ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argue that the National Society for the Prevention for Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), in an effort to maintain the Society’s classless stance, sought to reframe the debate surrounding child-life insurance by conflating stories of poverty and starvation with horrific narratives of parental savagery. Questions about the interrelationship of home and work, of family and commerce, continually occupied the nineteenth-century British imagination, particularly in the many debates surrounding the practice of child-life insurance. The London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was formed in 1884. As William Clarke Hall wrote in 1897, “there was no such offence known to English Law as the mere ill-treatment, no such offence as the mere neglect of a child. By the end of the nineteenth century, cases of neglect far outnumbered cases of assault in the NSPCC’s work, and the Society’s discourse began to focus on the role of alcoholism in the neglect of children.
