The background

During the course of the last quarter of the 19th century, child welfare moved from a concern with the rescue, reclamation and reform of children, mainly through philanthropic and Poor Law action, to the involvement of children in a consciously designed pursuit of the national interest, which included all-round efficiency, public health, education, racial hygiene, responsible parenthood, and social purity. Children were given a new social and political identity as belonging to ‘the nation’. This is not to say that there had been no self-evident national interest governing the campaigns of Mary Carpenter and other penal reformers in their reconception of juvenile delinquency in the mid-19th century, or that Dr Barnardo's was motivated merely by an evangelical desire to save souls. Such figures obviously strove to accomplish goals of national importance with respect to incorporating the ‘dangerous classes’ within the boundaries of civil society. Similarly, the NSPCC did not confine its objectives to punishing and preventing parental cruelty; it repeatedly claimed to be primarily concerned with improving standards of parental care among the poor in order to make their behaviour more ‘respectable’. However, it is argued here that the policies and interests of politicians, social reformers, and what would later be termed the caring professions, in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, were more comprehensive, more universal and more specific in their perception of all working-class children as members of the population. The different agendas of concern between these two categories can be gauged from the contents of a few standard social texts. Florence Davenport Hill's Children of the state, first published in 1868 and revised in 1889, dealt with the workhouse school; state aid and individual self-help; emigration; boarding out; and outdoor paupers. The interests were broader in Gertrude Tuckwell's The state and its children (1894): reformatories and industrial schools; truancy; workhouse schools; voluntary schools; hospitals and lunatic asylums; canal and van children; homes for the ‘blind, deaf and dumb’; circus and theatre children; prevention of cruelty; and children who worked as ‘half-timers’. However, compare these topics with the range listed in Sir John Gorst's Children of the nation: How their health and vigor should be promoted by the state (1906): infant mortality; medical inspection in schools; children under school age; underfed children; overworked children; children's ailments; medical aid; infant schools; school hygiene; physical training; child labour in factories and mines; state children in care; hereditary disease; and the home.