions. This, in turn, influenced medical, judicial, and welfare policies regar

PART I Infanticide News in the London Times: 1822–1871

Part I of this study provides a comprehensive overview of the representation of infanticide and the infanticidal woman, and the complex ways in which The Times played a formative role in the creation of public opinion on unmarried mothers, illegitimacy and infanticide, at various moments between 1822 and 1871. Through access to The Times Digital Archive 1785–1985 infanticide reports 1822–71 are quantified and then analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis and close textual analysis and contextualized through historiography. Chapter 1 provides the context for understanding how English society understood illegitimacy and the ‘fallen woman’ and infanticide in the decade before the introduction of the 1834 New Poor Law. This chapter shows how various strategic discourses aligned to create the political climate that allowed the New Poor Law with its harsh Bastardy Clause to be passed in 1834 by both Houses of Parliament. Chapter 2, again drawing upon multiple infanticide court and coronial reports, as well as leading articles and other infanticide discourses, analyses The Times’s campaign to amend the New Poor Law and to remove the Bastardy Clause. The final chapter in this section examines the way The Times privileged the voice of medical men, and in particular how the privileging of one medical coroner, Dr Edwin Lankester, allowed for the creation of a maternal panic in the 1860s.

1 Personal Tragedies, Public Narratives: 1822–1833

DOI: 10.4324/9781315546599-2

In nineteenth-century England the feminine ideal of chastity was considered the pre-eminent virtue of a respectable woman, linked as it was to the economics of a patriarchal society that required a man ensured the succession of his legitimate heirs. An illegitimate child tainted a man's lineage and threatened his position in a ‘society of blood’ (Foucault 1991a, p. 269). The illegitimate child was in law filius nullius (a son of nobody). Illegitimacy was named and defined by a set of rules and conditions that were established between institutions, economic and social practices and patterns of behaviour. Illegitimacy was framed as a great social evil. A report to the House of Lords in 1844 pronounced ‘illegitimacy is in itself an evil to a man’ for ‘without any crime whatever of his own, the illegitimate child is often exposed to dangers, hardships, and ignominy from his infancy’.

A woman who gave birth to an illegitimate child was framed as a ‘fallen’ woman, an allusion to the original ‘Fall’ of Eve from God's grace. (On the other hand a ‘fallen’ man was a heroic figure, a soldier who had literally fallen dead on the battlefield.) The ‘good woman’ in the nineteenth century was ‘constructed as a model for women to aspire to; but their natural propensities, as daughters of Eve, were believed to run counter to it’ (Ajroud 2001, p. 23). From early times woman's normal inclination was believed to be unruly, her obedience and virtue was only sustained by ‘vigilant suppression of her unruly drives’ (Wiltenberg 1992, p. 98). Susan Clark (2001) argues that the preoccupation with a woman's chastity in the nineteenth century was also a ‘reflection of the view that a woman's being was centered in her sexuality’ and that ‘her representative vice was adultery’, therefore ‘if a woman lost her reputation for chastity, then nothing else mattered’ (Clark 2001, p. 14).

Accepting Foucault's argument that both the discursive and the non-discursive are inextricably intertwined, the first chapter in this study of women, infanticide and the press looks at the ‘fallen women’ and infanticide in The Times newspaper in the period from 1822 to 1833. Through an analysis of press discourse in the decade leading up to the legislative changes of 1834 this chapter provides the political and social context for the introduction of the New Poor Law and its Bastardy Clause which had such a disastrous impact on the lives of unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children. Through a combination of historiography and discourse analysis, drawing from John E. Richardson's Critical Discourse Analysis methodology, this chapter will analyse court reports, coronial inquiries, law and police reports, editorials, political reports and letters published in the correspondence pages of the London Times to understand how in this period English society came to understand the ‘fallen woman’, illegitimacy and infanticide.

Gail Reekie argues (1998, p. 7) that the ‘illegitimate child’ and the ‘unmarried mother’ are ‘particular social identities or subjectivities extruded as part of the cultural process of making and maintaining the illegitimate birth category’. In nineteenth-century England the illegitimate child and the unmarried mother were discursively framed as a problem in society and when the new science of statistics tabulated the numbers of illegitimate children and quantified the economic burden unmarried mothers and their bastard children imposed on society through the distribution of parish relief they became the subject of vociferous political, religious and social debate. Newspapers reflected these concerns through moral discourses about the dangers of dissolute women, often articulated through reports of mothers killing their illegitimate babies. When newspapers published the annual returns for districts and included data on illegitimate births the public awareness of the ‘issue’ of illegitimacy led to demands for legislative control.

