Abstract
Friendless or Forsaken? Child Emigration from Britain to Canada, 1860–1935, makes a significant contribution to the history of the British child migration schemes and to the broader fields of British imperial and social history. Through an innovative local approach and meticulous research in British and Canadian archives, Ruth Lamont, Eloise Moss, and Charlotte Wildman examine the legal frameworks, cultural narratives, and the “moral economy” that sustained child emigration for decades. The book highlights the experiences and agency of the young emigrants and traces how the figure of the British Home Child has been (re)imagined in Canadian public memory.
The monograph studies the various schemes that sent poor children from the North West of England to Canada under the guise of spiritual rescue and economic opportunity. The sample of child emigration schemes enables the authors to point out similarities (such as shared assumptions about poor children) and key structural differences (particularly in funding structures) between Protestant and Catholic child welfare societies. By covering the period from 1860 to 1935, along with a discussion of contemporary memorial culture, the authors study what they describe as “a key period” (p. 27) that shaped later emigration schemes to Australia. These later schemes have received more public and scholarly attention over the last two decades. The period covered by Friendless or Forsaken? also deserves to be studied in its own right, as the authors do in five thematically structured chapters.
Chapter 1, “Criminals,” analyzes the records of emigration societies to explore criminality on two levels: first, as a trope in narratives that legitimized and promoted the emigration schemes, and second, as something which child emigrants were subjected to in the form of abuse and exploitation. The chapter brings these two seemingly disparate levels together in demonstrating that child emigrants were cast as complicit in their maltreatment because of their perceived criminality. Unlike other research, such as Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel's Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester University Press 2010) and Ellen Boucher's Empire's Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869–1967 (Cambridge University Press 2014), the chapter suggests that the children of the poor were seen as criminal, not merely as potentially criminal. A more sustained engagement with historical concepts of childhood as a phase of becoming and vulnerability would have added nuance. While the chapter draws connections with earlier convict transports, it omits discussion of the child emigration schemes of the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the authors shed important light on the conflicting ideas about inheritance and environmental influences among the supporters of child emigration.
“Legal Legitimisation for Emigrating the ‘Friendless Child’,” Chapter 2, examines the evolving relationship between the family and the state, specifically the growing role of the state in children's lives in the twentieth century. Through their analysis of the legal framework of child emigration, the authors trace the development of new forms of state intervention in the family that aimed to secure children's welfare yet ultimately failed to do so. They demonstrate that the legal frameworks for child emigration and the emigrants’ care overseas did not emerge as preconditions for the emigration schemes; instead, they were developed ad hoc in response to crises. The second part of the chapter discusses the lack of structured aftercare abroad and demonstrates how child emigration created conditions in which abuse could flourish—conditions that were known to, and largely ignored by, the emigration societies. A comparative perspective with boarding-out policies in Canada and Britain at the time might have added depth. Nevertheless, the chapter makes a compelling case for the legal system's complicity in perpetuating harm.
In Chapter 3, “Letters from a Land of Plenty,” the authors examine child emigrants’ letters both as an advertising tool for emigration societies and a means for the emigrants themselves to make sense of and direct their experiences. The chapter contributes to the scholarship on rescue narratives and to the growing body of work that studies the experiences of children in the welfare system, specifically care leavers’ correspondence back “home.” Using letters as a lens, the authors contrast the advertising strategies of Protestant and Catholic societies. The latter depended less on publicity to sustain their schemes financially. The authors argue that letters were extensively used for advertising in the twentieth century, even before “new forms of self-expression during childhood” (p. 119) were encouraged in the post-World War II period. This narrative obscures not only the fact that letters were commonly used in advertisements in the nineteenth century, as evidenced in Rebecca Swartz's article “Children’s Experiences of the Children's Friend Society Emigration Scheme to the Colonial Cape, 1833–41: Snapshots from Compliance to Rebellion” (University of London Press 2021) as well as in Greg T. Smith's article “Muffled Voices: Recovering Children's Voices from England's Social Margins” (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), but also overlooks that emigration agencies stopped publishing them in the second half of the twentieth century, as demonstrated in Gordon Lynch's article “Welfare and Constraint on Children's Agency: The Case of Post-War UK Child Migration Programmes to Australia” (University of London Press 2021). Shifting the focus to the emigrants, the chapter effectively demonstrates that despite the manipulation and appropriation of their letters, child emigrants exerted agency through their writing. They navigated institutional expectations to build social capital through strategic self-representation. They responded to their experiences and built an emotional support network by maintaining contact with their institutional surrogate family—societies’ staff and other child emigrants—as well as with their siblings (though rarely their parents).
