Massacre of the Innocents

Infanticide in Great Britain 1800-1939

Lionel Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317370628
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Before contraception was generally available, and when abortion was fraught with danger, infanticide was a common solution to the problem of unwanted children. Massacre of the Innocents, first published in 1986, shows the causes and consequences of the high tide of infanticide in Victorian Britain.

Lionel Rose describes the ways in which unwanted and 'surplus' infants were disposed of, and the economic and social pressures on women to rid themselves of their burdens by covert criminal and sub-criminal means. He discusses the activities of infanticidal and abortionist midwives, and shows how the practices of wet nursing and baby farming were closely related to infanticide. Unscrupulous insurance salesman even turned infanticide into a profitable business, in their reckless grab for commissions. Infanticide declined with the growing practice of contraception, the lessening of pressure of unmarried mothers, and as adoption was made easier.

This is a hard-hitting, scrupulously documented piece of social history. This title will be of interest to students of history and criminology.

1 Setting the scene

DOI: 10.4324/9781315671604-1

In January 1984 a baby’s body was found in a plastic bag, deposited in a litter bin in Sutton, Surrey. In March came news of the discovery of a badly burned body of a new-born baby in a field at Bramford, Ipswich. A few weeks later the mutilated body of a baby was found in a refuse skip on a factory site at Misterton, Doncaster.¹

Such accounts received only a brief paragraph in the press, and, of their type, form only a fraction of all the stories of babies killed in rage, or under stress by parents or parents’ lovers, that periodically crop up in the press. More commonly come accounts of live babies abandoned in places where the desperate parents intend that they should be found and taken care of: outside a police station, in a phone box, in a hospital lavatory – these are a few instances in recent times; and the police approach generally is to regard the mother as needing psychological and social help rather than to think of her as a criminal.

Babies under 1 year old today are four times as likely as other age groups to be victims of homicide (murder, manslaughter, infanticide) and even this figure is a very pale reflection of a phenomenon that once stained the social record of Christian Europe, which tended both figuratively and literally to sweep the problem under the rubbish tips and dung heaps where so many babies’ bodies were hidden. This book starts in 1800, but its theme can be traced back through the ages; and indeed forms an integral part of the foundation myth of many great cultures: Romulus and Remus, the abandoned babes suckled by a she-wolf, as originators of the Roman civilisation; Moses, the foundling in the bullrushes, as the Biblical deliverer of the Jews; and the baby Jesus who was saved from Herod’s soldiers.

Leaping the centuries, we find that such was the prevalence of infanticide in Stuart England that a draconian law passed in 1624 automatically presumed that the mother of a bastard was guilty of murder if she had tried to conceal the birth by secreting its corpse; and it was for her to prove otherwise, for example that it was stillborn or died naturally. The law, be it noted, applied only to unmarried mothers, as legitimate babies were assumed not to be at risk. In Scotland, the fear of a public shaming in the Kirk drove many single girls to kill their offspring and in 1690 a law there made it a capital offence for a woman to conceal her pregnancy, should the baby be subsequently found dead or missing (circumstantial proof of a secret birth would have included signs of lactation, the mother’s overnight change of weight, or stained bed linen). As the misogynistic Puritan influence that inspired such laws wore off in the eighteenth century, their very severity made them more and more unenforceable in an increasingly understanding climate of opinion. The Scottish law was the theme of Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, set in 1736, in which Effie Deans was capitally convicted of concealment of pregnancy (the baby had disappeared, though in fact it was not dead), but she was subsequently pardoned. The last hanging under the 1690 Act was in 1776; thereafter, under a peculiar Scottish procedure, an accused woman could avoid trial by electing to be ‘banished’ instead.²

In the eighteenth century the subject of infanticide and ‘baby dropping’ (the dumping of anonymous babies in exposed places) revolves round the efforts of the former sea captain Thomas Coram to establish a Foundling Hospital where desperate women could bring their babies. He faced much prejudice from people who thought that the existence of such repositories would encourage sexual irresponsibility and increase the problem of unwanted births. Coram’s intention was to confine admissions to the infants of innocent, deceived girls (I shall dub them ‘first-time lapsers’ in this book) whose lives would otherwise be ruined. The London Foundling Hospital was founded in 1739, and after a very chequered history, it followed Coram’s principles of selection only from 1801. But its relief was only a drop in the ocean, for in the nineteenth century it was taking in about 40 babies a year.³ Despite its emotively appealing name, it was not strictly a foundling institution, as the mothers had to come for prior interviews. Such charity did not by any means necessarily conserve infants’ lives, as the crowding of babies in institutions, especially when deprived of breast-milk, could produce a frightful mortality rate. Ecclesiastical foundling hospitals in Catholic countries could have infant death rates as high as 80 per cent in Paris and 90 per cent in Dublin just prior to 1800.

