The Female Crime: Gender, Class and Female Criminality in Victorian Representations of Poisoning

Abstract

The Victorian nineteenth century was awash with crime, murder, and violence. Not least, the ‘feminine’ art of poisoning. This was a ‘clean’ method of murder that might conveniently  rid oneself of an unhappy marriage or a love rival. Whilst poisoning cases framed interesting and salacious fiction, the conception of poisoning as a woman’s crime relates to deeper stereotypes in Victorian  society. Gender and class norms  weighed heavily, and poisoning was configured as an essentially feminine crime. This article examines, via several Old Bailey cases, the factors  responsible for the supposed link between women, poisoning, and predisposed gender and class ideals. I also consider the role that the nineteenth-century press played in establishing poisoning as a woman’s crime. The history of poisoning has been little considered due to the lack of archival material on poisoning cases. This study intends to expand the study of gender and crime in nineteenth-century Victorian Britain.

Key Words: Victorian, poisoning, murder, gender, class, trials, crime

Author Biography

Alison Morton is a postgraduate student of history at the University of Lincoln, currently studying crime and punishment in nineteenth-century Britain.

 

The Female Crime: Gender, Class and Female Criminality in Victorian Representations of Poisoning

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In nineteenth-century Britain, poisoning was a sensationalised crime, often in the public eye. No case better highlights the embedded Victorian middle-class fear of the secret female poisoner than that of Christiana Edmunds in 1872. Edmunds poisoned boxes of chocolates and other sweets as part of a plot to target her love interest’s wife. Her case demonstrates how poisoning was represented in the press as a female crime. During her trial it was noted that crowds of well-dressed women came to sit in the gallery of the Old Bailey. They were described as ‘enthralled’ by the defendant, with audience numbers increasing at every session.[1] It was feared that these women were flocking to hear and learn how Edmunds conducted her crime, later meeting in groups to share the recipes and tactics she used.[2] It is interesting that this perspective existed. After all, the evidence is clear that poisoning, while popular with women, was not a uniquely female crime. For example, William Palmer, a doctor, was sentenced to hang after he poisoned his friend John Cook with strychnine in 1855.[3] [4] Furthermore, women also committed murder through means considered more ‘masculine’. Eliza Gibbons murdered her husband in 1857 by shooting him in the head,[5] and Jane Colbert was imprisoned for murdering her husband by throwing a knife at him and piercing his lung in retaliation to domestic abuse in 1854.[6] However, poisoning was closely linked with female murderers in the Victorian press, which, as this article will demonstrate, was particularly related to sensationalist journalism.

This article examines the factors that drove women to kill their husbands, in the context of several poisoning cases tried at the Old Bailey, London. Providing a general history of poisoning cases in Victorian England, it will examine the types of poison used; how methods of detection changed; legislative changes; and will consider the public perception of such crimes. It will argue that the gender ideologies of the period helped to define poisoning as a female crime. Using several cases of husband murder this article will discuss the media representation of such crimes; why women might have chosen poison as their preferred method; and how gender ideals and social expectations were presented in court. This paper also considers how women in turn utilised the press’ sensationalist image of the female poisoner, in retaliation against male violence.

Studying the testimony and evidence given in the trials of nineteenth-century crimes can tell us much about society in Victorian Britain.[7] This article draws on five trials from the Old Bailey online archive, dated between 1842 and 1886, all of which were for cases of mariticide by poisoning. The cases include those of Jane Bowler, who was tried in 1842. Jane was a working-class woman accused of murdering her husband, Joseph Bowler, with arsenic. She was found not guilty. Ann Merritt was a working-class woman who, in 1850, was accused of murdering her husband, James Merritt, with arsenic. She was convicted and sentenced to death. Ann always asserted that she was innocent, and even in her final statement before the magistrate she reiterated that she originally bought the arsenic for herself. She claimed to have intended to commit suicide because of her husband’s recent drunken behaviour, but she changed her mind. She believed her husband must have taken it in place of the acids and sodas he had in the morning: whether accidentally or not she did not disclose. . Finally, Adelaide Bartlett was a lower-middle-class woman who was accused of murdering her husband, Thomas Edwin Bartlett, by poisoning him with chloroform in 1886. George Dyson, the man who purchased the chloroform for her, and who was also her love interest, was acquitted before trial. Adelaide was ultimately found not guilty.[8]

Whilst these sources give an insight into what the court deemed to be relevant information, one of the main issues with the Old Bailey trial reports is that they only show the witness testimony, and nothing from the lawyers, judge, or jury in the courtroom. Defendant statements are frequently missing from the testimony. In some cases, for example where multiple doctors were questioned, the accounts are often highly repetitive in nature. It is also important to note that some words had different meanings in the nineteenth century and so need to be read from a nineteenth-century perspective. Other primary source material drawn upon in this paper includes press reports and cartoons, either directly associated with these trials or of a related nature. The press reports add context to the trial reports, and they can fill in the gaps in the testimonies by exemplifying the popular attitudes and opinions of Victorian society, particularly on the subjects of class and gender. These reports, too, should be read with caution. The views of the editor, journalist, or audience could influence reporting, as could the geographical location of the paper. However, the five case studies that are the focus of this paper only offer a snapshot of cases of women killing by poisoning. Reconstructing the context and social concerns surrounding female crime more generally is, therefore, essential in order to interrogate the network of ideologies surrounding women’s alleged use of poison in murder cases, and the sensationalism that characterised the reporting of these crimes.

 

Gender, class, and women’s crimes

In the nineteenth century, women were legally classed as secondary citizens and were discouraged from gaining a formal education or a career and were unable to own property or vote.[9] Despite, in reality, very many women demonstrating agency and activities well beyond the domestic realm, the middle-class ideology of ‘separate spheres’ dictated, in theory, that a woman’s place was attending to the private sphere of home and family life as ‘the angel of the house’. This worldview came to transcend class boundaries to a great extent: the industrialisation of the workforce brought gender issues to the forefront of labour disputes, as working-class men competed against lower-paid women who they sought to relegate to the home in consequence. Moreover, middle-class philanthropic practices such as that of district visiting saw middle-class women taking domestic ideology into lower-class homes. As a result, for much of the nineteenth-century, women across society were expected to conform to these gendered, domestic roles. However, this ideology of ‘separate spheres’ was a pervasive discourse that was not always reflected in lived experiences.[10] Most lower-class women, and some middle-class women, had to work to survive. These working lifestyles did not conform to popular standards of feminine behaviour, and put women into the public sphere ideologically reserved for men. We see, here, the intersection of class and gender. Although working-class, (and, in reality, some middle-class) women had to work beyond the domestic sphere, for practical reasons, their transgression of gender ideals was used to show why middle-class women and, thus, the middle classes generally, were ‘superior’, justifying their societal cultural, moral, and political authority.[11]

Cases involving a sexual aspect, such as adultery or the murder of a lover or a rival were seen as didactic, warning of the ‘dangers’ associated with out-of-control female expressions of sexuality, to individual victims but also to stable society. Not only was it considered that such women’s divergence from the feminine ideal was a factor in their crimes, but they acted as examples of just why a woman’s place was at home, under the control and supervision of a husband, father, or brother, for their own and societies benefit. Furthermore, an essential aspect of middle class discourse was their ‘superiority’ over the working classes, whose women were more likely to have to work outside of the home, again diverging from expected female norms of behaviour. Court proceedings, press coverage and public interest in women’s crimes thus reflected and reinforced norms of gender and class. Such cases also reveal the contradictory nature of such discourses, as the press and public revelled in the fantasies of exoticized sexual revelation.

 

Poisoning in Victorian Britain

Eliza Fenning was sentenced to death for poisoning in 1815, although none of her victims died as a result of her actions. Fenning attempted to murder her employers by poisoning their food with arsenic, after she was disciplined by the lady of the house for visiting the rooms of young male workers in the house whilst semi-dressed.[12] Fenning provided four statements of good character at her trial, and there was doubt of her guilt, yet she, nevertheless, received the death penalty and was later executed at Newgate prison. It was hoped that harsh punishments would act as a deterrent, amongst fears that cases of poisoning were on the rise. John Marshall, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, published a pamphlet in 1815 describing five cases of recovery from arsenic poisoning. In this pamphlet he detailed why he thought Fenning was guilty, claiming to have witnessed Fenning double over in pain after eating some of the dumplings she had cooked in what he believed to be an attempt to divert suspicion away from herself.[13] He followed this with a piece in The Times, describing her as ‘one of the perpetrators of this dreadfully alarming and daily increasing evil’.[14] Marshall’s accounts reflected popular concerns about the increasing number of poisoning cases and the role of women such as Fenning in this surge of cases.

During the trial of Ann Merritt, who was tried and sentenced to death in 1850 for murdering her husband, the judge remarked on ‘the strange and horrible frequency of the crime which you are charged’.[15] As public concerns over poisoning grew, press reports of these crimes increased in number, reaching almost hysterical heights by the middle of the nineteenth century.[16] The rise in sensationalist reporting, and the fear that even more cases were going unreported, drew attention from both the medical and legal professions.[17] For example, the 1851 Arsenic Regulation Act prohibited shopkeepers from selling arsenic and other poisons to people they did not know. Buyers were required to sign a register with their name and the purpose for the poison. The regulation further meant that arsenic, typically a white powder, had to be mixed with either soot or indigo. This was because arsenic has a bitter taste and mixing with food or drink seemed to be a common way to hide this bitterness and administer the poison to victims.[18] By mixing it with soot or indigo, it would stand out in food and drink, reducing the likelihood that it would go undetected. The principles of this act worked on paper; however, the act relied on shopkeepers keeping well-documented ledgers, not destroying or altering their records, or selling poison illicitly. In Christiana Edmunds’s case, for example, it was discovered that the shopkeeper who had supplied the poison had pages missing from his record book.[19] Furthermore, whilst the legislation might have restricted anonymous sales, it did not help if the chemist knew the purchaser. In the case of Ann Merritt, for example, the chemist she obtained the arsenic from had sold the poison to her before, so did not feel it necessary to ask questions as prescribed by law, again showing the discrepancies between theory and practice.[20]

Legal professionals again tried to intervene five years after the Arsenic Regulation Act was introduced. In 1856 Betsy McMullen was tried for poisoning and murdering her husband. The presiding judge argued that women should be banned from buying any potentially lethal drugs and that those selling them should      be convicted of manslaughter in the event of them being used to cause harm.[21] Banning women from purchasing poisons would, in reality, have been practically difficult as common poisons such as arsenic, chloroform, and strychnine had many domestic uses as cleaning aids or medicines. Oddly, the focus of legislation and detection in this era focused specifically on arsenic. Although widely used, many of the trials, such as some of those considered in this article, related to other poisons. This special focus on arsenic was perhaps due to its particularly vicious effects and bitter, unpleasant taste. Contemporaries also remarked upon this focus on arsenic, to the exclusion of other poisons. A letter written to Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser on 23 March 1850, signed only by ‘An Englishman’, for example, questioned why arsenic was subjected to stricter controls compared to other poisons available, many of which were subtler in nature. The writer argued that, because these other poisons were used in medicine rather than domestically, the other poisons were protected from legislation.[22] This letter was dated a year before the Arsenic Regulation Act was passed in 1851 and it is probable  that the author, like the judge in Betsy McMullen’s trial, would not have been impressed at the limited extent of this legislation.

Ironically, a case brought against a male poisoner promoted legislation to protect defendants. When William Palmer was deemed not have been afforded a fair trial in Staffordshire due to sensational and widespread newspaper representation that caused public prejudice against him, the Palmer Act of 1856 was enacted.[23] This Act enabled hearings from outside of the London area to be moved to the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, to ensure fair trials for the accused.[24] Palmer’s case also indicates the influence that sensationalist journalism had over public opinion and that high profile poisoning cases had on the British legal system in the mid nineteenth century.

 

New methods of detection

One of the key challenges for contemporaries was determining poison as the cause of death. Other difficulties were discovering the exact substance, who administered it, and how. Testing for arsenic poisoning was developed during the early 1800s: until then there was not a test conclusive enough to differentiate between a stomach condition or an illness and a case of poisoning. This difficulty formed a point of contention that can be seen in the extensive trial transcript of Adelaide Bartlett, which discusses, across almost sixty pages, how chloroform could have gotten into the stomach of her alleged victim without any burns in the throat or mouth.[25]

During the middle of the century much changed. The 1840s bore witness to developments in both medicine and policing which had several key effects on the detection of poisoning crimes. First, rural English communities developed police and detective forces which investigated crimes that might have otherwise been abandoned and neglected.[26] At around the same time, medical professionals focused on the problem of detection, quickly leading to the development of a more conclusive and sensitive test for arsenic poisoning, commonly known as the Marsh Test.[27] Created by chemist James Marsh in 1836, it was found specifically useful in the area of forensic toxicology.[28] The result of better testing and wider investigation was a rise in documented cases and increased media coverage. However, Ann Merrit’s case highlights the continued difficulty of proving murder involving poison, mainly as it was almost impossible to determine who administered the poison to the victim. Ann Merritt was handed a death penalty based on a statement by Dr Henry Letherby, a ‘seasoned and educated toxicologist’, resulting in uproar from the public, and medical and legal professionals alike.[29] His statement implied that the average man’s stomach takes around five hours to digest food and pass into the bowel, creating a timeline that incriminated Ann Merritt.[30] R. E. Davies, of the Royal College of Surgeons, wrote a letter to the London Daily News in which he questioned Letherby’s statement. Merritt’s husband was an alcoholic and Davies presented a theory that food digests slower in a drunken man’s stomach. He argued that because of Letherby’s statement the jury in Merrit’s trial could not entertain a theory that the victim may have taken his own life, as in the time frame given it would have been virtually impossible.[31] Merritt was eventually pardoned following the outcry. An article in the Hereford Times, on 30 March 1850, explained that ‘our readers of whatever sex or party will rejoice to [know] that the efforts which have been made to save the life of Ann Merritt have been attended with success’.[32] Communication was made between the Home Secretary and the Governor of Newgate, ‘the execution of this unhappy woman would be respited during her Majesty’s pleasure’, meaning she had been detained in an asylum after being declared insane.[33] Martin Weiner observes that in the second half of the century there was a decline in prosecutions of women for serious crimes, and a larger decline in convictions and length of prison sentences.[34] The number of women executed reduced dramatically, whilst insanity verdicts for women nearly doubled. Weiner argues that the reason for this increase is that whereas Victorian juries would consider male criminals to be ‘bad’, it was becoming easier to explain female “deviants” who committed heinous crimes as ‘mad’.[35]

 

Press coverage

The public interest in cases of female poisoners is demonstrated by the large crowds at the trials of both Christina Edmunds and Adelaide Bartlett. In the latter case the courtroom was so crowded that one of the main doors was completely blocked.[36] There were crowds of spectators inside and outside of the courtroom. Even the apartments surrounding the Old Bailey had a considerable number of spectators watching the building.[37] The press both reflected and fed such interest, through  sensationalist journalism which fed social and moral fears of poisoning and poisoners, suggesting a threat to society more broadly.[38]

One concern was the secretive nature of the crime. George Robb argues that known poisonings were believed to be the tip of the iceberg and that for every case that was discovered dozens probably went undiscovered.[39] It does seem that the fear of unknown cases of murder caused some disquiet among a public concerned that wives were regularly killing their husbands, without detection.[40] On 16 December 1882, The Times remarked:

 

‘from the numerous poisonings which have only been detected by an accident or an afterthought, the inference is only reasonable that there remains a margin of poisonings which are never detected at all.[41]’

 

The obsessive coverage of poisonings in Britain played a slightly contradictory role. By publishing details of poisonings, the press potentially created the very problem they claimed to be concerned about, by providing details which might facilitate further poisonings.[42]

Sensationalist imagery also painted a misleading picture of poisoning as a crime conducted under the darkness of night. This sort of media representation was at best selective, and, at worst, inaccurate because poisonings also happened during daylight. An example of such sensationalist imagery appeared on the front page of the Illustrated Police News on 8 June 1889. It depicts the case of Florence Maybrick, accused of poisoning her husband, James, a wealthy Liverpudlian cotton merchant, by switching his medicine whilst he slept in his bed next to her.[43][44] The newspaper depicts multiple scenes from the crime she was accused of, including a maid finding the fly papers which Maybrick is said to have soaked to extract the arsenic, and a scene of her in prison after her arrest.[45]

It is interesting to note that the prison scene is the only one in which she is depicted showing any form of emotion. During the crime Maybrick is depicted as passionless and rather malevolent, but once she is in jail she holds her head in her hands, perhaps inferring guilt and regret. While this could be an indication of remorse, the overall depiction suggests that she is perhaps just grieved at being caught. Either way, the images imply guilt and she was indeed found guilty.[46] A similar image appeared on the front page of Reynolds’s Miscellany on 10 July 1858. Here, a woman named Joanna is shown preparing poison near a sleeping Sir John Cleveland. She is looking over her shoulder to ensure he is still sleeping and thus not aware of her actions. Meanwhile another man, who we can only assume was Joanna’s accomplice or perhaps her lover, looks on in the background.[47] She is depicted as protected under the cover of night, while Cleveland slept ‘safely’ in his bed, unaware that someone was attempting to murder him.[48] According to Lucy Williams, these women conformed to the ‘very middle-class fears of the sneaking female poisoner’.[49] Again, such representations both reflected and reinforced public fears and opinion in this period, and ultimately led to female poisoners being compared to witches and being labelled monstrous.[50] These ideas were not unique to the nineteenth century, and there is evidence of poisoning being linked to women and the comparison to witches, as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[51] The context of nineteenth century gender and class relations provided a framework in which that connection could be made more explicit, and more threatening. This was a useful discourse for journalists during a period of substantial expansion of the popular press. As we have seen, this combination of pre-existing public prejudices, fears and concerns, and the press coverage which reflected and fed them, influenced legislative, social, and medical perspectives on poisoning throughout the nineteenth century.

 

Poisoning and gender

Popular perspectives on women and gender in this period drove a view that poisoning was a largely female crime. Both men and women used poison to injure, incapacitate, and kill, however the Victorian press particularly portrayed poisoning as a female crime. Portrayed as a subversive crime, requiring no physical strength, female poisoners fed societal views of women as naturally passive but potentially dangerous and insidious when influenced by their emotions, particularly of a sexual nature. Such ideas supported and reflected a discourse of stable society requiring women to be under the supervision of men.

The idea that poisoning was a secretive crime is seen in trial judgements and contemporary press reports. In the Bartlett case, for example, the judge commented that ‘poisonings were not like crimes of sudden passion. They were necessarily mysterious and hidden in their operation’.[52] But this representation was not just about the subversive nature of poisoning. The nineteenth century, as many periods in history, considered men physically stronger and more violent than women. Judith Knelman and Martin Weiner have discussed how male crime was, therefore, expected to be more violent and on the spur of the moment in comparison to female crime, which was less physical due to women’s physical weakness.[53] Press representation promulgated this distinction. For example, in both the Maybrick and Cleveland illustrations, the victims were shown to be physically incapacitated, either by illness or simply because they were asleep, whilst the poison was administered. The female poisoner thus committed her crime in a non-violent manner.

This argument that the lack of physical force required in a case of poisoning meant the act could be attributed to women has another dimension. Knelman suggests that poisoning presented a practical, but immoral and illegal, response to the oppression of women. Or, in other words, a non-physical response to the physical violence of male partners.[54] Knelman believes any hostility and violence in a relationship comes out of a man’s attempt to control the woman and the woman’s attempt to exert her own independence and agency.[55] However, unlike an overzealous beating, poisoning could not be considered an accident because there is an element of premeditation in all poisoning cases; one had to go and acquire the poison, as well as determine how to administer it. [56] It is therefore unlikely that someone killed another by poisoning in a jealous fit of rage.

