Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900 (review)

Infanticide is a crime which provokes fascination and repugnance in equal measure. Since the Biblical slaughter of the innocents, the killing of the defenceless child has represented one of the most heinous and morally indefensible of crimes. In one sense, infanticide is an unspeakable, unknowable offence which lies beyond the pale of civilization (and indeed, may define that boundary). How can any sane person wilfully kill a child? Yet, as this interesting and insightful study shows, child murder was a relatively common phenomenon in English society until the late nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly, the roots of the problem lay in socio-economic inequalities: children were routinely killed by desperate mothers unable to cope, or died in droves in ‘baby farms’ (the grotesque precursor of the contemporary child-care facilities). Despite liberal reforms of the legal definition of child murder in the period covered by this book, the criminological, moral and sentimental burden of the crime fell most heavily on the mother. In this respect, any study of child murder casts light on that over-determined figure, the fallen woman. But the value of McDonagh’s book is that it ranges much more widely than this – as she puts it, ‘discussions of child murder frequently seeped into debates on other issues, often providing an example or test case through which society examined its own values and standards of civilised behaviour’ (6). McDonagh’s ‘test cases’ comprise a series of moments when the issue of child murder achieved a particularly powerful literary and cultural expression. Hence the cultural construction of infanticide performed creative and ideologically resourceful work well in advance of the socio-historical reality upon which it was based – indeed, as I will indicate below, McDonagh’s most impressive interpretive discoveries demonstrate a formidable ingenuity in psychoanalytically tracing her theme through the repressed underworlds of some of her chosen texts, even though some of her conclusions are, as she admits, speculative. Unsurprisingly, her narrative begins with that foundational infanticidal text, Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Chapter 1 locates Swift’s famous satirical attack on British colonial policy in Ireland within the context of anti-commercial critiques of society. McDonagh’s contribution to our understanding of Swift’s satirical method is to suggest that behind the colonialist trope of cannibalism – a topic explored by Claude Rawson in God, Gulliver, and Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2001) – lies the shadow of a redemptive form of child murder, the sacrificial, ‘socially Reviews