Songs of Innocence

by Abrams, Fran

  What happened next caught a mood of growing concern not just in America but across the world. A Methodist mission worker named Etta Angell Wheeler, alerted to Mary Ellen’s plight by a neighbour, gained access to the Connolly apartment and discovered the child, now aged ten, filthy, dressed in threadbare clothing and covered in scars and bruises. Although the law forbade excessive chastisement of children, the authorities were reluctant to intervene. In desperation, Wheeler alerted the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which sent an inspector to investigate. The society then prepared a private action to have Mary Ellen made a ward of court – and alerted the press to what it was doing. By all accounts a strikingly self-possessed child, Mary Ellen made quite an impression with her statement to the court:

  My father and mother are both dead. I don’t know how old I am. I have no recollection of a time when I did not live with the Connollys . . . Mamma has been in the habit of whipping and beating me almost every day. She used to whip me with a twisted whip – a raw hide. The whip always left a black and blue mark on my body. I have now the black and blue marks on my head which were made by Mamma, and also a cut on the left side of my forehead which was made by a pair of scissors. She struck me with the scissors and cut me. I have no recollection of ever having been kissed by any one – I have never been kissed by Mamma. I have never been taken on my Mamma’s lap and caressed or petted. I never dared to speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped . . . I do not know for what I was whipped – Mamma never said anything to me when she whipped me. I do not want to go back to live with Mamma, because she beats me so. I have no recollection ever being on the street in my life.2

  A photograph of Mary Ellen, barefoot in a thin dress and with the marks on her legs clearly showing, helped to ram home the message. The word went out that in New York animals were entitled to more protection than children. Mary Ellen did indeed become a ward of court and her remaining childhood was overseen by her rescuer, Etta Angell Wheeler. The case led to the founding of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and to the setting up of similar societies in Britain – first in Liverpool, then in London – and to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the NSPCC.3 It also led, through the efforts of campaigners in England, to the passing of the Children’s Charter.

  The Romantics knew how to manage public opinion. They had large parts of the literary world on their side, of course – Charles Dickens had already done much to promote the notion of the child’s vulnerability through characters such as the sickly but perky Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, and the orphaned Oliver Twist. And Benjamin Waugh, the founder of first the London and then the national society, rarely missed an opportunity to pick up on cruelty cases which were reported in the British newspapers at the time.4

  And while charities fought shy of relieving parents of their responsibilities, so the state often hung back in circumstances where, in later years, it would certainly not have hesitated to intervene. A case from October 1888, which cropped up as debate raged over the charter, illustrates the point. On the 3rd of that month, The Times reported a particularly gruelling instance from the impoverished East End in which a representative of the Board of Guardians had found a two-year-old named Daniel Tobin filthy and starving in a pitifully cold family home. One of five children of John Tobin, a ‘hard-working man’ who ‘generally got drunk on Saturdays’, he had been left alone while both parents hit the bottle. Neighbours testified that they had often been forced to throw food through a window to the Tobins’ desperate children. The magistrate, a Mr Saunders, had commented that ‘the prisoners no doubt neglected their children, but he could not see his way to convict them’. A few days later, the paper ran a letter from Waugh. His society had recently come across no fewer than forty-eight cases of child starvation, he said, but the law which said parents must properly nurture their children covered only forty-two of them. The relevant clause under the poor laws had never been intended to protect the individual rights of children, he said, merely to ensure they did not become an unnecessary burden on the authorities. Too often the courts were forced to bow down before the rights of parents to raise their own children as they saw fit. Echoing the debate which had recently taken place in New York, Waugh wrote: ‘Had it been John Tobin’s dog which was in question, no difficulty would have arisen, for the law is clear as to starving dogs. It was only his child. Our Bill proposes to raise a child to the rank of a dog, which, to our shame be it spoken, is still needed to put down child starvation.’

  It is hard to overstate the significance of the new Act, or its controversial nature. Even Lord Shaftesbury, the great Victorian social reformer who had pushed through the Factory Acts which restricted children’s working hours, and who had been a great promoter of working-class education, was against changing the law to protect children from their parents’ excesses. ‘The evils you state are enormous and indisputable, but they are of so private, internal and domestic a nature as to be beyond the reach of legislation,’ he wrote to a pro-charter campaigner.

  And while the NSPCC celebrated its victory and pushed on for yet more support in its crusade to stamp out child cruelty, a variety of late-Victorian child-abusing ‘beasts’ still loomed large in the public mind. The perceived dangers seemed to be proliferating, rather than receding. Little more than a year after the Charter became law, Waugh was again writing to The Times about the work of his charity, which had, he said, helped no fewer than 3,000 children in five years. ‘Some forms of the cruelties, from their immorality and the kind of physical miseries they involve, cannot be named,’ he wrote. ‘In many cases brothers and sisters had already died of similar treatment. The children have been children of drunkards, tramp children, stolen children, acrobats and performing children, step-children, little hawkers and friendless apprentices, children in baby farms.’

