Immortalized by Dickens, enumerated by Booth and exploited by Barnardo, the Victorian pauper child was a familiar image in nineteenth-century England.² In 1861, seven million of England’s population of twenty million was under the age of fifteen, a proportion of young people that would remain largely unchanged for the next thirty years.³ There were growing fears about child labour, juvenile delinquency, high infant mortality and the moral threat posed by large masses of the poor crowded into urban streets.⁴ In 1850, Charles Dickens described the poor children of London as:

These descriptions of poor children caught hold of the public imagination fortified by speeches in parliament and articles in newspapers.⁶ Such children, as Anna Davin has pointed out, were always visible on the streets employed in a variety of tasks lawful or otherwise and their very visibility made these ‘guttersnipes’ and ‘arabs’ threatening to society.⁷

Dickens was speaking to an active debate on juvenile delinquency, which as Harry Hendrick has demonstrated, brought into conflict eighteenth-century romantic ideals and the realities of industrial child labour. Notions of childhood were changing throughout the nineteenth century and by the middle of the period, children were increasingly regarded as innocent and malleable, in need of protection. Philanthropists were central to an emerging child welfare provision that argued that all children needed the guidance of a family environment that corresponded to middle-class ideals of domesticity.⁸ The discursive power of this image of the sweet innocent child at risk from its environment spawned a philanthropic movement that aimed to ‘rescue’ such children from their parents and place them in institutions where they could be educated, trained for future employment and most importantly separated from the adverse influences of their home.⁹

By reframing the discussion around these removed children, this chapter challenges the dominant historiographical view that nineteenth-century institutional welfare was a negative outcome for children. It explores the diversity of children’s backgrounds in conjunction with children’s agency and argues first that children played a role in shaping their encounters with welfare and second that the family environment was not always best for children; sometimes the institution was preferable, even if it was not always the outcome that parents desired. Using an innovative life-course approach that combines institutional documents with genealogical research, the first part of the chapter focuses on the circumstances under which children entered institutions as an important constituent of the welfare experience. Only by considering the complete background to children’s entry into care are we able to effectively critique the welfare experience. Building on this, the second part of the chapter explores children’s responses to their time in the Homes to argue that official documents such as punishment registers have multiple meanings and need to be combined with other sources such as letters and life course data to enrich our understanding of the way children were shaped by – and shaped – the welfare they experienced.

The child removal policy has been widely criticized in the scholarship in terms of both its effectiveness and the presumed pain it caused.¹⁰ Hendrick’s pioneering 1994 study of child welfare asserted what he described as the ‘misery endured by these boys and girls taken from their parents, brothers and sisters, families, communities and friends’ but without exploring any individual or collective experiences from the child’s perspective.¹¹ To justify the removal of children, nineteenth-century reformers constructed discourses that invariably depicted parents as abusive and neglectful, vagrants, drunkards and prostitutes primarily interested in their children for the wages they could bring in. This portrayal was successfully challenged at the turn of the twenty-first century by Lydia Murdoch in her influential book Imagined Orphans. Murdoch argued that institutionalized children more typically came from desperate yet caring families afflicted by poverty.¹² This implied that separation was harmful for both parties – parents and children – and was an important development in our understanding of nineteenth-century welfare that fitted within a broader historiographical shift, begun by E. P. Thompson that sought to restore dignity to working-class lives.¹³ However, it also positioned parents who were ‘drunkards, prostitutes and brutal abusers’ as the diametric opposite of the ‘single mother who struggled to maintain contact with her child despite poverty, illness or the death of a partner’ – a profile that Murdoch argued was more common in reality than the classic Victorian image of abusive and exploitative parents.¹⁴

This dichotomy is problematic because both presentations are not necessarily exclusive. Mothers can have suffered illness and poverty and also be prostitutes. Parents can both be drunkards and have lost a spouse. Furthermore, the focus on parents risks obscuring the children who had to live in the circumstances highlighted by Murdoch. Recent research into childhood indicates that in the present day, poverty, illness and instability can be as disruptive to a child as drunkenness and neglect.¹⁵ How did these factors influence children in the nineteenth century? Peter Stearns argued that when it came to childhood in the past ‘we know a fair amount’ about children who have passed through institutional care, but despite the wealth of scholarship on institutions, there is little that examines in depth what it was like to be a recipient of institutional welfare from the child’s perspective.¹⁶ It is twenty years since Lynn Abram’s pioneering work on Scottish foster-care children adopted a child-centred approach that wound together statistics and oral histories to highlight the adverse impacts of Scottish welfare policy, but few similar works have followed. Abrams’ critique while influential was limited, as Catriona Macdonald pointed out, both by the need to substitute the voice of the adult for that of the child and by a lack of evidence for the nineteenth century.¹⁷ More recently, however, Laura Mair has successfully centred the nineteenth-century child in her examination of letters between former ragged school pupils and their schoolteacher. In so doing, she not only revealed the many networks of friendship and community that were built through philanthropic endeavour, but has also enhanced our ‘partial’ understanding of the child’s experience of welfare.¹⁸

