Adults in the early twentieth century had no doubt that the welfare of British children had been transformed in recent decades. They also thought that they were responsible for these changes. Historians know a great deal about the aims and actions of elite women and men who sought to alter their nation’s future by remaking working-class childhoods. This chapter uses writing by working-class children to examine the impact and limits of investments in children’s lives by the state, the voluntary sector and private families.

A rich body of scholarship has revealed how institutional initiatives expanded in scale, coherence and national reach between the 1830s and 1930s. Historians have constructed a coherent narrative of reform that grew from Enlightenment intellectual seeds and early Victorian evangelical roots into a many-branched tree of modern extra-familial interventions.² Across this century of action, working-class child welfare – unlike the welfare of children’s parents or their wealthy peers – became a public concern suitable for benevolent and strategic investment.³ This scholarship makes clear that child welfare was at the heart of British ‘maternalist’ politics for almost a century before these discourses ‘intensified’ during the Second World War.⁴

Social historians since the 1970s have questioned the altruism of middle-class philanthropists’ motivations, highlighting the ‘social control’ that lay at the heart of these initiatives.⁵ For the last thirty years, however, scholars have also underlined the limited impact of providers’ intentions and the quite different ‘uses’ that recipients made of eagerly negotiated resources. The ‘survival strategies of the urban poor’ depended on what Peter Mandler conceptualized as their ‘social knowledge’ of the rich.⁶ Thus, Ellen Ross’s pioneering research identified maternal ‘information’ as ‘probably the single most important element determining access to’ London’s complex array of charitable and state relief. This knowledge, ‘embedded in women’s street culture’, was essential in enabling a poor mother to be a ‘forager’ within the mixed economy of welfare. She understood middle-class goals and displayed ‘herself and her children to best advantage’, but ensured that gifts were ‘distorted’ to meet her household’s needs.⁷ Research into working-class families has developed Ross’s insights to reveal the range of strategies used, also by fathers, to maintain their own ‘respectable’ morality and ‘private meaning’ in the face of regulation, whether from philanthropists, social workers or the disciplinary state.⁸

This chapter examines working-class children’s ‘social knowledge’ of child welfare. The letters analysed in this chapter allow us to see not only how the young created, used, disseminated and silenced ‘knowledge’ of formal and informal welfare, but also how they interpreted its impact on their well-being.⁹ As Ross pointed out in her study of the maternal relationship with charity, ‘children, too, spoke, though they are not part of the story I have told here’, and she refers the reader to adults’ autobiographical accounts.¹⁰ Memoirs offer powerful insights into the long-lasting emotional significance of welfare, recalled through the frame of the adults that children became. Yet, they are less sensitive to the minute practices of everyday life and to ephemeral perspectives that did not cohere with retrospective life-stories. Before analysing what children’s testimonies reveal, we first have to understand why children’s accounts of their everyday lives exist for these decades.

Childhood in the public sphere

The writing used in this chapter survives because of a short-lived moment when elite adults made working-class children prominent in the public sphere. When journalists introduced wholesome family supplements to Saturday provincial newspapers from the 1870s, they also pioneered the inclusion of columns for children. Editors sought to attract working-class readers and, thanks to the nineteenth-century expansion in elementary education, they knew that the young were more able to read – and especially write – than their parents or grandparents.¹¹ The pester power of literate children was co-opted by local newspapers as a means to attract an increasingly leisured and financially secure working-class family readership. Until the 1920s, their strategy paid off and weekly penny papers enjoyed the highest circulation figures outside of London.¹²

In contrast to most national children’s magazines, a minority of local columns published large numbers of letters, stories, poems and drawings by young contributors.¹³ The most successful participatory columns had a distinctive geography. Columns published from industrial districts of northern England were most enduring and sophisticated, and are the focus of this chapter.¹⁴ They relied on a local readership with relatively adequate and reliable weekly wages.¹⁵ In its turn-of-the-century heyday, the readership of Middlesbrough-based Northern Weekly Gazette stretched across north-east England, though readers also sent newspapers on to relatives across Britain and its colonial diaspora. Each week, the children’s column received hundreds of contributions and filled up to six pages of print. Unlike most adult correspondence, newspapers seldom anonymized letters submitted to children’s columns.¹⁶ Biographical details allow each child’s letters to be linked together, to those of their siblings and to household circumstances recorded in decennial censuses.¹⁷ Censuses reveal that the majority of writers were aged seven to fourteen, with fathers who worked in manual employment.

Adult journalists, most of whom used male pseudonyms, had the editorial power to create and curate this child-centred public sphere. The absence of unpublished letters makes it impossible to be sure how the column ‘Uncle’ or ‘Daddy’ selected letters for publication, but editors believed that they were at the mercy of young authors’ decisions. Indeed, columns published in Bristol and Glasgow became dominated by letters from, respectively, upper-middle-class women and wealthy colonial children. These correspondents offered more educated and exotic content, further discouraging non-elite children from writing about their lives.¹⁸ Young readers chose whether to invest time and resources in writing and determined what they considered newsworthy in their local environment. In this chapter, the ‘social knowledge’ revealed by the children’s columns is explored through the sociologist William Corsaro’s concept of ‘interpretive reproduction’. Corsaro examined the ways in which ‘children create and participate in their own unique peer cultures by creatively taking or appropriating information from the adult world to address their own peer concerns’. In contrast to didactic models of socialization, in these social worlds Corsaro suggested that ‘children are not simply internalizing society and culture but are actively contributing to cultural production and change’.¹⁹ Middle-class Victorian adults endowed childhood with novel public prominence, but children’s responses created this social and intellectual world of print.

