ABSTRACT
IN an earlier chapter we saw the development of legislation to protect the deprived child. In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century we can now begin to trace the growth of measures intended to protect the child neglected within his own home, or whose circumstances of birth and illegitimacy were exploited as a means of private profit. This was a grave problem requiring public attention and was brought into the open by the development of the new public health movement with its emphasis on the prevention of mortality by attention to environmental hygiene and social conditions. 1 The inadequate support given to unmarried mothers under existing bastardy laws, and the poor law policy of refusing out-relief to mothers with illegitimate children, also encouraged the practice of baby-farming whereby children were placed out with ‘professional’ foster mothers for payment of a lump sum or for weekly allowances. The mortality among infants under a year put out to nurse in this way was estimated to be between 40% and 60% in rural areas and between 70% and 90% in the large towns with their sanitary conditions so detrimental to infant life. 2 Many of the mothers, particularly in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, placed their children in good faith with ‘professional’ foster mothers or nurses either in the day time or by the week, so that they could carry on with their employment; but many also placed them out with the deliberate knowledge, and even intention, that they would be sure to die. The exploitation and despair of the unmarried mother is movingly described in George Moore's novel Esther Waters, published in 1894, but twenty-two years earlier legislation attempted, not entirely successfully, to deal with the evil first made notorious by the trial of Margaret Waters and Sarah Ellis. These women had been in the habit of advertising in the press for a child to adopt, 1 and arranging with applicants for a premium of four or five pounds to be paid over with the child. The children were afterwards neglected and many died. At the trial the conditions of the house were vividly described by a police sergeant who had visited and insisted on seeing a particular child who had been ‘adopted’ in this way:
