[In the following excerpt, Parr examines the working conditions in late nineteenth-century Britain that led poor parents to send their children to Canada as agricultural apprentices. Parr also discusses the conditions encountered by the children when they arrived in Canada.]

England does not know what childhood is.¹

There were visitors who came away from Salford, East London and East Glasgow eighty years ago claiming that in those crowded streets and lanes there were no children. School Board inspectors declared that there was no childhood among the poor, that there was only labour. European travellers reported that the labouring boys and girls of England were treated like men. Mission workers protested that their youngest clients were always pondering over things, apparently unable to play, unaware what play was. The pioneering social investigator Charles Booth described the elementary school pupils he met in East London as ‘anxious-eyed, with faces old beyond their years’ and ‘never no time to play’.²

Plainly tens of thousands of young people who had not yet reached their fourteenth birthday grew up among the labouring poor of Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their names appear on the school board and workhouse registers. Their numbers appear in the census. Their faces appear in photographs of the markets and wharves where they worked and of the crowded courts where they lived. It is true that they did not usually play in distinct places called children's playgrounds or sleep in separate children's rooms. They did not read children's books or wear specially designed children's clothes. Their inexperience was probably not praised as child-like; their mistakes were probably not excused on the ground that boys would be boys. But if outsiders said they were not children, their parents knew, and they knew, that they were not adults.

Eighty thousand of these girls and boys born among the urban labouring poor of Britain, children in the lights of their own class if not to others, while still very young were sent to Canada through the efforts of philanthropic rescue homes and parish workhouse schools. They came from that 30 per cent of the British population which lived in poverty. They had been born in those parts of British cities in which, in the 1890s, children at birth might expect to live only thirty-six years and one in four would not reach his or her first birthday. Boys and girls from the slums were shorter and thinner, weaker and less active than the average British child. The conditions that killed so many also severely impaired the later lives of those who did not die. And children faced the same implacable economic constraints that so sternly governed the lives of their elders.³

Men from among the British labouring poor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not earn a living wage. Women and children worked to provide basic necessities. When the labouring power of any part of the family failed, all suffered. In such crises parents were forced to place their children with parish and philanthropic institutions, some of which later sent on to Canada the distressed children first presented to them.⁴

The crisis points in a family's life were not entirely unpredictable. Manufacturer and sociologist Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree found ‘five alternating periods of want and comparative prosperity’ among the labouring people he studied in York, a pattern he called the poverty cycle. He found that during the years when children lived at home their economic relationships with their parents underwent several radical changes. At first they lived in scarcity because they and their young siblings kept their mothers from full-time paid work. As they grew older and more economically useful family circumstances improved. Boys and girls in their teens and young people in their early twenties found themselves with spare pennies jingling in their pockets at the end of the week. These relatively pleasant times continued up to marriage and afterwards until the first child arrived. With more children the parents' child-poverty deepened, to be relieved again only as their own children became productive. Men and women with adolescent children at home once again lived relatively well. As sons and daughters left to marry and live on their own, the last phase of a cycle began, the drift back into the poverty of the elderly person alone. This pattern was ubiquitous among labouring people, a stark and inevitable cycle. Its effects appeared even in the physical strength and stamina of siblings, older children being less robust because they ‘starve more’, whereas ‘by the time the younger ones come along, the older ones are starting to work, and there is more money coming in, and more food to go round’.⁵

The poverty cycle, induced principally by the changing needs and productive capacities of children, had profound effects upon the relationships between parents and their sons and daughters, delineating the stages in a child's life and the differences between childhood and adulthood. Working people whose lives were governed by the poverty cycle relied regularly upon their kin for help in times of crisis because they were less likely to refuse the request; in turn, relatives were aided because they were more likely to return the favour. But circumstances made everyone aware of the degree to which family associations made them better or worse off. Economic calculation forced itself upon family relations; kin lived together when sharing a household made them better off. Single persons considered leaving the common dwelling-place when it appeared that they might improve their lot by being on their own. With a subsistence crisis always looming, family members had to take account of the burdens and the benefits of family ties.⁶

But there was trust and affection too. Kin shared what little they had, confident that their generosity would neither be abused nor go unrepaid. The family performed vital psychological functions, and calculative considerations were not always paramount.⁷ Nevertheless, the poverty cycle did force economic considerations to the fore in nineteenth-century British families living on the margin of subsistence.

The child immigrants' families were plainly part of this group and were certain to be aware that family links implied clear economic gains and losses. This knowledge shaped parents' demands of their children and children's attitudes toward their parents.