This chapter argues that children were central players in the expansion of public and private investments in child welfare in modern Britain. The first section examines children’s engagement with the most novel welfare provision that originated beyond their household. Working-class children were passionate philanthropists who funded and promoted new children’s hospitals. These children thought about fund-raising as a form of mutual aid, not class-based largesse. This child-led philanthropy allowed institutions to grow where there was a strong civic identity, but also contributed to the neglect of services and localities that lacked enthusiastic activists. Children’s actions thus contributed to the geographical patchiness and inequities of institutional welfare. The second section goes inside the working-class household to examine how children negotiated welfare with parents and peers. Children commonly wrote about informal welfare provision in two contexts. Working-class children had a strong – but episodically articulated – sense of their household vulnerability. Children knew that their welfare depended on parents’ ability to work in a low-paid patriarchal labour market and, when this failed, on an unpredictable network of adult kin. Additionally, a minority of child writers were preoccupied with bodily impairments that excluded them from their peers’ trajectories. Children’s self-narratives of ‘weak’ bodies highlight the new centrality of schools to childhood well-being after 1880, but also reveal profoundly gendered patterns of paternal or peer care work. Elite adults thought they were the sole authors of modern understandings of, and investments in, child welfare; working-class families and their children knew they were not.

Institutional care

Studies of child welfare have been shaped by institutional archives.²⁰ Nineteenth-century philanthropic publications, minutes and case files are rich and alluring, as the chapters by Gillian Lamb and Claudia Soares in this volume indicate. It is also important, however, to assess the impact of institutional welfare using sources created and curated beyond the organization. The letters analysed in this chapter allow us to see how children interacted with medical and residential care, not merely as recipients, but also as philanthropists and promoters of extra-familial investments in child welfare. As the national birth rate fell from an average of more than six children for women who married in the 1860s to fewer than three children by the 1910s, children were increasingly likely to be growing up with only a couple of siblings.²¹ It was in this exceptional demographic context that children formed new mutual and philanthropic associational networks beyond their homes.

Historians of philanthropy have long acknowledged the scale and breadth of charitable giving by middle-class children. Frank Prochaska devoted a chapter in his 1980 monograph to children’s charitable work, particularly the evangelical missionary movement.²² Over the last forty years, studies of juvenile philanthropy have substantiated his conclusions that the ‘range of children’s charitable activity was enormous’ and the ‘financial contributions of children can be found in virtually every type of nineteenth-century charity’.²³ Children’s charities developed sophisticated ‘promotional branding strategies’ and ‘mass print media’ appeals, working through existing children’s magazines as well as new specialist publications.²⁴ Provincial children described how large charities vied for their philanthropy, including through the competitive material culture of collecting boxes.²⁵ Late nineteenth-century children’s columns also copied the successful strategies of national charities such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children by setting up societies with titles such as ‘The Band of Mercy’.²⁶ Young members were encouraged to support charitable causes as part of pledges to, for instance, promote ‘kindness’ to ‘all living creatures’, but ‘especially the very young, the ailing, and the old’.²⁷ Columns emphasized children’s agency and sought to instil in children their duty – and power – to protect the welfare of those who they understood to be weaker than themselves.²⁸ The agency of the child was central to Victorian and Edwardian conceptions of the individual.

Children’s philanthropic zeal was evident across northern England. Although adult column editors often suggested philanthropic projects, they only became a significant part of juvenile social worlds because of children’s enthusiastic responses. ‘Uncle Oldman’ first mentioned collections for Manchester’s annual Hospital Sunday a month after he founded his column in 1886. ‘Uncle Oldman’ went on to describe his visits to the city’s ‘Hospital and Dispensary for Sick Children’ using the conventional rhetoric of class-based benevolence. He painted a portrait of the city centre dispensary, founded in 1829, where ‘the marks of suffering and illness were plainly to be seen’. On a visit to the children’s wards, opened at Pendlebury in 1873, he added that ‘They are all from really poor homes, and it is sad to think what would have become of them if there had been no place like this hospital to which they could be sent’.²⁹ ‘Uncle Oldman’ expected his imagined middle-class child readers to respond to the annual appeal for the ‘relief of suffering among the sick poor’ by donating their toys, clothes or ‘pretty picture books’ from their nurseries or ‘you can surely spare something from your pocket money’.³⁰

Some young readers were fluent in the practices and rhetoric of class-based benevolence. Nine-year-old Nellie Marsh explained in 1890 that ‘I am so glad that I sent my dolly, for some poor little girl to make her feel happy.’³¹ The following month her ten-year-old sister enclosed a donation of twenty shillings and explained that ‘Sister Nellie has helped me to beg the money and we both feel glad to help the poor children’.³² As daughters of a felt hat manufacturer in suburban Manchester who employed one servant, the girls had spare toys and access to adults with surplus money from whom to ‘beg’.³³ Charities imagined that their donations came solely from comfortable children like the Marsh sisters. In 1891, the young readers of the Manchester Weekly Times donated £23, totalling more than one per cent of the annual funds recorded as maintaining the 140 in-patient beds and children’s dispensary.³⁴ In a letter of thanks, the hospital treasurer explained that ‘It is very gratifying to find so large a number of happy and fortunate children showing such helpful sympathy with those who are helpless and suffering’.³⁵ This language of philanthropy as a site of class distinction echoes the rhetoric used by national children’s charities. Kristine Moruzi revealed how stories designed to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital ‘highlighted the class differences between the contributors and the objects of their charity’.³⁶ Katharina Boehm drew on ‘social control’ arguments when she concludes that charitable work ‘could be propelled as much by anxious wishes for class regulation as by commitments to improve the plight of Victorian London’s ragged street children’.³⁷ It is impossible to know if precariously middle-class children such as the Marsh sisters were motivated by ‘anxious wishes for class regulation’, but – if they were – they were vastly out-numbered by donors whose charitable actions lead us to different conclusions.

