The murder of Thomas Sandles: meanings of a mid-nineteenth-century infanticide

Convictions of women for murdering their young children were rare in England in the nineteenth century. ¹ Yet the extraordinary can reveal a great deal about the ordinary, and were it not for the fact that Hannah Sandles's chosen solution to the unwanted burden of her illegitimate baby was an unusual one, we would know nothing about her at all. The justification for telling her story is twofold: it is interesting in itself as a piece of social history, a slice of 'history from below'; and it serves as a focal point for exploring the meanings that were woven around her circumstances by mid-nineteenth-century commentators. I have elsewhere explored some aspects of Victorian new-born child murder ² and 'baby-farming' where young children died at the hands of those who were not their parents. ³