However, there remains more to be done, particularly in the field of ‘child removal’ where the cultural turn has concentrated attention on discourses of child saving and emigration rather than on the social underpinnings and experiences of those saved. In critiquing institutionalization as a policy, the focus is on the act of removal not on the time leading up to it or afterwards and analyses are often constructed in ways that position family life as good and institutional life as bad. The scholarship has been understandably influenced by the emergence of twentieth-century institutional child abuse scandals. Even in scholarship that examines children’s experiences of institutional life, positive accounts are often implicitly characterized as unrepresentative – overshadowed by language and analysis that emphasizes the ‘quiet pain’ suffered by removed children as a result of the ‘loss of a mother’s love’ and on their ‘dislocation and alienation’ as adults.¹⁹ Yet there has been limited consideration of nineteenth-century experiences. Through the work of Lydia Murdoch, Pamela Cox and Harry Hendrick, we know how nineteenth-century philanthropists and the state viewed welfare for poor and criminal children. What we do not know is how the children themselves viewed the welfare provision available to them. How did they respond to philanthropists eager to ‘rescue’ them from family? How did they feel about the parents and families they left behind?

To answer these questions, this chapter explores the records of one hundred individuals (fifty girls and fifty boys) from two Surrey institutions in the second half of the nineteenth century. Children were admitted from across England. One-third of those in the Homes came from rural locations, forty-five per cent from London and the remainder from other English cities and towns. The period was one of increased state and philanthropic intervention in the welfare of Britain’s poor children. The Reformatory Act of 1854 established residential reformatory schools for young delinquents and by 1872, of an estimated 9,363 criminal children in England, around 5,575 were in such institutions. This was about a third as large as the destitute child population of workhouses, demonstrating just how significant this category of children was.²⁰ A broadly similar number (10,185) were part of what social reformer Mary Carpenter described as the ‘perishing classes’, children who had not yet committed a crime but might do so if left unaided.²¹ These children were taken into industrial schools, established in the Act of 1857, where, according to historian Marianne Moore, it was hoped that love and training would allow them to earn an honest living in what she described as ‘one of the most energetic child protection movements in modern England’.²² Both the schools studied in this chapter, the Royal Philanthropic School (RPS) for boys and the Princess Mary Village Homes (PMVH) for girls, were important within their respective movements. The reformatory RPS admitted children from across England and was regarded as the most prominent in its field, accounting for almost ten per cent of the boys in reformatory schools in England and Wales in 1860, while the PMVH, established in 1870 as an industrial school for daughters of criminals, similarly accommodated around ten per cent of England’s much smaller population of institutionalized girls.²³ Together, these two categories of children represented a substantial proportion of nineteenth-century child welfare recipients, yet they are relatively underexplored in the history of child welfare, which has tended to focus on higher-profile organizations such as Barnardo’s and the Waifs and Strays where parents played a more instrumental role in admission, normally seeking temporary care for their children after a family crisis.²⁴ Including these schools in an analysis of welfare providers therefore significantly expands our understanding of nineteenth-century experiences of welfare.

‘I determined to change my name and deny all knowledge of living relations’: children’s choices and their consequences²⁵

In order to evaluate children’s encounters with institutional welfare, it is essential to consider the environment and circumstances that led to their institutionalization. Only by contextualizing children’s lives before their removal can we truly understand the experience of separation in all its permutations. The revisionist historiography of institutional welfare positions parents and children as victims of philanthropic enthusiasm. Yet not all children resisted entry to institutional care; some actively sought it, while others still contributed to their admission through their own behaviour. Furthermore, not all families conformed either to the ideal of Victorian domestic life represented by Ruskin’s model of the ‘place of peace and shelter’ or to modern ideals of safety and security within the family structure.²⁶

Firstly, it is important to recognize that some children were eager to leave the family home despite their parents’ desire to retain custody of them. One such case was that of the Navin sisters, Margaret (aged seven) and Julia (aged four), whose mother Mary Ann often placed them on the streets to beg on her behalf. On her admission to prison in 1870, Mary Ann, a frequent thief with a string of aliases, gave the girls into the care of PMVH.²⁷ On her release seven months later, Mary Ann ‘violently removed’ both girls from the Home and took the children back to her lodgings in London’s ‘Devil’s Acre’ where as many as 120 people lived in a single lodging and disease and poverty were rife.²⁸ Shortly afterwards, smallpox struck the family and the girls’ new-born infant sister Jane died. Ravaged by illness and with Julia a ‘pitiable object’, Margaret left her mother’s home and ran the two streets to the PMVH’s Mission House. Reportedly ‘taking hold of the hand’ of one of the ladies, she asked if she and Julia could be returned that night to the PMVH and never leave. The girls were admitted to the Home under the Industrial Schools Act 1866, probably due to the report of them begging, although Margaret’s voluntary return to seek help may have also supported allegations of neglect. Subsequent attempts by Mary Ann to remove them were unsuccessful.²⁹

While it is tempting to dismiss this account as a romanticized story of child ‘rescue’, similar to those critiqued by Swain and others as propaganda, the details were not published but were reconstructed from the information contained in the private admissions register for the Home, supplemented by genealogical tracing and analysis of criminal registers.³⁰ This demonstrates the advantage of the methodological approach adopted for this chapter. Centring the perspective of the child forces us to recognize that, in some circumstances and for some children, institutional welfare was preferable to family life. That the interests of the child might come into conflict with the desires of their parent is something that is largely unrecognized in discussions of child welfare.