  The cases that Waugh would not name were, of course, sexual abuse cases – and while there was some movement on child cruelty, in this arena the state continued to avoid intervention wherever possible. One particular court case, reported a few years earlier in 1885, had sparked a national scandal. The case concerned a Mrs Jeffries, who was alleged to have been running a child sex-trafficking operation involving royalty and senior politicians. King Leopold of the Belgians was said to be her most prestigious client, purchasing as many as 100 under-age English virgins each year. Mrs Jeffries pleaded guilty and was abruptly fined and released before the evidence could be presented. But the case sparked the interest both of the social reformer Josephine Butler and of the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead. Enraged, also, that MPs had just ‘talked out’ a Bill to raise the age of consent from twelve to fifteen, the two set out together to expose the extent of child prostitution in London.

  The result was one of the most famous – or possibly infamous – pieces of investigative journalism in the Victorian era. Posing as wealthy clients, they engaged a team of investigators – including Josephine herself – to visit brothels, where they spent almost £100 purchasing children. The going rate for a young virgin was between £10 and £20.5 The Gazette titled its series ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, and in it Stead recounted how he had personally bought the services of no fewer than seven girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, four of whom had doctors’ certificates to say they were virgins. Much of the detail was made up – one article described the rape of a thirteen-year-old, ‘Lily’, by a stranger who entered her room while she was drugged. In fact the stranger was Stead himself – and a colleague of Butler’s later took her to a doctor to check that Stead had not actually molested her. Nonetheless the public reaction was one of outrage, and queues jostled to buy copies of the Gazette each day, hoping Stead would carry out his threat to name the guilty men. The result was impressive and swift, on two counts. First, a Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, raising the age of consent to sixteen. Second, Stead and three of his accomplices were charged – the first unde
r the very same Act – with unlawful abduction of ‘Lily’.

  Yet while the public appetite for stories of child prostitution was great, and while there was a growing clamour for retribution against those parents who neglected or beat their children, there was still little or no acceptance of the idea that parents might actually sexually abuse their own children. A recent study on the sexual abuse of children between 1870 and 19146 looked at hundreds of cases, but found that in just 4 per cent were the perpetrators’ family members. This was partly because until the Children’s Charter became law, wives were prevented from giving evidence against their husbands. In one case, in Lambeth in 1880, a woman had brought her friends and neighbours into the house so that they could witness her husband abusing their seven-year-old daughter. Incest was known about and was widely condemned – the perpetrator often becoming a ‘marked man’ in his neighbourhood, the author concluded. Yet in this area, as in many others, the family still remained largely a private domain, outside the purlieu of the state.

  Beyond the front door

  The public perception of family life in the poorer homes of late-Victorian times was riddled with contradictions. On the one hand, there was a growing awareness of the poverty and the squalor that so many children experienced – along with an uneasy feeling that there was some uncharted sea of depravity on which few had yet dared even to set sail. On the other, there was the belief that the family was the legitimate, the most wholesome and the most righteous social unit – a contradiction which persists, of course, in the modern day. And even the most chaotic and disrupted homes often had a curious veneer of respectability about them. Alice Foley, growing up in a poor home in Bolton, had a particular job to do every Friday morning: to take the family aspidistra carefully from its place of honour on top of the sewing machine. ‘The ritual was . . . first to place the giant plant pot in water in the kitchen sink. Even today I can hear the eager bubbling and gurgling of those thirsty roots sucking in the refreshing draught. Then the single leaves were carefully sponged with a wash-leather, cracked portions and faded tips nipped off to make room for younger shoots, and finally polished off with a spot of milk.’

  In Alice’s case, the lacquer was a very thin one. In her biography, she described ‘an era of privy middens . . . each summer brought an appalling plague of house-flies. Most houses had long, sticky papers hanging from gas-brackets; these trapped unwary insects who writhed until they expired. One of our street visitors was the “fly catcher man” who wore a tall hat exhibiting a broad, sticky band, black with captive flies, and called out vigorously: “Catch’em, catch’em alive-oh.”’7

  Childhood in this era was a great deal more red in tooth and claw – perhaps more similar to adult life – than the popular imagination would have had it. Alice described her family life as often impoverished, sometimes violent, but overwhelmingly tainted by a humdrum, everyday neglect. Her mother was kindly but undemonstrative, she said; her father, a firebrand and a drinker who put his Irish political obsessions before his children – even storing ammunition in the bedroom he shared with his sons.

  ‘He worked in fits and starts, punctuated by bouts of heavy drinking and gambling. During these years mother plodded gamely on, battling with a feckless husband whom she neither loved nor understood, and succouring her six children whom she never really wanted,’ Alice explained.8‘Poignant memories remain of a particular afternoon with mother bent wearily over the dolly-tub with her small child at her feet in a fidgety and peevish mood. Suddenly, she said quite sternly: “Now if you’re not a good girl, I shall run away with a black man” . . . For days and weeks I moved around in terror and heaviness at the threat of desertion. If a coloured person came in sight I wondered dumbly if that was the man mother had in mind. Pathetically, I tried to find ways of pleasing mother in the hope that she would not leave us, and on quiet evenings by the fire when we played Ludo or Snakes and Ladders, I cheerfully manoeuvred to send my counter down a long snake so that mother’s could reach “home” safely.’

