ABSTRACT
THE development of the voluntary child care societies in the nineteenth century, and the experiments in care which they pioneered as a result of their ideologies, profoundly affected the administration of the poor law towards the pauper child. Since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 the policy of the Poor Law Commissioners was one of education of the children to fit them for employment and independence in later life, and they aimed first at separating the children from the adult inmates of the workhouses and improving the quality of the workhouse schools. In their fourth annual report issued in 1838 1 is a description of the parish workhouse children before the formation of the unions in 1834. ‘The children, who were for the most part orphans, bastards and deserted children, continued to remain inmates of the workhouse long after the period at which they might have earned their subsistence by their own exertions; 2 and those who obtained situations, or were apprenticed by means of the parish funds, turned out as might be expected of children whose education was utterly neglected or at best confided to the superintendence of a pauper. They rarely remained long with their employer but returned to the workhouse—which, so far from being to them an object of dislike, they regarded as their home, and which they looked forward to as the ultimate asylum of their old age. In this manner the workhouse, instead of diminishing, increased pauperism, by keeping up a constant supply of that class of persons who most frequently, and for the longest period, became its inmates. Pauperism, however, was only one of the evils which resulted from the neglect to provide proper means of instruction for destitute children. Those who have ascertained the early history of persons who in a greater or less degree have offended against the laws, have found that a large proportion have passed their infancy and youth in the workhouse, and can trace the formation of the habits which have led them to the commission of crime to the entire want of moral training in these institutions.’
