Table Of ContentABSTRACT
Title of Document: “DEAR LITTLE LIVING ARGUMENTS”:
ORPHANS AND OTHER POOR CHILDREN, THEIR
FAMILIES, AND ORPHANAGES, BALTIMORE
AND LIVERPOOL, 1840-1910.
Marcy Kay Wilson, Ph.D., 2009
Directed by: Professor Gay Gullickson, Department of History
Orphanages in the United States and England cared for thousands of children between the early
decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These institutions were central
to local provisions for the poor during a time period in which state and government poor relief
remained limited. Though a small group of studies have focused on American orphan asylums
and even fewer works have evaluated English orphanages, no effort has of yet been made to
engage in a comparative analysis of the institutions that cared for so many children in both
countries. Through analysis of Protestant orphan asylum registers, correspondence, committee
minutes, and annual reports, this dissertation investigates the local provisions made for poor
children in Baltimore, Maryland and Liverpool, England, between 1840 and 1910, examines the
socio-economic realities of the families these children came from, the ways in which poor
children in both cities were affected by the needs of their families and the aid available to them,
and the similarities and differences that existed between these orphanages and their residents.
This dissertation argues that there were significant differences between orphanage inhabitants in
both cities when it came to parental survival and to who children ended up with after their
residence in these institutions, but that the orphanages were remarkably alike, providing the poor
children in their care with similar educational, religious and vocational training that the middle-
class reformers who ran these institutions understood as gender and class appropriate. This study
reveals a prolonged commitment on the part of orphanage administrators in both cities to the use
of indenture as a dismissal method, and suggests as well the existence of a shared trans-Atlantic
understanding of poor children and their labor when it came to these asylum officials.
“DEAR LITTLE LIVING ARGUMENTS”: ORPHANS AND OTHER POOR
CHILDREN, THEIR FAMILIES AND ORPHANAGES, BALTIMORE AND
LIVERPOOL, 1840-1910
By
Marcy Kay Wilson
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2009
Advisory Committee:
Professor Gay Gullickson, Chair
Professor Richard Price
Associate Professor Robyn Muncy
Professor Claire Moses
Professor Barbara Finkelstein
© Copyright by
Marcy Kay Wilson
2009
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ ii
List of Tables ..................................................................................................................... iii
List of Graphs .................................................................................................................... iv
Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2: Baltimore and Liverpool ................................................................................ 17
Chapter 3: The Families They Came From: Baltimore .................................................. 60
Chapter 4: The Families They Came From: Liverpool ................................................. 102
Chapter 5: The Children................................................................................................. 127
Chapter 6: The Orphanages ........................................................................................... 185
Chapter 7: The Apprenticeship of Asylum Children ..................................................... 235
Chapter 8: Once Outside the Asylum: The Realities of Dismissal to
Unrelated Adults .......................................................................................... 286
Chapter 9: Return to Family .......................................................................................... 332
Chapter 10: Conclusion.................................................................................................. 372
Glossary .......................................................................................................................... 378
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 379
ii
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Population size, Baltimore and Liverpool ........................................................ 20
Table 4.1 Causes of parental deaths in Liverpool, 1840-1910 ....................................... 103
Table 4.2 Parental deaths in Liverpool from respiratory illnesses, 1840-1910 .............. 104
Table 4.3 Parental mortality rates in Liverpool, mothers versus fathers, 1840-1910 ..... 117
Table 5.1 Birthplaces of parents of Baltimore asylum children (native/foreign), 1840-
1910......................................................................................................... 127
Table 5.2 Birthplaces of American-born parents of Baltimore asylum children
(state/region), 1840-1910 ........................................................................ 128
Table 5.3 American-born parents of Baltimore asylum children, states of origin,
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 129
Table 5.4 Maryland birthplace of parents of Baltimore asylum children,
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 130
Table 5.5 Maryland county of birth for parents of Baltimore asylum children,
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 131
Table 5.6 Foreign-born parents of Baltimore asylum children, 1840-1910 ................... 132
Table 5.7 Maternal occupations, HOF residents, 1840-1910 ......................................... 133
Table 5.8 Paternal occupations, Baltimore and Liverpool orphanage residents,
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 140
Table 5.9 Birthplaces of Baltimore asylum children (native/foreign),
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 146
Table 5.10 Maryland county of birth, Baltimore orphanage residents,
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 147
Table 5.11 Birthplaces of Liverpool orphanage inhabitants, 1840-1910 ........................ 149
Table 5.12 Birthplaces of foreign-born Baltimore orphanage residents,
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 151
Table 5.13 Average age of admittance to orphanages, Baltimore and Liverpool,
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 153
Table 5.14 Average length of residence in the orphanages, Baltimore and Liverpool,
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 159
Table 7.1 Dismissal of orphan asylum residents, Baltimore and Liverpool,
1840-1910 ............................................................................................... 236
iii
List of Graphs
Graph 3.1 Parental realities of HOF children, 1854-1910 ................................................ 61
iv
Chapter 1: Introduction
This dissertation is the result of a number of different research interests that intersected
with one another to form the finished work. I knew at the outset of this project that I not only had
an interest in social history, but that I wanted to work specifically in this field, and produce a
study that privileged this type of historical analysis. Yet it was not only social history that proved
fascinating to me. I was particularly interested in the subjects of poverty and dependence, and in
trying to understand what happened to people in different locations and time periods when it
came to these issues. I had been exposed to a number of different historical studies while a
graduate student that examined poverty and provisions for the poor during the first half of the
twentieth century. These works considered the professionalization of social work and the women
who were central to shaping the United States’ Children’s Bureau and Progressive-Era ideas
about dependence, the increasing participation of twentieth-century federal officials in debates
about dependence, and the actual creation of the modern-day welfare state in the United States
and England. These works were insightful and illuminating, but my initial research into the
secondary literature on poverty and dependence made me want to focus specifically on the
nineteenth century. This was the century in which older, colonial understandings of poverty were
changing and being redefined, and in which local public and private provisions were central to the
options the poor possessed when it came to aid and assistance.