Mary Hartman argues another reason for poisoning to be considered a threat in nineteenth-century Britain, is that women who killed men represented a threat to social norms of gender. She goes on to explain that if these women were also middle- or upper-class, the worry was that they would tip the scale of social class normativity, leading to potential social non-conformity.[57] In his letter to the London Daily News in 1850, R.E. Davies commented on expectations of women in this era: ‘Lately few women have humiliated their sex by the perpetration of heinous offences. The natural attributes of Women are kindness, virtue and affection’.[58]

Davies was writing in defence of Ann Merritt and argued that women did not poison as widely as the press suggested. But his perspective shows that, in this era, women were not expected to be a threat to men. Lucy Williams has considered how female crime lay outside of the normal social expectations of their gender. Women were considered caring, kind, and calm, whereas male crime fitted within the social bounds of masculinity. However, Williams explains that, for women, murder was ‘doubly deviant’, denoting a significant departure from femininity.[59] Robb argues that ‘a woman’s ideal gender role was to “love, honour and obey”’, not maim, injure and murder.[60] Unlike Weiner and Knelman, Hartman focuses on class rather than gender, stating that middle class women were literally getting away with murder.[61] One reason for this could have been that the middle classes had access to knowledge of poisons through domestic handbooks on medicine and drugs.[62] Robb expands on this argument, stating that middle-class women committing murder by poison was particularly troubling because their outward behaviours and appearance did not indicate any criminal nature. However, working-class women were almost expected to have a criminal side. Represented as ‘rough’ and ‘degenerate’, murder was just seen as another aspect of their depraved working-class lifestyle.[63] Anger and physicality were considered masculine traits and had no place in the home or around family.[64] Women were expected to dedicate themselves to the private sphere, running the home and family; while the men would go out in to the public sphere to work, earn money, and socialise. I would argue that men and women had to look and act in a certain way to remain adequately masculine or feminine. Those that did not fit into the boundaries of gender set out by Victorian society had to be ‘understood’ within a pre-existing framework of society. To challenge the idea that women were essentially passive and non-violent, or that men were just as likely as women to use poisoning to commit harm, was to challenge the very intersection of class and gender on which the middle classes predicated their social, cultural and political authority.

Due to the divisive intersection of class and gendered ideology that underpinned them, female offenders were judged  by these standards, rather than the facts of the case, by both the court and press. Often, they were also judged in medical and psychiatric terms. Female murderers of the Victorian era were almost never presented as the women they were, whether excused or vilified. Instead they were judged on their status as ‘good women’ and the ‘social rules’ they had broken.[65] Hence a woman’s reputation played a role in the court, the jury’s view of them, and how their sentence was decided.[66] Lucy Williams and Judith Knelman both agree that the masculinity or femininity of an offender was commented on by the papers and that their personal character was also a factor of judgement.[67] Robb uses the example of Mary Ann Geering in his article. Geering was described as ‘a woman of masculine and forbidding appearance’ in a Times newspaper article representing her trial.[68] It could be argued that these women’s greatest crimes were going against their prescribed social roles.

The trial transcripts of Merritt, Bartlett, and Bowler, also devote significant attention to a discussion of the character traits of both the victim and the accused. In the Bowler case, the victim was described as gloomy and disconsolate, and it was documented that he tried to kill himself on two separate occasions. A friend of Bowler’s, Henry Clarke, told the court that he had to stop Joseph jumping into the canal, for example. On the other hand, Jane Bowler was depicted as a good mother and wife, and therefore considered of good character. This may have swayed the jury and contributed to her ultimately being found innocent..[69] Although drunkenness was not discussed in the Bowler trial (it was only hinted at), alcohol abuse was a common theme in nineteenth-century trial reports. During the Merritt trial the victim was identified as a heavy drinker, a fact which grieved his wife. Francis Toulman, a surgeon and acquaintance of the Merritts, specifically commented that Ann attended to her husband judiciously, indicating that she adhered to the ideological expectations of a Victorian wife.[70] Other witnesses said that she was devoted to her husband and her grief after her husband’s death, if genuine, was described as overwhelming.[71] Whilst it did not sway the jury at the time, in contrast to the case of Jane Bowler, it had an effect on public opinion, eventually leading to Ann Merrit’s release. During her trial, Adelaide Bartlett seemed outright offended at the suggestion she could not adequately care for her husband, showing that she took her role as nurturer very seriously.[72] Of all the trials this article addresses, Bartlett’s is the lengthiest and the most unusual in terms of the character of the accused and victim. The Bartlett’s had a platonic marriage, their relationship one of brother and sister more than husband and wife. Edwin Bartlett, Adelaide’s father-in-law, insinuated at her trial that Adelaide and her husband had a sexual relationship in the beginning, noting that they shared a bed and that she had been pregnant once before which resulted in a stillborn child. While Edwin had no reason to believe the relationship was nothing short of marital normality, later in the trial he describes them as no longer having an intimate relationship.[73] The attention to detail given in the Bartlett trial to their relationship highlights the significance that the legal system, at least, attributed to this area in poisoning cases, again underlining the centrality of gender normativity to such cases.[74]

Whilst the media often focused only on the female offender, their character, personal circumstances, and physical attributes, the trials would look at both the victim and accused. Negative revelations about the personalities of the victim could help sway the court and jury in favour of the accused. Weiner believes that juries often looked with sympathy on women when their crimes were retaliatory.[75] However, Knelman discusses the case of Elizabeth Martha Brown which was given significant coverage in a broadsheet newspaper in 1856. However, there was no mention of the character of her victim, a violent and abusive husband, anywhere in the newspaper reports. In fact, she was regarded as a ‘wretched criminal’ murdering ‘poor Anthony Brown’.[76] This language also indicates that perceptions drawn upon in press reports about the victim’s character might be used by the wider public as a way to judge whether the crime could be morally explained or not, in terms of the popular ideologies surrounding gender roles. In portraying the victim as a good man, reporters consequently portrayed Elizabeth as a cruel and wretched murderer who had no reason to commit her crime. In contrast, Lisa Appignanesi refers to the case of Louise Hartley, an eighteen-year-old who attempted to murder her father. The defence condemned the victim for his ‘unfatherly behaviour’ and displayed him as being ‘vindictive and a brute’.[77] Appignanesi argues that such press coverage was influential on public opinion and, ultimately, on the jury who acquitted the accused.[78] Unlike Elizabeth, Louise’s crimes were excusable because of the ways in which the character of her victim were portrayed.

One area that garnered significant attention in both the trial and press was a woman’s sexual agency, which was considered as evidence of a deviant nature. This is shown in the trial of Florence Maybrick, whose adulterous affair with her husband’s friend was used as evidence against her in court. However, her husband’s numerous infidelities were never mentioned,  deemed irrelevant by the Victorian sexual double standard.[79] [80] Likewise, during Jane Bowler’s trial, focus was given to her interest in Jon Dunster, a lodger who lived in her house. This interest called into question her ‘loyalty’ to her husband, despite her otherwise appearing to be a ‘dutiful’ wife.[81] The Bartlett case presents sexual license, or lack of, as a motivation for the crime. Edwin, the victim, had married Adelaide on the promise of a largely platonic relationship. According to witnesses, he even went so far as to encourage Adelaide to receive male attention and Dyson, the co-conspirator, explained how Adelaide had been ‘given’ to him by her husband.[82] During the trial it emerged that Edwin had begun to change his mind about the platonic nature of his marriage.[83] The press seized on this information, with The Times creating a motive for Adelaide to administer chloroform to her husband: to prevent his sexual advances.[84]

Some women exploited the reputation that poisoning had as ‘the female crime’ to gain power over men. A salient example of this form of intimidation was women’s response to male violence in the period following the 1888 “Jack the Ripper” murders. Men would threaten to ‘whitechapel’ their wives; women, in return, threatened to ‘white powder’ their husbands.[85] A woman’s threat to poison her husband was both equivalent to, and a response to, a man’s threat of physical violence, aggression, or intimidation in a relationship.[86] Sarah Brice, for example, threatened to poison her husband after he was accused of robbery due to the bad company he kept.[87] Although these threats were not seen through, they were used as a form of intimidation against men.[88]

Another interesting example of this occurred in 1856, when Betsy McMullen was accused of murdering her husband in Bolton by putting tartarised antimony in his tea. Her supposed motive was to claim insurance money. An investigation revealed that it was common practice for women to give their drunken husbands antimony which caused vomiting and extreme physical weakness. Locally this practice was referred to as ‘quietness’.[89] The Times commented on the poisonings, stating that there were three customary evils in Bolton: that women were poisoning their husbands while they were incapacitated and drunk, that they did this without the husband’s knowledge, and that husbands became ‘wretchedly’ drunk.[90] It is interesting that the writer made the link between the evils of the husband and that of the wife, and seemed to be suggesting that the men and their actions were as culpable as the women.

Despite the salacious press and public hysteria, Martin Weiner notes some public and court sympathy towards ‘wronged women’ in this period, at least toward the end of the nineteenth century.[91] In certain cases a woman’s personal circumstances might be used in her defence or as grounds for reprieve. An example of this can be seen in the case of Charlotte Harris. Harris was convicted and sentenced to hang for deliberately poisoning her husband over a week so that she could marry her wealthy lover. However, she was later found to be pregnant.[92] Public interest in this case built, and letters were even sent to Queen Victoria pleading for her release. Her sentence was eventually commuted to transportation to the colonies and from then on no pregnant women or new mothers were hanged in Britain..[93][94]  When Ann Merritt was sentenced to death, even after the jury recommended to the court due to accounts of her good character, her case generated  public outcry.[95] The Times was clear in indicating that this sympathy was from both men and women, and that both campaigned equally. Not necessarily for Merritt’s release, but for at least a commutation her death sentence. These campaigns were successful and her sentence was reduced to incarceration in an asylum.[96]

There was, though, no guarantee of clemency. Mary Ball was hanged after being convicted of her husband’s murder by poisoning. Although the jury recommended mercy, the judge, Lord Coleridge, pressured them into withdrawing their recommendation.[97] Murders committed in the ‘heat of the moment’ were also shown limited mercy. Many were shown to be forms of self-defence or in retaliation to any wrongdoing towards them. As poisoning was predominantly premeditated, this defence was not available to these women. [98]

    

Conclusion

Cases of female poisoners offers a fascinating and instructive window through which we can view the intersection of class and gender norms in nineteenth century British society. Also, the growing influence of the popular press on public opinion and legislative change.

The very fact that female murderers existed challenged the ideals of femininity that justified supposed national and middle-class cultural, political, and moral ‘superiority’. The middle-class ‘domestic angel’ was at the heart Britain’s concept of itself as a stable and constitutional nation at home, authorised to bring such civilisational benefits to the benighted and backward peoples of their empire far away. To ‘explain’ the contradiction, poisoning was configured, by the criminal justice system, the public and the press, as an essentially female crime. Without the proper and appropriate supervision of a man, women were liable to be overcome by sexually-related emotions, become potentially dangerous to those around them and threaten the basis of stable society. Such unsupervised women could commit heinous crimes, but ones of insidious and ‘sneaky’ passivity, in line with their ‘natural’ characteristics.

Such ideas also required a very specific definition of what constituted ‘violence’, as an act requiring physical strength in the open, rather than an equally harmful act committed with malice aforethought, committed, supposedly, in the dark of night against an unresisting victim. Through such ‘understandings’ of poisoning, the public, press, and courts tried to maintain norms of gender and class. Recognising that women, middle class or otherwise, were as capable of violence as men, or that men were liable to resort to ‘passive’ crimes such as poisoning, would challenge the entire classed and gendered edifice around which society as structured.

What are also revealed are the cracks in such discourses. The recognition of male violence and abuse towards women, and the obvious contradictions between Victorian class and gender ideals and reality, are exposed in the protests and sympathy expressed towards many women; by the very public, press, and criminal justice system that judged those women by the same standards they critiqued and objected to through such sympathy. Even women’s apparent threats to poison abusive men reveals the oppression of women and their agency in resistance; an agency Victorian society did its utmost to deny. But through this study of female poisoning, we see signs that the centre would, eventually, not hold and begin to fracture under the weight of its own contradictions.

 

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Charge of Wilful Murder, Western Daily Press, 16 October 1869, p. 3.

Chester Guardian and Record, 26 June 1878, p. 8.

Chester Guardian and Record, 27 February 1878, p. 6.

Child Murder and Attempted Suicide, The Times, 28 October 1843, p. 5.

Child Poisoned by its Mother, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 16 December 1843, p. 5.

Hereford Times, 30 March 1850, p. 6.

Joanna Preparing the Poison for Sir John Cleveland, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 10 July 1868, Front Cover.

London Daily News 18 March 1850, p. 5.

Marshall John, Five Cases of Recovery of the Effects of Arsenic, (London, 1815).

Midland Circuit – Warwick, Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 4 April 1850, p. 1.

No Headline, Brighton Herald, 31 March 1849, p. 3.

No Headline, The Irishman, 6 November 1869, p. 10.

No Headline, The Times, 16 December 1882, p. 9.

No Headline, The Times, 19 April 1886, p. 4

No Headline, The Times, 26 August 1856, p. 6.

Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 23 March 1850, p.?

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674­–1913: William Palmer, May 1856, ref. t18560514-490, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18560514-490, accessed 04/02/2019.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674­–1913: Eliza Fenning, April 1815, ref. t18150405-18, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18150405-18, accessed 04/02/2019.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674­–1913: Adelaide Bartlett, George Dyson, April 1886, ref. t18860405-466, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18860405-466, accessed 04/02/2019.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674­–1913: Ann Merritt, March 1850, ref. t18500304-599, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18500304-599, accessed 04/02/2019.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674­–1913: Jane Bowler, October 1842, ref. t18421024-3062, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18421024-3062, accessed 04/02/2019.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913: John Hutchings, 20 September 1847, ref. T18470920-2217, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18470920-2217, accessed 11/04/2021.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913: Benjamin Alison, 2 April 1838, ref. t18380402-1088, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18380402-1088, accessed 11/04/2021.

The Mysterious Poisoning Case at Liverpool, The Illustrated Police News, 8 June 1889, Front Cover.

Wrongs Without Redress, Lincolnshire Chronicle, 5 April 1850, p. 7.

Gilbert Dugdale, A True Discourse of the practises of Elizabeth Caldwell (London, 1604).

 

Secondary Sources

Appigagnesi, L., Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness (London, 2014).

Arnot, M., ‘The Murder of Thomas Sandles: Meanings of a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Infanticide’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000 (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 149–167.

D’Cruze, S., Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850-1950 (Essex, 2000).

Digby, A., ‘Victorian Values and Women in the Private Sphere’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 78, (1990), pp. 195–215.

Hartman, M., Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French & English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes, (London, 1977).

Higginbotham, A., ‘“Sin of the Age”: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London’, (1989), pp. 319–337.

Knelman, J., Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (London, 1998).

Morgan, S., A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century, (London, 2007).

Robb, G., ‘“Circe in Crinoline”: Domestic Poisonings in Victorian England’, Journal of Family History, 22 (1997), pp. 176–190.

Stratman, L., The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder (Llandysul, 2016).

Walkowitz, J., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, (Chicago, 1992).

Weiner, M., Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, (Cambridge, 2004).

Williams, L., Wayward Women: Female Offending in Victorian England (Barnsley, 2016).

Notes

[1] L. Appigagnesi, Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness (London, 2014), p. 69.

[2] G. Robb, ‘“Circe in Crinoline”: Domestic Poisonings in Victorian England’, Journal of Family History, 22 (1997), p. 178.

[3]The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913: William Palmer, 14 May 1856, ref. t18560514-490,

https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18560514-490 (accessed 04/02/2019).

[4] Further examples of Male poisoners can be found when searching through the trial reports of The Old Bailey Online, including Benjamin Alison who murdered his wife with Laudenum in 1838. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913: Benjamin Alison, 2 April 1838, ref. t18380402-1088, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18380402-1088 accessed 11/04/2021. and John Hutchings who killed his wife with arsenic in 1847. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913: John Hutchings, 20 September 1847, ref. T18470920-2217, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18470920-2217 (accessed 11/04/2021).

[5] J. Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto, 1998), p. 108-109.

[6] M. Weiner, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004), p. 132.

[7] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 180.

[8]The Proceedings of the Old Bailey  5th April 1886, Adelaide Bartlett, George Dyson, ref t18860405-466, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18860405-466 accessed 04/02/2019.

[9] A. Digby, ‘Victorian Values and Women in the Private Sphere’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 78 (1990), p. 198.

[10] S. Morgan, A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2007), pp. 1–2.

[12] The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674­–1913: Eliza Fenning, April 1815, ref. t18150405-18, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18150405-18, accessed 16/03/2021.Old Bailey

[13] J. Marshall, Five Cases of Recovery of the Effects of Arsenic (London, 1815).

[14] Eliza Fenning, The Times, 27 September 1815, p. 4.

[15] The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674­–1913: Ann Merritt, March 1850, ref. t18500304-599, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18500304-599, accessed 04/02/2019.

[16] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 185.

[17]Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 185; J. Knelman, Twisting in the Wind (London, 1998), pp. 86.

[18] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 182.

[19] Appigagnesi, Trials of Passion, (London, 2014), pp. 69.

[20] Old Bailey, Ann Merritt.

[21]The Times, 26 August 1856, p. 6.

[22]Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser 23 March 1850.

[23] L. Stratman, The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder (Llandysul, 2016), pp. 181–182.

[25] Old Bailey, Adelaide Bartlett.

[26] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 179.

[27] Stratman, The Secret Poisoner, p. 181.

[28] Stratman, The Secret Poisoner, p. 180.

[29] London Daily News, 18 March 1850, p.5.

[30] Old Bailey, Ann Merritt.

[31]London Daily News, 18 March 1850, p. 5.

[32] Hereford Times, 30 March 1850, p. 6

[33]Hereford Times, 30 March 1850, p. 6

[34] M. Weiner, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004), p. 133.

[35] M. Weiner, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004), p. 133.

[36]The Times, 19 April 1886, p. 4.

[37]The Times, 19 April 1886, p. 4.

[38] Stratman, The Secret Poisoner, p. 274.

[39] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 185.

[40] Appigagnesi, Trials of Passion, p. 25.

[41]The Times, 16 December 1882. p. 9.

[42] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 182.

[43]The Mysterious Poisoning Case at Liverpool, The Illustrated Police News, 8 June 1889, Front Cover.

[44] This is the same James Maybrick, incidentally, who was the supposed writer of a faked diary, published in 1992, identifying him as Jack the Ripper. https://www.jack-the-ripper.org/james-maybrick.htm (Accessed 26/4/21).

[45]The Mysterious Poisoning Case at Liverpool, The Illustrated Police News, 8 June 1889, Front Cover.

[46] Florence Maybrick was released in 1904, after a review of her case showed that it was unsafe (her husband had been self-prescribing medicines), to significant public sympathy.

[47]Joanna Preparing the Poison for Sir John Cleveland, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 10 July 1868, Front Cover.

[48]Joanna Preparing the Poison for Sir John Cleveland, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 10 July 1868, Front Cover.

[49] L. Williams, Wayward Women (Barnsley, 2016), p. 29.

[50] Appigagnesi, Trials of Passion, (London, 2014), p. 25.

[51] G. Dugdale, A True Discourse of the practises of Elizabeth Caldwell (London, 1604).

[52]The Times, 19 April 1886, p. 4.

[53] Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, p. 86.

[54] Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, p. 86–87.

[55] Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, p. 86.

[56] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 185.

[57] Hartman. Victorian Murderesses, p. 1.

[58] London Daily News, 18 March 1850, p. 5.

[59] Williams, Wayward Women, p. 29.

[60] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 184.

[61] Hartman. Victorian Murderesses, p. 1.

[62] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 182.

[63] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 178.

[64] Williams, Wayward Women, p. 82.

[65] Hartman. Victorian Murderesses, p. 255.

[66] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 183.

[67] Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, p. 93.

[68] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 178.

[69] The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674­–1913: JaneBowler, October 1842, ref. t18421024-3062, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18421024-3062, accessed 04/02/2019

[70] Old Bailey, Ann Merritt.

[71] Old Bailey, Ann Merritt.

[72] Old Bailey, Adelaide Bartlett.

[73] Old Bailey, Adelaide Bartlett.

[74] Old Bailey, Adelaide Bartlett.

[75] M. Weiner, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004), p. 134.

[76] Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, p. 105.

[77] Appigagnesi, Trials of Passion, p. 114.

[78] Appigagnesi, Trials of Passion, p. 114.

[79] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 184.

[80] For wider context on the sexual double standard the recommended reading is Judith R. Walkowitz’s Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State

[81] Old Bailey, Jane Bowler.

[82] Old Bailey, Adelaide Bartlett.

[83]Old Bailey, Adelaide Bartlett.

[84]Old Bailey, Adelaide Bartlett.

[85] J. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, (Chicago, 1992), pp. 219–20.

[86] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 187.

[87]Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 187.

[88]Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 187.

[89] Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 179.

[90] The Times, 26 August 1856, p. 6.

[91] Weiner, ‘Men of Blood’, pp. 131-132.

[92] Weiner, ‘Men of Blood’, p. 133.

[93] Weiner, ‘Men of Blood, p. 131.

[94]Transportation was seen as a cost effective and positive form of punishment; it removed convicted criminals from British society, and the country’s prisons or asylums but in its own right it could be a death sentence.

[95]Old Bailey , Ann Merritt.

[96] ‘Wrongs Without Redress’, Lincolnshire Chronicle, 5 April 1850, p. 7.

[97] Weiner, ‘Men of Blood’, p. 131.

[98] Weiner, ‘Men of Blood’: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 131.