Children’s accounts suggest three correctives to conventional histories of philanthropy. First, class distinctions were not the primary motivation for working-class juvenile philanthropy. Mary and John Dennett were typical philanthropists in northern children’s columns. Eleven-year-old Mary and ten-year-old John Dennett began writing joint letters in January 1890 about their desire to collect donations and organize a ‘small “bazaar” ’ in aid of Manchester children’s hospital.³⁸ The Dennetts’ father was a tailor, living with his wife and four children in a three-bedroomed terraced house in the Lancashire industrial town of Wigan.³⁹ Class-based benevolence did not inspire their philanthropy, but the family worked strategically with the class distinctions that they lived with. When collecting money, Mary explained that ‘Papa has marked out the “plan of campaign” for us’, suggesting that his oldest daughter should be responsible for eliciting donations from Wigan’s ‘leading ladies and gentlemen’, while her younger siblings would lead in raising money from ‘amongst their own friends and working folk’.⁴⁰ The family conceptualized Wigan through a binary model of class that differentiated between a small elite and the masses, but they made philanthropy integral to reciprocal relations within their own class. The Dennetts believed that they – as children – were the ideal charitable workers whose time, mobility and persuasive power allowed them to stimulate support from across the local socio-economic hierarchy. Importantly, this model of mutual activism changed the rhetoric of children’s columns. Instead of assuming class-based hierarchies, as ‘Uncle Oldman’ had in 1886, by 1892 he instead explained that ‘children should help children’ and ‘a penny will fill up a corner’.⁴¹ Children across northern England showed no interest in the welfare of other vulnerable groups, such as elderly or sick adults. Historians have long highlighted the role of philanthropy in middle-class civic identity formation, so that charity ‘was a vital means of acquiring or reinforcing their symbolic capital and social position’.⁴² Working-class children were aware of their class position, but their philanthropy instead constructed a ‘social position’ based on moral, civic and above all age-based identities. Children’s humanitarian activism was prompted by the formation of a shared ‘childhood’ identity, rather than by the solidification of class distinctions.

Second, the Dennetts’ case highlights children’s active role in driving philanthropy. The siblings described how they had co-opted their parents and peers in their fund-raising campaign. Mary explained that ‘Mamma and I (Mary) and some of my friends are working hard making doll’s clothing’ while ‘Papa will make up a lot of lucky packets’ for a penny lucky dip.⁴³ Mary penned weekly updates before reporting the triumph of the bazaar, with stalls, games and banners including ‘“Success to the Children’s Hospital” ’. The family raised ‘£4.9s.6d.’ through ‘our little endeavours in aid of suffering children’.⁴⁴ We would expect correspondents to emphasize their own influence, but the timing of fund-raising does suggest that familial action was sparked by reading the children’s columns. The young used a wide range of tactics to gain control of household resources, and school-aged boys were as active philanthropically as their sisters. Ten-year-old Arthur Tom Nightingale, the son of a Blackpool joiner, explained that as well as collecting money from his school-friends, ‘I went without sugar in my tea for two weeks, and my mother gave me 8d. which went towards the hospital fund.’⁴⁵ Arthur repurposed the abolitionist tactic of the sugar boycott to transfer money intergenerationally within his own household economy.⁴⁶ Historians of adult lives have assumed that children were their mothers’ puppets; working-class mothers seeking relief knew that they should ‘hide behind the ultimate natural dependent, the child’ while in middle-class families ‘the charitable pursuits of children reflected those of their parents, especially their mothers’.⁴⁷ Yet, column evidence suggests that children more often supplied the inspiration and energy, drawing their parents with them as necessary and skilled collaborators. Mothers did not simply bestow class identities as part of the domestic education of an obedient younger generation. Rather, in regions with newly founded civic children’s hospitals, daughters and sons led a process of adult socialization, introducing their parents to new models of investment in children’s welfare and innovative strategies of ‘compassionate consumption’.⁴⁸

Third, evidence from children’s correspondence challenges the historiographical assumption that, under the 1834 New Poor Law, welfare moved away from a model of ‘reciprocal’ and ‘lifecycle’ relief towards sharply defined populations: the philanthropic, the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving poor’.⁴⁹ Young writers showed no awareness of these categories and instead conceptualized philanthropy as a form of mutual self-help. For instance, the Lloyd sisters joined the Dennetts in raising money for Manchester children’s hospital, motivated by Harriet’s own experiences of in-patient care. Nine-year-old Harriet wrote from the hospital’s ‘Lambe Cot’ to explain that:

Harriet and her five-year-old sister Annie were the daughters of a warehouseman, living in four rooms in suburban Salford with their mother and baby sister.⁵¹ Working-class parents were suspicious of new-fangled medical treatment, as well as critical of the quality of care provided by institutions beyond the home, especially if a child were ‘delicate’.⁵² As Harriet’s testimony suggests, children were aware of this familial environment of fear. In narrating their experiences, children sought to demystify hospital care, emphasizing the presence of female nurses who were ‘very nice to all who came near her’ and wards ‘full of presents’.⁵³ Correspondents with in-patient experience were explicit in using the column to undermine rumours that they had heard in their homes and neighbourhoods.

