Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England is the first detailed investigation of the way that child abuse was discovered, debated, diagnosed and dealt with in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The focus is placed on the child and his or her experience of court procedure and welfare practice, thereby providing a unique and important evaluation of the treatment of children in the courtroom. Through a series of case studies, including analyses of the criminal courts, the author examines the impact of legislation at grass roots level, and demonstrates why this was a formative period in the legal definition of sexual abuse. Providing a much-needed insight into Victorian attitudes, including that of Christian morality, this book makes a distinctive contribution to the history of crime, social welfare and the family. It also offers a valuable critique of current work on the history of children's homes and institutions, arguing that the inter-personal relationships of children and carers is a crucial area of study.
Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England is the first detailed investigation of the way that child abuse was discovered, debated, diagnosed and dealt with in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The focus is placed on the child and his or her experience of court procedure and welfare practice, thereby providing a unique and important evaluation of the treatment of children in the courtroom. Through a series of case studies, including analyses of the criminal courts, the author examines the impact of legislation at grass roots level, and demonstrates why this was a formative period in the legal definition of sexual abuse. Providing a much-needed insight into Victorian attitudes, including that of Christian morality, this book makes a distinctive contribution to the history of crime, social welfare and the family. It also offers a valuable critique of current work on the history of children's homes and institutions, arguing that the inter-personal relationships of children and carers is a crucial area of study.
Providing a much-needed insight into Victorian attitudes, including that of Christian morality, this book makes a distinctive contribution to the history of crime, sociak welfare and the family.
From New York Times bestselling author Naomi Wolf, Outrages explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer’s refusal to stay silenced. Newly updated, first North American edition--a paperback original In 1857, Britain codified a new civil divorce law and passed a severe new obscenity law. An 1861 Act of Parliament streamlined the harsh criminalization of sodomy. These and other laws enshrined modern notions of state censorship and validated state intrusion into people’s private lives. In 1861, John Addington Symonds, a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford who already knew he loved and was attracted to men, hastily wrote out a seeming renunciation of the long love poem he’d written to another young man. Outrages chronicles the struggle and eventual triumph of Symonds—who would become a poet, biographer, and critic—at a time in British history when even private letters that could be interpreted as homoerotic could be used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law. Drawing on the work of a range of scholars of censorship and of LGBTQ+ legal history, Wolf depicts how state censorship, and state prosecution of same-sex sexuality, played out—decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde—shadowing the lives of people who risked in new ways scrutiny by the criminal justice system. She shows how legal persecutions of writers, and of men who loved men affected Symonds and his contemporaries, including Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and the painter Simeon Solomon. All the while, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was illicitly crossing the Atlantic and finding its way into the hands of readers who reveled in the American poet’s celebration of freedom, democracy, and unfettered love. Inspired by Whitman, and despite terrible dangers he faced in doing so, Symonds kept trying, stubbornly, to find a way to express his message—that love and sex between men were not “morbid” and deviant, but natural and even ennobling. He persisted in various genres his entire life. He wrote a strikingly honest secret memoir—which he embargoed for a generation after his death—enclosing keys to a code that the author had used to embed hidden messages in his published work. He wrote the essay A Problem in Modern Ethics that was secretly shared in his lifetime and would become foundational to our modern understanding of human sexual orientation and of LGBTQ+ legal rights. This essay is now rightfully understood as one of the first gay rights manifestos in the English language. Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is a critically important book, not just for its role in helping to bring to new audiences the story of an oft-forgotten pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights who could not legally fully tell his own story in his lifetime. It is also critically important for what the book has to say about the vital and often courageous roles of publishers, booksellers, and freedom of speech in an era of growing calls for censorship and ever-escalating state violations of privacy. With Outrages, Wolf brings us the inspiring story of one man’s refusal to be silenced, and his belief in a future in which everyone would have the freedom to love and to speak without fear.