Margaret’s story also challenges traditional presentations of institutional children as ‘passive objects’ and sharpens our understanding of agency by demonstrating that children could not only willingly conform to adult agendas when it suited them to do so, but also wield significant strategic power that influenced their futures.³¹ In returning to the Mission to seek help, Margaret would have understood the probable outcome of her actions. Mary Ann clearly wanted her children with her and had only given them up to the care of the Home temporarily. The word ‘violently’ used to describe the children’s removal could imply either that the managers resisted Mary Ann’s attempts to reclaim her children or that the children themselves resisted removal – unfortunately, we cannot tell. Once reclaimed, the girls were lodging barely two streets away from the Mission, yet it was a definitive action by seven-year-old Margaret, perhaps scared by her younger sister’s death and in fear for her own life and that of her remaining sister, that resulted in the girls’ readmission. Margaret had spent six months in the Home the preceding year, had been back with her mother only briefly and had still chosen institutional life over the alternative with her mother. Faced with contradictory adult demands, she made her own assessment of the best means to secure her welfare.

This example supports the assertion that the familial background of the children matters in our evaluation of welfare experiences. Poverty was often intermingled with other factors such as criminality, the loss or desertion of a parent, neglect and abuse. In such circumstances, while children may not have chosen welfare as Margaret did, the institutional environment may still have been preferable to the domestic one. As Murdoch has argued, abuse was rarely recorded, but neglect and abandonment were far more common.³² Around forty-five per cent of the PMVH girls had criminal mothers. This, of course, reflects the profile of the Home, which targeted such families, but it is nonetheless worth emphasizing given the historiographical focus on the loving struggling single mother of an institutionalized child. There were many iterations of mothers and families. Catherine Hall’s parents were both in prison. Her mother, Ellen, was first convicted at the age of sixteen for theft and had four further convictions for housebreaking and stealing together with a man called William James.³³ After serving nine months of her second twelve-month sentence, she was released to give birth to Catherine. Shortly afterwards, together with James, she broke into yet another house, was caught and convicted and one-year-old Catherine removed to the PMVH to prevent her entering prison with her mother.³⁴ Similarly, thirteen-month-old Julia Jenkins was admitted from Westminster prison, where her mother, a habitual criminal with nine aliases, was serving one of her many jail terms for larceny. Another Catherine, Catherine Coleman, also had parents who were both convicts. Her father was serving fourteen years in prison and her mother on her fourth conviction took up an offer of emigration sponsored by a society for female prisoners, failing to disclose to them that she was leaving behind a child in order to gain her ticket. According to the admissions register, eight-year-old Catherine was reportedly left to live with ‘some people named Hart’ from whom she ran away frequently, living on the streets. Eventually an intoxicated Mrs Hart, who was in fact Catherine’s maternal aunt, and who ‘wished to get rid of her’ brought her to the PMVH.³⁵ For these girls, the PMVH offered the only alternative to life on the streets or in prison.

Yet admission to a residential institution was not their choice and like most of the girls admitted to the PMVH, they were there because of their parents’ criminal activity, not their own. Victorian justice was gendered and tended to focus on the risks posed by female sexuality and disorder and there were relatively few criminal convictions among the cohort studied for this chapter.³⁶ However, there were exceptions. The group studied contained three girls who were clearly of concern to the authorities. These were eleven-year-old beggar Eliza Goulden, and ‘uncontrollable’ twelve-year-old Flora Green, both of whom subsequently stole from their mistresses, and thirteen-year-old Emma Brady who ‘ran wild’ in bad company and repeatedly robbed her respectable-but-deaf seamstress mother. All these girls were admitted to the PMVH in the hope that its ‘discipline and confinement’ would encourage them to mend their ways.³⁷ Their actions, which disrupted Victorian norms of female behaviour, contributed to their admission.