Importantly, this juvenile educative mission extended to state-funded healthcare that was infamous for its stigma, including fever hospitals and workhouse infirmaries. Under the 1866 Sanitary Act, the poor could be forcibly removed to isolation hospitals and Graham Mooney has identified the practices of ‘hidden coercion’ used to regulate working-class households that were held responsible for spreading infectious disease.⁵⁴ Children were aware of struggles between public health officials and the public they sought to govern. For instance, Gerty Turnbull, the nine-year-old daughter of a Middlesbrough blacksmith, explained in 1896 that ‘I write this, as children sometimes get a wrong impression of the hospital.’⁵⁵ Isolation hospitals were diverse local institutions, but up to four-fifths of patients were aged under ten.⁵⁶ Studies of mid-twentieth-century medical care, including the chapter by Maria Marven in this volume, reveal the emotional harm caused by spatial isolation and restrictions on visiting hours.⁵⁷ Before the First World War, children never mentioned these regulations, even in isolation hospitals, but instead highlighted how parents managed their distress when away from home.⁵⁸ Letters and parcels were essential to the maintenance of familial care-giving. In reassuring other children about the fever hospital, Gerty Turnbull recalled that ‘Father and mother brought me a nice doll, and a friend sent me half a dozen little dolls which we dressed in the day time’, with no mention of any disinfection procedures.⁵⁹ Although Gerty did not specify who the ‘we’ who played with dolls were, she did not present herself as isolated. Six-year-old Olive Ward emphasized visiting practices during her stay in Middlesbrough ‘fever hospital’ and explained that ‘Mother came to see me twice a day. I was so ill’.⁶⁰ Middlesbrough isolation hospital later permitted window visiting, so it may be that this was how her mother, a widow with her own fruit and confectionary shop, sought to care for her youngest daughter.⁶¹ Or, if face-to-face twice-daily visits were accepted within the turn-of-the-century isolation hospital, it is perhaps significant that the six year old underlined her and her mother’s gratitude: ‘The nurse was so kind. She came to our house and had tea with us. I got to love my nurse’.⁶² In explaining how ‘intrusive interventions’ by public health officials became accepted by working-class families, Mooney speculated that it is ‘probable that favorable reports of personal experiences in the isolation hospital got around by word of mouth, and the public’s antagonism toward these feared institutions consequently waned’.⁶³ Children’s letters provide evidence to support this hypothesis, but also suggest that children who survived and recuperated engaged in more conscious activism to promote hospital care to peers and parents. The subjects that preoccupied children offer important clues to oral rumours about institutional medical care. Given that the vast majority of professional medical care required parental support, child recipients played a crucial role in altering working-class cultures of healthcare.

Other children testified to experiences in Poor Law institutions that the state had designed to be stigmatizing. Towns such as Middlesbrough lacked newly built paediatric facilities that cities such as Manchester enjoyed, so Matilda Rogers, the eleven-year-old daughter of a blast furnace labourer, was admitted in 1894 to a non-age-specific ward of the Middlesbrough Poor Law Infirmary.⁶⁴ She described how ‘Day by day accidents were continually coming in, and this kept the nurses at work all day’. In spite of recalling that she was ‘startled’ by the injuries she ‘witnessed’, she underlined the ‘clean appearance’ of the ward and ended her letter by noting ‘I liked to be in the Infirmary very much, and was extremely sorry when I had to leave.’⁶⁵ Matilda never explained what she missed about the Infirmary when she returned to her family home. None of these eye-witness testimonies were solicited as part of promotional initiatives, nor did the children show any knowledge of how state funding shaped their care. Rather, children’s accounts of their interactions with the mixed economy of welfare unintentionally reveal the divergent experiences that funding gaps created; metropolitan children’s experiences in paediatric charitable hospitals contrasted with sparse and over-worked Poor Law facilities nationwide. Most children showed no sign of accessing newspapers beyond their local column, so children’s expectations were shaped by local experiences that were recounted orally and in print. Importantly, while nationwide charities were prominent in young minds, the nation-state was not. Children’s letters showed no signs of noticing either parliamentary legislation to protect children or the implementation of celebrated policies such as free school meals or school medical inspections. As Jose Harris has pointed out, state expansion was ‘piecemeal and unsystematic’ and this meant that working-class children before the First World War seldom conceptualized their welfare as connected to the actions of the national government.⁶⁶

Young correspondents’ silences are also revealing. While children praised medical care unanimously, correspondence written by children living in state workhouses or charitable orphanages seldom described – let alone evaluated critically – day-to-day life in non-medical institutions. Twelve-year-old Alex V. Martin in Darlington workhouse reported at length on a charitable ‘tea’ organized by a ‘lady’ where ‘they threw sweets and nuts for us’ and ‘had all sorts of games’. He only added as an after-thought: ‘When we got home we had nothing to do but change our clothes and go to bed. In the morning we got up and finished our work.’⁶⁷ Even this aside was unusual in providing a child’s perspective on everyday workhouse life, unintentionally making clear the normally strict routines of having things ‘to do’ in the Poor Law institution. Working-class writers thus distinguished between types of investment; correspondents from poorly funded non-medical institutions had no desire to use their public platform to promote the extra-familial welfare they received.