The question "What is a child?" is at the heart of the world the Victorians made. In Child-Loving, James Kincaid writes a fresh chapter in the history of the Victorian era. Dealing with one of the most intimate and troubling notions of the modern period - how the Victorians (and we, their descendants) - imagine children within the continuum of human sexuality, Kincaid's work compels us to consider just how we love the children we love. Throughout the nineteenth century, the child developed as a symbol of purity, innocence, asexuality - the angelic child perhaps not wholly real. Yet the child could also be a figure of fantasy, obsession, suppressed desires. Think of Lewis Carroll's Alice (or, a few years later, James Barrie's Peter Pan). The image of the child as both pure and strangely erotic is part of the mythology of Victorian culture. And so, Kincaid argues, the Victorians viewed children in ways that seem to us now complex and perhaps bizarre. But do we fare much better today? Contemporary society sees children at risk, in need of protection from pedophiles. Yet as our culture recoils from the horror of child molestation, we offer children's bodies as spectacle in the media and advertising, giving children the erotic attention we wish to deny. Built on a decade of research into literary, medical, cultural, and legal materials, Child-Loving traces for the first time the growth of our conceptions of the body, the child, and sexuality, and the stories we tell about them.
In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed. In Family Likeness, Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of "family" and even helped refine those borders. Corbett takes up historically contingent and culturally variable notions of who is and is not a relative and whom one can and cannot marry. Her argument is informed by legal and political debates; texts in sociology and anthropology; and discussions on the biology of heredity, breeding, and eugenics. In Corbett's view, marriage within families—between cousins, in-laws, or adoptees—offered Victorian women, both real and fictional, an attractive alternative to romance with a stranger, not least because it allowed them to maintain and strengthen relations with other women within the family.
In this amazing odyssey of two black women from the 1930s to the present, all the storytelling gifts of a brilliant Pulitzer Prize -- winning writer are abundantly displayed. When we first meet Baby, she's one of six black children abandoned by their parents during the Depression. They are roadwalkers -- homeless wanderers across the rural South, leading a dangerous, almost enchanted life. One by one they are saved, lost, or simply disappear, until only Baby and a brother are left, living off the land -- a primitive gypsy existence hauntingly described. Finally Baby is captured -- almost like a wild animal -- by the white farm manager of an old plantation where the children have been hiding. He sends her to an orphanage in New Orleans, where she guards the rich mythic content of her wandering against the invasive kindness of the nuns by covering the walls with strange, brilliant drawings of flowers and animals. We next see Baby decades later, through the eyes of her daughter, Nanda, who at thirty-six looks back at her own childhood. Baby and Nanda move into the middle class through Baby's eccentrically successful career -- first as a seamstress, then as a designer of dresses for rich white women. Raised a princess in the protective circle of Baby's magic, Nanda in her teens is suddenly catapulted into the white world when she is sent off to integrate a white Catholic girls' school in the East. Seeing herself as her mother saw herself -- alone in an alien place, Nanda finds an entirely different means of survival. A rich and wonderfully fresh -- often astonishing -- evocation of the black experience in the South, seen through the lives of two fascinating women.
"This work brings together the thoughts on this question advanced by leading scholars, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, from around the world. These thinkers...provide new perspectives on sanctioned and informal responses to abuse in religious, educational and total institutions, as well as to abuse carried out in non-institutional settings."--
From the author of the "hysterically funny and unsettlingly fascinating" New York Times bestseller Unmentionable, a hilarious illustrated guide to the secrets of Victorian child-rearing (Jenny Lawson). Feminist historian Therese Oneill is back, to educate you on what to expect when you're expecting . . . a Victorian baby! In Ungovernable, Oneill conducts an unforgettable tour through the backwards, pseudoscientific, downright bizarre parenting fashions of the Victorians, advising us on: How to be sure you're not too ugly, sickly, or stupid to breed What positions and room decor will help you conceive a son How much beer, wine, cyanide and heroin to consume while pregnant How to select the best peasant teat for your child Which foods won't turn your children into sexual deviants And so much more. Endlessly surprising, wickedly funny, and filled with juicy historical tidbits and images, Ungovernable provides much-needed perspective on -- and comic relief from -- the age-old struggle to bring up baby.
