Improving The Care Of Children During The Victorian Era

Lloyd de Mouse boldly remarked in the opening of, History of Childhood, that “the history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken,” proposing the further back in history one explores, the greater the care of children deteriorates. Although many points in history can be looked to as proof to this claim, the Victorian era provides an abundance of examples. Victorian era Britain offered little benevolence towards the homeless and abandoned children of the working-class. For these children public relief efforts were limited, and the middle-class did not see it as their responsibility to help the children of the intemperate and immoral working-class, poor as a result of their own doing. It was not until

As with modern day media, positioning an individual or a group as unfavourable can be achieved through the use of certain terms and/or images; the same was true during Victorian Britain. For example, a newspaper article from 1897, entitled London waifs and Strays (Appendix F) uses the terms ‘waifs’ and ‘strays’ in direct reference to the children of the working-class. The use of these terms asserts just how deep-rooted the practice of ‘othering’ these children extended; they are no longer referred to by who they are (children), but instead what they are perceived to be. Further along in the article the children are once again minimizes as being placed in a category of the lesser as “representing the worst cases of children destitution to be found” and neglects to consider them as boys and girls, children who have had the misfortune of being born into a society strongly vested in a class system which positions them at the very bottom. Moreover, in considering the theory of social representation, newspapers act to communicate information that becomes knowledge, “reproduced through acts of communication that are guided by the interests of people involved,” and the interest of the middle-class was to not lose their newly acquired status and for Dr. Barnardo, to promote is child rescue work. By creating the portrait of waifs, strays, gutter children, etcetera, as different, the lesser, the ‘other’, part of the working-class, yet different due to their vulnerability sets them apart from both classes. With this in mind, some felt it acceptable or excusable to marginalize and maltreat the