Instead, children who lived in non-medical institutions focused on activities and relationships that allowed their lives to fit with those of children still living with families. A thirteen-year-old correspondent from Newcastle boys’ orphanage was typical in highlighting his family and friends. Fred Hall noted how he was ‘enjoying myself very well’ on his ‘Christmas holidays’ in Northumberland and sent a penny so that he might buy a copy of the Middlesbrough newspaper.⁶⁸ It is unsurprising that children in institutional care sought to make their self-narratives fit the social norms of columns that promoted models of fictive kinship and that were dominated by children who wrote a great deal about affective ties. It is interesting, however, that while children understood the lack of family and friendship to be stigmatizing, the receipt of relief was not. As a result, most working-class children publicized their experiences of both giving and receiving welfare. Twelve-year-old Charlotte Bontoft described benefiting from an organized outing to the ‘seaside’ at Scarborough, funded by charitable neighbours in her North Yorkshire village. Later in the same letter, she explained her role in helping her mother to provide a home for eight ‘holiday children’ who arrived each summer, sent in ‘batches’ from industrial Bradford and Leeds. From the 1880s, charities and local government sought to transform urban children’s lives through access to ‘fresh air’.⁶⁹ As the daughter of an agricultural labourer, Charlotte shared this rhetoric, explaining that for them it was ‘so nice being in the country’.⁷⁰ Place thus replaced class as a marker of need. In another letter, Charlotte described raising funds for ‘Dr Stephenson’s Children’s Home’ while also feeling pride in receiving a ‘beautiful book’ as her own charitable Sunday School ‘Christmas prize’.⁷¹ Across northern England, working-class children made the charitable receipt of resources an unremarkable part of childhood, about which they wrote in public without any sign of embarrassment. Just as London mothers were ‘foragers’ for resources to maintain their households, children were omnivorous consumers of extra-familial resources, providing that they could show that their family and friends cared for them too.

Working-class children were essential to the project of public investment in children’s welfare. Young correspondents across northern England used their privileged understanding of children’s embodied ‘suffering’ to raise money for paediatric hospitals and to promote the use of institutionalized medicine as part of working-class healthcare. As Mandler advised in relation to charity in general, evidence from the children’s letters reveals why historians should ‘scrutinize the assumption that dependence on charity carried a stigma for the poor’.⁷² Working-class children were discriminating ‘experts by experience’, refusing to praise their life in children’s homes and ignoring the welfare of vulnerable adults. Yet, whether writing as recipients, philanthropists or reporters, another thread runs through children’s letters: the importance of peers, siblings, adult kin and, above all, parents.

Parental and peer care

The vast majority of investment in children’s welfare came from within working-class households. As economic historians have highlighted, we lack evidence for the intra-household negotiation of resources. Sara Horrell and Deborah Oxley’s quantitative analysis revealed the significance of ‘earner bias’ in determining the distribution of material resources, concluding that ‘bargaining occurred not just between husband and wife but also between adolescent children and parents’. As children’s philanthropy demonstrates, children who were not yet wage-earning adolescents were also able to ‘beg’ to divert money away from the household economy. This culture of ‘bargaining’ is beyond the reach of statistical evidence, and indeed Horrell and Oxley advised that further ‘empirical work on these historical households is required to understand the substructure of negotiations and the resultant outcomes’.⁷³ In this section, children’s letters offer a window into working-class households. By examining how children negotiated not merely money, but also time and care, we gain new insights into how children conceptualized their own welfare. This analysis suggests first children’s awareness of the vulnerability of their household welfare and second the importance of peer comparisons in forming new identities founded on bodily impairment.

Research into parenthood makes clear that adults were proud investors in their children’s welfare. When fathers and especially mothers expressed suspicion about institutional interventions, they were confident in articulating the parental prerogatives, time-consuming labour and individual expertise that meant that they knew how to care for their offspring.⁷⁴ Historians have learnt about children’s views on these intergenerational relationships principally through memoirs. A standard feature of working-class memoirs was the uncomfortable adult realization of the depths of their childhood poverty and the extent of maternal ‘sacrifices’. Autobiographers recalled their mothers’ efforts to maintain a clean home and to provide their children with food, even when it meant living without meals or with domestic violence.⁷⁵ Contemporary evidence from children’s correspondence suggests that most of the time children took this age-specific parental care for granted. Children were silent in their letters about routine intergenerational investments of money, time and skill. Indeed, one ten-year-old boy, whose widowed mother had recently died, wrote to warn other children ‘I am an orphan boy. I wish to tell the children to make much of their fathers and mothers.’⁷⁶