Titled “Rescue or Reward?,” Chapter 4 maps out the creation of a “moral economy” surrounding child emigration in the North West of England. Through an examination of the financial interactions among governments, society, emigration agents, employers, and the child emigrants themselves, the authors trace how moral arguments were entangled with economic interests. Building on the work of Sarah Roddy, Julie-Marie Strange, and Bertrand Taithe on the late Victorian “charity market,” the chapter situates child emigration firmly within the dynamics of modern capitalist markets. Cost saving on domestic welfare emerged as a key motivator—and marketing strategy—for British emigration societies. The authors demonstrate that gendered ideas about financial entrepreneurship caused male and female agents to navigate this system in distinctly different ways. Contradicting Gordon Lynch's assertion in Remembering Child Migration: Faith, Nation-Building and the Wounds of Charity (Bloomsbury 2016) that child emigrants’ labor was primarily viewed as morally redemptive, the authors argue that financial considerations were central. The young emigrants often recognized this economic logic and leveraged their labor power for personal benefit. At a time when charitable enterprises were under increasing scrutiny, the authors argue that collaborating with both British and Canadian authorities likely bolstered public trust in emigration societies. However, the chapter reveals cases of financial fraud, exposing a troubling lack of concern for the emigrants’ well-being and further exposing the commercial underpinnings of the so-called “moral” economy.
Chapter 5, “Aftermath,” explores the collective memory of child immigration in Canada through the lens of public history and memory studies. The chapter draws not only on (auto)biographical sources but also on fictional representations. Unlike the politically contentious history of Indigenous child removal in Canada, the history of the so-called British Home Children has been reimagined in light of contemporary understandings of childhood and debates about Canada's national past and identity. Today, the schemes are presented as having sought to rehabilitate the young migrants, rather than punish them (which Chapter 1 argues was their actual goal). The public portrayal of the British Home Children as “good” immigrants—resilient, hardworking, and ultimately successful within traditional gender roles—supports a national narrative of progress and citizenship. The authors convincingly demonstrate that, for Canada's white society, the British Home Children have become a sort of counterbalance to the unresolved trauma associated with colonization and the residential school system, a phenomenon that Stephen Constantine has already identified at the individual level in his article “Children as Ancestors: Child Migrants and Identity in Canada” (2003). The chapter advocates for a more inclusive approach to public memory—one that accounts for the full range of child migrants’ experiences and moves beyond simplistic, redemptive tropes.
The Conclusion revisits five central research questions, synthesizing the social, cultural, legal, and political conditions that allowed the child emigration schemes to flourish in England's North West, as well as the local economy of welfare underlying the schemes and their longevity. The Conclusion highlights the negotiation of consent—between emigration societies, parents, and children—within and beyond legal frameworks, and it revisits the theme of children's agency, thereby countering dominant narratives of victimhood. The final research question connects the past and present by asking which aspects of the rationale behind the emigration schemes found their way into British adoption law and child separation policies in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. The authors argue that the practice of “closed” adoption was “directly informed” (p. 180) by the practice of emigration, both being forms of family separation under the guise of child protection. While the analogy stretches at points—given that family separation through adoption is typically aimed to create new families, unlike the emigration schemes—the comparison remains intellectually productive. Thus, the authors convincingly assert the importance of historical research into the emigration schemes and emigrants’ “lived reality” (p. 181), not only in terms of national identity formation (as discussed in Chapter 5), but also regarding child welfare policies and political accountability.
In the Introduction, the authors reflect on their positionality and privilege, and they address the problem of gatekeeping by writing a book that is interesting for and accessible to both historians and non-experts. Each chapter has a distinct research question, approach, and source corpus, and can thus be read as a separate essay. Personally, I would have preferred for the Conclusion to connect the five chapters through recurring themes such as agency or narratives. However, the approach chosen by the authors is probably better suited for a broad audience, including students.
The book has its limitations. It fails to address age as a critical category, describing all emigrants as “children” even though many were in their mid-to-late teens. The use of first names for the emigrants, which is a potentially infantilizing practice, is not problematized. Dis/ability—an important category in determining migrant eligibility—is also overlooked. Furthermore, the authors’ assertion that child migration continued until 1967 (p. 13) ignores Gordon Lynch's finding that the last child migrant arrived in Australia in 1970, as discussed in his book UK Child Migration to Australia, 1945–1970: A Study in Policy Failure (Palgrave Macmillan 2021).
Despite these shortcomings, Friendless or Forsaken? stands as an important work. The authors establish novel and enlightening connections to other fields of historical inquiry, namely to the history of juvenile criminality and economic history, as well as to literary studies. Acknowledging that “[t]he history of child migration is not simple” (p. 4), the authors succeed in presenting a complex history of conflicting interests, diverse experiences, and lasting legacies.