 

 

 

Bad or Mad? Infanticide: Insanity and Morality in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Bad or Mad? Infanticide: Insanity and Morality in Nineteenth-Century Britain

PAIGE MATHIESON

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Introduction

Infanticidal mothers have been murdering their newly born offspring for hundreds of years. Historically, infanticide was used as a form of contraception by hunter-gatherers in nomadic tribes, when their societies were at war and food supplies were scarce.[1] The horrific act of infanticide has been practiced throughout history amongst communities for various reasons, the most common motivations being, social, economic and religious.[2] Historian Anne Kilday describes infanticide as an ‘international phenomenon’.[3] Economic motivations behind infanticide can be seen woven throughout history and in the nineteenth century, women often resorted to infanticide as a form of delayed abortion amongst the most destitute of women.[4] For a considerable part of the Victorian era, London accounted for roughly half of all infanticide cases carried out in England and Wales; ‘Edwin Lancaster, coroner for Central Middlesex, claimed that some 12,000 London mothers had murdered their infants without detection.’[5] Infants were killed during this period by means of strangulation, suffocation and drowning.[6]

Responses to cases of infanticide in the nineteenth century saw an increasing connection to feminine ideals. Although the vast majority of infanticide victims were new-born infants, the murder of a child up to one year of age was categorised as infanticide under Victorian law. Single women and those working as domestic servants were the most frequently acknowledged social group of women to commit infanticidal acts during this time period.[7] James Kelly believes that this was a result of women longing to escape the ‘consequent social ostracism and economic marginalization’ they faced when giving birth to an illegitimate child. The ideal Victorian woman was held in high regard as an emblem of inherent purity. As a result of this, the nineteenth century saw an increase in reported infanticide cases as it contradicted the new-found values of womanhood, becoming a threat to the strong principles of family that stood at the roots of Victorian society.[8]

Nineteenth-century society in Britain saw a growth in fascination with infanticide cases. The horrors of child-murder were sensationalised in the press and became a catalyst for Victorian anxieties and fears surrounding motherhood. Infanticide spread alarm throughout Victorian society regarding the innocence and vulnerability of new-born infants.[9] Horrifying cases of infanticide were often published: local and national newspapers identified public areas such as parks and streets in which the bodies of infants were found.[10] ‘It has been said of the police, with too much truth’, reported Mrs Baines in the Journal of Social Sciences in 1866, ‘that they think no more of finding the dead body of a child in the streets than of picking up a dead cat or dog’.[11]

Throughout the early 1800s, doctors of medicine developed and established the medical term ‘infanticide’ as an indication of insanity. Scholars have been inclined to focus on infanticidal women and the questions surrounding infant murder, such as puerperal insanity, poverty and illegitimacy.[12] Puerperal insanity was one of the few psychiatric disorders that was recognised in the Nineteenth-Century, understood as insanity caused by the trauma of childbirth.[13] Nineteenth-century Britain saw dramatic changes to the legislation of infanticide and insanity. The National Health Service states that the 1800s saw a ‘new found interest in the causes and treatment of mental illness’, which shaped the way in which the insane were assessed and treated as a result of their condition.[14] Additionally, the changing legislation of insanity shaped society’s responses to infanticidal mothers and created a more ‘sympathetic approach’ to cases of infanticide as a result of insanity.[15] The changing legislation surrounding the murder of children demonstrates an already ongoing changing perception of women prior to the nineteenth century. The Infanticide statute of 1624 became the first written law for the killing of children and was established to ‘prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children’, demonstrating the strong link between illegitimacy and infanticide already embedded in the seventeenth century.[16]

Infanticide carried with it a sentence of execution in the nineteenth century, however, it was widely accepted that a woman who committed acts of infanticide did so because she had been driven to insanity.[17] Consequently, judges avoided sentencing such women to death by charging them with concealment of birth rather than infanticide which carried a prison sentence rather than execution; not reporting the birth of a child would be considered concealment of birth.[18] Lord Ellenborough’s Act of 1803 saw dramatic change in the conviction of infanticide and overrode the harshness of the Stuart Bastard Neonaticide Act of 1624, which decreed that the mothers of bastard children, if found attempting to conceal the child’s birth by hiding the body, were assumed to have murdered the infant and were therefore subject to the death penalty. Yet, the newly established 1803 Act assumed the mother innocent of infanticide until proven guilty. As a result of the newly established law no women were executed in Britain for the crime of infanticide after 1849.[19]

This article recognises that the changing perception of insanity shaped the responses to infanticidal women in nineteenth-century Britain. Society understood that poverty and illegitimacy were also causes of infanticide. In addition to this it is argued that mothers who committed infanticide as a result of poverty, illegitimacy and insanity were recognised as victims of society and were thus treated with increasing sympathy. Furthermore, although there was increasing sympathy for infanticidal mothers in this period, there was a continuous recognition that female baby-farmers and infanticidal fathers were murderous and thus were increasingly villainised in society. Nineteenth-century baby-farmers consisted of women who offered their services to take on other women’s children in exchange for payment, and young children who were taken to these establishments often died within a short period of time; thus young vulnerable mothers who could not cope with motherhood would use baby-farmers as a desperate solution in an attempt to rid themselves of their child.[20]

 

Bad?

Records from the nineteenth century evidence the existing stereotypes illustrated in society when discussing infanticide. The majority of those convicted of both infanticide and concealment of birth were un-married, working-class women in domestic service.[21] It was not uncommon for single working-class women of very little means to enter the workhouse in order to give birth as their pregnancy left them destitute and desperate. Therefore, it is significant to note that a considerable number of infanticide cases during this time period involved women who had recently entered the workhouse with limited and fragile support networks; Jackson argues that for these single women there was no place for them in society, even in working-class culture.[22] Society acknowledged that poverty became one of the primary causes of infanticide in Britain during the nineteenth century; in conjunction with the ‘avoidance of shame of an illegitimate child’, illegitimacy was perceived to be a far more influencing factor resulting in child-murder.[23] However, impoverished women were perceived as unwell as they did not fit into the Victorian ideology of femininity and thus were treated with increasing sympathy. This was because motherhood was such a strong Victorian ideal that only women who were in mental and social distress would commit acts such as infanticide and break away from the strongly implemented ideals of femininity and motherhood.[24] This section explores Victorian perceptions of poverty and illegitimacy as influencing factors of infanticide; whilst acknowledging societies’ increasing sympathetic responses to infanticidal women. Furthermore, this section analyses the way in which baby-farmers and infanticidal fathers were continually villainised in society.

Prior to the 1624 Infanticide Act equal numbers of mothers with legitimate and illegitimate offspring were tried with child-murder. However, after the 1634 statute the majority of mothers found guilty of infanticide were unmarried women, further suggesting that during the nineteenth century, illegitimacy was perceived to be associated with guilt and the mothers of illegitimate children were therefore more likely to be found guilty of infanticide in a court of law.[25] Nineteenth-century Christianity preached that, ‘virginity was not only an admirable human condition, but also the only appropriate state for an unmarried woman.’[26] The very existence of an illegitimate child would have deemed a woman in ‘poor mental state’, as the connection between female sexuality and insanity had been progressively woven into Victorian society.[27] Moreover, illegitimacy in the nineteenth century presented a threat to female reputation.

Thorn states that the Victorian period brought about a medical transformation in which the body of the infant became a vast source of medical knowledge and thus medicalised the criminal trial; consequently the judge and jury were no longer dependent on the mother’s testimony and were made reliant on the medical autopsy.[28] New medical understandings of the body and insanity led to the end of executions as a punishment for infanticide: the doctor’s testimony ensured that though the mother had been found guilty of infanticide she would not be sentenced to execution or become a public spectacle, but would be disciplined under the newly developing procedures of social welfare.[29] Therefore, the medicalisation of infanticide trials shaped the legislation surrounding child-murder and created a new classification of crime for infanticidal mothers. One doctor in 1865 stated that:

Above all let, women feel that they should not be visited with so much indignation for simple pregnancy as for murder… Let society, if possible, look on the fact of illegitimate pregnancy with a more forgiving eye, and pity at least the unhappy victims of seduction, or the otherwise innocent who may have fallen. Let such victims have their future course through life of a less hopeless character. [30]

This demonstrates an increasing sympathy toward infanticidal women. When illegitimacy was a factor, such women were regarded as victims of a discriminating society, as opposed to simply being irredeemably cruel. In the nineteenth century juries were reluctant to commit the infanticidal mother to death whom had suffered deplorable and distressing social conditions that were instrumental in her committing of the crime.[31] Nevertheless, the act of infanticide in itself contradicted the Victorian idealised role of femininity in which motherhood was seen as central to their identity.[32] Committing child-murder was perceived to be unnatural and society demanded a solution for the eradication of infanticide and punishment for the offender.[33]

The harshness of the Bastardy Clauses originating in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act placed full moral responsibility for the illegitimacy of a child on the mother, ensuring that the mother carried the full financial burden of the child.[34] Therefore, illegitimacy and poverty can be perceived as a viable cause for the increase in infanticide.[35] Hoffer and Hull have argued that the 1624 Act to prevent the ‘Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children’ consequently became a motive for avoiding the ‘economic burdens of bastardy’ resulting in child-murder.[36] In order to understand the motives behind nineteenth-century infanticide, it is important to recognise the Victorian understandings of sexual liaisons and social practices connecting to marriage. The inherent abundance of shame in association with pre-marital fornication and the sexual ignorance apparent within nineteenth-century society created a platform upon which infanticide would be conceived as a viable option to combat illegitimacy.[37]  On 23 October 1851, The Morning Chronicle reported a case of infanticide near Bury St. Edmunds in which, ‘a young woman named Maria Stewart was charged, on her own confession, with the murder of her two illegitimate children’. The accused stated that:

It was born about 9 o’clock in the morning and was alive in the afternoon. When I laid hands on it, held it to my breast and let it suck it began to cackle and I thought someone would hear it, and that I must kill it. I put my hand over the mouth and nipped the throat with my fingers, and then took my garter and tied or put it around the neck so that it might die okay. I killed it because I thought I should not have a father for my child…It is the second little girl I have murdered, I strangled the both.[38]

This case illustrates that illegitimacy was Maria Stewart’s central reason behind the murder of her two children. Maria’s reasoning for murdering her two children is representative of the way in which illegitimate single mothers were ostracised from polite society.  The profound sensationalism of infanticidal cases in nineteenth-century publications scandalised child-murder and shaped the responses to infanticidal women portraying them as victims of illegitimacy and thus created an increasing sympathetic response to infanticidal mothers. [39]

Whilst infanticide was a criminal act, it was viewed as a lesser crime than that of the murder of an adult. This can be partly attributed to society’s observations of Victorian women and how they were generally regarded as acting under the extreme ‘pressures of poverty and social stigma’.[40] Poverty was a crucial factor that unquestionably contributed to women committing infanticide.[41] D’Cruze presents the case study of Sarah Cooper in 1847 in which poverty is shown to be the significant factor behind the murder of her child. The young women is said to have stood before the Central Criminal Court accused of murdering her new-born infant, her circumstances being ‘very bad indeed’, she showed no sign of having a regular occupation and thus no income. After she was in custody, a police sergeant stated that:

… it would not have happened had she not been in such a bad state of poverty, that she and her children had been starving all the winter…she said that the child was hers…that she must have fainted after she was delivered, and she had put it where it was found.[42]

In support of this, it is important to note that some mothers turned to infanticide as their last option to prevent the infant from growing up in a life of poverty and suffering. [43]  A mother’s act of intentional infanticide can therefore be seen as an emotional reaction and an act of love in order to stop the child from suffering as opposed to an act of inherent violence and cruelty. The police sergeant’s admission to Sarah Cooper’s distressing conditions further illustrates the changing perceptions of infanticidal women during this period and further demonstrates that mothers who committed infanticide as a result of poverty, were seen as victims of society and treated with increasing sympathy in the nineteenth century.

During the eighteenth century violence was an accepted code of male behaviour yet, upon the emergence of the Victorian period, violence became less tolerated in polite society.[44] Violence against children in the nineteenth century became much less tolerated as it contradicted the ideals of the new Victorian gentlemen and the expectations of a father as a moral protector.[45] Child-murder was a heinous criminal act committed historically by both parental figures yet, during the Victorian period the word ‘infanticide’ was labelled only on the murders committed by women.[46] Men accused of child-murder often killed their offspring in an attempt to conceal the evidence of their illicit sexual relations. Nonetheless, infanticide historians have often concentrated on unmarried mothers, whose fear of shame upon exposure of their illegitimate child had come to be associated with puerperal mania and infanticide. Men also attempted to evade association with illegitimate children either because they were married or they feared for their social positions.[47] Historian Jennifer Thorn discovered that there were around eighty articles written by The Times that document paternal child-murder between the years of 1807 and 1905; these articles described the murders as being, ‘committed largely by working-class fathers who reportedly strangled, stabbed, beat, and drowned their children’.[48]

Frost argues that the act of child-murder committed by men was less frequent in comparison to that of women and therefore has received much less historical attention.[49] Furthermore, Victorian masculinity encompassed the significance of male honour and ‘saw the pride and status of the patriarchal family’ at the central core of fatherhood; this transgression of the Victorian ideals of fatherhood became of significant importance in infanticide cases and thus shaped the way in which infanticidal men were perceived as a more severe threat to society than that of infanticidal women.[50] As a result of this, men suffered from fewer leniencies in court as a consequence of their violent aggression in order to conceal the shame of their infidelity.[51] It was assumed in the nineteenth century that men were sexual aggressors who ‘seduced women into falling’ and were therefore released from their parental responsibility. However, whilst women could claim to have committed infanticide as a result of insanity or poverty, men could not.[52]  Jackson has argued that men were to blame for tempting women into sexual acts more so than women were to blame for yielding to them and thus society held little sympathy for men in infanticide cases.[53] Furthermore historian Jade Shepherd states that murderous fathers were treated unsympathetically, as savage tyrants due to their inability to plead insanity as motivation behind the murder of their children.[54]

Male infanticide cases were very much dependent on the masculine characteristics of respectability and class. Frost argues that the higher the social standing of the accused gentleman, the more he had to lose as a result of an allegation of illegitimacy; the courts held very little sympathy for men in cases of infanticide as they held the strong belief that men were themselves responsible for their position in both society and familial situations.[55] The few accounts of child-murder committed by men during the nineteenth century provide insight into the ‘ideological pressures and fears underlying constructions of fatherhood’ that existed during this period. Whilst the press and popular fiction often represented the infanticidal mother as a young single woman in stifling poverty, men were usually depicted as violent, hostile and unable to provide for their families, a complete contrast to the idealised Victorian gentleman.[56] As Jackson has argued, women were seen as ‘passive, compassionate, pitiable, and innocent victims of society’s heathen principles and of men’s criminally cruel behaviour… acknowledged in part by the wider public.’[57] This further illustrates the lack of sympathy for men accused of child-murder and demonstrates society’s perception of the infanticidal father as a violent aggressor. One of the chief motivations behind fatherly violence came as a consequence of objecting to pay for financial support, despite the Victorian ideals of masculinity that inherently obliged men to provide for their family.[58]  Men were more frequently executed for infanticide unlike women; this was often due to women being able to claim postpartum ‘mania’ and puerperal insanity whilst men were unable to do so.[59] Victorian courts considered that men were able to obtain sufficient amounts of self-control in regards to violent behaviour. [60] Hunter in 1783 argued that, ‘the father of the child is really criminal, often cruelly so; the mother is weak credulous and deluded’.[61] This suggests that the attitude towards men was one of continuity while that toward women changed throughout the century becoming much more understanding and lenient in their attitudes to infanticidal women.

Nevertheless, infanticidal fathers and baby-farmers were continuously villainised in the Victorian period in contrast to the way in which infanticidal mothers were treated. By the mid-1800s resourceful women from within the working-classes began establishing child minding businesses in exchange for payment. These businesses were commonly known as baby-farms and allowed single unmarried women to continue in employment and function within the public sphere.[62] Established baby-farms often ran on overstrained resources and as a consequence resulted in an extremely low standard of care for the infants.[63] For the majority of people during the nineteenth century, seeking out a baby-farm was usually a last resort and was, ‘probably restricted to unmarried mothers…and social outcasts such as casual prostitutes or members of the petty criminal classes’.[64] Nevertheless, the children in these late-Victorian enterprises were dying at alarmingly high rates and the ‘farms’ were soon exposed as corrupt and murderous trades.[65]

Commonly known as ‘she-butchers’ in the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century baby-farmers were a consequence of societal anxiety surrounding ‘over-breeding’ within the poorer classes. Baby-farming was a pejorative term that grouped together all working-class females involved in the same criminal class.

[n]o respectable woman . . . would have called herself a baby farmer, ‘Baby farming’ was an accusation, not a profession. In normal usage, the term conflated the criminal acts of wilful murderers with the daily labor of honest nurses. [66]

It is significant to note that Annie Cossins villainises the term ‘baby farmer’ when she states that, ‘[n]o respectable woman . . . would have called herself a baby farmer’ suggesting that the mothers were exempt from blame in cases of infanticide that occurred within baby-farms. Printed in the early 1860s, this poem reveals the public’s abhorrence to Mrs Winsor’s baby-farm and is representative of society’s repugnance to the baby-farming industry during the nineteenth century.

This dreadful woman, Charlotte Winsor,

Took children in to nurse,

A devil she was in human form

We could not call her worse;

She would tamper with their young mother,

With if you would like to pay,

For a few pounds, say three of four,

I will put your child away.

Those children belong to some poor girl

That has been led astray.

Mrs. Winsor would take them to nurse

As long as they would pay.

She would murder them – yes, strangle them

For this paltry gain,

By putting them between beds,

Or pressing the juglar vein.[67]

It is significant to note that the poem presents the mother of the child as a victim of the baby-farming industry when it states that the mother has been ‘led astray’ and is supportive of the ongoing argument that society increasingly sympathised with the infant’s mother. Additionally, the ‘baby-farmer’ is endlessly associated with blame similarly to that of the infanticidal father. The interesting use of language by the poet such as ‘young mother’ and ‘poor girl’ suggests that it was perceived by Victorian society that only young, single, vulnerable women living in poverty sought out baby-farms as a desperate solution to rid themselves of shame.

Motherhood was seen as central to the construction of female identity in the nineteenth century, therefore, female ‘baby-farmers’ in this period juxtaposed these strongly implemented feminine ideals.[68] ‘The Execution of Mrs Winsor’, demonstrates the Victorian anxieties surrounding child-murder and the conflict between femininity and motherhood in the fourth stanza when it states:

While the babes on her would smile,

She would kiss and feed him tenderly,

And murder all the while.[69]

Anxiety around illegitimate children and the practice of baby-farming erupted in the late 1860s and the women involved became objects of scorn and derision.[70] On 25 September 1867, The Pall Mall Gazette stressed that ‘care of illegitimate children has become a regular trade’ and that the death of a child whilst in the care of a baby-farm was often a ‘happy release’ for the parent.[71] The press’s evaluation of the nineteenth-century baby-farm suggests that these establishments murdered children upon the instruction of the mother(s) and therefore should carry the same amount of blame as infanticidal fathers. Nevertheless, the language presented in the first stanza of the poem ‘Baby-Farming Mothers Bewareis illustrative of society’s attitudes towards Victorian mothers and the ‘baby-farming’ trade during the nineteenth century:

Oh, mothers, fond mothers your attention I pray.

And listen a while to a pitiful late. It’s a out baby farming a scandalous trade.

And shocking disclosures have a lately been made.

Near Brixton in Surrey this system so base.

Has at last! Been discovered a social disgrace.[72]

The phrases such as, ‘scandalous trade’ and ‘social disgrace’ are representative of the societal distain against the new found practice and thus become a contradiction of the Victorian familial ideals of gentility and sensibility. [73] The language used in this poem demonstrates the continuation of the idealisation of motherhood when it describes the parental figures as ‘fond mothers’. As a result of the Victorian ideals of motherhood ‘baby-farming women’ were seen as transgressors of their natural roles as women and thus presented a threat to society as they prevented mothers from fulfilling their natural duty. Consequently, baby-farmers were villainised by society and were judged with more severity than infanticidal mothers.

