ABSTRACT
OUR own experience during and immediately following the second world war has proved that children are profoundly affected by changes in the stability and values of society and this was as true in the eighteenth century as it is in our own time, and was correspondingly expressed in the problem of young offenders who lacked moral standards and needed guidance and understanding. But no authority in the eighteenth century had the duty of providing care and protection for the children in moral danger who stood so urgently in need of it, and those who begged, roamed the streets in a neglected condition and eventually appeared before the magistrates for offences even at the age of eight and nine were sentenced to death, imprisoned with felons or transported across the great seas to the penal settlements of Canada and Australia. Law-breaking children were thought to be a dangerous infection to be removed from society, but already some people were beginning to wonder if society itself did not contain the germs of contamination and to think of measures which might be taken to prevent the spread and development of delinquency and to reform the delinquent once discovered. In 1754, for example, the blind Sir John Fielding, chief magistrate at Bow Street and brother of the novelist, after sending five boys to prison for stealing, wrote these words, ‘It is indeed a melancholy truth, which I have learned from experience, that there are at this time in town some hundreds of this kind of boys. They might be made useful to society if they were collected together before they commence thieves, and… placed either in men of war or the Merchants ‘Service.’ The unrelieved discipline and restraint of such a life may have been hardly what the neglected delinquent child most badly needed but the suggestion appeared attractive, providing a disciplined training and at the same time rescuing the child from the hideous conditions in which he lived. ‘In the latter end of the year 1755,’ wrote Fielding, ‘it appeared that there were a vast number of wretched boys, ragged as colts, abandoned, strangers to beds, and who lay about under bulks, and in ruinous empty houses, in Westminster and its environs’ 1 . In January 1756 the commanding officer of H.M.S. Barfleur wrote to Fielding, asking him to send thirty boys for employment in his ship as officers' servants. Fielding complied, and on their way to Portsmouth the boys were seen by a Mr. Fowler Walker of Lincoln's Inn. Impressed by the novel and constructive aspect of Fielding's plan he set about raising subscriptions to fit out an even larger number of poor boys to go to sea in this way and so avoid the opportunities and temptations to crime in the city. Soon the Marine Society was founded in July, 1756 ‘for the redemption and reformation of young criminals', and undertook to clothe the boys for whom applications had been received from the captains of many English ships. In 1786 a training ship was started for the boys, a shelter which was also a source of recruits. Sir John Fielding, now one of the Society's administrators and a member of its committee, in February 1758 had also drawn attention to the number of homeless young girls in London, some of whom had become prostitutes at the age of twelve. 2 As a result of his interest and support the Female Orphan Asylum and the Magdalen Hospital were both founded before the end of the year as measures of prevention and reform.