Yet, if we piece together letters longitudinally, a different picture emerges. This suggests that working-class children were – episodically – painfully aware of their household’s precarious dependence on paternal breadwinning, maternal unpaid labour and the threat of poverty that loomed over their welfare. We see this best if we direct a spotlight on just one family. As well as being engaged in reciprocal philanthropy, twelve-year-old Charlotte Bontoft’s frequent letters were speckled with signs that she knew of the fragility of her welfare. Her fears emerged when her ‘father’ fell ‘so very ill’ in winter 1897 and became unable to continue his work as an agricultural labourer and gardener.⁷⁷ The next letter noted with relief that ‘my father is better, but not strong yet, but he is working’.⁷⁸ The ‘breadwinner frailty’ that Jane Humphries identified as central to autobiographical narratives was an economic fear that haunted writers in childhood too.⁷⁹ Charlotte knew that ‘he is working’ was the crucial sign, not of her father’s recovery, but of her household’s survival. When her ‘mother was taken very ill’ eighteen months later, Charlotte explained regretfully to the column that ‘I should have written to you before now’, but she had had no time for five weeks. Charlotte was aware that her freedom to enjoy the community of fictive kinship through the children’s column depended on not being responsible for housework or care work. Working-class children narrated a relational sense of self that was preoccupied with family, not simply because of romanticized ideals, but because they knew how much their welfare depended on the flimsy bodily strength of adults who provided for them.

By tracing children’s lives beyond their letters, the material and emotional significance of networks of kin investment that stretched far beyond the nuclear family becomes apparent. We learn from genealogical records that the adults Charlotte lived with and called her parents were in fact her childless aunt and uncle.⁸⁰ Her birth mother, father and some of her older siblings lived in a separate nearby cottage.⁸¹ Her birth father had been an agricultural labourer, but became an ‘invalid’ in his forties, around the time of Charlotte’s birth.⁸² Charlotte retained her birth family’s surname in official records, but she always identified herself in her own writing using the surname of her uncle.⁸³ Leonore Davidoff’s research highlighted the significance of life-long sibling ties to middle-class welfare, but the concept of the ‘long family’ also helps us to understand how poorer counterparts supported each other during familial crises.⁸⁴ Children made extended kinship networks central to their assessments of their emotional well-being, not merely their material welfare. When Charlotte Bontoft’s cousin died, after having ‘suffered dreadful pain in her body’, Charlotte noted that she ‘was like a sister to me, and I loved her dearly’. When a six-year-old cousin died in an accident, she explained how ‘very sad’ it was. Charlotte’s assessment of her own happiness was always relational; after this summer of family tragedies, she concluded ‘I am sorry to tell you that I have not enjoyed my holidays.’⁸⁵ Fragile affective kin structures were the preferred means for managing family crises, including when they threatened to envelop the youngest and most vulnerable children, such as Charlotte in infancy.

Thanks to Victorian post and rail services, news of how people ‘suffered’ spread with unprecedented rapidity around kinship networks, leaving children with emotions that some articulated in print. It is not clear that the flexibility, fragility or significance of the extended family to children’s welfare was novel in these decades, but we have sources that allow historians to see how working-class children made sense of its centrality. Indeed, the columns were part of this culture of kinship. For instance, when thirteen-year-old Charlotte’s normally monthly letters had been delayed through her own illness, she explained affectionately to the column’s ‘Daddy’ that ‘You will think I have forgot you as I have not written to you this year; but I have not. I often talk about you.’⁸⁶ Familial death, injury and disease were the events that wrought the shape and duration of children’s well-being; even if temporary, family crises made children aware of their dependence on the health, emotional ties and decisions of adult relatives. Vulnerability was essential to the experience of growing up working class.

On top of this undercurrent of concern about familial fragility, children assessed their individual welfare through comparison with peers. Across northern England, this led one group of children with bodily impairments to identify themselves as different because of their additional needs. Thomas G. Cox, the son of a Northumbrian coal miner, was a frequent correspondent who was described in print as ‘the little cripple boy’. The fifteen year old explained that ‘I am just the same poor useless fellow as ever. I cannot keep out of bed long at a time now – about an hour daily.’ The litany of growing inadequacies included the inability to write unaided. Thomas explained that ‘As I cannot write myself now, I have got my father to write a few lines to you for me, to let you know how I am getting on.’⁸⁷ Narratives of ‘affliction’ held particular power in Victorian literary culture, leading Martha Stoddard Holmes to argue that adults’ ‘narratives of self were inevitably fashioned with reference to the melodramatic conventions that permeated cultural constructions of disability’. Charles Dickens’ figure of ‘Tiny Tim’ was the ultimate ‘figure of pure pathos, an afflicted, innocent child’.⁸⁸ The letter scribed by Thomas G. Cox’s father hints at these literary tropes, but it is significant that every column reference to the pathos of the ‘cripple’ child was penned by an adult or within a fictional story, rather than by children making sense of their own lives.⁸⁹ Working-class children formed strong narratives of corporeal, social and emotional difference, but this evidence suggests that they grew from different roots.

Children’s awareness of bodily difference intensified as their peers constructed a normative age-graded childhood identity defined by schooling. The nineteenth-century expansion in elementary schooling, including mandatory attendance from 1880, meant that adolescents expected to have grown away from the, often shaky and laboured, literacy of older generations. As soon as children became able to write, they ever-more uniformly introduced themselves through the standard they had reached. They wrote with frequent updates on their achievements. Ill and impaired correspondents aged over ten were most vocal about their frustration at their failure to make progress and gain autonomy. Joseph Shearer, the son of an engineman, penned a letter from his four-roomed home to explain that ‘I am thirteen years of age, and in Standard II. I go to Iveston Village school. I have been very poorly a long time, and I can not attend school regularly. This is the reason I am not in a higher Standard.’⁹⁰ Patchy attendance meant that Joseph was still three standards below the school-leaving qualification in his County Durham neighbourhood, but comparison with his twelve-year-old brother heightened his self-definition through his illness.⁹¹ Both boys wrote the following week to celebrate exam successes, when Joseph was ‘put in Standard III’ while his younger brother boasted that ‘I am now in Standard VI.’⁹² Children described impairment through the experience of confinement, stagnation and dependence. Through comparisons with peers’ ever-growing autonomous activity, these children formed an identity around accumulating relative incapacity.