Delinquent children, as Heather Shore has demonstrated, immediately present as more agentic than the traditional pauper child.³⁸ Yet, while such children were central to discourses on crime in the Victorian period, analysis of their agency was still framed and structured within a broader narrative that foregrounded their parents. Reformers believed that criminal children were nurtured into crime. Victorian social commentator James Greenwood argued that juvenile offenders were ‘thieves from infancy. Their parents are thieves in most cases; in others, the children are orphans, or have been forsaken by their parents’.³⁹ Central to this argument was a fundamental association between the juvenile criminal and the criminality or immorality of their families that simultaneously rendered the child corruptible yet innocent and therefore passive. Yet, surprisingly few of the boys studied for this chapter fitted this stereotype. Genealogical tracing reveals no evident birth order pattern among offenders. Over two-thirds came from families where the father earned a reasonable wage, there were other siblings in employment and they were in employment themselves. One such boy was sixteen-year-old George Wheeler who was admitted in 1892. His father earned thirty shillings per week as a bookbinder, his elder brother was in the army and he himself had had several previous jobs as an errand boy in a fishmonger, bootmaker, picture gallery and a printers in London. He had lost his previous jobs for theft and was eventually convicted of stealing two diamond rings worth £16.⁴⁰ Another boy from a similarly respectable family, George Heywood (aged twelve), was convicted twenty years earlier in Derby of a less serious first offence of stealing pigeons but was described on admission as a ‘known associate of thieves’.⁴¹ George, the son of an iron moulder, had been employed driving a steam hammer at a forge at the time of his admission and his two older brothers Henry and Alfred were also gainfully employed in iron manufacturing.⁴² The examples of the two Georges demonstrate the value of tracing children’s backgrounds. In an 1853 speech in support of the Reformatory Schools Bill, evangelical reforming MP Charles Adderley described criminal children as ‘orphans in body and mind’ driven to commit crimes by an absence of family or moral guidance.⁴³ Yet, the genealogical analysis reveals that both Georges came from families who were relatively poor but respectable, with established familial networks of employed or married non-criminal siblings and grandparents nearby. According to the records, they were relatively typical of the type of boy to be found within the RPS. Just over half of the boys from the cohort came from families where the father was in skilled employment such as blacksmithing, tailoring and boot-making. A further eleven per cent had fathers in manufacturing occupations such as iron moulding. Even when the father was not in employment, was dead or absent, more than seventy per cent of the boys had older siblings who were in employment. If the RPS boys were not driven to criminality through desperation and hunger, as the historiography suggests, there must have been more specific factors.⁴⁴ What led this particular child to behave differently to his or her siblings, many of whom would have been subject to the same influences?

Recognizing the individuality of the child within the family unit encourages broader considerations of potential causes of his or her behaviour. While modern analysis has considered the contributory factors to youth offending in some detail from the perspective of the child, most studies of Victorian juvenile delinquency have focused on either the role played by structural factors or the socially and culturally constructed nature of youth misbehaviour.⁴⁵ The response of the child to changing family circumstances is neglected. Yet viewing juvenile delinquency through a framework of family relationships can provide possible alternative explanations for children’s criminality. One of the most fundamental crises in family life was the death or desertion of a parent. Analysis of the children in the RPS and the PMVH reveals high rates of parental loss. Across the period 1850–1900, fifty per cent had lost a parent to death at some point and a further twenty-eight per cent had been deserted by one or more parents. This is significantly higher than Jane Humphries’ estimates of ten to twenty per cent of all fourteen-year-old nineteenth-century children having lost at least one parent to death and Zhao’s modelling that indicated twenty-five per cent of children born in 1851–5 had lost at least one parent by age fifteen.⁴⁶ It is, of course, unsurprising that children who have lost a parent would be more likely to encounter welfare. Murdoch found similar rates of paternal loss in her study of institutionalized children as did Emma Griffin in her recent book on Victorian society and economics.⁴⁷ Jane Humphries identified in her study of childhood and child labour that the loss of one or both parents jeopardized all family life and had a significant impact on a child’s life chances.⁴⁸ The loss of a father was both a ‘major economic and emotional blow’ and the disappearance of a mother was likely to lead to a family break-up.⁴⁹ Yet death or desertion was not the only form of absence a child could experience. Thirty-one per cent of children in the cohort also had a parent who was or had been in prison. For the child of a frequently imprisoned parent, the impact of the uncertainty and dashed hopes caused by repeated jail-time could have as profound an emotional impact as death. Modern studies have shown that parental imprisonment is a ‘strong risk factor’ for adverse life outcomes for children and that children are even more affected if their mother is imprisoned.⁵⁰ Similar studies are lacking for the nineteenth century that allow us to historicize children’s emotions regarding the loss or desertion of a parent; however, scholarship by Julie-Marie Strange and Ellen Ross has demonstrated the significance of parental care in nineteenth-century working-class children’s lives, the absence of which could have had emotional consequences.⁵¹

The economic effect of parental loss has in contrast been a focus of much of the analysis of children’s entry into institutions and poverty unquestionably played a crucial role in many admissions.⁵² However, an examination of bereaved children’s backgrounds reveals that in many cases in the cohort, the surviving parent had remarried. Just over a quarter – just as many fathers as mothers – had a new partner by the time of their child’s entry to the Homes. This may have alleviated some of the economic pressures on families, but there is some evidence that it did not necessarily lessen the emotional impact of such a significant change in family life. The influence of family reconstitution on institutional children is absent from the literature, yet in over seventy per cent of the cases where a parent had remarried, the children in the step-relationship displayed signs of unhappiness that contributed to their admission. In Victorian public discourse, step-parents, although a common occurrence, were often blamed for family breakdown or delinquency.⁵³ Prominent campaigner Lord Shaftesbury argued that ‘very many’ criminal children were ‘driven from home and turned into the street by the ferocity of their step-parents’, adding that there was ‘no cause of vice, misery or suffering more common than the domineering temper of step-mothers who will not allow their step-children to remain in the same house with them’.⁵⁴ These discourses drew on long-established tropes of wicked step-parents that were given new strength in the period by the increasing sacralization of the family and the parental role.⁵⁵ Historians have increasingly questioned these stereotypes by pointing first to the widespread occurrence of Victorian remarriage and, second, to the many historical examples of happy or successful step-families.⁵⁶ Yet, there are nonetheless indications within the records of the RPS and the PMVH that some families found their new step-relationships problematic or even abusive. One parent who unquestionably fulfilled the stereotype of the wicked step-father was John Colwell, step-father of Sarah Rivett and her sister Elizabeth, who married the girls’ mother when the girls were aged three and four, respectively. In 1883, Colwell confessed to indecently assaulting and causing actual bodily harm to his eldest step-daughter, thirteen-year-old Elizabeth, on multiple occasions and was sentenced to eight months in prison.⁵⁷ Elizabeth was sent to a home for girls and twelve-year-old Sarah was admitted to the PMVH to rescue her from the further ‘demoralizing and depraving influence’ of her step-father. She remained there until she was seventeen and safely of an age when she no longer needed to remain under parental control.⁵⁸ For the Rivett girls, as for the Navin sisters, the family environment was less safe than the alternative of the institution.

