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The Foundress and the Foundlings: the ‘Moral Panic’ of 1893 in the Orphanage of Mercy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Stuart Mews
Stuart Mews*
Affiliation:
Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education
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Extract

Child abuse sometimes seems to be a discovery of the closing decades of the twentieth century. Academic attention was focused on the problem by a conference sponsored by the Royal Society of Medicine, chaired by the Health Minister Dr David Owen, in 1976. Among the twenty-six contributors was a member of our society, Professor Gordon Dunstan, and Dom Benedict Webb. The publicity for the published proceedings claimed that ‘Child abuse and neglect provide some of the most important and difficult problems in Western Society.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 31: The Church and Childhood , 1994 , pp. 477 - 499
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1994

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References

1 The Challenge of Child Abuse. Proceedings of a Conference sponsored by the Royal Society of Medicine, 2–4 June 1976, Alfred White Franklin, ed. (London and New York, 1977).

2 Bell, Stuart, When Salem Came to the Boro: The True Story of the Cleveland Child Abuse Crisis (London, 1988)Google Scholar. For the official view: The Report of the Inquiry into Child Abuse in Cleveland (London, 1988).

3 Doyle, Michael, ‘Child Abuse and the Reality of Sin’, New Blackfriars, 69 (1988), p. 431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Ibid., p. 435.

5 The Times, 22 Dec. 1993.

6 Rose, Lionel, The Erosion of Childhood. Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London, 1991), p. 236.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 96.

8 Thompson, F. M. L., The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (London, 1988), pp. 53–4.Google Scholar

9 Mews, Stuart, ‘The General and the Bishops: alternative responses to dechristianisation’. Later Victorian Britain 1867-1900, O’Day, Alan and Gourvich, T. R., eds (Houndmills, 1988), pp. 225-6.Google Scholar

10 Bristow, Edward J., Vice and Viglience (London, 1977), ch. 5Google Scholar; Gorham, Deborah, ‘The “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” re-examined; child prostitution and the idea of childhood in late Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1978), pp. 353—79 Google Scholar; McHugh, Paul, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (London, 1980).Google Scholar

11 Paget, Elma K., Henry Luke Paget; Portrait and Frame (London, 1939), p. 123.Google Scholar

12 Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People of London: Religious Influences, 1 (1902), p. 209 Google Scholar, quoted in Anson, Peter F., The Call of the Cloister, 2nd rev. edn (London, 1964), p. 442.Google Scholar

13 Vicinus, Martha, Independent Women, Work and Community For Single Women 1850–1920 (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Reed, John Shelton, ‘A female movement: the feminization of nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholicism’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 57 (1988), pp. 199–238 Google Scholar; Hill, Michael, The Religious Order. A study of virtuoso religion and its legitimation in the nineteenth century Church of England (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Sean Gill, ‘The power of Christian ladyhood: Priscilla Lydia Sellon and the creation of Anglican Sisterhoods’, in Mews, Stuart (ed.), Modem Religious Rebels (London, 1993), pp. 144–65 Google Scholar. Vicinus, Independent Women, p. 82.

15 [Sisters of the Church], A Valiant Victorian. The Life and Times of Mother Emily Ayckbowm (London, 1964), pp. 1-20.

16 A Short History of the Church Extension Association (nd), copy in Lambeth Palace Library: Benson MS 158, fos 115-28.

17 Copy in Benson MS 158.

18 Valiant Victorian, p. 68.

19 Our Work (September, 1884), p. 268.

20 Valiant Victorian, pp. 85-6, 91-2.

21 Ibid., p. 166; Vincinus Independent Women, p. 82.

22 Ibid., p. 147.

23 Anson, Call of the Cloister, p. 442.

24 Markwell, Bernard Kent, The Anglican Left, Radical Social Reform in the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal Church, 1846-1954 (New York, 1991), p. 39.Google Scholar

25 Benson MS 158, fol. 10.

26 Valiant Victorian, p. 148.

27 Ibid., pp. 148-9.

28 Benson MS 158, fol. 2.

29 Ibid., fols 3-4.

30 Ibid., fol. 5.

31 Ibid., fol. 4.

32 Our Work (October 1894).

33 Benson MS 158, fols 3-4.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Truth [Supplement] (18 June 1896) p. 10.

37 Benson MS 158, fol. 217, E. Ayckbowm-E. W. Benson, 28 November 1894.

38 Benson MS 158, fol. 70, Copy of Local Government Board Report.

39 Benson MS 158, fol. 234, E. Ayckbowm-E. W. Benson, 30 January 1895.

40 Russell, G. W. E., The Household of Faith (London, 1902), p. 161.Google Scholar

41 Benson MS 158, fol. 202, E. W. Benson-E. Ayckbowm, 12 January 1895; Benson MS 158, fol. 218 Sisters. E. W. Benson: 25 January 1895; Church Times, 8 Nov. 1895.

42 English Churchman, 23 May 1895.

43 Protestant Echo, 15 Sept. 1895.

44 The Times, 20 June, 28 Sept. 1895.

45 Charity Organisation Review, ii (1886), p. 52; see also Social Policy 1830-1914, ed. Eric J. Evans (London, 1978), pp. 204, 208-9; Guardian, 2 January 1895.

46 Canon Barnett. His Life, Work and Friends by his Wife (London, 1921), p. 658.

47 Seymour-Jones, Carole, Beatrice Webb: Woman of Conflict (London, 1992), p. 77.Google Scholar

48 Tablet, 28 April, 19, 26 May, 9, 23 June 1894; Truth, 24 May, 7 June 1894.

49 Truth [Supplement], 18 June 1896, p. 7.

50 Ibid., pp. 7-8.

51 Church Bells, 27 March, 2, 10, 24 April 1896.

52 Truth [Supplement!, 18 June 1896, p. 8.

53 Ibid., p. 8.

54 Ibid., p. 11.

55 Ibid., p. 12.

56 The Sisters of the Churth. Reply to certain Statements addressed by two ladies to the Bishops of the Lambeth Conference (privately printed), copy at St Michael’s Convent, Ham Common, p. 3; Sr M. Mae Eamon-Diana Wood, 13 June 1994.

57 Truth [Supplement], 18 June 1896, p. 9.

58 The Sisters of the Church, p. 6.

59 Truth, 9 January 1896; Hesketh Pearson, Labby. The Life of Henry Labouchere (London, 1936), pp. 274-80.

60 The Sisters of the Church, p. 6.

61 Cohen, Stanley, Folk Devils and Moral Panics—the Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar; see also Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger; an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo (London, 1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62 Church Bells, 1 May 1896.

63 Lambeth Palace Library, F. Temple MS 4, fol. 358: A. Earle—F. Temple, 14 April 1897; Mews, Stuart, ‘Lambethkonferenzen’, Theologische Realenzyklopadie, Band XX, Lieferung 3/4 (Berlin and New York, 1989), p. 420.Google Scholar

64 Michael Ramsey, ‘Foreword’, Valiant Victorian, p. viii.

65 I owe this information to Sister Marguerite Mae Eamon, CSC, Archivist to the Community of the Sisters of the Church, who read the proofs with great care and helped to improve the article, although she disagrees with my interpretation, insisting that ‘none of the accusations were ever proven’; letter to Diana Wood, 13 June 1994.