Monica Flegel, Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England: Literature, Representation and the NSPCC.

Wood, John Carter

Monica Flegel, Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England: Literature, Representation and the NSPCC (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 208 pp., $99.95 cloth.

The complex "civilizing" processes of the nineteenth century have often featured in analyses of the emergence of modern sensibilities. Recent decades have seen significant research into not only the explicit debates, languages, legal reforms, and institutional changes related to combating cruelty but also into the implicit assumptions and discursive strategies that defined it as a problem in the first place. It is difficult to carve out new territory on this well-mapped terrain, but Monica Flegel seeks a new perspective in her exploration of representations of cruelty to children by bringing analyses of key literary, journalistic, and activist texts together with a study of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), founded in 1889.

An opening chapter provides an overview of representations of child cruelty, centering on a shift from "the more complex figure of the endangered child" toward that of the "abused child ... whose place was ensconced within nascent child-protection discourse" (3). In this process the imagination of child suffering narrowed and became dominated by new "authorities" (such as the NSPCC). Building on this argument, four chapters examine specific contexts for the representation of cruelty. One on animals and children considers the relationship between perceptions of these two "helpless" (42) categories of creature.

The child "performer"--on stage, in circuses or on the streets--is at the center of an intriguing chapter on what was seen as a highly ambiguous occupation. Similar tensions recur in a chapter on narratives of child endangerment, which centers on perceived threats to the (idealized) domestic sphere from "commerce" (whether in the form of child-labor or child-insurance). A chapter on "juvenile delinquents" highlights the challenges that such "dangerous" children posed to the narratives of youthful innocence propagated by the NSPCC. The book's conclusion focuses on the figure of the "Cruelty Man"--i.e., the child-welfare inspector--and the stories created by and about this new type of "expert."

Flegel evinces throughout a fine eye for the complex dualities that shaped images of children and notions of childhood. Romantic and evangelical views of children--the "child of nature" and the "child of God" were both, for example, suffused with tensions between beliefs in children's putative "innocence" or "savagery." Child performance might be seen as "a joyful and pleasurable expression of childhood fancy, as an endangerment to the souls of the performers themselves and to their audiences, as a form of employment, and as an instance of 'cruelty to children'" (73). With regard to "commerce," while some argued "it was both right and necessary for working-class children to be gainfully employed," Flegel notes, "these narratives coincided and competed with representations of the abused and endangered labouring child"(110).

Such ambiguities and some overall shifts in emphasis are subtly presented, but it is ultimately difficult to discern any overall critical trajectory apart from that of "centralization" across the nineteenth century: the creation "of a single crime [i.e., child abuse] that seeks to encapsulate a broad number of dangers facing children; of a unified, national organization that sought to take on the task of identifying and ameliorating that crime; and of a specialized professional discourse--casework--developed for the purpose of intervention and protection" (2). The narrowing of discourse was signaled by an end "to a broader discussion of social issues that included literary interventions as legitimate and authoritative interventions--much to the impoverishment ... of social discourse" (3).

This story--embedded in a familiar Foucauldian paradigm--is somewhat undermined by the exclusive focus on discourse and representation. Unless one wants to argue that a plurality of discourses about child cruelty is inherently superior, the question of whether their "centralization" led to "impoverishment" or, to the contrary, an improvement in the quality of knowledge about cruelty can only be answered by going beyond the discourse itself. Flegel's claim that the NSPCC narratives of child cruelty were "impoverished" compared to fictional ones implies that they failed to capture something important about the real causes and meanings of children's suffering; but her representational focus precludes such judgments.

It would perhaps be unfair to hold a book that is explicitly about "representation" and largely focused on literary sources to a strict, historical standard; nonetheless, Flegel casts her book as transcending literature and making claims about reality. While she ably analyses narratives, her contributions to historiography are less clear. Clearly, fictional tropes were incorporated into non-fictional contexts, but it is not entirely convincing that "casework"--such as that carried out by the NSPCC--can simply be considered another "genre" (3) of writing since, unlike fiction, its reports emerged directly from interactions with real families and children who may have actually been abused. It may be that such narratives appear imaginatively "impoverished" in comparison with the works of Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins; however, it may be that the apparent narrowing of discourse is inherent in the selection of sources, as one moves from mid-century novels to late-century casework. Both kinds of narratives were created for different reasons in different contexts, meaning that some of this study's conclusions appear somewhat predetermined.

The switching among "genres" is sometimes jarring. For example, in her chapter on juvenile delinquents, Flegel discusses (largely on the basis of secondary literature) the treatment of children in criminal courts to highlight how "narratives about childhood set the terms of the debate" (151); she then shifts to analyzing Oliver Twist as an "important text in the construction of the child criminal in the early nineteenth century" (151). However, despite the implied connection, she fails to demonstrate that fictional discourses influenced real interactions between courts and children.

Finally, cruelty to children is insufficiently located among discussions about (and practices regarding) cruelty toward adults. (The insightfulness of Flegel's chapter on animals and children makes this gap all the more noticeable.) Flegel's engagement with the broader literature on adult crime and violence (particularly the extensive historiography of

domestic violence) is rather limited, with some relevant work--such as on the shift from moral to medical discourses on criminality, the "pornography of pain" or the declining tolerance of wife beating--missing or insufficiently deployed. More attention to these issues would have aided her analysis. She describes, for example, how some children who did not correspond to emerging norms of passive and helpless childhood--for example, juvenile delinquents--could thereby by classified as adults: their "fall from childhood into a kind of adulthood" (148) meant that they become undeserving of sympathy or care. In contrast to the dynamism, ambiguity and "instability" (13) of the category of "childhood," "adulthood" thus comes across as a rather static notion. However, throughout the century, concerns about violence directed at adults (particularly toward women) were also rising, a topic that, properly integrated, could have strengthened Flegel's discussions of domesticity. Despite these criticisms, however, Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children makes a very readable and significant contribution to understanding not only the diversity of representations of suffering, cruelty, and violence in nineteenth-century England, but also the efforts of newly emerging organizations to establish themselves as authorities on what was increasingly recognized as a pressing issue of social reform.

John Carter Wood

Leibniz Institute of European History (Mainz, Germany)