Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900

by Josephine McDonagh

• ISBN13: 9780521054560
• ISBN10: 0521054567
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-01-21
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In this wide-ranging study, Josephine McDonagh examines the idea of child murder in British culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Analysing texts drawn from economics, philosophy, law, medicine as well as from literature, McDonagh highlights the manifold ways in which child murder echoes and reverberates in a variety of cultural debates and social practices. She places literary works within social, political and cultural contexts, including debates on luxury, penal reform campaigns, slavery, the treatment of the poor, and birth control. She traces a trajectory from Swifts A Modest Proposal through to the debates on the New Woman at the turn of the twentieth century by way of Burke, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, among others. McDonagh demonstrates the haunting persistence of the notion of child murder within British culture in a volume that will be of interest to cultural and literary scholars alike.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Note on references

List of abbreviations

Introduction: plots and protagonists

Child murder and commercial society in the early eighteenth century

'A squeeze in the neck for bastards': the uncivilised spectacle of child-killing in the 1770s and 1780s

1789/1803: Martha Ray, the mob, and Malthus's Mistress of the Feast

'Bright and countless everywhere': the New Poor Law and the politics of prolific reproduction in 1839

'A nation of infanticides': child murder and the national forgetting in Adam Bede

Wragg's daughters: child murder towards the fin de si+cle

English babies and Irish changelings

Appendix: on the identity of 'Marcus'

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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