Creating cruelty to children: Representations of the endangered and abused child in nineteenth-century literature and child-protection narratives

At the end of the nineteenth century, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) claimed the credit for "creating" child abuse as a social and legal phenomenon. While the NSPCC's work in identifying, classifying, and disseminating information about cruelty to children was crucial to our current understanding of child abuse as a social problem, I argue that the Society's work was greatly indebted to representations of endangered and suffering children in the nineteenth-century English novel. This project therefore suggests that a necessary precondition for the emergence of child protection was a representation of the child as particularly endangered, as separate from the rest of human experience, and as inherently salvageable---a conception of the child largely constructed by and through literary texts. In tracing the indebtedness of the NSPCC's child abuse narratives to earlier literary narratives, I wish to examine the consequences of the codification of child abuse in legal and social-scientific discourse at the end of the nineteenth century. What aspects of child endangerment become lost or obscured within the new concept of cruelty to children? And what aspects of child endangerment remain, and how are they expressed in the emergent language of child protection?; My first chapter traces the symbolic "relationship" constructed between animals and children in nineteenth-century discourse. It is my contention that both "the child" and "the animal" were defined, in philosophical and literary texts, through their role as either victims or perpetrators, a connection which created both cooperation and competition between the RSPCA and the NSPCC. My second chapter examines issues of child performance, tracing the ways in which narratives about the performing child helped to define what a child should be able to do, and how an adult should respond to it. My third chapter examines the role of commerce in the endangerment and abuse of children, with a focus on child employment and the debates surrounding child-life insurance. And in my final chapter, I analyze the NSPCC's discourse, and in particular, the emergence of social casework as a means of propaganda.