The Rivetts’ case, however, was one of only two cases of obvious abuse in the PMVH register. Far more common across both institutions were neglectful, fractured or difficult step-relationships. Alice Sophia Wells was the illegitimate child of eighteen-year-old servant Amelia.⁵⁹ Alice was reportedly ‘terribly neglected’ after her mother married coachman Benjamin Knight and was ‘a constant subject of dispute between the parents, the step-father having a thorough dislike for the child’. She was admitted to the PMVH and remained there for six years, finally leaving for a position in service in 1883 at the age of fifteen.⁶⁰ While she was in the Home her mother gave birth to two more children, Caroline and Amelia Ann, with her husband Benjamin.⁶¹ Interestingly, while Alice’s step-father is blamed in the records for Alice’s removal from the family home, background analysis reveals that almost ten years later, following her step-father’s death and her mother’s subsequent remarriage to William Johnson, Alice’s seven-year-old half-sister Amelia Ann was also sent away from the family home to live with her uncle Thomas, an engineer’s fireman.⁶² Perhaps it was Alice’s mother therefore that struggled to integrate her children from a former partner into a new relationship and not her step-father. As Claudia Nelson has pointed out, inadequate parental–child bonds were more acceptable to Victorian society when the parent that failed to conform to nurturing norms was a step-parent rather than a birth relative.⁶³ Irrespective of the cause, what the records and research cannot explain is why on the second occasion that Amelia sent a child away, it was to a family member rather than to an institution. Did her new husband intercede or was it that her brother Thomas, by this time in a good job, but in a childless marriage, offered on this occasion to take in Amelia’s child? Or did Amelia’s previous experience of having placed Alice in an institution deter her from doing so with a second child? It is worth noting here that at any point during Alice’s six years in the PMVH her mother could have chosen to bring her back home; other mothers in similar circumstances did. That she did not speaks of the boundaries of her affection and obligation towards Alice as well as of a deliberate choice to place her child in institutional care rather than the familial alternative.

Just as step-parents rejected their step-children so did step-children reject their new parents. Fifteen-year-old William Stanford from rural Sussex, on admission to the RPS, refused to admit that his twenty-four-year-old step-father even existed. Instead, he pretended that his father, who had died five years previously, was still alive and was a station master when it was his step-father who really worked on the railway, but only as a labourer.⁶⁴ Both the resurrection of his father and his father’s occupational elevation clearly demonstrated William’s resentment towards the man by whom his mother had become pregnant a scarce five months after his father’s death. Despite therefore generally improving a family’s economic situation, remarriage could result in a disruption to family life that provided impetus to a child’s encounter with welfare, either at the instigation of the step-parents or through the agency of the child.

Children appear to have been aware of the ways in which they could use the welfare system to direct their futures. This chapter began with the example of the Navin sisters who begged to leave their family to return to the Home. They were not an isolated instance. Every time George Wallace ran away from his ‘cruel stepmother’ and his father, he was found by his father and returned home. Eventually, when caught in Derbyshire stealing a shirt on one such adventure, he gave a false name and claimed to have no relatives, thus ensuring not only his escape from his home life, but also his admission to reformatory school. He remained in the Home for four years and only admitted the truth of his background in a letter to the RPS over twenty years later.⁶⁵ George’s actions have parallels with those of fifteen-year-old Frederick Whiffen who was discovered by a police constable sleeping rough in a market van in Holloway, North London. Frederick refused to give any account of his actions other than to claim that his parents were dead and, like George, he gave a false name on entry. This ensured his institutionalization. It was only some months later that the RPS staff discovered his true background. Frederick was illegitimate and had been placed by his mother Charlotte as a baby in the care of a Mrs Hart who had brought him up until the age of eleven when his mother’s second cousin (and possibly his father), a Mr Cole, arrived, removed Frederick and placed him in the home of Frederick’s maternal aunt some miles away in rural Kent as an apprentice brewer to her husband.⁶⁶ For Frederick, who had been unaware that Mrs Hart was not his real mother, it was clearly a blow. He spent the next two years being so ‘tiresome’ that Mr Cole then took him to London to be apprenticed as a bootmaker – from which post he promptly ran away back to Mrs Hart. The now widowed Mrs Hart refused to return Frederick to Mr Cole, who ‘annoyed with her abuse’ gave up his efforts.⁶⁷ However, after two years Mrs Hart moved to Reading, leaving Frederick behind and now aged fifteen Frederick was forced to live on the streets, scraping a living doing ‘chance jobs’ and spending the nights in market vans. On his arrest, Frederick could have chosen to reveal the existence of the numerous relatives he had recently discovered but instead pretended to be an orphan, thus, like the Navin sisters, choosing the alternative of institutional care. Perhaps having suffered what was in effect a twin abandonment by two mothers – his birth mother and Mrs Hart – he felt himself to be an orphan in truth. Certainly, his maternal grandmother in her letter to the RPS recognized that Frederick had been ‘buffeted about a great deal’.⁶⁸ Frederick’s return to Mrs Hart seems to indicate that his childhood as a foster child was a happy one and certainly preferable to him than the two good apprenticeship opportunities offered by his new-found relatives.

