Courtroom Ghosts

Amelia Dyer A note at the beginning to say that most of the illustrations I have included in this post come from the  The Illustrated Police News , a tabloid which ran from the 1860s through to the 1930s and is a goldmine of weird and wonderful cases, complete with equally bizarre illustrations. The British Library have some examples  here  and you can find even more on Google Images.  While women who killed their own new-born  infants increasingly generated sympathy among the public and within the judicial system, there was one class of baby-killers who most certainly did not. As I mentioned last week, the introduction of the 1834 Poor Law left women who were pregnant outside of marriage in an even more dire situation than had been the case previously. If a woman wanted to continue working and stay out of the workhouse, she would need to make alternative arrangements for the care of her child. And this is where the baby farmers come in. On 16 th  May 1...

Last week I talked briefly about the ways in which attitudes towards the crimes and execution of women changed over time. The crime of infanticide, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as the crime of a mother killing her child when it is less than one year old, is a useful lens for looking at those changes. This post is based in part on my MA dissertation, which looked at the options available to unmarried mothers in the 17th and 18th centuries.  In 1624, Parliament passed a piece of legislation called the 'Act to prevent the Destrouing and Murthering of Bastards'. The full text reads Whereas many lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoid their Shame, and to escape Punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the Death of their Children, and after, if the Child be found dead, the said Women do alledge, that the said Child was born dead; whereas it falleth out sometimes (although hardly it is to be proved) that the said Child or Children were murthered by the sai...