The problem of illegitimacy was not new to nineteenth-century English society. England had been legislating to control illegitimacy and the economic burden it posed on society for centuries. The first legislation to manage the cost of upkeep of illegitimate children was in the Elizabethan era when a statute governing ‘chargeable bastards’ was passed (‘Poor Act’ 1575). This initial act compelled the mother and the ‘putative’ (reputed) father of a bastard child to maintain the child by weekly payments. Subsequent Acts (‘An Act for the Due Execution of Divers Laws and Statutes’ 1610; ‘An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children’ 1624) allowed overseers of parish relief and churchwardens to recover the costs through parental rents. In 1810 a new law to control the problem of illegitimacy was passed (‘Bastards Act’1810), which explicitly placed the burden of upkeep onto the father. The 1810 law allowed a single woman to declare herself pregnant to any justice and to charge a man with being the father. Upon a woman's word an overseer, or a ‘substantial householder’, could issue a warrant for the putative father's arrest and his committal to jail unless he could provide surety to indemnify the parish. If unable to provide surety he remained in jail until the child was a month old, at which time paternity was determined on family likeness. It was not long before there was a male outcry over the ‘injustices’ of this new law. This female power over men was reported in the press as a gross inversion of the natural powers of humanity and led to Poor Law Commissioners gathering a corpus of anecdotal evidence on mothers making ‘a kind of enterprise’ out of bearing illegitimate children (this is discussed in Chapter 2). When this discursive ‘evidence’ was published in The Times, there was public outrage at the duplicity of unmarried women and increasing pressure to change this ‘abhorrent’ law.

Infanticide News

Infanticide news reports worked as ideological texts on several levels. Through the choice of content, language, rhetorical style, tone and layout these texts reinforced the patriarchal hegemonic position of the female in society. Infanticide news reports reinforced the mental and physical inferiority of women and the dangers unmarried mothers and their illegitimate offspring posed to society. Infanticide news reminded men of the need for eternal vigilance over their wives and daughters and female servants. Foucault talks about how ‘the literature of crime transposes to another social class the spectacle that has surrounded the criminal’ (Foucault 1991b, p. 69) and by publishing infanticide stories about poor working class women in the pages of The Times under such attention-grabbing headlines as ‘Extraordinary Case of Infanticide’ (Times 18 November 1823, p. 3); ‘Shocking Infanticide!’ (Times 30 June 1830, p. 3); ‘Shocking Case of Infanticide’ (Times 19 December 1831, p. 4), upper and middle-class readers gained an insight into the lives of desperate, poor unmarried women. The publication of coronial inquiries and trials exposed the stereotypical ‘infanticide’ as a young unmarried female domestic servant, alerting society to the close proximity of this moral danger and reinforcing the duty of mistresses to constantly keep their female domestic servants under surveillance.

Foucault describes the ‘literature of crime’ as a ‘locus in which two investments of penal practice meet – a sort of battleground around the crime, its punishment and its memory’ (2008b, p. 90). He argues that in the highly regulated printing industry crime texts were allowed to be printed and distributed ‘because they were expected to have the effect of an ideological control’ (2008b, p. 90). While Foucault was referring primarily to the publication of crime reports in broadsheets, the publishing of less hyperbolic accounts of crime in The Times had the same ideological effect. In 1799 Justice Lawrence, presiding in a libel case (Rex v. Wright, 8 T.R. 293 [K.B.1799]) explicitly acknowledged the ideological effects of newspapers publishing court reports:

it is of vast advantage to the public that the proceedings of courts of justice should be universally known; and the general advantage to the country in having these proceedings made public more than counterbalances the inconvenience to private persons whose conduct may be the subject of such proceedings. (‘Privileged Parliamentary Reports and Comments’ 1 December 1868, Andrews 1869, p. 6)

When looking at the ideological function of news it is important to understand who created the texts and in the nineteenth-century press reports of criminal trials and coronial inquests and police reports were, in the main, not produced by journalists but by lawyers and law clerks. The following account from 1863 provides insight into just who was providing courtroom copy for the newspapers:

In our Law and Police Courts may be seen, sitting in a privileged compartment, a busy penman taking down notes of the proceedings. This person is likewise preparing copy for the press. He is generally a barrister not overburthened with briefs, who is glad to eke out an uncertain income ‘by just doing a little reporting’. As a rule, he receives a weekly stipend, and, with one or two exceptions, is in the service of three or four journals, receiving a limited salary from each. (King 1863, p. 372)

Most nineteenth-century citizens had no personal experience of courtrooms, and most were informed of the goings on inside the courts through news stories. The fact that lawyers and law clerks, with a vested interest in law, were predominantly creating court reports for newspapers had a significant influence on their lexical structure and ideological effect. The privileging of legal language and the framing of courtroom participants within a legal framework created a sense of authority and a perception of ‘truth’ that allowed court reports to be privileged by readers and interpreted as the reality of law and justice, providing clear evidence of the consequences for those breaching society's rules.