The example of Frederick and the other children undermines any narrative that presents such children as passive victims of philanthropic welfare. Children existed both within and separate to the family and they understood the power they wielded as children with a right to protection in an increasingly interventionist society. It is difficult to conceive that the children would not have known what might happen to them if they concealed their origins, especially given the widespread discourses on philanthropic intervention and the overcrowded and cramped living conditions of the working classes. Historians have successfully demonstrated the ways in which poor parents used nineteenth-century welfare structures for their own benefit and in so doing enhanced our understanding of how the working poor understood their rights and status as citizens.⁶⁹ Yet what this analysis reveals is that children too made use of the systems of philanthropy and the state to suit their own ends and importantly that their interests did not necessarily coincide with those of their family. Family life was sometimes less appealing than the alternative of institutional welfare.

‘I shall always look on the time I spent at Waterlands as being the turning point of my life’: the importance of relationships in intervention⁷⁰

Central to children’s encounters with welfare were people – both those they left behind and those that they met inside the institution. Children created new relationships with staff inside the Homes that had long-lasting effects and the character of the institution was of crucial importance in this process. Like family welfare, institutional welfare varied considerably depending on provider. Too often Barnardo’s and the Poor Law institutions are regarded as representative of charitable approaches to child welfare overall.⁷¹ Yet, as Seth Koven has demonstrated, Victorian philanthropy was widespread and involved people of both genders, from all social classes with a complex variety of motivations and impulses.⁷² Nineteenth-century welfare was a patchwork of often partially state funded but locally embedded provision that took on the character of those who founded and operated the institutions and similar policies, such as emigration, could be delivered very differently. This diversity needs to be recognized in order to effectively evaluate children’s experiences.

Both the RPS and the PMVH had a strong religious ethos and a shared belief in both the efficacy of the family-based system and the principle that institutionalized children should be met with kindness as well as structure.⁷³ The RPS’s first warden following its institution as a farm school believed that children had to voluntarily engage in their own reform for it to be effective, arguing that the warden’s role was to be ‘the parent influencing by affection, not the officer, governing by discipline; to make the Asylum, not a prison for punishment but a school for education’.⁷⁴ Susannah Meredith, the founder of the PMVH, adopted a similar approach. Meredith was the widowed daughter of the governor of Cork County gaol, an experienced prison missionary and an evangelical Christian. According to her biography, she felt genuine compassion for those she helped and a great love for young people and established her institution with the aim of creating a ‘intimate, tender and highly moral family ethos’ to replace the adverse influences of the children’s previous environment.⁷⁵ Both Homes delivered religious and moral instruction that aimed to both reform children in the present and support them in the future.

Crucial to this process of reformation were the relationships that were created and maintained with the children. In their book examining the divergent life outcomes for a group of delinquent boys born in the 1930s and tracked into old age, John H. Laub and Robert J. Sampson identified the importance of connectivity and social bonding throughout life. In particular, they argued that individuals who lacked nurturing relationships that provided informal social control through expectation and responsibility were more likely both to reoffend as adults and to achieve poor life outcomes.⁷⁶ Both the RPS and the PMVH were characterized by a stability in leadership and principal staff that seems to have been significant for many of the children in enabling them to form sustainable relationships. Within the PMVH, most house mothers stayed for around eight to ten years and the leaders of the school, Mrs Meredith and her sister Miss Lloyd, remained unchanged throughout the entirety of the period meaning that most children experienced a stability of care. Similarly, between 1857 and 1918, the RPS had only three principal wardens, the Reverend Charles Walters (1857–81), the Reverend Arthur Jackson (1882–7) and the Reverend Marshall George Vine (1887–1918). Throughout the entire second half of the century, the school was served by a single secretary, John Trevarthen, himself a certified schoolteacher, who was regarded as instrumental in the development of the school. Nor did the RPS experience much turnover in housemasters. As Trevarthen pointed out to the 1882 Commission of Inquiry into Reformatory Schools, at that time their newest master had been in the school for nineteen years and the remainder had been there since almost the farm school’s inception.⁷⁷ Given the importance attached by Laub and Sampson to social connectivity throughout life, recognizing this factor in any analysis of children’s welfare experiences is important. For some children, such as Catherine Hall, removed from her imprisoned mother shortly after birth, the institution was the only source of human relationship that she had; for others it provided stability and security after a life of neglect.