The London Foundling Hospital adopted a system of boarding babies out to wet-nurses and managed to reduce the death rate to 52 per cent, set against the average death rate of 70 per cent for infants under 2 in the London of the 1750s.⁴ The great exponent of boarding-out was the eighteenth-century businessman-turned-philanthropist, Jonas Hanway. In the six months from December 1758 he counted 2,271 foundlings under a year old in the streets of London; the general receptacle for unwanted bastard babies was the workhouse, from which they were farmed out to local nurses, who let them die off in droves. Han way’s efforts secured the passage of an Act in 1767 which obliged the workhouses to board babies out in rural homes where the survival chances were higher. But it is a moot point whether the totality of infant deaths was reducible by this expedient alone, for the wet-nurses, by suckling strangers’ babies for money, were denying their own babies, and so prejudicing their survival chances.

Figure 1 This allegorical engraving c. 1740 shows ‘dropped' babies to the right. A penitent mother who has abandoned her infant is being reassured by Thomas Coram. He carries the Charter of the newly founded London Foundling Hospital, which he points towards, preceded by a beadle bearing the rescued baby to its portal. At the left are clustered the hoped-for future fruit of the Hospital’s nurture. The girls carry symbols of the domestic occupations they are intended for. The seascape towards which the boys are turned, clutching navigational instruments, signifies the naval careers they will be encouraged to follow. (Source: John Brownlow, Memoranda or Chronicles of the Foundling Hospital, 1847. Courtesy: Wellcome Institute Library, London.)

If infanticide is related to the level of illegitimacy, then it is quite likely that it was increasing as the eighteenth century wore on, for there was apparently a rise in illegitimacy during the century;⁵ this was aggravated by the domestic dislocations caused by the Napoleonic Wars, and early nineteenth-century newspapers were sprinkled with stories of babies found dead or abandoned, with the occasional trial of some wretched girl for murder.⁶

2 Infant mortality: ‘the waste of infant life'

DOI: 10.4324/9781315671604-2

Historically, the value of infant life is determined by the forces of supply and demand, and contemporary attitudes to the inevitability of death. Dead babies were quickly replaceable when the birth rate was high; and an ignorance of the means to prevent death bred a helpless, resigned mentality – ‘it’s God’s will’, ‘perhaps it’s for the best’ and so forth – which compounded the cheapening of infant life.

When babies became relatively scarce and as improved medical and sanitary understanding eroded the fatalism, so infant life started to become more precious, and we see the beginnings of this change at the end of the nineteenth century. An important element in the equation, too (more notably in the case of illegitimate babies), was the economic status of women: the more desperate the plight of the unsupported mother, the greater the compulsion to abandon the child. This will be examined in the next chapter.

The later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were marked by an unprecedented population explosion; in the period 1801 to 1851 the population of England and Wales doubled from 9,000,000 to 18,000,000. This was due not to an increase in the rate of procreation but a decline in the infant death rate from the late eighteenth century. Primitive contraceptive devices were not altogether unknown, but rarely used.¹ The average number of surviving births per family in the mid-Victorian period was about six. The lower down the social scale one went, the greater the number of pregnancies a woman tended to have. However, there were marked variations among the working classes. In the textile districts like Lancashire, where there was a tradition of independent earnings by girls in the mills, the birth rate was almost as low as among the middle classes; in mining and agricultural districts, however, the birth rate was very high, and remained well above average, even when the working classes were evidently taking to family limitation at the beginning of this century.

From around 1880 the birth rate began to decline perceptibly, and this trend began among the middle classes; their average family size fell by about 30 per cent between 1851 and the early 1880s;² textile workers and artisans were not too far behind, but unskilled workers did not show an appreciable fall till nearer the end of the century. Dock labourers married between 1861 and 1881 would have about 7.5 children on average, but those marrying between 1881 and 1891 would produce an average of 5.7.³ This decline is attributed to an increased interest in contraception from the late 1870s, as indicated by the spread of contraceptive advertising and retail outlets but there was also evidence of a growing use of abortifacients. Working-class women from the 1890s were becoming more determined to limit family size.