While working-class children who emphasized their incapacity described physical or sensory impairments, wealthier children extended this language of comparison to intellectual deficits. Seventeen-year-old Rose M. dictated a letter that explained that she was a ‘regular duffer’ who her siblings called ‘the odd one’. She noted that ‘I am not like my brothers and sisters; they are all very clever in their undertakings and I am not.’ The letter described her inability to ‘write shorthand’, to ‘play any musical instrument’ and to learn science or languages. Her lower-middle-class family valued secondary education, so she became painfully conscious of her limitations during her teenage years. Although Rose acknowledged that she could ‘do any kind of housework’, she defined herself through her inadequacies when compared to her six siblings, noting that there are ‘so many can’ts among my list’. For most of the letter, it is not possible to distinguish Rose’s voice from her scribe’s, but after her uncle signed Rose’s name, he added the aside ‘(actually) the useful one’. Rose’s identification through incapacity had become the subject of family jest.⁹³ Historians have assumed that disabled identities were produced by state investment in special schools from the 1890s and the impact of expanding processes of expert categorization following the Boer War ‘degeneration’ scandal.⁹⁴ Yet, letters from across northern England reveal that decades earlier school-aged children articulated persistent identities founded in the sense of being ‘not like’ others. As turn-of-the-century children aspired to linear age-related progress, those who did not follow this route articulated a painful awareness of difference from their peers.

Dependency was at the heart of these identities, but through distinctly gendered relationships. Boys wrote a great deal about their father’s care. In a letter penned with an older sister, five-year-old Johnny Stubbs described how ‘I have a lame leg, and when I go out I have to go on my crutches or my little tricycle dada bought for me.’⁹⁵ As the manager of a Middlesbrough music business, Johnny’s father was wealthier than most correspondents’ and could afford multiple mobility aids. He also sought out professional medical advice for his son, recording – unusually – his then seven year old’s medical condition in the 1901 census’s disability column: ‘Lame from childhood. Hip joint’.⁹⁶ The special mention boys made of their father’s care was, however, typical of boys’ letters. Robert M. introduced himself by explaining that ‘I am suffering from some trouble in my legs, and I cannot move about like other boys. The doctors say I shall get well some day, but that it will be a long time before I am able to walk without assistance. I try to be patient.’ In comparison to younger boys, the frustration in adolescent letters is palpable. Yet, Robert was also aware of the need to ‘try’ to fight against feelings of inadequacy when comparing himself to his mobile peers, adding ‘I am trying also to be useful, for my arms are not weak’. To counter his son’s experience of being ‘weak’, Robert’s father gave him an education in masculine craftsmanship. Robert explained that ‘a box of joiner’s tools has been given to me that I may keep my hands busy’. He was ‘busy now on a wooden doll, for my little sister’, but noted proudly that ‘father says that if Maggie won’t have the doll because it is stiff, he will help me to make a big ship, and use the doll for a figure-head’.⁹⁷ Working-class men defined themselves through independent breadwinning, manual skill and physical strength, and boys valued their fathers’ efforts to pass on those aspects of this masculine identity that evaded their impairments.⁹⁸ Fathers also showed awareness of the emotional impact of social isolation in boyhood. Not only was fifteen-year-old Thomas G. Cox’s father his scribe, but Thomas described proudly how ‘Father takes the Weekly Chronicle on purpose for me, so that I see everything that is going on’ in the children’s column.⁹⁹ Unlike the Stubbs family, the coal miner could not afford equipment to enable his adolescent son to leave their three-roomed home. He instead assured his son that he would bring childhood social life to his bedside. In practice, none of these breadwinning fathers could have been solely responsible for their sons’ care, but boys placed particular value on the father–son relationship and chose to narrate these interactions in print.

Girls who defined themselves through their impairments did not mention paternal investment, but instead dwelt on the importance of care provided by other young girls. Nine-year-old Tilly Calvert, whose father worked in a Hartlepool forge, described how ‘I go to school, and am in Standard I, but would have been higher, only I cannot walk like other girls.’ Tilly’s paralysis required her to be dependent on care haphazardly provided by her peers to get to and from the classroom.¹⁰⁰ She explained that ‘I have a lot of playmates, who are very kind to me, and take me all over.’¹⁰¹ Anna Davin used the concept of ‘little mothers’ to describe the caring roles of young Londoners, echoing the rhetoric of philanthropists who bewailed poor girls’ premature maturity.¹⁰² In their writing, however, northern girls did not compare peer care to motherhood. Instead, they made sense of care-giving through a language of friendship, expressed through emotional support as well as physical aid. Nineteen-year-old Rose Taylor introduced herself through her incapacity because ‘I have had a stroke.’ As the daughter of a widowed milliner, she focused on her inability to do manual work, writing ‘I am not like other girls: I cannot knit or sew, for I have only one arm that I can use.’¹⁰³ Rose emphasized her dependence on ‘a great many companions who call to see me and try to cheer me as best they can’.¹⁰⁴ While boys alluded to peer homosocial bonds that became fragile and distant due to disability, girls depicted friendships that strengthened through dependency. Care-giving was made integral to girlhood.

