Imagined
Orphans
Price:
$44.95
Subtitle:
Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London
Author:
Lydia Murdoch
Subject:
History/Family and Childhood studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3722-3
Pages: 288
pp. 24 b&w illus.
Series: Series
in Childhood Studies
Praise for
Imagined Orphans
"Lydia
Murdoch's engaging study complements scholarship on childcare and
offers
the first book-length scholarly treatment of institutional care
provided
by agencies such as Barnardo's." -Susan L. Tananbaum, Department of
History,
Bowdoin College
"Murdoch explores the ways in which melodramatic incitement of pity for
allegedly orphaned children worked to demonize the poor in Victorian
England. This insight flies in the face of much current
scholarship. Written with refreshing clarity, this historical study
will illuminate public policy discussions of child welfare and poverty
even in the present day."-Susan Thorne, Associate Professor of History,
Duke University
"Imagined Oftens
makes many useful connections among the developing starnds of Victorian
social history. ... Murdoch's work could mark an important milestone in
the history of official willingness to remove poor children from
parents depicted as incapable of raising them properly, a policy that
has been detected as early as the seventeenth century."-John D.
Ramsbottom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Description:
With his dirty,
tattered clothes and hollowed-out face, the image of Oliver Twist is
the
enduring symbol of the young indigent spilling out of the orphanages
and
haunting the streets of late-nineteenth-century London. He is the
victim
of two evils: an aristocratic ruling class and, more directly,
neglectful
parents. Although poor children were often portrayed as real-life
Oliver
Twists-either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy parents-they, in fact,
frequently maintained contact and were eventually reunited with their
families.
In Imagined
Orphans, Lydia Murdoch focuses on this discrepancy between the
representation
and the reality of children's experiences within welfare institutions-a
discrepancy that she argues stems from conflicts over middle- and
working-class
notions of citizenship. Reformers' efforts to depict poor children as
either
orphaned or endangered by abusive or "no-good" parents fed upon the
poor's
increasing exclusion from the Victorian social body. Reformers used the
public's growing distrust and pitiless attitude toward poor adults to
increase
charity and state aid to the children.
With a
critical eye to social issues of the period, Murdoch urges readers to
reconsider
the stereotypically dire situation of families living in poverty. While
reformers' motivations seem well-intentioned, she shows how their
methods
solidified the public's anti-poor sentiment and justified a minimalist
welfare state that engendered a cycle of poverty. As they worked to
fashion
model citizens, reformers' efforts to protect and care for children
took
on an increasingly imperial cast that would continue into the twentieth
century.
About the
Author:
Lydia Murdoch
is an assistant professor of history at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie,
New York.
Table of
Contents:
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1.
"A Little Waif of London, Rescued from the Streets": Melodrama and
Popular
Representations of Poor Children
Chapter 2.
From Barracks Schools to Family Cottages: Creating Domestic Space and
Civic
Identity for Poor Children
Chapter 3.
The Parents of "Nobody's Children"
Chapter 4.
"That Most Delicate of All Questions in an Englishman's Mind": The
Rights
of Parents and Their Continued Contact with Institutionalized Children
Chapter 5.
Training "Street Arabs" into British Citizens
Chapter 6.
"Their Charge and Ours": Changing Notions of Child Welfare and
Citizenship
during the First World War
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Receive
special offers and book notices by email. Sign up for RU READING?
Price: $44.95
|
