ABSTRACT
The Liverpool group, notes Monica Flegel, ‘gained immediate and influential support’ from figures prominent in philanthropy, education and evangelical tract writing. In 1889, the year that also saw the success of their efforts to persuade Parliament to pass the ‘Children’s Charter’ specifically criminalizing cruel treatment of children, the various local societies united to form branches of a single national group, which gained a Royal Charter and Queen Victoria’s patronage – Princess Mary was already a subscriber – in 1895. Matters pertaining to child rearing or to the child’s employment were originally viewed as entirely private until 1763, when the court hearing the case of Rex v. Delaval determined that a father did not have the right to apprentice his daughter to a prostitute. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the authority of the paterfamilias sustained further erosion in areas such as child labour, child custody and married women’s property.