Perceptions of poverty and illegitimacy as justified causes of infanticide shaped the way in which infanticidal women were viewed in the nineteenth century. Men of the courts increasingly anticipated that infanticidal women were, ‘young, poor… naive victims of a wily seducer’ and thus justified the sympathetic treatment they received.[74] Perceptions of infanticidal women have fashioned more sympathetic reactions from society as shown by the poems in Appendix 1 and 2 which villainise the baby-farming industry. Furthermore, society’s perception of male infanticide as a villainous crime further weakened the impact of female infanticide; the medicalisation of insanity ensured that ‘mad’ women were being medically diagnosed as insane and were no longer a threat to the Victorian ideals of motherhood. [75] Furthermore, society’s perception of infanticidal fathers as ‘criminally cruel’ suggests the possibility that the nineteenth century saw an increasing shift away from the infanticidal woman as ‘bad’ and instead seeing them as victims of insanity and society.[76] Moreover, the transgression of the Victorian ideals of fatherhood became of significant importance in infanticide cases and thus shaped the way in which infanticidal men were perceived as a more severe threat to society than that of infanticidal women. In the Victorian period women were seen as ‘innocent victims of society’s heathen principles and of men’s criminally cruel behaviour.’[77] There was substantial emphasis on the mother’s ‘natural capacity for love and nurture’ and as a result, the nineteenth century saw a growing shift of sympathy for infanticidal mothers who were seen as victims of insanity or of society itself.

 

Mad?

Alongside the understanding that poverty and illegitimacy caused infanticide, child-murder was also perceived to be a product of insanity in the nineteenth century. The 1800s saw significant changes in the legislation of the Lunacy Acts. The Lunacy Act of 1845 and the County Asylums Act of 1845 combined to form mental health law in England and Wales.[78] Their most significant provision was in categorising mentally ill people as patients in order to stop the abuse of the insane; patients were admitted to licensed premises and institutionalised care was established for lunatics in public asylums.[79] This act was revisited in 1853 and ensured that a medical examination and certificate was to be issued and signed by a medical practitioner when administrating a patient to an asylum.[80] Finally, the Lunacy Act of 1890 generated a set of rules evoking legal controls over the psychiatric admissions of private patients.[81] The newly founded legislation of the Lunacy Acts during the course of the nineteenth century demonstrates the ongoing formal treatment of insanity during the Victorian era. This formalised treatment of the ‘insane’ enabled the Criminal Justice System to utilise the new medical advances in mental illness to diagnose women with puerperal insanity and which constituted an ‘appropriate charge’ in place of a prison sentence.[82] The emergence of ‘moral insanity’ into the medical profession saw the appearance of a body of ‘alienists’ whose job was to identify and treat mental conditions. This section assesses perceptions of insanity and establishes insanity as the chief influential factor in cases of infanticide during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, this section evidences that there was a growing sympathy for infanticidal mothers in Victorian Britain.

Puerperal insanity became a popular topic amongst ‘alienists’ and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had been readily implemented into the discourse of insanity.[83] The 1800s saw an increasing development of medicine as a natural science consequently leading to the rise of the medical profession and the specialisation of mental illnesses.[84] The medicalisation of infanticidal cases in the nineteenth century was dependent on medical professionals ‘pathologising’ puerperal mania, consequently treating the accused as subjects of ‘medical rather than legal attention and treatment rather than punishment’.[85] In the nineteenth century, the role of doctors as witnesses in infanticide trials became increasingly prominent; this was a consequence of the complex forensic evidence they were required to provide; in the case of doctors whom worked in mental asylums legal proceedings such as infanticide trials could be considered opportunities to improve their status and repertoire.[86]

This section assesses perceptions of insanity and establishes insanity as the chief influential factor in cases of infanticide during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, this section evidences that there was a growing sympathy for infanticidal mothers in Victorian Britain as a result of the increasing awareness of mental health disorders.

On the 10 October 1881, Catherine (Kate) Rumsby from Hertford was accused of the murder of her new-born infant. The case demonstrates the newly founded importance of the doctor in infanticide trials. The attending registered medical practitioner, George Marshall Phillips, concurred that:

the umbilical cord was broken off and had not been tied. There was a long abrasion on the front of the neck about the length and width of a finger, blood on the brain, bruises to the right hand side of the face and blood in the ear. Both lungs inflated and were filling up the cavity of the chest nearly covering the pericardia. The ten portions of arms and legs were immersed in hot water sufficiently long enough to solidify the flesh. There were patches of blood on the accused’s dress corresponding to the size of the placenta.[87]

Doctor Phillips confirmed that the bruising on the forehead and blood on the brain were sufficient to cause death and that the lungs were capable of working upon birth. He also stated that he could not verify that the umbilical cord had been severed before death. The bruising on the top of the infant’s cranium, as Doctor Phillips stated ‘may have been caused by the child falling on the floor not in birth.’ The remains of the infant were found in two separate places, the head and the torso in a paper box and the remaining limbs in a cooking pot upon the kitchen stove. Medical practitioner George Phillips deducted that the violent mutilation and trauma to the body were a consequence of the mother’s insanity and concluded that Catherine Rumsby was in a ‘state of much mental distress and excitement at the time of the murder’.[88] In 1859, Forbes Winslow, writing about puerperal insanity, argued that subsequent to giving birth the woman’s temper ‘changes completely, and family affection is apparently changed into the bitterest hatred; this is particularly observed as regards the child, which the mother often attempts to destroy.’[89] Catherine Rumsby pleaded not guilty of infanticide in court. Although a conviction on this case could not be found it might be considered that as a result of the statements given by Doctor Phillips and the apparent Victorian anxieties surrounding puerperal mania, Miss Rumsby may have been confined to an asylum as a result of suffering from puerperal insanity. In 1815, historian William Hunter declared that, ‘it is only murder when it is executed with some degree of cool judgement, and wicked intention. When committed under phrenzy from despair, can it be more offensive in the sight of God, than under a phrenzy from a fever, or in lunacy?’ In addition to this, Hunter also stated that, ‘the insane are not to be held responsible for their actions’.[90] The case of Catherine Rumsby provides evidence to suggest that insanity was perceived to be the main influencing factor behind her act of infanticide.

Victorian notions of femininity understood the female body to be associated with unconditional love and nurture of her husband and offspring.[91] These illustrations of the ideal women were based upon images of motherhood, domesticity and passive obedience, compared to ‘the sexually aggressive harlot’ exiled from society as a consequence of defying the Victorian codes of conduct that deemed their behaviour as ‘irrational’ or ‘wicked’. Women who denied ideological codes of behaviour were understood as ‘becoming more like the animal within, she was a mythical figure of power and destruction, selling her soul to the powers of Darkness.’[92] The behaviour of mothers suffering from puerperal insanity was shocking to Victorian society as their unsettling and frightening behaviour became a risk to new-born children, a time when the young infant is in constant need of its mother’s care and protection. ‘The hand that rocked the cradle was also the hand that slapped, smothered or strangled the infant’, as women suffering from insanity put their baby at risk of injury and even fatality.[93]

During the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘child-murder became a modern secret…the modernity of this secret was signalled in the vigorous publicity that surrounded it: everybody was talking about how no one was willing to talk about it.’[94] In 1862, William Burke Ryan described his first-hand account of living in a time of heightened infanticide rates.

[T]he feeble wail of murdered childhood in its agony assails our ears at every turn, and is borne on every breeze. The sight is horrified as, day after day, the melancholy catalogue of murders meets the view, and we try to turn away the gaze in hope of some momentary relief. But turn where we may, still we are met by the evidence of a widespread crime. In the quiet of the bedroom we raise the box-lid, and the skeletons are there. In the calm evening walk we see in the distance the suspicious-looking bundle, and the mangled infant within. By the canal side, or in the water, we find the dead child. In solitude of the wood we are horrified by the ghastly sight; and if we betake ourselves to the rapid rail in order to escape the pollution, we find a journey’s end that the mouldering remains of a murdered innocent have been our travelling companion; and that the odour from that unsuspected parcel truly indicates what may be found within.[95]

The Victorian era was a period surrounded by an atmosphere of elevated anxieties concerning the endangerments of childbirth ‘and threats to the sanctity of the bourgeois home offered an ideal medium for it to take hold and flourish’.[96] The period saw the introduction of the new term and medical jargon ‘puerperal insanity’ and ‘puerperal mania’ into medical texts which incorporated the newly established forms of mental illness associated with childbirth.[97] Expectant mothers before the introduction of ‘puerperal insanity’ were still thought to fall victim to mental disorders, such as hysteria.[98] Women’s biological weaknesses that had been medically determined in the nineteenth century were thought to have put them at risk of developing insanity during pregnancy or subsequently months after giving birth due to their weakened mental state.[99]

Giving birth in the Victorian era was increasingly described as, ‘dangerous and pathological rather than normal and natural’; in his introduction to ‘Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery’, Robert Lee states that that all women were ‘exposed to great suffering and danger during pregnancy and childbirth’.[100] Although the disorder became a complete contradiction to the social norms of behaviour during this period, puerperal insanity became so frequently identified by male medical professionals that it became an accepted accomplice to the process of giving birth.[101] The new medical jargon and legislation surrounding insanity and puerperal mania ensured that childbirth was perceived to be a threat to new mothers and also became a ‘successful defence strategy’ in infanticide cases during this period.[102] The Victorian period saw the introduction of the term ‘puerperal insanity’ and its use in both a medical and social setting; violent mania, severe melancholia, or postpartum dysphoria were accredited by physicians to be accepted as a common consequence of childbirth.[103] In the 1880s the eminent psychiatrist Thomas Clouston described how childbirth, ‘One of the most joyous times of life is made full of anxiety and the strongest affection on earth is then often suddenly converted by disease into an antipathy: for the mother not only ‘forgets her suckling child’, but often becomes a danger to its life’.[104] In 1848, James Reid, physician to the General Lying-in Hospital in London, described how:

the mothers urged on by some unaccountable impulse to commit violence on herself or on her offspring… the infant is usually the object … in puerperal insanity; an impulse to destroy, haunts the mind continually, and struggles with maternal tenderness… The sufferer, in some cases, implores that the infant may be removed from her, lest she should altogether lose her self-control, and is heard praying to heaven to prevent her from yielding temptation.[105]

It is significant to note the juxtaposition of the emotional and dispassionate language used by Reid, when he refers to children as the ‘object’ and cause of the mothers suffering yet, he discusses ‘maternal tenderness’, juxtaposing ‘puerperal insanity’ with ‘maternal tenderness’.[106]

In the case of Rose Earle for the murder of her new-born child (in Appendix 3) who was also named Rose Earle in Liverpool October 1899, (by cutting of the throat) the mother is explicitly described as showing extreme physical signs of insanity. Medical Officer (MO) Arthur Price stated that:

Her general health has not been good. She has been depressed in her manners subject to outbursts of crying, swinging of the hands and generally chewing…She also suffers from delusions to the effect that God told her to kill her child to save it from suffering and she hears impossible voices urging her to commit suicide, says she must die as she is not fit to live…I consider her to be unsound of mind.[107]

Rose Earle’s apparent affection and maternal tenderness for the child was demonstrated when she stated that she must save it from ‘suffering’. The MO’s evaluation of her physical symptoms and emotional verbal outbursts demonstrates the changing nature of how women were perceived to have developed insanity during the nineteenth century as a result of giving birth. [108] In addition to this, the certificate (in Appendix 3) provides evidence to suggest that the medicalisation of insanity born of the nineteenth century shaped the way in which infanticidal women were treated in court. The certificate confirms that Miss Earle was incarcerated in the Liverpool Lunatic Asylum in 1899.

Marland states ‘that doctors saw infanticide as an actual symptom of puerperal insanity, so prevalent was the extraordinarily deranged and dangerous behaviour of the women, expressed in sexual obscenity, filthy language, self-neglect, attempted suicide and violence to others.’[109] This can be evidenced through the confinement of women to asylums as punishment for infanticidal crimes in replacement of execution. Subsequent to both the mental and physical pain of giving birth, new mothers were seen as predisposed to developing deranged, neglectful and violent behaviour. Thus, they became a risk to themselves, their family members and most importantly their new-born infant(s). These behaviour traits were categorised as mental conditions and labelled as puerperal insanity or mania. This newly established diagnosis in new mothers led to its increasing use in defence of the mother in cases of infanticide in the Criminal Courts.[110] Furthermore, Logan states that, ‘deliberate infanticide by a sane woman has far different connotations from the unaccountability of a random act prompted by insanity,’ further demonstrating the ongoing understanding of mental health and how this resulted in growing sympathy for infanticidal mothers in the nineteenth century. [111]

In the case of Bridget Doyle accused of the murder of Ellen Doyle in Liverpool in 1899, the witness statement from Mrs Doyle’s eight year old son John shows that the accused made statements such as ‘Oh my Jesus, begin today tomorrow is too late.’ After that she remained in a kneeling position on the bed and seemed to be praying silently until 4 o’clock the next morning when she said, ‘the devil is coming into me and it is not Kate Holland.’[112] The accused was, according to young John Doyle, ‘sitting on the floor bleeding from a wound in her throat and the deceased lying a little to the right in a pool of blood.’ Bridget Doyle was under mental observation since her reception on 27 September 1899 and was assessed by Medical Officer Arthur Price who found her to be:

very violent, behaving in an excited maniacal fashion shouting incoherently. It had been necessary to transfer her to prison in a strait jacket, restraint was continued for two days when she became stuporous…She still refuses to speak nor has she spoken since I have seen her. I consider her to be unsound of mind.[113]

Though the incriminating evidence suggests that Bridget Doyle was guilty of the murder of her child and thus of infanticide the certificate in Appendix 4 demonstrates that Bridget Doyle was ‘unfit to plead’ and was ‘to be detained in strict custody as a criminal lunatic until her Majesty’s pleasures be known’. Bridget Doyle’s indefinite confinement to a lunatic asylum in Liverpool as punishment for her crime further supports the argument that the changing legislation of insanity shaped responses to infanticidal mothers and created a more ‘sympathetic approach’ in infanticidal trials as a result of the medicalisation of insanity.[114]

Puerperal mania was of great interest to psychiatrists during this period as it not only ‘developed their theories which tied women’s mental disturbances to their intrinsic weakness and the rigours of reproductions, but also linked women to a wider range of social, environmental and moral factors’.[115] It was mania which appeared most frequently in infanticide cases with its, ‘temporary nature and sudden onset, typified by the struggle that mothers felt… between not wanting to harm their infants and the inability to prevent themselves from doing so’.[116] This can be evidenced in the case of Mary Harrison who was charged with the murder of her two children on the 28 September 1894 at the parish of Bootle in the County of Cumberland; her charge reads as follows, ‘She did feloniously wilfully and of her malice afterthought did kill and murder one Hannah Mary James and John Harrison against the peace of our Sovereign Lady the Queen her Crown and Dignity.’ Upon questioning at H. M. Prison Carlisle on 11 October 1894, the accused stated that:

On Friday morning last I brought my children down stairs soon after my husband had left the house. I got a step ladder and put it against the water tub. I went up the ladder with Hannah Mary and baby in my arms. I got into the water with them I held them in the water until they were dead. I intended to drown myself but the water in the barrel was not deep enough… I have been troubled in my mind for the last three years…I told Hannah Mary I was going to drown them both she cried bitterly and said oh mamma mamma don’t. I now sincerely regret I have done… I hope the lord will forgive me.[117]

Women who suffered from puerperal insanity often displayed outbursts of deranged and dangerous behaviour such as ‘attempted suicide and violence to others’ as displayed by Mary Harrison.[118] The Victorian period saw a general consensus about puerperal insanity and its sub-divisions: Melancholia, ‘a form of intense misery which was likely to result in permanent insanity’ and Mania, ‘distinguished by overexcited, disruptive and deviant behaviour, usually curable within a few months.’[119] Mary Harrison’s initial regret for the murders of both her children in her confession provides confirmation that she was suffering from mania; her apparent ignorance to her child’s cries at the time of the murders suggests a poor emotional and mental state and that she may have been suffering from post-partum melancholia. Furthermore in a statement made by J. A. Campbell the Medical Superintendent of Cumberland and Hertfordshire concludes that, ‘Mary Harrison was insane at the time her two children were drowned on September 28th 1894’. [120] This is further supported by the certificate in Appendix 5 in which the verdict reads that Mary Harrison was ‘Found insane on arraignment by a jury duly empanelled for this purpose’ and certifies that the accused will be, ‘detained in custody until Her Majesty’s pleasure shall be known’. The courts verdict in response to Mary Harrison’s exhibit of insane behaviour further illustrates that there was a growing recognition and perception of insanity that shaped the responses to infanticidal women in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the treatment of Mary Harrison as a victim of insanity in conjunction with the case studies of Rose Earle and Bridget Doyle demonstrates that the newly perceived consequences of insanity became the most important factor in cases of infanticide in nineteenth-century Britain.

The ambiguity surrounding the definition of puerperal mania contrasts the increasing levels of precision that were used in the establishment of procedures evaluating the circumstances of new-born infant mortality; this included establishing the difference between stillborn infants and those who had been born alive. It was difficult to establish evidence whether the child had breathed independently from the mother, whether strangulation by the umbilical cord was accidental and occurred during the birthing process, or whether the infant had been deliberately suffocated.[121] This can be seen in the case against Florence Dolman who at the parish of South Bearsted in the county of Sussex on the 15 March 1881 ‘did feloniously wilfully and of her malice aforethought did kill and murder a certain female infant child born of her body’. After Dolman’s employer discovered the body of the new-born infant, Dr Samuel Maughan was called to the scene and noted:

There was blood in serval places of the carpet in the small room. I saw two boxes underneath the basin on the shelf, upon opening the box I found the body of a female child. The child had the head turned downwards, it was dead but quite warm. On examining the body, I found two wounds on the neck (one either side). The wound on the right was 2-2.5 inches long, deep. Superficial on the left around 1 inch. The windpipe and the gullet were both severed underneath the skin. The head was bruised at the back, potentially from birth. They did a test hydrostatic, the lung floated. I cannot say whether the child was fully born when the wounds were inflicted but it had respired. The deep wounds had the appearance of being done with scissors. I saw the scissors at the time on the floor…The right wound was such as would have caused death had the child been born alive. The umbilical cord was torn about 3 inches from the trunk. There was a loose piece about 6 inches long in the same vessel as the after birth. This appeared to have been cut. Jugular veins had been divided but not the main artery, assuming the child was born alive the wounds would have been fatal. There is not medical proof of the child being born alive. I think the wounds may have been inflicted before the child was fully born by the mother, I have heard of such cases and believe it to be possible.[122]

The denial of either pregnancy or of the new-born infant there after often resulted in the death of the infant.[123] Miss Dolman when approached by Dr Maughan and asked about the child said ‘I have not had one.’ Upon asking a second time the accused simply denied having had the child. Her denial further illustrates her weakened mental state. Although the verdict for this case could not be found, it demonstrates the difficulties that both medical and legal professionals had in finding concrete evidence to convict women of infanticide in the nineteenth century, as Dr Maughan could not find ‘medical proof of the child being born alive’.[124] Sit, Rothschild and Wisner stated that patients involved in cases of infanticide often ‘denied their pregnancy and the pain of childbirth; they often experienced dissociative hallucinations, brief amnesia, and depersonalization’.[125] Moreover, the case of Florence Dolman provides evidence to support that the changing legislation of the Infanticide Acts in the nineteenth century increased convictions of concealment of birth which further supports the fact that there was an ever increasingly sympathetic reaction to the infanticidal mother in the Victorian period.

To further illustrate the difficulties in evidencing still-birth and infanticide it is important to note that all forms of abortion were illegal. However, abortion after the fifth month of pregnancy remained a capital crime throughout the nineteenth century.[126] Nevertheless, unwanted pregnancies often resulted in abortions at all different stages of pregnancy; some desperate women who lacked networks in order to have an abortion resorted to infanticide.[127] Thorn describes the killing of new-born bastard infants during this time period as a ‘kind of belated birth control, regrettable but nonetheless understandable’.[128] In 1862, George Graves noted that the law’s classification of live birth in contrast to stillbirth could be seen ‘in the eye of the law of England, that it is, no crime to strangle a child with a cord, to smash its skull with a hammer, or to cut its throat from ear to ear… [if] its lower extremities are at the time within the body of the mother’.[129] Using Graves’s statement as a platform for the perceptions of society in the Victorian period, the case of Florence Dolman becomes representative of a more prominent sympathetic reaction to infanticide in cases of belated abortion.

The changes to the legislation of the Lunacy Acts during the nineteenth century had a profound effect on the establishment of the mentally ill as medical patients; further supported by historian Michael Foucault who has argued that madness has been understood to be a ‘phenomenon assessable and resolvable within the terms of the nineteenth-century explanatory programmes of chemistry, physics and biology’ and that prior to the nineteenth century there were no specific scientific regulations that classified a diagnosis of insanity.[130] Thus the medicalisation of insanity in this period created a more protective environment for the patients and established an improvement in their care in institutionalised asylums.[131] The case of Florence Dolman demonstrates the difficulty that doctors had in evidencing that the child was alive after birth in conjunction to establishing still-births in infanticide cases. Moreover, the cases of Rose Earle and Mary Harrison provides evidence to demonstrate that women who were accused of infanticide in the nineteenth century could now be verified as victims of a mental disorder and in association, not be convicted on a murder charge but treated more sympathetically escaping the death penalty.[132] The growing recognition and perception of insanity in the nineteenth century shaped the responses to infanticidal women and the way in which patients were treated in a court of law and by medical professionals.[133] This new found perception of puerperal mania as a mental illness shaped the way in which women were treated in infanticide trials evoking an increased sympathetic response from both judge and jury.[134] Similarly, the newly established language around ‘puerperal mania’ and ‘puerperal insanity’ demonstrates a shift away from the historical perceptions of hysteria and insanity that attacked women for their madness towards a more medicalised diagnosis and thus provided justification for infanticidal crimes.