Almost all these families would have been counted among Rowntree's four poverty classes in York or among Booth's labouring poor of London. But the child immigrants came from urban centres throughout Great Britain. And although with rare exceptions they came from families bound to the poverty cycle, the range of deprivation among the poor was large. An attempt to portray the childhood experience of the immigrants could thus render only those parts that would likely have been widely shared through the poverty cycle until some graver crisis intervened to force them into an institution. What follows is therefore an optimistic portrait, a description of childhood in the most stable and adequately provisioned sections of the labouring poor, presented to place the child immigrants' Canadian apprenticeships in perspective.

In any time or any culture a child begins life as a frail and dependent being. Among the child immigrants' families this dependency usually continued through the first six years of life. Infants and toddlers drew on family resources for food, clothing and shelter—though of course their demands in any of these respects were small. What the youngest children did need, what heavily burdened their kin, was physical care and supervision. Baby-minding required the time and attention of more mature family members, time that might otherwise have been spent in the paid labour market, attention that might otherwise have increased the efficiency of the small craft manufactures pursued in the home, energies that in terms of the immediate economic interests of the family would have been better invested in the adults and older children who were making material contributions to the well-being of the household.

The care of young children sorely taxed the family's resources. Sometimes women withdrew from the labour market to tend their first-born, and the family made do without their wages for the duration of the youngster's dependency. In other cases parents paid cash to a neighbour for the care of toddlers and infants while they were both away at work. Women who found themselves raising several preschool children alone often paid a substantial portion of their income to the nearby nurse or the local crèche, especially in urban centres outside London where factories had replaced domestic industry and removed the possibility of supporting the family on handicraft work in the home. The records of the child emigration agencies are full of cases in which widows' youngest children were surrendered to the homes because adequate day-care became beyond the laundry worker's or charwoman's means. Schooling was an inexpensive alternative to paid nurses, crèches or mothers tarrying unpaid as baby-minders at home. The expense of child-minding made working mothers particularly eager to send their youngsters to school as soon as possible.⁸ In 1912 it was contended that in the poorer districts of London there were more children in the elementary schools at the non-compulsory age of 3 to 5 than in the succeeding years of 5 to 7.⁹

By age 6, boys and girls were no longer as dependent upon the family. Each now had recognised responsibilities toward their kin and useful roles within the household economy. For the next five or six years, although their cash contributions to the family income would not be large, they performed important services in the interest of the group. Bartering their board, shelter and clothing for their labour, they typically became, from age 6 to 12, the care-takers of the working-class household.

Among the families from which the young immigrants to Canada were drawn, child care was principally children's work. Once one sibling entered the care-taker phase, particularly if the eldest child was a girl, paid nurses or crèches were less often required. More of the mother's attentions might be freed for other household tasks or paid labour. Dependent infants and toddlers were now the care-taker's charges; the household had become self-sufficient in baby-minding.

While their mothers retained household responsibilities for cooking and laundry, baby-care was entrusted to girls from 6 to 12 and to boys—chiefly those under 10—who could be cajoled into such unmanly work. Girls packed their young siblings into perambulators and go-carts and went about on family errands or escaped the family's crowded rooms into the neighbouring streets to play. The Fabian journalist Magdalene Pember Reeves, writing in 1913, reported seeing infants, unwitting participants in their older sisters' fantasies, careering down streets in prams transformed by youthful imagination into ambulances and toboggans, or hidden together in a corner under one nursemaid's eye so that friends might by turns have hands free for skipping. By and large girls' play was more subdued and less adventurous than boys because girls were constrained by toddlers tugging at their skirts.¹⁰

In the households of widows or widowers, children aged 6 to 12 were likely to have heavier responsibilities. To them fell the cooking, cleaning and laundry which their mother had done before she died or before their father's death forced her to work longer hours away from home to keep the household together. One man remembers that his widowed mother worked by day waitressing and then by night at catering jobs in Manchester. He kept the home fires burning, collecting his sister from school and fetching their dinner from a neighbour or from a cooked food shop. At bedtime they settled themselves upstairs, the boy with a string tied around his leg and dangled out of the window. His mother, returning late from work, thus wakened him to descend and let her in. In most families in which the mother worked away from home, girls in the care-taker stage ‘kept house’, tidying the rooms and preparing the evening meal in their mothers' absence. Mission workers who wanted girls of this age admitted to their homes could expect especially strong parental resistance. Without the caretaker's unpaid services, many a household delicately balanced on the edge of subsistence would have been lost.¹¹

In London, where the old patterns of domestic industry were still common in the late nineteenth century, many children 6 to 12, both boys and girls, worked at home with their parents making lucifer matches, paper bags, flowers and clothing. Young children were valued in this work for their agility and quickness, which towards the end of the care-taker stage made girls more useful in home manufactures than boys.¹²

The slum workshops of the late nineteenth century were not so well serviced as the rural cottage industries, their counterparts of a century before. No agent arrived at the door with raw materials in hand or, after disputing the quality of the work, carried the finished articles away. Instead, children before going to school ran to fetch their mother's and sisters' materials and each evening returned what had been completed during the day.