As Claudia Soares has also found in her chapter in this volume, these relationships proved to be important throughout the children’s lives and can be glimpsed through their correspondence and official records of visits and donations. Letters provide an important insight into children’s thoughts and experiences of their encounters with welfare. There are only a few letters from the girls who passed through the PMVH, but there is an extensive body of boys’ correspondence both published and unpublished, as well as other records of communication. Institutional letters were often printed in annual reports and their expressions of gratitude or affection have been regarded sceptically by historians, who believe they were edited or falsified for promotional purposes.⁷⁸ However, by tracing the lives of the children who passed through the RPS and the PMVH, it has been possible in many cases to match the published letters (identified only by initials) to real children and often to verify circumstances recorded in the letters through other sources including the unpublished originals. This provides credibility to many of the public letters, as does recent work by Laura Mair. Mair examined unpublished letters from ragged school pupils and found similar themes to those that are evident in institutional published letters such as requests to send love, evidence of network building and fears of being forgotten by staff.⁷⁹ Lending further weight to assumptions of authenticity are the wide range of perspectives about children’s adult lives that are published, many of them negative or critical. Some of the letters talk about children who have been reconvicted or suffered accidents or death or poverty; if these letters were selected or carefully edited, then they were a strange choice. Mair also found that institutional staff formed important and long-lasting relationships with the children in their care and this was certainly the case with the PMVH and the RPS – over half of the boys and girls who passed through the Homes in this period kept in touch with the Homes through letters and/or visits and expressed considerable affection towards individual staff members.⁸⁰ The girls were on average thirteen years old when they left the school, while the boys were on average eighteen. Many of the letters from children were sent within five years of their departure when their memories were still fresh, yet there is also evidence that children kept in touch for ten or twenty years after leaving, occasionally longer.

Not all children appear to have valued the relationships they established or the welfare experience overall. As Laub and Sampson acknowledged, relationships operate in conjunction with human agency. Individuals make a ‘situated choice’ that depends on structural constraints, intercontingencies and peer influences.⁸¹ This was equally true for the children in the institutions. Although within the RPS all the children had contributed through their actions to their encounter with welfare, that did not mean that they all accepted their institutionalization or that they nurtured their relationships with the institutions. The records of both the PMVH and the RPS are far from complete and the PMVH lacks the detailed follow-up records that characterize the RPS. However, one way to evaluate the unhappiness of those who did not keep in touch with the home is through analysis of the punishment register, which reveals both infractions and instances of running away. There are few records of girls absconding from the PMVH, but many of boys running away. Staff and government inspectors monitored the annual numbers of those absconding as a key measure of the success of reform. The RPS had no walls around its grounds and a boy was ‘put to his honour’ not to breach boundaries such as streams or hedges.⁸² A child’s decision to run away resulted in a loss of good conduct marks, which adversely impacted the house within the school to which they were attached. Yet, of the 250 boys within the Home, on average across the period ten boys a year ran away, some repeatedly. If children were recovered, they were returned to the school, but sometimes their efforts were successful and they were never found. Sometimes boys left in groups. In the worst year, 1861, around sixty boys absconded, although in subsequent years the rate fell to less than two or three.⁸³ Occasionally, there was an obvious trigger – as was the case for Timothy Burns who absconded after quarrelling with fellow pupils – but more often there is little to explain their departure.⁸⁴ Through exercising this power to leave the Home, however, children were rejecting welfare and taking control of their own futures, demonstrating, as historical geographers of childhood have argued, the importance of mobility in impacting children’s ability to shape both their present and their futures.⁸⁵

Yet punishment records are complex and hold multiple meanings. The tendency of managers to highlight episodes of defiance and punishment in the admissions records naturally draws the eye and gives an impression of children’s widespread resistance to and unhappiness with their welfare experience. This tallies with the dominant historiographical view that institutions were unhappy, emotionally cold places.⁸⁶ However, inverting the analysis of recorded punishments to take note of records or periods of time when children were not punished reveals a much larger mass of children who complied with or potentially even felt attached to institutional life. Letters from children in later life speak fondly of time spent walking in the woods, playing games and participating in the band or military drill.⁸⁷ Furthermore, many of the punishments were for laziness, untidiness or impertinence – all typical categories of misbehaviour that could equally be experienced in a public school or a domestic environment.⁸⁸ Some children were frequently punished, others not at all. Of those who were punished, Henry Hopwood was to the bottom of the scale, punished on five occasions in four years, most often for smoking, while Sidney Pearce was towards the higher end, punished fourteen times in the same period, sometimes for impertinence and lying but most often for ‘rambling’.⁸⁹ Children challenged the spatial boundaries within the Home, demonstrating the degree of freedom open to them. The punishment registers for the RPS show that boys stole out to the railway bank to look for birds’ nests, went to the brook or rambled in the meadows near the Home without permission.⁹⁰ Interestingly, these offences were typically punished less severely than offences of character such as lying, disobedience or impertinence. This could indicate that, while rule breaking had to be punished, staff regarded such stereotypical adolescent masculine activities as part of the expected range of behaviour. Michael Leyshon has described such episodes of mobility among young people as driven by ‘marginalising effects of adult regulation and/or surveillance’ and part of a process of identity creation through ‘small acts of resistance’.⁹¹

