Illegitimacy in English law and society, 1860–1930 Illegitimacy in English law and society, 1860–1930 Ginger S. Frost Manchester University Press Copyright © Ginger S. Frost 2016 The right of Ginger S. Frost to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 1 7849 9260 6 hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guara ntee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Out of House Publishing Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 ‘Strangers in the blood’: custody, inheritance, and taxation 14 2 ‘The workhouse or death’: maternal crimes and illegitimacy 49 3 Part of the family? Non-maternal carers in the criminal courts 79 4 Courts of last resort: affiliation and the poor law 109 5 Simple acts of justice: illegitimacy and law reform 146 6 Love and loss: family and illegitimacy 179 7 ‘Passed from hand to hand’: child circulation 204 8 ‘Bad blood’? Social discrimination 238 Conclusion 266 Bibliography 276 Index 292 Acknowledgements All books are collaborative efforts to one extent or another. I have accrued many debts in writing this book, financially and intel- lectually. I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for giving me a summer research stipend in 2009, allowing me to stay in Britain and do much of the research. I was also privileged to be a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2009–10, where the dedication to scholarship and the many academic resources made writing much easier. Samford University gave me a small grant for my research in 2009; in addi- tion, the administration has given me time to research and write on a regular basis. I am deeply grateful for this help. Second, I must thank archivists in Britain and the United States, including those at the IAS and Princeton University, the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, the Women’s Library (shame- fully closed; its holdings are now housed in the London School of Economics and Political Science), the London Metropolitan Archives, the Institute of Historical Research, Special Collections at Reading University, Special Collections at the University of Birmingham, the Northwest Regional Studies Centre in Lancaster, the Cambridgeshire Record Office, the Gloucestershire Record Office, and the Children’s Society Record Centre in Bermondsey. Despite swingeing cuts to their budgets, these research centres continue to offer high-quality help and expertise. All historians are in their debt. Third, I also owe a number of colleagues thanks. Professors Martin Wiener, Martha Vicinus, and George Robb wrote numerous letters for me in my quest for funding. Gail Savage, Daniel Grey, and George Robb also read the completed manuscript and made a number of helpful suggestions. I also owe gratitude to the numerous newgenprepdf Acknowledgements vii readers of the articles I have published from the material and the papers I have given on the subject. The book is much better for their constructive criticisms. Finally, I thank my family for doing without me many holidays, and for listening to my stories – funny, tragic, or peculiar – with interest and without complaint. Some parts of the book have already been published, and I thank those publishers for allowing me to use copyrighted material. These articles include the following: ‘ “The black lamb of the black sheep”: Illegitimacy in the English working class, 1850–1939’, Journal of Social History 37:2 (2003), 293–322; ‘ “I am master here”: Illegitimacy, masculinity, and violence in Victorian England’, in Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Wills, eds, The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 27–42; ‘ “When is a parent not a parent?” Custody and illegitimacy in England, 1860–1930’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 6:2 (2013), 236–62; ‘Claiming jus- tice: Paternity affiliation in South Wales’,Rural History 24:2 (2013), 177–98; ‘Neither fish nor fowl: Children and parents in cross-class cohabitation’, Victorian Review 39:2 (2013), 47–50; ‘The kind- ness of strangers revisited: Fostering, adoption, and illegitimacy in England, 1860–1930’, in Rebecca Probert, ed., Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales, 1600–2012 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 125–44; ‘ “Revolting to human- ity”: Oversights, limitations, and complications of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926’, Women’s History Review 20:1 (2011), 31–46; and ‘ “Your mother has never forgotten you”: Illegitimacy, motherhood, and the London Foundling Hospital, 1860–1930’, Annales de Demographie Historique 1 (2014), 45–72. Introduction In 1874, at the Leicester Police Court, Ann Caltman, ‘of independ- ent means’, faced charges of assaulting her servant, thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Neale. Caltman was a widow with four children, and Neale was a maid-of-all-work. On the day in question, Caltman, dissatisfied with the girl’s performance, beat her on the head, back, and shoulders with a brush stick and a poker. When examined, Neale’s body ‘presented a shocking appearance’. What made this story sadder was that the police soon discovered that Neale was Caltman’s illegitimate daughter. Neale had lived with an aunt until she was ten, then transferred to her mother’s house, presumably when her mother was widowed. Neale then became the drudge of the house. Until the trial, she had not known Caltman was her mother; indeed, in her testimony, Elizabeth referred to Ann as ‘her mistress’. The magistrate gave Caltman six months at hard labour, saying ‘no one could … witness the state of the child without shed- ding tears’.1 Caltman’s cruelty earned her a gaol sentence, but her refusal to acknowledge her daughter agreed with the English legal system. According to the law, Elizabeth was a stranger to her own mother and belonged to no one. Mothers had to provide for their illegitim- ate offspring, but, as this case showed, did not have to treat them like family, and fathers had no legal connection at all (the news- paper’s silence about Elizabeth’s father was typical). In this case, the law defended the illegitimate child only so far, by punishing the mother as it would an unrelated employer. Over a long period, judges and juries made similar difficult decisions, determining who did or did not belong in a family, who would or would not receive protection from violence and poverty, and who could or could not 2 Illegitimacy in English law and society, 1860–1930 claim British citizenship. Such decisions literally had life-and-death results; illegitimate children had twice the death rates of their legit- imate peers. Yet few people fought for reforms until the 1920s. The reasons for the silence were many. During the Victorian period, children ‘outside the law’ were embarrassing to their fami- lies, reminders of their mothers’ ‘falls’. Illegitimate births revealed illicit sexuality, and these children often knew they were unwanted. Until the twentieth century, most legislators and church leaders believed the only way to reduce sexual ‘immorality’ was to punish any children resulting from it. After 1834, mothers suffered too, since they bore the burden of rearing the children alone, but moth- ers could marry and regain their social status (and most did). In England, illegitimacy was irreversible, a punishment assessed on the one person who had done nothing wrong, and all in the name of encouraging ‘morality’. Many historians have written about illegitimacy, but primarily from the point of view of the unwed mothers, especially in studies of infanticide or ‘baby farming’. Feminist historians, in particular, stressed the misogyny inherent in the bastardy laws and the hard- ships for single women in rearing children in an age with few jobs open to women and little societal support.2 I do not deny that the position of an unwed mother was horrific, but this work focuses instead on the experiences of their children. Doing so highlights the failure of the Victorian criminal justice system to protect its most vulnerable citizens and the misplaced priorities that worsened their circumstances. Similarly, studies of baby farming, though fas- cinating, often overstate the prevalence of this crime; a focus on illegitimacy corrects these oversights through sheer force of num- bers. I have collected over 1,300 criminal trials involving illegitim- ate children as victims, and 81 per cent were by mothers while only 0.25 per cent were by ‘baby farmers’. Though culturally significant, such trials were a tiny part of a much broader problem of provision for these infants. In addition, concentrating on infanticide or baby farming tends to understate the role of men. This book will discuss both men’s absence and presence as crucial to the life chances of children of unwed parents.3 Given the poverty of single mothers, studying the poor law is vital to understanding the experience of illegitimacy. An increasing num- ber of historians have looked for the voices of paupers in poor-law records, but most of these are for the ‘old’ poor law. Recent article Introduction 3 collections are the same; the majority of pieces concentrate on the period before or during the 1840s.4 Few studies of the workings of the New Poor Law reach far into the Victorian period, much less the twentieth century.