The decision to study nineteenth-century provisions for the poor meant a number of
different possibilities in terms of the actual subjects of my study, as “the poor” encompassed so
many individuals during the period in question. I quickly decided to focus on poor children and
their families, because of my own interest in the history of children. The history of children and
childhood is a relatively young field of study that emerged in the early 1960s with the publication
of Philippe Aries’ manuscript L’Enfant et la Vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Childhood and
Family Life in Prerevolutionary France). Aries argued that the concept of childhood did not exist
1
in the medieval period, that childhood came into existence only in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and that childhood as well as parent-child relationships changed remarkably between
1
these centuries and the twentieth century. In the decades following the publication of his work, a
number of historians, including Lloyd DeMause and Linda Pollock explored the nature of parent-
child relationships, and the changes in family structure that have occurred historically, and
challenged Aries’ findings. Lloyd DeMause privileged a psychoanalytic framework in his work
The History of Childhood, and argued that childhood much predated the medieval period. He
also posited that children of the past had regularly been subject to neglect and mistreatment, but
suggested that this treatment had been progressively improving and evolving since the Classical
2
period. Linda Pollock posited in her work Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from
1500 to 1900, that there had been far fewer changes in parent-child relationships than either
DeMause or Aries suggested, that these relationships were characterized by love and emotion
rather than by the lack of such sentiment, and that many children of the recent past were not, as
3
DeMause claimed, victims of neglect and abuse.
More recent works in the field have provided significant insight into the actual lives of
children, as well as the intersections between the public, the private, and the family. I found
myself particularly interested in the works of historians like Ellen Ross and Anna Davin, who
examined the realities of poor urban children and their families in late-nineteenth and early
4
twentieth century London. Ellen Ross argued that in poor Victorian and Edwardian families,
mothers went to extraordinary lengths to insure the daily survival of their families and children,
and their efforts were central to the continued existence of these families. Anna Davin,
meanwhile, focused her study on the intersections between poor families and an expanding
1
Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood; a social history of family life, trans. Robert Baldick. (New York: Vintage
Books, 1962).
2
Lloyd DeMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974).
3
Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1983).
4
Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School, and Street in London, 1870-1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996).
2
English educational system. Davin demonstrated that in these poor families, the sexual division
of labor emerged in childhood, and was reinforced not only by the work these girls were expected
to engage in within these households, but by the lessons and training these girls received via the
English educational system. Both of these studies shed light on the lives of poor families, and to
different degrees, on the children who resided in them. And both historians suggested the
fragility of these families, despite the best and continued efforts of their members to preserve
these units. I found myself intrigued by both of these insightful works, but also curious about the
poor children that these authors did not examine—the children who lacked parents or a cohesive
family unit. I became increasingly interested in poor families, the realities of their lives, and
understanding how the youngest members of these units were affected not only by dependency,
but by the economic and social needs of their families and the options available to them. Who
were these children, what was the impact of the provisions made for them, and what were their
experiences?
My interest in the history of children, poverty and dependence, and social history were
not, however, the only aspects that contributed to the shape of this dissertation. My attempts to
familiarize myself with the variety of works that focused on the history of childhood made clear
to me that there was a real reticence on the part of many historians working in this field to engage
in comparative study. This seemed problematic to me, especially in light of the historic links
between England and the United States when it came to understandings of and provisions for the
poor. Migrants from England brought over beliefs about dependence and the treatment of the
poor to the American colonies with them, and these ideas contributed to the creation of poor laws
and the establishment of institutions in the United States in the years that followed that were quite
similar to those that existed in England as well; in this respect the systems of poor relief and aid
available to poor citizens in both countries were remarkably alike. Despite this, I could locate no
works that interrogated how provisions for the poor in the United States and England were
comparable or dissimilar. Engaging in a comparative evaluation of this aspect seemed not only
3