It is difficult to read running away as anything other than a demonstration of unhappiness, but unhappiness could be transitory and perspectives changed over time. It would be wrong to regard it as delivering a holistic verdict on institutional welfare. As Rebecca Swartz argues in her chapter, children’s agency can be expressed in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways. William Page who ran away once in 1852 and twice in 1853 – the third time successfully – applied in 1855, aged seventeen, for readmission to the RPS.⁹² Several of the boys who ran away later corresponded with and visited the school as adults. This indicated a significance to the children’s relationship with the home that problematizes the use of desertions or punishments as a proxy for the long-term effect of welfare in shaping children’s lives. One such correspondent was George Martin. Having run away twice from the RPS within a month after being punished for a separate offence, fifteen-year-old George was placed out with a shoemaker, promptly ran away and once again committed larceny. He was then readmitted to the Home and emigrated to New York six months later. Despite his unwillingness to remain in the Home, George became a frequent correspondent with RPS staff over the next seven years, updating them on his adventures in the Army of the Potomac during the American Civil War, although his letters were predominantly factual in nature.⁹³ Many of the children who were punished for infractions while within the Homes, however, wrote back affectionately to staff and came back to visit with their families.⁹⁴ It is evident that many of the boys chafed at the discipline, constraints and hard work of the school environment while they were there, but some years later recognized the benefits it brought. Twenty-two-year-old Thomas Bonnar wrote of how he, like many new boys, had counted down the days until his release from the school, but now he wished he was back there.⁹⁵ Charles Swann wrote from South Africa in 1888:

Writing from the perspective of their late teens or early twenties, the young men and women also wrote with gratitude about the transformation they believed the Homes had made in their lives. Hodson Gaiter Smith had entered the RPS in 1879 aged thirteen from the rural market town of Shrewsbury. He wrote in 1888 from South Africa that a boy in the Home ‘is now 100 per cent better off than if he were living in London or elsewhere’, while twenty-three-year-old James Cooper wrote ‘I am ever glad that I went to the school.’⁹⁷ George Woods, twenty-four, wrote ‘I have gained a lot of good by being there the time I was.’⁹⁸ Evidence is less strong for the girls than for the boys, but given that by 1890, twenty years after the PMVH had opened, sixty old girls were visiting the home every year on Open Day, bringing with them their husbands and children, it reasonable to assume their sentiments were similar.⁹⁹ For the boys, almost all of whom were over the age of twelve when they entered the home, this recognition was particularly important because, unlike many of the girls, they were old enough on entering the home to have clear memories of their lives before institutionalized welfare. That children who had been punished while in school or those who had entered under difficult circumstances could recognize in later life the benefits welfare had brought to them is significant. It broadens our understanding of the welfare experience in the moment of delivery and provides a different insight into its longer-term impact.

Conclusion

By centring its analysis on the children who experienced welfare, this chapter has demonstrated the boundaries and limitations of familial affection and challenged the sacralization of working-class life that has developed in recent years. In much the same way that we are encouraged by Anna Davin to move past our expectations of what is ‘proper’ in our consideration of Victorian child employment, we need to put aside our partiality for the parental home and family environment when evaluating Victorian welfare.¹⁰⁰ Analysis of children’s backgrounds reveals that the present dichotomous presentation of the binaries between institutional care and family life need to be re-examined. If we consider how children themselves were shaped by the intersecting inequalities of Victorian life, we develop an insight into the comparative advantages that welfare might have seemed to offer to its recipients. Death, desertion, criminality and family reconstitution all played their part in severing bonds. Lives were messy, relationships complicated and not all families provided ideal conditions for children to thrive.

This is an important development in our understanding of child welfare provision. Once we recognize that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, institutional care could represent a preferable alternative for children to that of the family, not only do we undermine one of the key contentions of the dominant historiography on child removal, but we also begin to question some of the bigger twentieth-century narratives of progress in terms of welfare provision. Nineteenth-century investment in care provided a comparative advantage for institutionalized children that has disappeared in the intervening period, as relative living standards have improved and state investment in care has regressed.

Core to these new understandings is the process of tracing children and their families before and after entering welfare to examine their life course. Only by incorporating the whole range of available information can we gain deeper insights into the state, society and family. Over-reliance on institutional records reveals only a snapshot of children’s encounters with welfare. Yet, children responded in ways that were contingent, complex and changed over time. Their perspectives altered as they aged and their priorities changed. Only by including the whole of their lives can we gain a deep understanding of their experiences with welfare.

Considering children situated within and separate to the family unit also highlights that children are individuals not a uniform age-categorized body. Within families, children’s subjectivities were different from that of their siblings and constructing one view of institutionalized childhood risks obscuring this broad variety of responses. It also marginalizes the agency children demonstrated. There were limits to the control that families could exercise over children who were determined to resist adult intentions. Children could make decisions in unexpected ways, sometimes actively choosing life in institutional homes over family life and on other occasions demonstrating their agency through their power to leave. In their encounters with welfare, they accepted or pushed against adult expectations and regulations on behaviour to shape their outcomes. They were not Hendrick’s ‘passive objects’ or Swain’s ‘victims’ of misguided philanthropy but rather architects of their own futures.¹⁰¹ Given such children’s subsequent role as citizens of Britain and its empire, recognizing these factors opens us to new considerations of the life-long impact of care.