Indeed, working-class parents’ attention to the needs of the ‘suffering’ child disempowered their other daughters. Letters from girls whose parents expected them to care for their ‘weak’ siblings described a quiet sense of injustice. The twelve-year-old daughter of a railway worker explained that she had no free time during the summer because ‘I had to take my little lame sister out every day and night with it being so fine.’¹⁰⁵ Polly Sturdy’s ‘little lame sister’ was only two years her junior, but Polly made clear that the health-endowing outings were demanding labour, not merely play. It was not until mid-September that she wrote with relief of the return of some free time because ‘It is Saturday, and it is rainy, so I thought I would write’.¹⁰⁶ Just as disabled boys’ self-narratives marginalized care by anyone other than fathers, girls seldom wrote about parental investment. Yet Polly’s reference to the pressure that she ‘had to take’ her sister out implies her parents’ efforts to invest resources disproportionately in the life of her ‘lame’ sister. Importantly, young writers showed no signs that they felt able to ‘bargain’ to alter parents’ decisions or to challenge the intergenerational power dynamics with which they lived.

Conclusion

The project of ‘child saving’ was not the preserve of either adults or the middle classes. Working-class parents knew that they were the principal providers for children’s welfare. Everyday money, time, expertise and networks of kin maintained a household, but late nineteenth-century fathers as well as mothers were proud of the additional care they provided to children identified as ‘weak’. We need to rewrite our histories of child welfare to include parents as central actors, not merely impediments, in expanding specialist investment in the lives of the young.

‘Weak’ children were well aware of their unique household status. Children’s letters suggest that this identity strengthened rapidly from 1880, as compulsory age-related schooling made children painfully conscious of their inadequacies compared to peers. Gendered patterns of dependence, on either fathers or female peers, heightened this sense of difference. This evidence suggests that a disabled identity in childhood was thus not primarily the adult-authored product either of literary tropes or of expert categorization. Rather, children’s interactions with peers through schooling and associational life (including through the social world of print) created new age-defined norms that made some children feel that their trajectories were inadequate. For the majority of child writers who did grow as they hoped towards autonomous achievements and social relations, periods of illness – their own, of siblings, or of parents – were the principal events that punctuated their lives. Histories of childhood have remained largely untouched by the corporeal turn, but children understood individual ‘welfare’ through comparing their bodily capacities to those of peers. These comparisons were gender- and class-specific, so that, for instance, only wealthier children extended the language of deficits to their intellectual abilities. Health – subjective and relational, mental as much as physical – is thus a crucial category of analysis for social historians of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain that has at least as much explanatory power as gender or age.

Children were not merely recipients of welfare, but also providers, philanthropists and activists. As friends and sisters, girls in particular provided crucial care for ‘weak’ siblings. Children felt that they had little power to challenge the intergenerational and deeply gendered power dynamics upon which households depended. This makes it even more significant that boys and girls alike did have ‘bargaining power’ when negotiating extra-familial investments. Children worked as sibling collectives to divert parents’ money away from the household economy, but simultaneously sought out their own charitable gifts to bring resources into their household. Child philanthropy thus challenges the historiographical preoccupation with charity as a site of class distinction. Evidence from the letters suggests charitable work did crystallize identities, but, for most philanthropists, morality, place and especially age were at least as significant as class. Working-class children publicized their own experiences as ‘suffering’ children and used their privileged ‘social knowledge’ to respond to adult fears about new forms of healthcare. Children’s collective actions also contributed to the local patchiness and inequities of institutional provision. Children were zealous promoters of local medical care, but residential institutions, whether funded by the state or charities, lacked advocates from among their residents. Children’s experiences thus underline how truly mixed the ‘mixed economy of welfare’ was. The young did not distinguish between state and charitable providers, but instead made distinctions based on the quality of care they experienced.

Participatory children’s columns, dominated by working-class writers, were a short-lived, provincial and contingent phenomenon. After the First World War, middle-class journalists continued to provide ‘child-centred’ content, but ceased to give a platform in local newspapers to working-class children’s everyday experiences. Yet, these momentary ‘imagined communities’ prompt us to rethink the assumptions of Victorian literary scholars who have presumed the ‘necessarily middle-class status of children who take the pen into their own hands: they must be literate and they must have access to writing materials’.¹⁰⁷ For forty years from the late 1870s, working-class children – clustered in particular geographical regions and when their family had sufficient income – had the literacy, resources, motivation and spaces in which to make their lives and views public. Attention to children’s agency and peer culture are thus not merely ‘mantras’ of childhood studies, but are essential if we are to understand how children experienced welfare.¹⁰⁸ Although M. J. D. Roberts concluded that voluntary associations focused on ‘moral reform’ and ‘active citizenship’ had ‘diminishing significance’ after the 1880s, it was in these decades that this culture of activism flourished for the largest demographic group in Britain, working-class children.¹⁰⁹ Columns thus contributed to the creation of a distinctively child-focused culture of social reform that had profound implications for child welfare. Children believed they had influence and they used this power to make others – peers and adults alike – aware of their experiences of welfare.