 

Conclusion

Victorian periodicals sensationalised crimes of infanticide linked to illegitimacy and poverty in the nineteenth century. Acknowledging women as the victims of distressing social conditions shaped the way in which infanticidal women were received with compassion in both the criminal courts and in society. Although, illegitimacy juxtaposed the Victorian ideals of femininity and motherhood, single vulnerable mothers were seen to be victims of men who were perceived in the nineteenth century to be sexual aggressors and thus infanticidal women were treated with increasing sympathy.

Infanticidal fathers challenged the new-found ideologies of fatherhood as a moral protector and were treated with a greater sense of hostility both in society and in the court of law. Victorian society became progressively lenient towards the crime of infanticide when committed by women as a consequence of suffering from emotionally distressing conditions such as insanity, poverty and illegitimacy and therefore shaped society’s responses to infanticidal women. Nevertheless, female baby-farmers were treated with greater hostility as they juxtaposed the construct of motherhood that was seen as central to female identity in the nineteenth century. Additionally, female baby-famers were continuously villainised during this period as they disrupted the duty of other mothers and presented a threat to society. Male offenders accused of infanticide and the proprietors of baby-farms were punitively judged in society and were increasingly portrayed in a negative light as they became a threat to the Victorian ideologies and society’s well-being. Although the majority of the people accused of infanticide were women, it is significant to note that infanticidal fathers were also tried for the crime. Even though there were significantly fewer cases of infanticide committed by fathers during the course of the nineteenth century, men were treated considerably harsher than women in court as a consequence of transgressing the moral codes of masculine behaviour.

Nineteenth-century Britain saw a period of increased anxiety around child-murder; female infanticide was an act of emotional desperation in response to distressing social conditions. Newly established medical knowledge and recognised treatments of the insane confirmed society’s perception of insanity as the most influential factor instigating child-murder in this period. The new-found perception of puerperal mania as a mental illness fashioned the way in which women were treated in infanticide trials with an increasingly sympathetic response from both judge and jury. The social constructs of femininity by Victorian definition, similar to those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contained women to the domestic sphere and defined women as being, ‘virginal, passive and obedient’.[135] Insanity became a threat to Victorian society and  a solution was therefore needed. Overall, there were shifts in the nineteenth century in how infanticide was viewed; there was a growing recognition of the impact of insanity, poverty and illegitimacy in shaping the actions of mothers who killed their babies.

Appendices

Appendix 1:

Anon, ‘The Execution of Mrs Winsor’ (1865), in M. Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000 (Aldershot, 2002)

You mothers all, come listen to me,

While a dreadful tale I tell.

Of all she crimes upon this earth,

This one does all excel.

Children slaughter’d fearlessly,

And by a woman’s hand,

Just for the sake of getting gold,

This woman you command.

 

This dreadful woman, Charlotte Winsor,

Took children in to nurse,

A Devil she was in human form,

We could not call her worse;

She would tamper with their young mother,

With if you would like to pay,

For a few pounds, say three or four,

I will put your child away.

 

Those children belong to some poor girl,

That had been led astray,

Mrs. Winsor would take them to nurse,

As long as they would pay.

She would murder them – yes, strangle them,

For this paltry gain,

By putting them between beds,

Or pressing the juglar vein.

 

What must this wretch’s feelings be,

While the babes on her would smile,

She would kiss and feed him tenderly,

And murder all the while.

She would tamper with their motuers,

And of them beg and pray,

With get four pounds together dear,

And your child shall die to day.

 

She stifled one just three weeks old,

Jane Harris, she would say,

You will never see them after,

They will sink in the Torquay.

Dead children tell no tales,

And cause no more strife,

And with children smiling on her,

She would take away their life.

 

No one knows this woman’s crime,

Bet God’s a l eeing eye,

But justice overtook her,

And for these crimes she died.

The tempter and the murderess,

As you see by these lioes,

As gone to face their Maker,

And to answer for her crimes.

Appendix 2:

Anonymous, ‘Baby Farming Mothers Beware’ (London, 1871), in P. Chassaigne and W. Heppel, ‘Popular Representations of Crime: The Crime Broadside – A Subculture of Violence in Victorian Britain?’ Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, 3/2 (1999), pp. 23-55.

Oh, mothers, fond mothers your attention
I pray.
And listen awhile to a pitiful lay.
It’s a out baby farming, a scandalous trade,
And shocking disclosures have lately been made,
Near Brixton, in Surrey, this system so base,
Has at last! been discovered, a social disgrace.

Then mothers, fond mothers, of your children take care,
And against baby farming I pray you beware.

What is baby farming, some mothers may say
Tis a practice that takes a poor infant away
From the care of it’s mother by a stranger instead,
The poor little creature is foster’d and bred.
It encourages vice and [?] I won’t name,
Tis a means to get rid of the offspring o’shame.

Sometimes a young woman has been led astray,
Sends the child of her guilt to be out of the way.
She pays a few pounds, tis a bargain, and then
She gives it up never to see it again,
While the indolent wife in luxury fed,
Pays a stranger to suckle her offspring instead

In a Terrace, at Brixton, two sisters did dwell
And of their sad doings the newspapers tell.
How they tempted poor mothers their offspring to leave,
To their tender care, but alas to deceive.
They starved them to death, for of late has been found.
The bodies of infants in the fields there around.

Poor children half-naked, their state we deplore,
Too weak for to stand, they laid on the floor
Unwashed and neglected by night and by day,
Till their dear little souls from life pass away
And what cared the nurse for the dead ones, [?]
The [?] of a child, why a saving would be.

Will the hen drive the chicken from under under her wing,
And leave it to perish, the poor little thing,
Or will dumb brutes desert their offspring, ah ! no,
What proofs of affection animals show.
Yes mothers alas their children will slay,
Or else pay another to put it away.

Appendix 3:

Rose Earle Certificate. The National Archives, ASSI 52/44, Murder: Earle, Rose (Infanticide), 1899.

Appendix 4:

Bridget Doyle Certificate. The National Archives, ASSI 52/43, Murder: Doyle, Bridget (Infanticide), 1899.

Appendix 5:

Mary Harrison Certificate. The National Archives, ASSI 52/20, Murder: Harrison, Mary (Infanticide), 1894.

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[1] N. Goc, Women, Infanticide and the Press, 1822-1922: News Narratives in England and Australia (Surrey, 2013), p. 1.

[2] S. Wilson, ‘Infanticide, Child Abandonment, and Female Honour in Nineteenth-Century Corsica’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30/4 (1988), p. 762.

[3] A. A. Kilday, History of Infanticide in Britain, c. 1600 to the Present (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), p. 2.

[4] R. G. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005), p. 192.

[5] A. R. Higginbotham, ‘Sin of the Age: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, 32/3 (1989) p. 319.

[6] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, pp. 99-100.

[7] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty p. 99.

[8] Goc, Women, Infanticide and the Press, p. 1.

[9] Higginbotham, ‘Sin of the Age’, p. 320.

[10] J. Thorn, ‘Introduction: Stories of Child-Murder, Stories of Print’, in J. Thorn (ed.), Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722-1859 (Newark, 2003), p. 13.

[11] H. Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder? Puerperal Insanity, Infanticide and the Defence Plea’, in M. Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000 (Aldershot, 2002), p. 169.

[12] J. Shepherd, ‘“One of the Best Fathers until He Went Out of His Mind”: Paternal Child-Murder, 1864 –1900’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (2013), p. 17.

  1. Shepherd, Institutionalizing the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 2014), p. 9.
  2. Mauger, The Cost of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public, Voluntary and Private Asylum Care (Basingstoke, 2018), p. 155.

[13] I. Loudon, ‘Puerperal Insanity in the 19th Century’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 81 (1988), p. 76.

[14] Anon., ‘19th Century Mental Health’, National Health Service (2014), <http://www.ashfordstpeters.nhs.uk/19th-century-mental-health>, accessed 16.01.2018.

[15] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 173.

[16] A. Loughnan, ‘The “Strange” Case of the Infanticide Doctrine’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 32 (2012), p. 690.

[17] Kilday, A History of Infanticide in Britain, p. 167.

For more information on infanticide and execution see: J. Gregory, Victorians Against the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Abolitionist Movement in Nineteenth Century Britain (New York, 2011).

[18] S. D’Cruze, Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850-1950: Gender and Class (Essex, 2000), p. 58.

[19] M. L. Arnot, ‘The Murder of Thomas Sandles: Meanings of a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Infanticide’, in Jackson (ed.), Infanticide, p. 150.

  1. L. Berry, The Child, The State and The Victorian Novel (Charlottesville, 1999), p. 179.

[20] L. M. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (New Jersey, 1989), p. 88.

[21] Thorn, ‘Introduction’, p. 28.

[22] Arnot, ‘The Murder of Thomas Sandles’, p. 150.

[23] J. Kelly, ‘Responding to Infanticide in Ireland, 1680–1820’, in E. Farrell, She said she was in the family way’: Pregnancy and Infancy in Modern Ireland (London, 2012), p. 189.

Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 99.

  1. Andrews and A. Digby (eds.), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (New York, 2004), p. 109.

[24] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 100.

For more on motherhood and maternal instincts see: A. Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction & the New Woman (Oxford, 2003), p. 176.

[25] Thorn, ‘Introduction’, p. 28.

For more on Infanticide law see: L. Rose, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain 1800-1939 (Oxford, 2016), p. 77.

[26] Kelly, ‘Responding to Infanticide in Ireland’, p. 189.

[27]  J. A. Sheetz-Nguyen, Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital (London, 2012), p. 38

[28] L. C. Berry, ‘Confession and Profession: Adam Bede, Infanticide, and the New Coroner’, in Thorn (ed.), Writing British Infanticide, p. 202.

[29] Higginbotham, ‘Sin of the Age’, p. 331.

[30] Berry, ‘Confession and Profession’, p. 202-03.

[31] Arnot, ‘The Murder of Thomas Sandles’, p. 150.

[32] E. Gordon, and G. Nair, ‘Domestic Fathers and the Victorian Parental Role’, Women’s History Review, 15 (2006), p. 551.

[33] Arnot, ‘The Murder of Thomas Sandles’, p. 150.

[34] S. L. Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 2012), p. 201.

[35] D’Cruze, Everyday Violence in Britain, p. 57.

[36] P. Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558–1803 (New York, 1981), cited in Thorn, Writing British Infanticide, p. 20.

[37] D. A. Logan, Fallenness in Victorian Women’s Writing: Marry, Stitch, Die, Or Do Worse (Columbia, 1998), p. 18.

[38] Anon., ‘The Case of Infanticide Near Bury St. Edmund’s.’, The Morning Chronicle, 23 October 1851, Issue 26478, in British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900.

[39] Kelly, ‘Responding to Infanticide in Ireland’, p. 189.

[40] R. Sauer, ‘Infanticide and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Population Studies, 32 (1978), p. 92.

Andrews and Digby, Sex and Seclusion, p. 109.

See for example: C. Chinn, Poverty amidst Prosperity: The Urban Poor in England 1834-1914 (Lancaster, 2006).

[41] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 192.

[42] D’Cruze, Everyday Violence, p. 57.

[43] D’Cruze, Everyday Violence in Britain, p. 58.

For more on the link between poverty and insanity see Chapter 6 in A. Gestrich, E. Hurren, and S. King (eds.), Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe: Narratives of the Sick Poor 1780-1938 (London, 2012).

[44] R. Shoemaker, ‘Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in Eighteenth-Century’, Social History, 26 (2001), p. 194.

[45] C. Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750-1900, 2nd edn (Harlow, 1996), p. 107.

  1. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities: Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow, 2005), p. 130.

[46] M. V. Gregory, ‘“Most revolting murder by a father”: The Violent Rhetoric of Paternal Child-Murder in the Times (London), 1826-1849’, in Thorn (ed.), Writing British Infanticide, p. 71.

[47] G. Frost, ‘“I am master here”: Illegitimacy, Masculinity, and Violence in Victorian England’, in L. Delap, B. Griffin, and A. Wills (eds.), The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 30.

[48] Gregory, ‘Most revolting murder by a father’, p. 72.

[49] Frost, ‘I am master here’, p. 31.

[50] J.M. Ferraro, Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice 1557-1789 (Baltimore, 2008), p. 12.

For more on masculinity see J. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 133; H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge, 1995).

[51] E. Farrell, ‘A most diabolical deed’: Infanticide and Irish Society 1850-1900 (Manchester, 2013), p. 149.

Chinn, Poverty amidst Prosperity, p. 114.

[52] Frost, ‘I am master here’, p. 31.

[53] Jackson, New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, 1996), p. 118.

[54] Shepherd, ‘One of the Best Fathers until He Went Out of His Mind’, p. 21.

[55] Frost, ‘I am master here’, p. 31.

[56] Gregory, ‘Most revolting murder by a father’, p. 72.

[57] Jackson, New-Born Child Murder, p. 118.

[58] D. Rabin, ‘Beyond ‘Lewd Women’ and ‘Wanton Wenches’: Infanticide and Child-Murder in the Long Eighteenth Century’ in Thorn (ed.), Writing British Infanticide, p. 47.

Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 132.

[59] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 173.

[60] Frost, ‘I am master here’, p. 39.

[61] W. Hunter, On the Uncertainty of the Signs of Murder in the Case of Bastard Children (London, 1783), p. 6.

[62] A. Cossins, Female Criminality: Infanticide, Moral Panics and The Female Body (New York, 2015) p. 91.

[63] J. McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture 1720-1900 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 125.

[64] J. Himmill, cited in Farrell, A most diabolical deed, p. 35. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 57.

[65] A. Clark, ‘Irish Orphans and the Politics of Domestic Authority’ in Delap, Griffin, and Wills (eds.), The Politics of Domestic Authority, p. 71. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 46.

[66] Cossins, Female Criminality, p. 91.

[67] Anon, ‘The Execution of Mrs Winsor’, in Jackson (ed.), Infanticide.

[68] Gordon and Nair, ‘Domestic Fathers and the Victorian Parental Role’, p. 551.

Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 108.

[69] Anon, ‘The Execution of Mrs Winsor’.

[70] M. Jackson, ‘The Trial of Harriet Vooght: Continuity and Change in the History of Infanticide’, in Jackson (ed.), Infanticide, p. 10.

[71] Anon., ’Baby Farming’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 25 September 1867, Issue 819, in British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900.

[72]  Anon., ‘Baby-Farming Mothers Beware’ (1871), in P. Chassaigne, and W. Heppel, ‘Popular Representations of Crime: The Crime Broadside – A Subculture of Violence in Victorian Britain?’ Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, 3/2 (1999), pp. 42-43.

[73] Anon., ‘Baby-Farming Mothers Beware’.

[74] E. Farrell, ‘A very immoral establishment’: The Crime of Infanticide and Class Status in Ireland, 1850–1900’, in Farrell (ed.), She said she was in the family way, p. 220.

[75] A. Loughnan, Manifest Madness: Mental Incapacity in the Criminal Law (Oxford, 2012), p. 154.

[76] Hunter, On the Uncertainty of the Signs of Murder, p. 6.

[77] J. Geyer-Kordesch, ‘Infanticide and the Erotic Plot: A Feminist Reading of Eighteenth-Century Crime’, in Jackson (ed.), Infanticide, p. 118.

[78] H. Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865 (Oxford, 1996), p. 21.

[79] C. Stebbings, ‘Protecting the Property of the Mentally Ill: The Judicial Solution in Nineteenth Century Lunacy Law’, Cambridge Law Journal, 71/2 (2012), p. 385.

[80] P. Bartlett, The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth Century England with Special Emphasis on Leicestershire and Rutland (London, 1993), p. 192.

[81] I. Butler and B. Drakeford, Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 22.

  1. Burtinshaw and J. Burt, Lunatics, Imbeciles and Idiots: A History of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century (Barnsley, 2017), p. 37.

[82] Loughnan, Manifest Madness, p. 154.

Small, Love’s Madness, p. 35.

[83] Loughnan, ‘The “Strange” Case of the Infanticide Doctrine’, p. 687.

Mauger, The Cost of Insanity, p. 155.

[84] T. Chakravarty, ‘Medicalisation of Mental Disorder: Shifting Epistemologies and Beyond’, Sociological Bulletin, 62/2 (2011), p. 21.

Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 132.

  1. I. Burney, ‘The Politics of Particularism: Medicalization and Medical Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in R. Bivins and V. J. Pickstone, Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 4

[85] Loughnan, ‘The “Strange” Case of the Infanticide Doctrine’, p. 687.

Small, Love’s Madness, p. 35.

Butler and Drakeford, Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare, p. 17.

[86] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 171.

[87] ASSI 72/04, Murder: Rumsby, Catherine (Infanticide), The National Archives, London (TNA).

[88] TNA, ASSI 72/04, Murder: Rumsby, Catherine (Infanticide).

[89] W. Forbes, ‘On Puerperal Insanity’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 12 (1859), p. 21.

[90] Hunter, On the Uncertainty of the Signs of Murder, p. 5.

See also: K. Busfield, Men, Women and Madness: Understanding Gender and Mental Disorder (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 159.

[91] Cossins, Female Criminality, p. 57.

[92] Cossins, Female Criminality, p. 57.

[93] H. Marland, Dangerous Motherhood Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 4.

[94] Berry, ‘Confession and Profession’, p. 196.

[95] W. R. Burke, Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention, And History (London, 1862), p. 45-46.

[96] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 3.

[97] Shepherd, Institutionalizing the Insane, p. 9.

[98] Andrews and Digby, Sex and Seclusion, p. 165.

[99] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 3.

[100] R. Lee, Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery: Delivered in the Theatre of St. George’s Hospital (London, 1844), cited in Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 175.

[101] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 5.

[102] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 175.

[103] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 4.

For anxieties surrounding puerperal mania see: D. Brunton, Health and Wellness in the 19th Century (Oxford, 2014), p. 142.

[104] T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 2nd edn (London, 1887), p. 502.

[105] J. Reid, ‘On the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Puerperal Insanity’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 1 (1848), p. 135. Reid was an author on puerperal insanity who was much cited in forensic texts.

[106] Reid, ‘On the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Puerperal Insanity’, p. 135.

[107] ASSI 52/44, Murder: Earle, Rose (Infanticide), TNA.

[108] TNA, ASSI 52/44.

[109] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 4.

[110] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 173.

[111] Logan, Fallenness in Victorian Women’s Writing, p. 184.

[112] ASSI 52/43, Murder: Doyle, Bridget (Infanticide), TNA. After extensive research it was not possible to identify what Mrs Doyle meant when referring to Kate Holland.

[113] TNA, ASSI 52/43.

[114] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 173.

[115] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 6.

  1. Trowbridge and T. Knowles, Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2015), p. 156.

[116] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 176.

[117] ASSI 52/20, Murder: Harrison, Mary (Infanticide), TNA.

[118] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 174.

[119] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 176.

[120] TNA, ASSI 52/20.

[121] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 179.

[122] ASSI 36/25/14 Sussex. Accused: F Dolman. Offence: Infanticide, TNA.

[123] Thorn, ‘Introduction’, p. 13.

  1. I. Schwartz and N. Isser, Child Homicide: Parents Who Kill (London, 2007), p. 50.

[124] TNA, ASSI 36/25/14.

[125] D. Sit, A. J. Rothschild, and K. L. Wisner, ‘A Review of Postpartum Psychosis’, Journal of Women’s Health, 15/4 (2002).

[126] S. Mitchell, Victorian Britain: An Encyclopaedia (Oxford, 1998), p. 1.

[127] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 54.

[128] Thorn, ‘Introduction’, p. 25.

[129] G. K. Behlmer, ‘Deadly Motherhood: Infanticide and Medical Opinion in Mid-Victorian England’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 34/4 (1979), p. 411.

[130] A. Still and I. Velody, ‘Introduction’, in A. Still and I. Velody, Re-Writing the History of Madness Studies in Foucaults ‘Histoire de la folie’ (London, 1992), p. 2.

[131] Stebbings, ‘Protecting he Property of the Mentally Ill’, p. 2.

[132] Loughnan, Manifest Madness, p. 154.