The trend of infant mortality between 1800 and 1939 reveals two striking landmarks, coinciding with the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The death rate of 0–1-year-olds in England had been falling sharply from the mid-eighteenth century; in the 1790s it is estimated at about 24 per cent; in the early nineteenth century at 20 per cent, and from the time when civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began in 1837 (in England and Wales) it hovered around 15 per cent until 1900.⁴ The reason postulated by M.W. Beaver⁵ is the increased availability of all-the-year-round cow’s milk for infants, as the agricultural revolution made possible a storeable winter fodder and permitted the expansion of urban cowsheds. However contaminated and unhygienic this milk was, he argues, it probably saved more infants’ lives than it killed. The infant death rate⁶ remained obstinately static till 1900, despite improvements in public sanitation, and a progressive fall in death rates among all ages above 1 in the last quarter of the century. However, after 1900 it began to fall as well–to 10.5 per cent in 1910 and 6.5 per cent in 1930.⁷

Beaver proposes his milk theory to explain this phenomenon. Greater attention was being paid to milk hygiene and its suitability for infants at the end of the century, as the falling birth rate, among other economic and political considerations, was making infant life more precious. With the municipal milk depot movement for mothers of infants starting in 1899, and the consolidation of dairies into modern, better-managed and more hygienic combines proceeding apace from 1900, the improvement in milk quality enhanced infants’ survival chances.

The average infant mortality rate hid dramatic social contrasts. Dr John Brendon Curgenven explained before the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science⁸ in 1867, in a notable address on ‘The Waste of Infant Life’, that while the death rate of 0–5 year-olds among the ‘educated and well-to-do’ ran at 11 per cent, the equivalent figure among the urban working class ranged from 35 to 55 per cent, and this concealed, even more shockingly, an estimated 60–90 per cent among illegitimates.

Within the 0–5 age group it was the 0–1s whose lives were overwhelmingly at risk. In 1860, of the 167,000 children in England and Wales who died in this age range, 101,000 alone were 0–1, and fewer than 33,500 were 1–2.⁹ The 0–1s, who in 1890 formed about 2.4 per cent of the total population, accounted for just under a quarter of all deaths that year (131,000 out of 562,000),¹⁰ and the figures for this group conceal a startling variation within those first twelve months of life. A third of all deaths within the first year took place in the first month,¹¹ and a fifth in the first week!¹²

There were also striking geographical variations. The infant death rate among farm labourers was closer to that of the urban middle classes; country air and wider dispersal in villages assisted survival chances. The industrial cities, especially those of the Midlands and Lancashire, had the worst record; Leicester and Liverpool vied with each other as the blackest of black spots, with an infant death rate (0–1) hovering around 22–24 per cent in the 1870s,¹³ compared with the national average of 15 per cent. Until 1926 stillbirths were not entered in the official returns, and these figures exclude an untold number of infants born dead, or born alive but dying so soon afterwards that they were casually treated as if stillborn (see Chapter 14).

What, then, were the listed causes of this frightful mortality? We are at the mercy of Victorian inaccuracy and wooliness in medical terminology: ‘Wasting Diseases’ (such as ‘congenital defects’, ‘injury at birth’, ‘want of breast milk’, atrophy, debility, ‘marasmus’ and prematurity) led the way, followed by ‘Diarrhoeal Diseases’ including gastritis and enteritis, and then respiratory disorders, like bronchitis and pneumonia. ‘Convulsions’ took a fair number, but this blanket-term could cover a variety of causes – such as gastritis, acute indigestion and teething. The ‘common infectious diseases’, such as smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria and whooping cough, accounted for only a small proportion of all infant de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Original Page
• Copyright Original Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Setting the scene
• 2 Infant mortality: ‘the waste of infant life'
• 3 The economic and sexual vulnerability of women
• 4 Bastardy and the Poor Law in mid-Victorian England
• 5 Infanticide and the mid-Victorian conscience 1830–70 (I)
• 6 Infanticide and the mid-Victorian conscience (II): the milk of human kindness
• 7 Coroners, inquests and the exposure of infanticide
• 8 Infanticide and the law 1803–70
• 9 Lifting the lid on midwives and baby-farmers 1868–71
• 10 ‘Churchyard luck': midwives and murder
• 11 The South London Baby-Farmers 1870
• 12 Infant life protection legislation 1870–90
• 13 Bastardy, seduction and infanticide law reform 1870–1900
• 14 Cradle and grave: birth and death registration and infanticide
• 15 Burial insurance and child murder (I)
• 16 Burial insurance and child murder (II)
• 17 Infant life protection 1890–1914
• 18 Bastardy, eugenics and affiliation law reform to 1939
• 19 Infant conservation 1890–1920
• 20 The disappearance of baby-farming 1920–39
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography and abbreviations
• Index