One to frighten your children

[Clive Blackaby]

In these days when everyone is slagging off the CSA (sorry - I'll wash my mouth out with Jeyes fluid in a minute), we have to remember just how bad things used to be
http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1989-0/haller.htm

[Betty Willson]

Thanks Clive Blackaby. I have printed out the article about illegitimacy on the web site given. I can understand after reading it, why my great grandparents , after their marriage in 1852, went to such extreme lengths to cover the fact that the first two children of their family were illegitimate and in so doing, made it very difficult for me to adequately trace my family history. Oh well, nothing worth having comes easy, they say. Betty Willson

[Mythology]

"Laura Clarke, a young unwed mother from the rural village of Cornwall"

Oh dear, oh dear.
Must be somewhere in Englandshire I guess.
Sorry, but when I see something as ridiculous as that, I stop reading - if they can get that so badly wrong, how trustworthy is the rest of it?

[Ladkyis]

What were you reading Myth? I didn't see anything like that on the page about baby farming.

Ann

[Mythology]

Well, I had another look, and it's still there. :D

A Ctrl+F (or whatever find facility your browser has) for "Cornwall" will take you straight to it.

Edit:
By "it's still there", I mean that the bit I quoted is still there on the page that Clive linked to, not that the "rural village of Cornwall" is still there in real life. That, as we all know, disappeared when they extended the runway at Plymouth airport. ;)

[Diane Grant-Salmon]

What were you reading Myth? I didn't see anything like that on the page about baby farming.

Ann

|wave| Ann ...... it's on the first page, quite a way down though. The end result being that poor Laura 'drifted' into prostitution' ...... funny way of putting it! :D

Errmmmm ..... if Cornwall is a village, wotcha call 'my' villages of Constantine and Wendron in Cornwall then ..... villagettes ;)

[Geoffers]

I suppose that the author may have intended it to be Cornwell which is on the Oxfordshire/Gloucestershire border, about 10 miles from me. We'll never know as the article dosen't make this clear.

But even allowing that, my gripe is that the article seems to deal with society as a whole, rather than considering the various levels within society and in different parts of the country, and how attitudes changed over a period of time.

I realise the title refers to Victorian England (what happened to Scotland, Wales and Ireland?) but I could only find mention of the 1733 Act in one paragraph, it would have been interesting to read of the differences between those parishes where there was an active investigation of the father of an illegitimate child and those where the investigation seems to be less stringent. Why did the system need to be changed by the Poor Law Amendment Act?

Similarly, little seems to have been made of the Poor Law Amendment Act which allowed mothers of illegit children to apply for maintenance through the Petty Sessions - what were the differing effects of this in urban and rural areas and between those in factories, domestic service and working on the land.

It's a personal opinion only, but I gained the impression that the author was writing an article to support a belief, rather than exploring all the issues.

Geoffers

[Ladkyis]

now that I have clicked on the thingy at the bottom of the page I understand the error and what I want to know is this. When I was having to write history papers why couldn't I write something like that and get it described as the best history paper of that year! probably because I had history tutors who weren't dependant on other people's writing for their knowledge but had done their research in original sources - now where Have I heard that before Hmmm?

Ann
feeling much better now Mr M's temperature is back to normal

[Mythology]

I am also rather suspicious about one of the footnotes to this "Baby Farming" article.

No. 41 claims that the relevant source is the "London Times" (which I don't think exists anyway, AFAIK it's The Times, London being merely where it was published) of March 17, 1865 ...

"Baby Fanning"

Obviously, March 1865 was exceptionally warm. ;)

[Clive Blackaby]

"Laura Clarke, a young unwed mother from the rural village of Cornwall"

Oh dear, oh dear.
Must be somewhere in Englandshire I guess.
Sorry, but when I see something as ridiculous as that, I stop reading - if they can get that so badly wrong, how trustworthy is the rest of it?I'll agree that the article contains a number of errors and typos - I spotted the one mentioned by Myth, and several others, though by no means all. I should perhaps have put a caveat in my original posting

As an academic paper it does not pass muster, but I read it more as a piece of "historic journalism": flawed in some detail and supportive of the author's view of life, as journalism almost invariably is (even in "The Times", which our transatlantic cousins often describe as "The London Times" to distinguish it from "The [New York] Times").

But for all its faults I considered that it painted an interesting (and I think not too seriously distorted) picture of the conditions some of our ancestors faced.


C :)

[Burrow Digger]

Despite the errors, this article does answer some questions for me. :)

I have 2 baby girls who died and/or disappeared from my family in census records. One was with another family while her mother was a domestic servant. She died at age 2. The other was with the family in 1881 and I have no idea who she was, who her parents were as she was entirely unrelated.

PS I loved HMS Pinafore when I was a young girl. I was raised listening to Gilbert & Sullivan. The Mikado is my most favourite :)

BD