[133] Stebbings, ‘Protecting the Property of the Mentally Ill’, p. 2.

[134] Chakravarty, ‘Medicalisation of Mental Disorder’, p. 21.

[135] Cossins, Female Criminality, p. 57.

Book Review: B. Simms, Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation (London, 2016)

In this article, Robert reviews Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms, published immediately prior to the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union in 2016. The book challenges the existing historical tradition that places Britain as exceptional due to its insular geography and instead gives an account of the centrality of European relations to British home and foreign policy, in the form of a narrative from the medieval period to the present, concluding with a section on modern relations with the European Union. The result is a stimulating read, though is not without shortcomings, most notably in relation to the brisk treatment given to the British Empire.

 

 

Robert Frost

Author Biography

Robert Frost (@RobertF32691246) is a first-year AHRC-funded doctoral student with joint Geography and History department supervision for his research on Georgian and early Victorian travel and exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean.

B. Simms, Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation (London, 2016)

By suggesting that the history of England, and later that of the United Kingdom, has been one predominantly determined by its relationship with neighbouring Europe, as opposed to its geographical separation as an island, Brendan Simms propounds a subtle not entirely original, but stimulating paradigm shift in how British history should be viewed,  though by no means one without problems. Britain’s Europe offers a longue durée of over one-thousand years of political history, which covers both Britain’s international relations and its own constitutional development. Simms has two central arguments. First, British foreign policy has consistently been based on a grand strategy of preventing continental Europe from being dominated by a single power, especially in the Low Countries, though later moving east to an obsession with Halford Mackinder’s heartland theory. This was achieved time and again by the country building coalitions to oppose an expansionist power, whether King Phillip II’s Spain or Napoleon’s France. Second, the form of the United Kingdom’s own political geography has been primarily forged in response to its engagement with Europe. Simms traces the emergence of the English nation-state to Alfred the Great’s opposition to the Danes and interprets the Union of the Crowns and the Acts of Union as efforts to expand the resources of England and prevent encirclement by France. By contrast, the British Empire is portrayed solely as a means to increase Britain’s standing in Europe rather than as a legitimate enterprise in its own right. Simms also challenges other quasi-isolationist approaches, in particular the ‘Our island story’ narrative, as particularly grotesque distortions of a reality in which Britain has far more often than not been part of a cross-channel state in some form.[1] Though these ideas do not totally convince, they parallel other authors’ attempts at provincialisation. Simms’ lineage includes Hugh Kearney’s call for a four-nation ‘Britannic’ alternative to ‘self-contained’ histories of England, an approach widened again by Norman Davies’ efforts to set the whole of the British Isles in its European context, which is ultimately Simms’ starting-point.[2] Perhaps the ultimate provincialisation was Brotton’s consideration of Elizabethan England/ Britain in its relation with the geographically-proximate Islamic world, though like Simms, he summarises his approach as being to enrich British history rather than diminish it.[3]

Britain’s Europe consists of ten chapters, which are evenly-spaced chronologically after a brief account of the medieval period. Four-fifths of these offer a chronological narrative of Britain’s history, with interactions with Europe given the centre stage. ‘The Bonds of Christendom’ recounts English/ British-European relations up to the fifteenth century, starting in quite a traditional manner with Alfred’s response to Viking raiders leading to the formation of the English nation-state.[4] Simms reinterprets the Cinque Ports as a ‘cross-channel ferry service’ to link the Anglo-Norman/ French and later Angevin, domains.[5] Simms notes John of Gaunt (Ghent), whose speech is held highly by insular-focused historians such as Christopher Lee, had French origins, as many nobles did, while a common Christian culture provided the basis for crusader alliances.[6] ‘A piece of the continent’ outlines the origins of the (aforementioned) grand strategy that Simms forwards as taking place during national soul-searching after England’s defeat in the Hundred Years’ War.[7] The critical importance of the Low Countries, described as the ‘counter-scarp’ by William Cecil and ‘outworks’ by others, takes shape in an age of England’s navy having neither the technology nor ability to intercept a cross-channel force; the channel could only be a second line of defence.[8] Hence England made common cause with the Dutch early on.[9]

‘The bulwarks of Great Britain’ introduces the importance of Germany and its various incarnations, starting with the Holy Roman Empire, as a key counterbalancing power. Simms also argues that the overlooked union of ‘Hanover-Britain’ was a truly European state.[10] He includes the interesting vignette that before the late eighteenth century, those referring simply to ‘The Empire’ meant the Holy Roman Empire, but even when the expanding British Empire was in mind it was regarded as valuable only in terms of the increased strength it could bring on Europe, especially in territorial swaps such as after the Seven Years’ War.[11] ‘The Age of revolution’ on the French and American revolutionary wars serves as a warning as to what could happen when Britain sidelined continental engagement in favour of an imperial ‘blue water’ approach: the ‘first’ British Empire was partitioned.[12]

‘The age of Napoleon’ recounts what may be the best-known pre-twentieth century example of an isolated Britain bringing together a grand coalition and leading it to eventual victory.[13] Simms introduces the ‘fiscal-military’ state as a key advantage that Britain had over rival states, especially France. By way of an ‘implicit contract’ that had grown up between political elites and private finance over the preceding century, the country was able to tap into private wealth generated during the Industrial Revolution by way of credit. In turn, parliamentary democracy gave the British state greater legitimacy than others.[14] Simms also finds the threat from revolutionary France to be decisive in leading to the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800.[15] ‘Britain and Europe in the age of nationalism’ surveys the long nineteenth century, during which Britain was forced to contend with an acquiescent German confederation morphing into a rival German Empire under Bismarck, a transformation which made the self-centred British guarantee of Belgian independent-neutrality from France dangerously anachronistic in 1914.[16]

‘Britain and Europe in the age of total war’ covers Britain’s handling of the ‘German Question’; mobilising a global coalition to prevent domination of Europe by Germany in two world wars.[17] As in 1792-1815, Simms holds Britain’s parliamentary and ‘fiscal-military’ state as key, a conclusion also recently reached by Adam Tooze.[18] Irish independence is ignored however. The final chronological chapter is devoted to events since 1945 in which Britain faced a ‘negotiated merger’ with the European Economic Community and European Union rather than a ‘hostile takeover’, which, unlike earlier Acts of Union, diluted power in Westminster.[19] Simms is critical of the chances Britain might have had in the nascent European Coal and Steel Community, maintaining that such a move would have been catastrophic for domestic industry and still-strong Commonwealth links.[20]

The final two chapters break the chronological structure to bring in an analysis of present and future trends. The first, referring to Britain as ‘the last European great power’ provides a welcome critique of the post-war ‘declinist’ discourse which has dominated so much of recent historiography, often closer to ideology than reality.[21] The final chapter differs from previous ones by offering what  comes across as an attempt to opt out of expressing a concrete position on the referendum campaign then in its final stages, by offering a quixotic call for a radically-reformed English-speaking federal EU. Simms emphasises the need for this to be created in a sudden ‘event’ in the manner of Bismarck, as opposed to the ever-closer-union ‘process’.[22] In fact, it is an argument that Simms has forwarded on several occasions, both before and after the publication of Britain’s Europe, most recently presenting Emmanuel Macron as the new Bismarck.[23] It is also a watered-down summary of the manifesto of the Project for Democratic Union think tank, though Simms omits any mention of the group and his control of its presidency.[24] Despite this, the call seems cavalier and in conflict with the rest of Britain’s Europe. Recognising that Britain would not likely join a fully-federal “superstate”, even an English-speaking one, he brushes aside concerns of his millennial-length British grand strategy thesis by insisting that relations would be friendly due to mutual self-interest.[25] This has not however stopped grandstanding during current Brexit negotiations. The idea that a majority of Europeans would vote to relinquish any remaining national sovereignty appears unlikely, especially given the massive opposition to issues such as the proposal to overcome the shortcomings of the Dublin regulations by way of EU-directed settlement of migrants to Hungary and other central/ Eastern European countries. The reader is left puzzled as to why Simms seemingly disowns his own arguments of thousand-year precedent for the future. A comparison with the strong federal nature of Germany also makes the reader wonder whether the apparently hyperdynamic British model is the best option.

The principal consistent weak point in Simms’ argument however, is surely the secondary role he gives to the British Empire. Though Simms mentions kinship links between members of the Medieval English elite and Europe, his primarily political perspective leaves little room for considering that most kinship links in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were imperial due to emigration.[26] There are also more strictly political shortcomings. The argument that expansion of the British Empire was due to a desire to strengthen Britain’s place in Europe overlooks eagerness for colonial plunder. The Scramble for Africa culminating at Fashoda, the acquisition of Cyprus, and the exchange of Helgoland for faraway Zanzibar brought along tense Anglo-French relations, Turkish alignment with the Central Powers and a strengthened Germany.[27] Likewise, Britain’s first twentieth-century alliance was with Japan, in part to bolster its interests in China against Germany and Russia. By writing British possessions in the Mediterranean off as imperial, Simms marginalises them in favour of Northern Europe, especially the ‘German Question’, thus missing the extent to which that sea became a ‘British lake’ up to the mid-twentieth century, causing Italian hesitation in entering both world wars.[28] The idea that British decolonisation was swift, clean and driven by a desire to keep up appearances in Europe also ignores the renewed enthusiasm for empire after 1945, the drawn-out nature of decolonisation in Kenya and the impact of US pressure.[29]

Though the abovementioned omissions are serious and provide a somewhat ironic warning over the dangers of excessive Eurocentrism, they should at the same time not mask the common ground between Simms and historians of empire such as Niall Ferguson and John Darwin. Both give Europe a central role, the former in the twentieth century in particular, while the latter goes as far as describing the American War of Independence as ‘almost a side-show’ next to the Anglophobic League of Armed Neutrality.[30] Also like Darwin, Simms’ methodology combines extensive secondary literature with plentiful primary sources (in his case mainly quotations from diplomats and politicians), and reaches a good compromise between breadth and depth, crucial to such a grand survey. One of the key strengths of the book is its treatment of the English Channel being as much a highway as a barrier. That Britain’s frontiers lie in the Low Countries is a fascinating concept. Though some of the quotations appear metaphorical, the events that Simms recounts from the Hundred Years’ war and Anglo-Dutch wars through to Napoleon and the twentieth century provide a strong argument against the idea that Britain was regarded as detached from Europe by contemporaries. [31] In many cases of critique, the reader is left wanting more, rather than change. Though Simms includes an incredible twenty pages of maps at the beginning showing Britain’s long-standing territorial links with Europe, he leaves many details out. Why certain features, such as the ‘British postal intercept station’ at Celle, were important is not fully explored.[32] More crucially though, an expanded section on what the union of the crowns with Hanover looked like on the ground would have helped overcome the book’s social-cultural shortcomings: the reader is left assuming that since Westminster did not include Hanoverian MPs as Dunkirk once did, the trans-channel state was analogous to Anglo-Scottish relations prior to the Act of Union (1707). Similarly, the ability of the reader to think of several examples that could have been included in Britain’s Europe, such as the Hanseatic League and Anglo-Portuguese alliance surely strengthens the thesis.

To conclude, Simms’ thesis is convincing, with the exception of his marginalisation of the British Empire. Even here however, the reviewer would place this factor as of equal importance to Europe as opposed to greater importance. Although Simms’ manifesto seems impractical, it is at least as interesting as it is unorthodox. Overall, Britain’s Europe provides a welcome revision of Britain’s place in relation to the continent, highlighting an obsession with cooperation to win conflict on the continent at a time when many apparently believe that Britain can leave Europe altogether.

Notes

[1] B. Simms, Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation (London, 2016), p. xiii; Simms is particularly critical of Arthur Bryant for giving this narrative credibility, in his work such as Set in a Silver Sea.

[2] H. Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge, 1989), p. 1; N. Davies, The Isles: A History (London, 1999).

[3] J. Brotton, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London, 2017), p. 305.

[4] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 1-3.

[5] Simms, Britain’s Europe, p. 4.

[6] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 7-9.

[7] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 20-22.

[8] Simms, Britain’s Europe, p. 30.

[9] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 31-32.

[10] Simms, Britain’s Europe, p. 55.

[11] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 52-69.

[12] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 71-92.

[13] Simms, Britain’s Europe, p. 114.

[14] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 98-110.

[15] Simms, Britain’s Europe, p. 112.

[16] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 116-142.

[17] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 143-144.

[18] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 145-164; A. Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (London, 2014), pp. 173-217.

[19] Simms, Britain’s Europe, p. 170.

[20] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 177-178.

[21] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 206-218; J. Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post-war Britain (Harlow, 2000).

[22] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 219-227.

[23] B. Simms, ‘Towards a mighty union: how to create a democratic European superpower’, International Affairs, 88/ 1 (2012), pp. 49-62; B. Simms, ‘The ghosts of Europe’s past’, New York Times, 10 June 2013, p. 23; B. Simms, ‘The storm on fortress Europe: the continent’s old crises have not been resolved’, New Statesman, 24-30 November 2017, p. 29.

[24] Project for Democratic Union < http://www.democraticunion.eu/>, accessed 19.4.2018.

[25] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. 235-236.

[26] W. S. Churchill, History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Birth of Britain, Volume 1 (London, 1956), pp. vii-viii.

[27] T. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London, 1991).

[28] C. Duggan, A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge, 1994); R. Holland, Blue-water Empire: The British in the Mediterranean Since 1800 (London, 2012).

[29] J. Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London, 2012).

[30] N. Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2004); Darwin, Unfinished Empire, p. 317.

[31] For instance, Stanley Baldwin’s assertion that Britain’s frontiers lay on the Rhine or Elbe, in Simms, Britain’s Europe, p. 157, cannot be taken anywhere near literally, or as something that must be defended, rather they imply that Britain had an interest in Germany. Harold Macmillan took a similar approach to show solidarity with India against communist China by declaring that ‘Britain’s frontiers are on the Himalayas’ in 1965, Darwin, Unfinished Empire, p. 378. However Simms does point out that due to NATO commitments, ‘the United Kingdom’s eastern defence perimeter now effectively ran and runs along the eastern flank of the European Union’, Simms, Britain’s Europe, p. 197.

[32] Simms, Britain’s Europe, pp. xxvii.

Bibliography

Brotton, J., This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London, 2017).

Churchill, W. S., History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Birth of Britain (London, 1956).

Darwin, J., Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London, 2012).

Davies, N., The Isles: A History (London, 1999).

Duggan, C., A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge, 1994).

Ferguson, N., Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2004).

Holland, R., Blue-water Empire: The British in the Mediterranean Since 1800 (London, 2012).

Kearney, H., The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge, 1989).

Lee, C., This Sceptred Isle (London, 1998).

Simms, B., ‘Towards a mighty union: how to create a democratic European superpower’, International Affairs, 88/ 1 (2012), pp. 49-62.

Simms, B., ‘The ghosts of Europe’s past’, New York Times, 10 June 2013, p. 23.

Simms, B., Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation (London, 2016).

Simms, B., ‘The storm on fortress Europe: the continent’s old crises have not been resolved’, New Statesman, 24-30 November 2017, pp. 24-29.

Tomlinson, J., The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post-war Britain (Harlow, 2000).

Tooze, A., The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (London, 2014).

Pakenham, T., The Scramble for Africa (London, 1991).

Project for Democratic Union < http://www.democraticunion.eu/>, accessed 19.4.2018.

‘Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism’?: An Examination of the Relationship between Evangelical Revivalism, Madness and the Age of Reform

Capitol, Capital, and the Ancient City: The Influence of Roman Urban and Architectural Models of the Design of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.

Capitol, Capital, and the Ancient City In his 1992 landmark text Architecture, Power, and National Identity Lawrence Vale demonstrated the extent to which government buildings ‘serve as symbols of the state’ and how one can ‘learn much about a political regime by observing closely what it builds’.[1] The Residence Act of 1790 gave the American […]

Why Were Colonial Powers Interested in Sexuality?

Why were colonial powers interested in sexuality? In his 1847 account of the Aboriginal Australians, designed to familiarise new white settlers with the indigenous population, George Angus made sure to note why the settlement of aboriginal lands was entirely justified. ‘The population of the native tribes inhabiting South Australia is not considerable’ remarked Angus, because […]

Italian Orientals

In this article David Robinson considers the discursive construction of Italian identity by British travellers in the early nineteenth century, through the lens of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism. David challenges Said’s construction of a purely East-West binary, showing how intra-European binaries were similarly constructed, through the combination of apparently objective ‘academic’ knowledge of Italy, and a more ‘imaginative’ construction of the peninsular through popular literature, including travel writing.

 

David Robinson

Author Biography 

David Robinson is a second-year, AHRC-M3C-funded PhD student supervised by the Department of History at the University of Nottingham. His thesis is entitled ‘Orientalism or Meridionism? Comparing Imperial and European Travel Writing in the Creation of British and European Identity’ and explores the British construction of Italy and India as cultural and geographical spaces contributing to British identity formation.

Italian Orientals

As John Urry notes, traveller’s observations are not innocent: ‘people gaze upon the world through a particular filter of ideas, skills, desires, and expectations, framed by social class, gender, nationality, age and education.’[1] Travel writing describes encounters with alterity which both reflect and reinforce the writer’s identity, while simultaneously constructing the identity of the ‘other’. As Carl Thompson explains, travel is an encounter with alterity, and travel writing is the record of the negotiation between self and other, and thus reflects the differences which constitute identity.[2]

The construction of Italian identity also mapped onto Britain’s internal ‘others’, for example, a licentious aristocracy, the bestial lower classes, and unsupervised women, in a period when the middle classes were vying for greater socio-political authority. As part of that contestation, they increasingly configured Britain’s national superiority as emerging from values with which they self-identified. For example, domestically centred, Protestant morality and purposeful industry. Italians were often portrayed in opposition to such values, as were the British aristocracy and lower classes. An Italy, discursively configured as inferior, was thus a mirror for British national, and middle class, superiority.

Orientalism-Constructing Knowledge of the Eastern ‘Other’

Edward Said described how the meaning of India, and ‘the East’ generally, was configured through discursive Western fantasies that portrayed ‘the East’ as exotic, uncivilised, pre-modern and dangerous. By implication, ‘the West’ becomes the rational, modern, and civilised corollary of the East. Orientalism, is far more than simple stereotyping, as Said put it, not ‘an airy European fantasy about the Orient but a created body of theory and practice.’[3] Said contended that Orientalism works in an ‘academic’ sense, with ‘objective’ knowledge of the East generated through scholarship in Oriental history and culture.

Bernard Cohn claimed that, in invading India, the British ‘invaded and conquered not only a territory but an epistemological space as well.’ The British created ‘forms of knowledge’ which ‘bound the vast social world that was India so it could be controlled.’[4] The British assumed the authority to investigate, observe, research, collate, categorise, write about and define what it was to be Indian, claiming ‘a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture’.[5] Eighteenth-century scholars of the Orient were sympathetic to, and genuinely interested in, ancient Indian culture, history, and religion. Later, in the early nineteenth century, the influence of Utilitarians, particularly James Mill and his 1817 hegemonic History of British India, led to a scathing view of Indian culture as degraded and backward, and of Indians as requiring wholesale re-education along British lines. As Ronald Inden points out, however, sympathy or otherwise is not the point:

a genuine critique of Orientalism does not revolve around the question of prejudice or bias, of the like or dislike of the peoples and cultures of Asia […] scholars whose attitudes seem at polar opposites do not disagree here in any major way about the facts of Indian history, facts which constitute India as a veritable glass-house of vulnerability, forever destined for conquest by outsiders.[6]

Where Mill and the Utilitarians were contemptuous, sympathetic Orientalist scholars tended to represent the East as a ‘civilisation of dreams’, yet both are constructed fantasies.[7]

A key difference then, one which differentiates between Orientalism and simple ‘othering’, is that the body of knowledge Orientalism creates has the appearance of objectivity and authenticity. Knowledge produced by scholars has the apparent ability to objectively construct the reality of the East, and, therefore, supposedly represent the East more accurately than can the inhabitants themselves. Orientalism is a discourse imposed from the outside, one which erases difference between individuals and denies those described the opportunity to respond or refute the construction. Orientalism translates into real power, given that the body of knowledge produced for eighteenth and nineteenth-century colonisers justified and ‘enabled the Orientalist and his countrymen to gain trade concessions, conquer, colonise, rule, and punish in the East.’[8]

Said draws on Foucault and the relationship between knowledge and power in developing these ideas:

without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.[9]

Flaubert’s description of an Egyptian courtesan for example, was influential onWestern ‘understanding’ of Oriental women.[10] Flaubert spoke for the woman, offering no opportunity for her to speak for herself and no recourse to dispute what Flaubert said about her and, by extension, about all Eastern women. Following Foucault, Said shows how such knowledge about the East is produced within an asymmetric power relationship, where the observed and described have no ability to refute, respond or write back. For Said, the asymmetric power balance between the described and the describer in Flaubert’s account, reinforced through actual and metaphorical sexual conquest, ‘fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled.’[11]

In parallel with ‘academic’ knowledge about the East, Said describes an ‘imaginative’ form of Orientalism, whereby writers in various genres have a preconceived notion of an Eastern mind-set, an Eastern ‘way of being’:

Poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and Imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on.[12]

An on-going exchange between ‘the academic and the more or less imaginative meaning of Orientalism’ extends hegemonic knowledge of the East throughout Western culture. Here Said draws on Gramsci’s distinction between the coercive and consenting institutions of political and civil society respectively, whereby ‘culture […] is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent’.[13] Even apparently innocent portrayals of the East suggest a strange and exotic, even dangerous place. Take for example, the dispute over the 1993 Disney release, Aladdin, and the lyrics to the opening song:

Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where it’s flat and immense
And the heat is intense
It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home

Despite Arab-American protests, the word ‘barbaric’ was retained, as was a scene depicting the threatened amputation of Princess Jasmine’s hand for stealing an apple for a hungry child.[14] Orientalising depictions of the East are not, Said claimed, simply historical artefacts but ongoing constructs. Nor are they necessarily overtly political or deliberately racially offensive, as this children’s film demonstrates.