The format for reporting trials developed from the eighteenth century and provided a fairly uniform style for court and coronial reports across all newspapers from the popular presses to the serious newspapers. While the development of this style was hegemonic, and reflected particular ideological perspectives, the practicalities of just how law clerks reported on court proceedings also impacted on the content, style and format, and had ideological implications. King's 1863 description of the court reporter illustrates these effects: ‘He writes upon very thin prepared paper with a pencil also specially adapted to the paper, and is thus enabled to produce six or seven copies of his reports at once. This saves, time, labour, and expense’ (King 1863, p. 372). The ability to duplicate a report for publication in multiple newspapers across the country, and the Empire, reinforced the ideological power of these texts to inform and influence mass audiences.

With the popularity of Pitman's shorthand, devised by Sir Isaac Pitman (1813–1897) in 1837, journalists were able to create lengthy news reports that had the appearance of being full verbatim transcripts. The fact that these court transcripts were rarely verbatim, or full transcripts, and were in fact highly mediated texts was a moot point. The perception was that reports of court proceedings, with their perceived neutrality through the use of legal language, were read as ‘true’ accounts. Court reporters, educated men with stenographic skills and legal knowledge, created reports that allowed readers to feel a part of the judicial process. Nineteenth-century newspaper readers, according to Judith Knelman:

were quite prepared to plod through masses of peripheral detail on the way to the verdict and sentence. ‘The theory of The Times,’ said one chronicler of the period, was ‘that every reader knew by experience that every word in the paper was indispensable, he worked his way through the entire solid and black print, from the first page to the last.’ (Knelman 1998, p. 39)

While shorthand promised the ‘ipsissima verba of a speech’ (A. Smith 1978, p. 154) in reality it rarely delivered that promise. Before the advent of the inverted pyramid reporters with shorthand ability to capture the words of sources verbatim rarely created news narratives with direct quotes. Rather they used ‘constructed dialogue’ (Richardson 2007), creating discourses from indirect reported speech, paraphrasing and summarizing what the speaker actually said, overtly mediating the courtroom discourse. The words uttered in the courtroom, and appropriated by the reporter, ceased to be those of the speaker, reminding readers of the reporter's central role in the delivery of news. When direct speech was used in infanticide court reports it was always the exception rather than the rule. These brief utterances were used in the news discourse for dramatic effect to add weight and solemnity to the spoken words.

In The Times report of the coronial inquiry into the death of Mary Lazenby's newborn baby in 1823 (‘Infanticide’, Times December 15, 1823, p. 3), for example, direct speech is used just once and attributed to the medical expert witness, reinforcing the importance of the medical voice in infanticide court discourse. Nineteenth-century readers were told that when the physician examined the girl he said to her, ‘You must at least have had a miscarriage’. Mary's response is not reported. In the very next sentence the reader is told: ‘every part of the house was searched, but nothing was found’. When Mary finally confessed the court reporter mediated her crucial testimony: ‘She confessed that she had been delivered of something, but said it was very small. She would not say that it was alive she had never heard it cry’. Beyond a pithy response such as ‘may God forgive me’, or a simple ‘sorry’, the voice of the female in the dock was rarely unmediated. Was the infanticidal woman silenced because to allow her to speak of her infanticidal actions was to allow her to broadcast her agency to the world?

The law had legal authority over court news discourse and this authority impacted on the verbatim style of court reports. The laws of libel required that reporters provide ‘full and fair’ accounts of court proceedings or run the risk of a libel action. In actions of libel ‘a jury must be satisfied that the article was an honest and fair comment on the facts; in other words, that in the first place they must be satisfied that the comments had been made with an honest belief in their justice’ (see Rex v. Wright, 8 T.R. 293 [K.B.1799]; and Davison v. Duncan 7 E and B 229, 1857; Andrews 1869, p. 6). Court reporters were required to provide a full (with one exception which will be discussed later in this chapter) and fair account of court proceedings. ‘A garbled or partial report, or detached parts of proceedings, published with intent to injure individuals, will equally be disentitled to protection’ [f...