  Yet to the modern reader it is not her father’s drinking, nor even her mother’s offhand cruelty, that are thrown into the sharpest relief by her account: it is the Foleys’ casually neglectful attitudes to the nurturing of their children that now strike the harshest note: ‘At tea time our parents shared a savoury tit-bit from one plate, Father getting the lions share, for Mother doled out tiny morsels from her portion to the younger children. At supper time Father drank beer, Mother relished a piece of bread spread with slices of raw onion, and we youngsters went to bed on a “butty” and a drink of cold water.’

  Time and again, the children of the Victorian era describe their relationships with their parents as more remote, perhaps more wary, than the children of later years would do. A typical family had more children, of course, and it was usual – particularly in poorer areas – for some of them to die without reaching adulthood. Parents simply could not – or at least did not – make the same emotional investment that they do today. ‘No jubilation sounded on this occasion,’ Alice wrote of her birth. ‘Only the dull acceptance of another hungry mouth to feed.’

  Nor was it only the impoverished working classes who took this more relaxed attitude to child-rearing. Morrice Man was born into a middle-class family from Kent – his father was a barrister in Burma and the family also lived for a time in France. He described being put on a ferry alone, aged nine, to travel to school in England. A random passenger was asked to keep an eye on him: ‘Nobody spoke to me, so far as I remember; the aforesaid passenger forgot all about me. I never saw him (or her) again. It was a rough passage. I was homesick and very seasick. On reaching Newhaven I got ashore somehow – I had a through ticket to Lewes where I was to be met.’9

  While Morrice described his family life – he was one of nine children – as warm and loving, and his mother as devoted, he spent much of his time with a nurse. From the age of nine, he was away at boarding school. Yet, despite the rather buttoned-up sensibilities of the era, the childhood he described was one into which the less respectable aspects of the adult world would quite often intrude. ‘Uncle Bill . . . taught me the Charge of the Light Brigade and often he would take me, when he lived at Hythe, to the White Hart, and stand me on the bar . . . and make me recite to the assembled company,’ he recalled.

  But the great incident of his childhood, long remembered, occurred during an election while the family were living at Croydon. Morrice’s father went out to support the Tory candidate: ‘The excitement was terrific and the night when the result was declared we children were as a treat allowed to be present at the town hall. I shall never forget the scene that night, the raging crowds. Our house was put under police protection as some of the Liberal mob considered my father mainly responsible for their defeat. We boys knew this and went to bed armed to the teeth (we slept three in a room) with sticks and toy pistols . . . The only incident that occurred that night was the temporary arrest of a great friend of father’s who came to congratulate him in a state of some inebriation. We were allowed to speak our minds and father always enjoyed a joke.’

  While the popular imagination, fired by the works of Dickens, saw the child as a vulnerable innocent, in need of protection from the vicissitudes of adult life, parents, it seemed, took a very different view.

  Out on the streets

  While most families seemed to accept a certain amount of rough-and-tumble in their own lives, such behaviour was a very different matter when it was happening elsewhere – particularly in the over-crowded alleys of Britain’s industrial cities. While Morrice Man was revelling in high jinks on election night, there was growing concern about the levels of violence in other quarters.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, the abolition of stamp duties on newspapers had allowed the popular press to proliferate. And by the end of Victoria’s reign, there was a plethora of publications eager to catch the mood of the times – not least, to tap into the age-old feeling that society was in a state of terminal d
ecline. In the hot summer of 1898, the Hooligan burst on to the pages of the national press after an exceptionally rowdy August bank holiday weekend. In the following weeks and months, a fully-formed youth culture solidified in print form, wearing a uniform of bell-bottom trousers, peaked caps and neck scarves, heavily ornamented leather belts and a shaved tuft at the crown. The English fair play tradition of fighting with fists and not with feet, it was reported, was in eclipse. The issue played into the hands of those who believed there had been too much romanticism about children in recent years, and not enough time spent beating the devil out of the young.

  Violent youth cultures had, in reality, been a fact of life for years in the industrial cities. In Manchester, the gangs were known as Scuttlers; in Birmingham existed the Peaky Blinders. The Chelsea Boys and the Battersea Boys also cropped up regularly, indulging in street robberies, assaults on the police and pitched battles among themselves.

  Reports of casual violence were widespread throughout the Victorian period, and it was considered quite normal to settle a dispute outside a public house with fists. But these newly discovered teenage gangs had their own distinctive styles, and a recognized hierarchy. Industrialization had brought huge numbers of people together in crowded conditions – and that led to children being on the streets together. Now the adult world began to fear the young were developing their own cultures, and that those cultures could be a threat to traditional orthodoxies.