The interchange between the academic and ‘imaginative’ forms of Orientalism combine in ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.’[15] This is Orientalism as a ‘corporate institution’ which takes advantage of a helpless and inferior East, and justifies, even valorises, authorises and facilitates the colonial activities of European nations. Of course, Orientalism configures not only the East, but also ‘helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’.[16] Where the East is irrational, pre-modern and inferior, the West is the opposite.

Said applied Orientalism exclusively to a discursive construction of an East-West binary, and perhaps the broadest criticism of his work is that he constructs the West as inherently and ubiquitously racist and imperialist. Said’s work has subsequently attracted both adoration and vitriol in equal measures. Other scholars have applied Orientalism to, for example, the Western construction of ancient Greece as the ‘cradle of civilisation’, as a European ‘myth of origins’. Anna Carastathis argues ‘that the function of Hellenism in constituting both the fantasy of Europe and Western hegemony has an Orientalist structure.’[17] Carastathis argues that Western Europe has denied Greece a real identity and its own heritage, ‘in fantasies of white supremacy’ which simultaneously places ancient Greece as the origin of Western civilisation and modern Greece as Western Europe’s ‘other’.[18]

British travellers to Italy similarly separated modern Italy from its own classical past. The British appropriated this past to associate themselves as the heirs to classical civilisation. As the periodical writer Francis Jeffrey said in the early nineteenth century, ‘an Englishman bears a much greater resemblance to a Roman, than an Italian of the present day.’[19] Saree Makdisi has argued that around the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no essential or stable Western, nor British, or even English identity. Instead, he argues, these things were in the making, and before the British could assert any Occidental identity, they had first to rid themselves of their own internal ‘orientals’. Makdisi shows how racialised language was aimed at groups of white indigenous British people such as the ‘London Arabs’, how the lower orders were depicted as ‘bestial’, and the aristocracy categorised as vain, effeminate and sexually immoral. Orientalist language was used by groups as diverse as the nascent middle classes, religious Evangelicals and political radicals.[20] Similarly, Indira Ghose points out that Utilitarian and Orientalist constructions of India are both discourses of colonial domination, and that disagreement between the two factions can be mapped onto domestic disputes between the traditional aristocracy and the reform-minded middle classes.[21]

In what follows, I shall demonstrate how nineteenth-century British travellers similarly used an Orientalist configuration of supposedly objective ‘academic’ history, and ‘imaginative’ Gothic and Romantic literature and travel writing, to identify Italy and Italians as inherently irrational, superstitious, pre-modern, perpetually liable to foreign oppression, and thus inferior to a modern, rational, and constitutional Britain. Italians were, therefore, configured with many of the characteristics also imposed on Indians. Finally, I will discuss the specific example of the portrayal of Italian women and domesticity by British travellers. Such portrayals explained in an ‘objective’ way, why Britain was inherently  a more civilised and advanced nation, but also mapped on to socio-political debate back home; in this case, a strategy to align a superior British identity with the growing socio-political authority of the British middle classes.

Constructing Knowledge of Italy 

Joseph Luzzi opens his account of Italian Romanticism with a description of a modern Alitalia advert, telling the tourist to ‘fire their therapist…do something monumental…give in to temptation’. In doing so, the Italian national airline ‘draws on a myth, formed by writers in the early nineteenth century, of Italy as a premodern, sensual, and unreflective (hence, analyst-free) oasis.’[22] Such descriptions represent a ‘habit of thinking about Italy as an eminently premodern corpus of cultural traditions, a habit that emerged in the Romantic literary movements of Europe in the early nineteenth century.’[23]

The idea of Italy as a Romantic literary construct in the minds of British (and German, Swiss, French etc.) travellers is well established.[24] As David Laven observes, ‘by the late 1810s British engagement with Italy had come to be shaped heavily by a handful of Romantic poets and writers.’[25] The writers to whom Laven refers however, (Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Keats, Germaine de Staёl, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning for example) were themselves informed by what Walchester calls, ‘a complex chain of reference’ which included: ‘eighteenth-century accounts, which draw on Italian Renaissance poetry, which in turn refers to Classical descriptions of Italy.’[26] For example, the work of popular Gothic novelists such as Anne Radcliffe, itself informed by descriptions of Italy by historians and eighteenth-century travel writers, was instrumental for later Romantic authors and their tales of Italian rape, incest, and murder.[27] In turn, these views of Italy became hegemonic in the minds of travellers to Italy and were reflected in their travel writing.

Romantic literature was also ‘intimately linked’ to, and informed by, Italian history and politics.[28] Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) and William Roscoe’s Lives of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795) stimulated public interest in classical and medieval Renaissance Italy, as did the Genevan historian Sismondi’s Histoire des Republiques Italiennes au Moyen Age (1809-18). Slightly later British historians such as Henry Hallam and George Percival recycled much of this earlier work in their own accounts of Italy, View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages (1818) and the two-volume History of Italy (1825) respectively.[29] Italy was ubiquitously portrayed as having slumped into ‘decadence and defeat’ since its days of glory.[30] Such views were also informed by earlier historical views of Italy. Inspired by national pride, jealousy of superior Italian commerce and diplomacy, and as a reaction to Catholic Inquisitional persecution of Protestants, sixteenth and seventeenth-century British travellers often described Italians as lascivious, corrupt, vicious, treacherous and deceitful. [31] In 1570, Roger Ascham, a poet, writer, Tudor Royal tutor, and secretary to the Privy Council declared that in nine days in Italy, he witnessed more sin than in nine years in London.[32] Contemporary continental politics also played its part in Italy’s portrayal, for example in Napoleonic apologist Count Daru’s condemnatory eight-volume account of Venice, Histoire de la République de Venise (Paris, Didot, 1819). For Daru, Venice’s moral collapse justified Napoleonic conquest. Whether accurate or not, such accounts were influential on the creation of semi-historical Romantic productions.[33] Between 1815 and 1840, episodes of Italian history inspired semi-fictional creations by Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Bulwer Lytton, Robert Browning, Mary Mitford, Walter Landor, and Felicia Hemans. In reverse, a literary construction of Italy influenced academic writing on Italy, as in the case of George Percival, whose historical account ‘reads rather like a series of romantic tales than a connected historical study.’[34]

Unsurprisingly, the themes which garnered most attention and came to form the British view of Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century, were

the violence and unrestraint of passion in Italy, with all the gruesome horrors and miseries resulting from it…the exciting, almost incredible adventures of men of extraordinary courage and personality…the struggle for freedom of peoples subjected to tyrannous rulers.[35]

A slew of plays and novels were predicated on themes of Italian revenge and delight in torture, murder, and rape. Emerging from such work, was a view of Italians as passionate and potentially talented but irrational, violent, jealous, and unable to control their emotions and energy or direct them to positive moral, political, or civic ends. The popular novelist Anne Manning wrote in her own account of Italy that, historically, ‘the energy and violence which marked their national character was often directed to evil purposes by such dark and vindictive passions.’[36] Following a popular belief, one also held regarding Africa and the East, Manning attributed some of the Italian temperament to the hotter Italian climate, producing ‘emotions of hatred and jealously which in our cooler climate occasionally ruffle our bosom, and are mastered by steady principle and placid temperament.’[37] In a later account of Italy, and in a slightly different vein, the Countess Blessington also discussed the climate in Rome, and praised young Englishmen for (apparently) resisting the ‘temptations of this luxurious capital…the delicious habits of the dolce far’ niente [carefree idleness]…[to] which the climate disposes people’.[38] Blessington published several accounts of life in London and travel in Europe, where she befriended Byron, and was well disposed towards Italians, praising the men for their particular skills in music, their gallantry, and their talent for seductive amour. By contrast, she made the (dubious) observation that young Englishmen were studious and rational, and used their Italian experience to gain knowledge and skills to aid a ‘future career of utility.’[39] Italian women were delightful, although with a ‘naivete resembling that of children.’[40] Different travel accounts thus ‘objectively’ observed that the Italian climate produced passion in its people, which could turn alternatively towards sensual luxury, childish indulgence, or jealous and violent anger, whereas northern climates produced a rational, sober, and purposefully industrious character.

As Inden observed regarding India, the point here is not the extent to which travellers criticise, praise, or sympathise with Italians, but how Italy is configured as naturally and inherently a certain way, through the ‘objective’ observation of evidence. Italian ‘nature’ explained both their past triumphs and present fallen state, and why Britain had surpassed Italy morally, politically, civically, and economically. Although critical of the outcomes of Italian ‘nature’, Manning expressed pity for Italian victims of inherent disadvantages, those of ‘prevailing example, the influence of climate, and the imperfect moral restraint of […] [Catholic] religion.’[41] Describing the events between 1797 and the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, Manning depicts Italy as an impotent trophy to be tossed between the French and the Austrians. Manning’s Italians, like Blessington’s, are somewhat naïve and infantile, unaware of their own self-interest, at once looking to Napoleon as a patriarchal ‘guardian angel’, and complacently content to be rid of him when once again under the Austrian yoke.[42] Manning conceded that some Italians had been awoken to their lack of freedom but implies that Italian religion, prejudice and general nature meant that achieving freedom was likely to be an uphill struggle.[43] History and the observations of travellers thus empirically demonstrated the natural inferiority and irrationality of Italians, and such views were supported and promulgated through popular fiction and travel literature.

Manning mentions the negative influence of the Catholic religion on Italy, and this was a regular feature of travel discourse. Most travellers were at least interested, often fascinated, by Catholic rituals. After English Catholic emancipation in 1829, there was a British revival of Catholicism and many more positive and balanced accounts of the Italian church.[44] For many however, and particularly in earlier accounts, Catholicism was suffused with superstition and ritual, intimately linked to Italian social and political weakness. The painter, poet, writer, journalist and friend to influential Romantics such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, William Hazlitt’s 1826 travel account is typically scathing, particularly regarding the religion’s use of confession ‘to get rid at once of all moral obligation, of all self-control and self-respect, by the proxy of maudlin superstition.’ Hazlitt concludes that Catholicism, ‘suits the pride and weakness of man’s intellect, the indolence of his will, the cowardliness of his fears, the vanity of his hopes.’[45] The nature of Catholicism was woven into knowledge formation about Italy, a fundamental part of the reason why Italians lacked purpose, industry, and political freedom. Maria Graham’s 1820 account of the campagna east of Rome sets out to describe the present-day ‘peasants of the hills’ and

their actual manners as may enable others to form a judgement of their moral and political condition and to account for some of those irregularities which we do not easily imagine to be consistent with the civilised state of Europe, but which for centuries have existed in the patrimony of the church.[46]

Graham, the author of two popular and widely-reviewed travel accounts of India and the wife of a military officer, associated Catholicism with superstition, noting ‘how closely the Roman church has followed the Pagan ceremonies in her festivals.’[47] Graham implies that Catholicism was at odds with free-thinking rationalism, and with fair, just and effective government. Graham suggests that Catholicism’s preference for show over substance and its encouragement of idolatry, inculcated submission in Italian people, hindered their ability to think for themselves or engage with political life, and failed to develop in them, a strong and proper work ethic. Graham described the Italian

state of moral lethargy [which] produces great indifference as to public interest, and renders them acquiescent under any government, so long as they remain in peace, and can sit every man under his own vine and his own fig tree.[48]

This was opposite to the middle-class sentiments of hard-working ambition and political inclusion promoted back home.

The glory of Italy’s past only served to heighten the sense of modern-day decline and to emphasise Italy’s inability to recapture its former heights. Sismondi’s contrast between Italy’s potential which ‘remained in the fragments of the broken colossus’ and the failure of modern Italians to realise the possibilities, added to their moribund image in the eyes of the British.[49] This is the sense that is captured by French novelist Madame de Staёl’s enormously influential 1807 Corinne, ou l’Italie, a novel based on de Stael’s own Italian journey and widely read in Britain. De Staёl describes an Italy of great potential but populated by effeminate men lacking purpose or political drive. As de Staёl’s British protagonist Oswald considers, ‘the Italians are more remarkable for what they have been, and might be, than for what they are.’[50] The influence of Corinne was such that ‘perhaps more than any other work of its time, it provided a paradigmatic interpretation of Italian society, politics, and character’, although as Robert Casillo is quick to point out, ‘Staël often follows in the path of seventeenth and eighteenth-century travel writers whose attitudes and judgments she shares’.[51] For many travellers, Corinne exemplified British superiority over Italy. As Francis Jeffrey suggested in the Edinburgh Review, ‘it is Great Britain and Italy, the extremes of civilised Europe, that are personified and contrasted in the hero and heroine of this romantic tale’.[52] It is also notable that Jeffrey configures Britain as male against a female Italy. As Jeffrey also points out, ‘what a difference between the ancient Romans and the modern Italians.’[53]

For many then, modern Italy was ‘a land of barbarians’, in contrast to its glorious Greco-Roman and Renaissance past.[54] This in no way detracted from Italy’s popularity as a travel destination. Indeed, the poet and travel writer Mary Shelley compared the transit of English travellers to Italy with that of rats crossing a stream over the bodies of their drowned companions: ‘we fly to Italy; we eat the lotus; we cannot tear ourselves away’.[55] Shelley draws a distinction between residents of Italy like herself, better informed and sensitive to the ‘real’ Italy, and the hordes of ‘rats’ scurrying across the Channel, ‘guidebook in hand’.[56]  Many residents however, simply ignored Italians or reduced them to stereotypes.[57] The poet Walter Savage Landor, resident in Florence from 1821, claimed he took ‘no interest whatsoever in the affairs of Italians: I visit none of them: I admit none of them within my doors.’[58] Percy Shelley, sympathetic to Italian independence, wrote of Venice in a letter of 1818, that it was ’a wonderfully fine city’, yet of the ‘avarice, cowardice, superstition, passionless lust’ of the people.[59] Separating the city from its modern context, Shelley reveals the historical and literary influences on his opinion, describing palaces with dungeons ‘where these scoundrels used to torment their victims…where the sufferers were roasted to death…where the prisoners were confined sometimes halfway up to their middle in stinking water.’[60] The juxtaposition of the beauty and luxury of the palace with the horror and degradation of the dungeon became a common theme recycled from historical and literary accounts. The historian George Perceval famously wrote of Venice that, ‘her prisons and her palaces were contiguous’, describing the ambivalence of ‘the double nature of Venice, their extremes of misery and joy’. Such views were reinforced by the popular symbolism of the Bridge of Sighs, from which prisoners had their last glimpse of Venice whilst crossing from the Doge’s palace to the prison. Perceval also notes the debt owed to Byron as ‘one of the key-stones of the arch’ in the configuration of a romanticised Italy, yet thought that Byron paid too little attention to ‘all her silent crimes’.[61] Bryon had, however, already written two historical tragedies in The Two Foscari and Marino Faliero, tales which included Italian intrigue, murder, revenge, torture, libel, and political corruption. A year after his letter above, Shelley published The Cenci, an ‘historicised and Gothic vision of Italy’,  in a story of incest and parricide based on an apparently true story from Ludivico Antonio Muratori’s 1749 Annali d’Italia.[62] Shelley was aware of the commercial potential of the work, telling his publisher that it was ‘written for the multitude’.[63] His private correspondence above, however, shows the degree to which historical accounts of Venice, such as Count Daru’s, intermingled with popular Gothic fantasy in Shelley’s own imagining of Italy.

In the same letter, Shelley reveals another popular trope in constructions of Italy: their inability to contest foreign oppression or their own despotic rulers. Shelley writes of Venice, ‘which was once a tyrant, is now the next worst thing, a slave; for in fact it ceased to be free or worth our regret as a nation from the moment that the oligarchy usurped the rights of the people.’[64] Italy was a slave to its own nature as much as to foreign oppression. The degraded aspects of Italian character, which had taken them from classical and Renaissance triumph to domestic despotic oppression, now left them unable to regain their independence in the face of foreign domination. Disparagement of Italian character was by no means restricted to Venice, even when Italians did attempt to throw off the Austrian yoke. The 1821 Neapolitan failed uprising served only to ‘place in a clearer point of view the cowardice, versatility, profligacy and total want of character of the Neapolitan nation…it would be a waste of words to say more of them.’[65] Lord Normanby, a long-term Italian resident, commenting on the failure of the Piedmont uprising of the same year wrote, ‘it grieves me to be compelled to treat in a mingled vein of ridicule, these attempts to obtain rational liberty.’ Normanby concludes that the Italians deserved a ‘point of view more ludicrous than either hateful or demanding sympathy.’[66] The general tenor of such comments perhaps reflected British guilt and self-justification, for ignoring Italian independence in favour of a strategic need for European stability in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat. The British acquiesced to Austrian rule in Italy, partly over fears for the security of their Indian territories.[67] Subsequent failures of Italian uprisings only showed they had been right in their judgement; there had been ‘no confidence that the Italians could be trusted with their own destiny’ and ‘the Italians seemed unable either to re-enact their past or to seize the promise of their future.’[68] Italy was not colonised by the British, but it was largely subjugated to foreign domination, and its status as such played a part in maintaining Britain’s stability as a colonising power elsewhere. Orientalist constructions of Italy as naturally submissive to oppression thus suited a broader British agenda and justified Italy’s continued subjugation.

Italian resident Mary Shelley, anonymously reviewing Lord Normanby’s account of Italy, takes a slightly more sympathetic view but one which still configures Italy as intrinsically unsuited to resistance. Shelley suggests that Italy lacked, not the desire for freedom, but the organisational drive to effect it. The rich and poor of the cities cared more for their wealth and security respectively than to risk them in rebellion; the senior academic community were too naturally timid to resist; their younger students lacked any sense of higher moral purpose; the peasantry of the countryside had no thought of political liberty at all.[69] Yet still, Shelley believed emancipation would eventually come because Italy was such a repository of natural talent, although not of the kind best suited to the type of purposeful activity required to achieve freedom. Their talents were of a different stripe, ‘untaught courtesy, their love of the fine arts, the poetry with which their sunny sky endows them’.  Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Shelley suggests this ‘native genius’ was the ‘foundation stone…of Italian liberty…though no superstructure is thereto added’.[70] Natural Italian artistic genius was both their blessing and their hindrance to freedom in an Italy configured as a pre-modern Romantic fantasy.

Prior to Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, Italy was largely unavailable to most British travellers and therefore for most of the first post-Napoleonic travellers, unknown through personal experience. Presumably this served to heighten the view of Italy discursively created through many of the historical and literary texts discussed above, the view of Italy most commonly available. Regardless, as Laven concludes, British views of Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century were, ‘the product of a dialogue, which was not only transnational, but shaped by the relationships between different creative arts and academic disciplines.[71] (My emphasis). As this last point makes clear, the discursive configuration of Italy and Italians in the eyes of the British has obvious parallels with Orientalism, as a body of apparently objective knowledge formed through the interchange of academic and imaginative ideas. As Cavaliero observes, the ‘attitudes that the younger generation of British Romantic poets took towards Italy…were reflected in the notions of other writers and through them of politicians.’[72] The concept of Italy with which travellers arrived in the country was one informed by historians, Gothic and Romantic writers, and previous travellers. This is the construction of Italy evident in many of the travel accounts of the early nineteenth century.

In the following section, I will discuss how British travellers utilised ‘Orientalised’ Italy to describe Italian domestic formations, comparing them negatively to their British counterparts. In doing so, British travellers implied the superiority of Britain as a nation. Such observations, however, also intersected with ideas emerging back home: that the success of the nation was intrinsically linked to domestic formations with specifically middle-class characteristics, during a period when that class agitated for a greater share of socio-political authority. As we will see, however, some travellers used such observations to contest the constraining and oppressive nature of middle-class British domesticity.

The Discourse of Domesticity

The importance attributed by British travellers to appropriate domestic arrangements reflects not just national superiority, but a particular view of domesticity advanced by the middle-classes; the importance of separating the roles of men and women into public and private spheres. Davidoff and Hall have detailed the importance of the ‘separate spheres’ arrangement as key to the growing authority of the middle-classes between 1780 and 1840. The role of women as the moral centre of the middle-class household, the educator and nurturer of children, was portrayed as essential to the general flourishing of the nation. Sons were brought up to learn and respect their public, civic and political responsibilities, and daughters to understand their importance in providing a similarly nurturing home. Kay Boardman notes that, ‘for middle-class Victorians, the home and the management of it was central to their perceptions of themselves as a social group’ in a ‘complex network of class allegiance.’[73] As Davidoff and Hall point out, through the example of their domestic arrangements, the middle-classes, ‘placed themselves in opposition to an indolent and dissolute aristocracy, and a potentially subversive working class’.[74] By doing so, they staked a claim for greater socio-political authority. As discussed above, this is consistent with Makdisi’s observations regarding the identification and marginalisation of Britain’s internal ‘others’ as part of the process of configuring ‘Occidental’ British identity. As Rattansi puts it,

the processes which led to the formation of Western modernity also involved an inferiorisation and government, or regulation and disciplining of internal Others such as women, children and the rapidly growing urban working class. Thus, ‘internal’ questions of the forms of incorporation of these subalterns into the national culture and polity became conflated with and superimposed onto issues involving the forms in which the ‘natives’ of the colonies were to be discursively comprehended and ruled.[75]

Both Rattansi and Makdisi refer to a connection between the Eastern and domestic ‘other’, however, as I will discuss, the same strategy can be seen, when employing the Italian ‘other’.

Returning to the travel writer and novelist Anne Manning, Italian weakness was as much moral, domestic, and civic as it was military. Although critical of French excess, Manning concedes the advantage conferred by the many French improvements made to Italian institutions, lamenting that the Austrians had not maintained such developments, and that Italians had barely missed them once absent.[76] For example, Manning describes the French introduction of ‘liberal education’ to combat the ‘ignorance and bigotry of most of the Italian ladies’, in institutions run by French women in the absence of suitable Italians. A ‘liberal education’ was essentially domestic instruction, vital to the development of the ‘character and disposition of their sons.’ [77] It was the introduction of superior Northern European domestic practices that gave Manning some hope that the younger generation of Italians might fight for the freedom their parents were incapable of achieving, given the ignorance, bigotry, superstition and fatalistic submission of the latter.[78]

In an account which Lord Normanby claimed was based on personal experience and observation, he describes a doomed marriage between a high-ranking young Englishwomen and an Italian Count. In doing so he implied the superiority of English domestic relationships and the inferiority of their Italian counterparts.  Normanby suggested that Italians had no sense of national pride or spirit and no concept of civic duty, due to their foreign masters forbidding involvement in politics. Consequently, ‘forbidden to dream of ambition, the Italian devotes himself to love.’[79] This outlet ‘for all their enthusiasm’ inevitably led to the degrading spectacle of Italian domesticity. Matilda, the poor English unfortunate whose head is turned by the Italian natural talent for seduction, is forced to accept the humiliation of her new husband’s infidelities. Worse, she is obliged to consent to a cavalier servente, or male companion, when her husband characteristically tires of her company and becomes inattentive. When Matilda complains that she is being sexually harassed by the cavalier servente, her husband laughs it off, suggesting this is her affair and not his, and a silly,excessive English over-reaction.[80] Italian domestic arrangements are portrayed as both a symptom and the cause of Italy’s foreign domination. Italian domesticity failed to produce and nurture sons with national and civic pride who valued, and would fight for, political freedom. Their inability, however, to engage in political and civic life was what led to such domestic arrangements in the first place. The sexually and morally licentious view of aristocratic domesticity clearly maps onto a similar view back in Britain. Lord Normanby’s support for middle-class domesticity might appear an anomaly, coming as he did from an aristocratic lineage. Although elected as Tory MP for Scarborough in 1818, Normanby spoke up for Catholic Emancipation and parliamentary reform. Displeasing his family with these liberal views, Normanby resigned in 1820.  Returning to parliament, helater crossed the floor and became a prominent Whig politician.[81] Normanby’s apparent support for Whiggish middle-class domesticity in his writing perhaps reflects his political conflict with his aristocratic Tory family.

In reviewing Normanby, Mary Shelley agreed with some of his general observations regarding Italy, but utilised them to critique English domesticity in a different way. Shelley was ‘far from advocating the Italian conjugal system, which puts the axe to domestic happiness, and deeply embitters the childhood of the offspring of the divided parents’, but pointed out that an Italian woman would be equally unhappy in an English marriage.[82] Shelley asks how an Italian woman would fare with

the toils and dullness of an English home…her snug, but monotonous fireside, her sentry-box of a house…the necessity of forever wearing that thick and ample veil of propriety which we throw over every act and word.[83]

To English women, social constraint was ‘the music, the accompaniment by which they regulate their steps until they cannot walk without it; and the veil before spoken of is as necessary to their sense of decency as their very habiliments.’[84] The unconventional Shelleys had left England under a fair degree of social and financial disapprobation, and Mary, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, would no doubt have been particularly sensitive to the strictures of English social and domestic conventions. Shelley concludes by suggesting that Matilda, the unfortunate victim of Italian domesticity, had been offered far more freedom than would have been possible in England, yet ‘even the excess of freedom does not permit her the exact liberty she wants.’[85] Shelley implies that English women were as entrapped by domesticity as Italians were by despotism. Matilda is so conditioned by domestic restraint, she does not know how to react to relative freedom.

Mary Shelley’s critique is reminiscent of de Staёl’s in Corinne. The aristocratic Oswald must decide between marriage to the talented and vivacious Italian Corinne, and a conventional and demur Englishwoman. Oswald’s friend, Mr Edgarmond, whilst acknowledging Corinne’s beauty and talent, exclaims ‘none but English wives will do for England…of what use would she be in a house?’. He continues,

now the house is everything with us, you know, at least to our wives. Can you fancy your lovely Italian remaining quietly at home, while fox-hunts or debates took you abroad? The domestic worth of our women you will never find elsewhere…where men lead active lives, the women should bloom in the shade.[86]

De Staёl has been interpreted here as sympathising with the repression of English women  under English domestic arrangements, as Shelley appears to be doing. Indeed, in his review of Corinne, Francis Jeffrey acknowledges the accuracy with which de Staёl portrays ‘the almost total separation of the male from the female part of society’.[87] Jeffrey suggests however, the negative aspects of this have been exaggerated, that it is a ‘necessary consequence’ of a superior and politically engaged nation.’ Jeffrey draws attention to what he describes as de Staёl’s portrayal of the superiority of English men, derived from, ‘having some object in active life, and some concern in the government of their country.’[88] Indeed, given her positive comments regarding the English political and diplomatic landscape generally, it was unlikely that de Staёl ‘disputed Jeffrey’s broad conclusions’.[89]

Here, Shelley and de Staёl offer examples of what Kathryn Walchester describes as a trope among female travellers, whereby ‘women writers both manipulate the discourse of the domestic sphere and transgress its boundaries to offer various perspectives on European politics.’[90] In doing so, however, both writers contribute to a totalising configuration of Italian domestic life, one which suggests that Italian domestic arrangements are intimately linked to their lack of political freedom. ‘Effeminate’ and ‘licentious’ men are unable to exercise appropriate control over their households and, consequently, given freedom from domestic duties, Italian women fail to raise children who recognise their civic, political, and social responsibilities.  The reviewer Jeffrey seems to suggest that the suppression of women’s expression and individuality within British domesticity is a necessary and justifiable consequence, a noble sacrifice that superior English women make for the greater national good. No wonder then, that whatever de Staёl or Shelley’s intentions, even many nineteenth-century women ‘argue in essays or fictions that cultural differences in female conduct represented not legitimate differences of convention but deviations from a single real standard: that of British Protestant domesticity’.[91]

Clearly then, the comparison between Italian and British domesticity configured Britain as the superior nation. Not only was British domesticity morally superior, but emerging from it was the sense of social and political responsibility that had facilitated Britain’s rise as a free and stable nation at home, and a world power abroad. Thus gender difference was co-constitutive with a discourse of middle-class superiority, one transferable to claims of national superiority. In a famous article on women travellers, Elizabeth Rigby, later to become Lady Eastlake, a writer for the influential and conservative Quarterly Review, compared English women with their foreign counterparts. Rigby noted that, ‘the foreign lady can in no way be measured against her’ because of the Englishwoman’s ‘very habits of order and regularity which make her domestic’.[92] English superiority was attributable ‘to nothing less than the domesticity of the English character’.[93] Mary Poovey points out that the portrayal of middle-class women, from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, moved from emotionally and sexually unstable, to domestic angel, the nation’s ‘moral hope and spiritual guide’.[94] Such portrayals demonstrate an inherently patriarchal view of women as unstable and dangerous, unless properly supervised within a male-controlled domestic environment such as that promoted by the middle-classes. For the lower classes, ‘separate sphere’ domesticity was effectively an impossibility, given the economic requirement for women to work. They were entrapped by a circular argument which stated that their lower-class deficiencies were caused by their lack of domestic qualities, yet their economic status prevented them from such domesticity in the first place. By the 1860s, one anonymous author noted that

It seems a bold statement to make, but it is put forth under a deep conviction of its reality and truthfulness, that the want of domesticity among women – of the working classes especially – is a great source of most of the ‘social evils’ which are as a plague spot upon the nation at the present time.[95]

Conclusion

Travellers, novelists, poets, and academics in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries used a combination of ‘objective’ academic knowledge and ‘imaginative’ cultural representations of Italy to configure Italy as ‘other’ and Britain as its superior corollary. Such strategies have clear parallels with Edward Said’s Orientalism and suggest that the discourse which Said identified has far wider applications than as purely an imperialist East-West binary. Travel literature is a useful genre to consider in this respect, intersecting as it does, the objectively observed ‘academic’ and ‘imaginative’ forms of Orientalism.

Orientalising descriptions of Italian domesticity were superimposed onto questions of class and gender back home. Stoler and Cooper point out that to properly understand the role which Orientalism plays in the construction of the foreign and domestic ‘other’, ‘metropole and colony’ must be seen within ‘a single analytical field’.[96] As I have identified, gender, class, national superiority, and configurations of British and Italian identity can also be seen in the same co-constituting analytical frame. As Cohn identified as regards India, it seems that the British also invade an ‘epistemological space’ in Italy, to configure superior British ‘identity’ as essentially Protestant, male and middle-class. Although neither ‘Eastern’, nor a formal colony, ‘knowledge’ of Italy played a part in Britain’s self-identification as an Imperial power.[97]

Notes

[1] J. Urry, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London, 2011), pp. 1-2.

[2] C. Thompson, Travel Writing (Abingdon, 2011), pp. 10-11.

[3] E. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), p. 14.

[4] B. Cohn, ‘Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge’, in A. Howe (Ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (Oxford, 2010), pp. 117-124, 118.

[5] Said, Orientalism, p. 27.

[6] R. Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, Modern Asian Studies, 20 (1986), pp. 401-46, 409-10.

[7] Inden, Orientalist Constructions, p. 408.

[8] Inden, Orientalist Constructions, p. 408.

[9] Said, Orientalism, p. 11.

[10] Said, Orientalism, p. 14.

[11] Said, Orientalism, p. 14.

[12] Said, Orientalism, pp. 10-11.

[13] Said, Orientalism, p. 15.

[14] Los Angeles Times, 10th July 1993. http://articles.latimes.com/1993-07-10/entertainment/ca-11747_1_altered-lyric (Accessed 4/10/17).

[15] Said, Orientalism, p. 11.

[16] Said, Orientalism, pp. 9-10.

[17] A. Carastathis, ‘Is Hellenism an Orientalism? Reflections on the Boundaries of

“Europe” in an Age of Austerity’, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 10 (2014), pp. 2-17, 2.

[18] Carastathis, ‘Is Hellenism an Orientalism?’, pp. 4-5.

[19] F. Jeffrey, ‘Review of “Corinne, ou l’Italie.”’, Edinburgh Review, 11 (1807), pp. 183-95, 194.

[20] S. Makdisi, Making England Western (Chicago, IL., 2014).

[21] I. Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (Delhi, 1998), pp. 22-5.

[22] J. Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (London, 2008), p. 1.

[23] Luzzi, Romantic Europe, p, 52.

[24] For example, see the seminal, C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1957); C. Hornsby (Ed.), The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond (London, 2000); L. M. Crisafulli (Ed.), Imagining Italy, Literary Itineraries in British Romanticism (Bologna, 2002); L. Bandiera & Saglia, D., (Eds.), British Romanticism and Italian Literature. Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (Amsterdam, 2005); J. Stabler, The Artistry of Exile, (Oxford, 2013); D. Laven, ‘The British Idea of Italy in the Age of Turner’, in D. B. Brown (Ed.), J. M. W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, (Tate Research Publication, London, 2015). http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/david-laven-the-british-idea-of-italy-in-the-age-of-turner-r1176439 ,(Accessed 16/04/2017).

[25] Laven, British Idea of Italy

[26] K. Walchester, Our Own Fair Italy (Bern, 2007), p. 39.

[27] Laven, British Idea of Italy.

[28] Brand, Italianate Fashion, p. x.

[29] Brand, Italianate Fashion, p. 187.

[30] Laven, British Idea of Italy.

[31] Brand, Italianate Fashion, p. 1.

[32] R. Ascham, The English Works of Roger Ascham (London, 1815), p. 248. ‘Roger Ascham’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/732 (Accessed: 06/10/17).

[33] D. Laven, ‘Lord Byron, Count Daru, and Anglophone Myths of Venice in the Nineteenth Century’, MDCCC, 1 (2012), pp. 5-32, 12.

[34] Brand, Italianate Fashion, p. 187.

[35] Brand, Italianate Fashion, p. 189.

[36] A. Manning, Stories from the History of Italy (London, 1831), p. 59.

[37] Manning, History, p. 59.

[38] M. Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, The Idler in Italy, Vol. ii (London, 1839), p. 213.

[39] Blessington, Idler, p. 213.

[40] Blessington, Idler, p. 214.

[41] Manning, History, p. 59.

[42] Manning, History, pp. 351-9.

[43] Manning, History, pp. 358-9.

[44] Brand, Italianate Fashion, p. 215.

[45] W. Hazlitt, Notes of a Journey (London, 1826), p. 246.

[46] M. Graham, Three Months Passed in the Mountain’s East of Rome (London, 1820), pp. iv-v.

[47] Graham, Three Months, p. 131.

[48] Graham, Three Months, p. 60.

[49] J. C. L de Sismondi, History of the Italian Republics (London, 1832), p. 3.

[50] Mdm. de Staёl, Corinne; or Italy (London, 1834), p. 16.

[51] R. Casillo, The Empire of Stereotypes: Germain de Staёl and the idea of Italy (New York, 2006), pp. 2-3.

[52] Jeffrey, Review, p. 183.

[53] Jeffery, Review, p. 194.

[54] Brand, Italianate Fashion, p. 14.

[55] M. Shelley, ‘The English in Italy’, Westminster Review, VI (1826), pp. 325-41, 326-7.

[56] Shelley, ‘The English’, p. 327.

[57] A. Szegedy-Maszak, ‘A Perfect Ruin: Nineteenth Century Views of the Colloseum’, Arion, 2, (1992), pp. 115-142, 127.

[58] T. Earle Welby (Ed.), The Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor, Vol. XI (London, 1930), p. 89.

[59] S. C. Hughson (Ed.), The Best Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, (Chicago, IL., 1892), p. 133.

[60] Hughson, Letters, p. 133.

[61] Percival, History, p. 170.

[62] Laven, British Idea of Italy.

[63] ‘Introduction: The Cenci’ in Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Hastings, 2012).

[64] Hughson, Letters, p. 133.

[65] C. K. Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh 1815-1822: Britain and the European Alliance (London, 1925), p. 334.

[66] C. H. Phipps, Lord Normanby, The English in Italy in 3 Volumes, Vol. 2 (London, 1825), pp. 39-40.

[67] R. Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London, 2005), p. 5.

[68] Cavaliero, Italia Romantica, pp. 6,8.

[69] Shelley, English, p. 330.

[70] Shelley, English, pp. 330-31.

[71] Laven, British Idea of Italy.

[72] Cavaliero, Italia Romantica, p. ix.

[73] K. Boardman, ‘The Ideology of Domesticity: The Regulation of the Household Economy in Victorian Women’s Magazines’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 33 (2000), pp. 150-164, 162.

[74] L. Davidoff &Hall, C., Family Fortunes (London, 1992), xviii.

[75] A. Rattansi, ‘Postcolonialism and its Discontents’, Economy and Society, 26 (2006), pp. 480-500, 482.

[76] Manning, History, p. 339-40.

[77] Manning, History, p. 353.

[78] Manning, History, pp. 383-9.

[79] Normanby, English, pp. 41-3.

[80] Normanby, English, pp. 76.

[81] ‘Constantine Henry Phipps’, Oxford Database of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22187?docPos=1 (Accessed: 02/05/17).

[82] Shelley, English, pp. 328-9; R. Balzaretti, ‘British Women Travellers and Italian Marriages, c. 1789-1844’, in V. Babini, C. Beccalossi and L. Riall (Eds), Italian Sexualities Uncovered: The Long Nineteenth Century (1879-1914), (Basingstoke, 2015), p. 264.

[83] Shelley, English, p. 329.

[84] Shelley, English, p. 329.

[85] Shelley, English, p. 329.

[86] De Staёl, Corinne, p. 127.

[87] Jeffrey, Review, p. 192.

[88] Jeffrey, Review, p. 193.

[89] E. Simpson, ‘On Corinne, Or Italy’, BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=erik-simpson-on-corinne-or-italy (Accessed: 27/04/17).

[90] Walchester, Our Own Fair Italy, p. 7.

[91] E. Simpson, ‘On Corinne, Or Italy’.

[92] E. Rigby, ‘Lady Travellers’, Quarterly Review, 76 (1844), pp. 98-136, 102.

[93] Rigby, Travellers, p. 103.

[94] M. Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1989), pp. 9-10.

[95] M.A.B, A Few Words on Women’s Work (London, 1859), p. 7.

[96] A. Stoler & Cooper, F., (Eds.), Tensions of Empire Colonial: Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA., 1997), pp. 3-4.

[97] Such entanglements of race, class, gender, and national identity, offer support to the ideas of ‘Intersectionality’ proposed by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins. Crenshaw and Collins discussed the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality and nationality, predominantly connected with the marginalising experiences of black men and women in twentieth-century America. However, such ideas appear to be equally applicable to British identity-making and the marginalisation of foreign and domestic ‘others’ in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. See: K.W. Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrines, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, The University of Chicago Legal Forum, (Chicago, IL., 1989). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York & London1990).

[98] D. Ludden, ‘Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge’, in C. A. Breckenridge & van de Veer, P., (Eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, (Philadelphia, PA.,1993), pp. 250-278, 270.

[99] Carastathis, Is Hellenism an Orientalism?, p. 4.

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Cavaliero, R., Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London, 2005).

Cohn, B., ‘Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge’, in A. Howe (Ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (Oxford, 2010), pp. 117-124.

Crisafulli, L. M., (Ed.), Imagining Italy, Literary Itineraries in British Romanticism (Bologna, 2002).

Davidoff, L., & Hall, C., Family Fortunes (London, 1992).

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The “Russian” Woman? Cultural Exceptionalism among Noblewomen in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia

In this article Darcie Mawby poses two important questions: firstly, to what extent did cultural exceptionalism exist among Russian noblewomen in the late imperial and revolutionary periods? Secondly, were Russian noblewomen part of a transnational European elite, or is national specificity integral to understanding their identity construction? In doing so Darcie provides important insights into the extent to which Russian noblewomen consciously engaged with national and international ideological developments related to marriage, education and adult vocations and the impact these interactions exerted on their sense of national identity. Through a comparison with the written work of English upper-class women, particularly travel accounts of Russia, Darcie identifies points of similarity and departure which highlight instances of transnational cultural crossover and national specificity. This article offers new interpretations of cultural exceptionalism and national identity in Europe during the increasingly global nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries.

Download a PDF Version of this Article Here

Darcie Mawby

Author Biography 

Darcie Mawby is a Masters student in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham. This article formed part of her Undergraduate dissertation which was completed in the summer of 2017.

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