Fetching and carrying was an important part of the responsibilities of each child in the care-taker stage. Many daughters of widows worked with their mothers in the wash-house, sorting and packaging bundles, turning the wringer, helping to carry laundry to their mothers' customers and to collect work for the next day. Much of this running about was to save the family money or to preserve a parent's limited energy for more demanding tasks. Sometimes the child's role was more strictly to save face—to take goods to the pawnshop, to ask a shopkeeper for a small loan, to coax from him extraordinarily small quantities or luxury goods (‘fancies’) on credit when the family bill was already long.¹³

There were also children in the care-taker stage who worked outside their home before they reached school-leaving age. They loitered about railway stations to make a few pennies carrying bags, scoured vacant lots and rubbish heaps for odd bits to sell as scrap, ran with bread and tea for men in the lock-up or with nursing infants to their mothers employed at the mills. They shone shoes, or sold rush-pipes and matches or firewood on the streets. Some earned money running messages. At times even the vestiges of early industrial child labour practices cropped up in later nineteenth-century case records for care-taker age children. One lad came into an emigration home from Kilmarnock in Scotland when he was 11 in February 1872; an orphan, he had been working in the coal pits with a man who gave him food and lodging in return for work.¹⁴

Parents urged their sons and daughters into such employment in the family interest. Youngsters surrendered to their mothers the proceeds of bottle collecting, dragging barrows and carts in the market or mixing lather at the barber's, and hoped for a small bit back for their own fun. Both Alexander Paterson and Reginald Bray who lived among the working people of London in the early twentieth century claim this pattern was a general one even among the artisan class. Boys and girls worked under parental suggestion or compulsion principally to augment the family income but perhaps also, Paterson suggests, because their mothers thought it ‘better for a boy to wander round the streets for the purpose of delivering newspapers than to wander round for no purpose at all’.¹⁵ In 1898 almost 150,000 school-age British children were working for wages. Seven years later employed boys and girls comprised 20 per cent of all school children in the poorer districts of London, the districts from which child emigrants came.¹⁶

Some school board visitors railed against this paid work, arguing that it kept children from school or made them too weary to benefit from their attendance in class. More thoughtful observers understood that wage work was but a small part of the labour the poor were forced to exact from their children. In the poorest sections of London Charles Booth found only 52 per cent of children attending school regularly. Younger children among the labouring poor were sent off to class each day to get them out of the way, but older children attended only when their home responsibilities were not pressing.¹⁷

Before the First World War school board officials shared with working-class parents a ‘strong sense of the domestic responsibilities’ of children 6 to 12 and were unwilling to tamper unduly with their care-taker role at home. Charles Booth called home work ‘fairly reasonable grounds’ for keeping children from school. Even reformers who were unbending about the state's obligations to protect the health of such children were reluctant to be ‘too stringent’ in the regulation of care-takers' vital family work, which was often important in lifting the household to or above the poverty line. School attendance officers had to be flexible and lenient in their work among the poor, accepting explanations about absences and compromising about fines. They found their recently created notion of the school-age child in direct conflict with a longer-standing definition of the role of children 6 to 12 within the household economy, a role still too essential to be challenged.¹⁸

At some time between 12 and 14, depending upon their progress and record of attendance, youngsters were relieved of the burden of being present at school. They were free then to take full-time work, and their role within the family economy changed once more. They were no longer care-takers, bartering their services for a share of the family's goods. They became contributors to the family income whose individual fortunes in the job market affected, sometimes substantially, the well-being of their parents and siblings.¹⁹

Older children were often the mainstays of the child emigrants' families. The crisis that led parents to surrender a dependent or care-taker-aged child to an institution would have made them particularly reliant upon the help of older boys and girls who were beginning to bring home wages.²⁰ Thomas W., who homesteaded in 1910 near Swift Current, Saskatchewan, had lived until he was 9 in Bethnal Green, East London, one of a family of seven who subsisted on parish relief and the earnings of his elder sister. When their relief was cut off, Thomas came to a London home because his sister's pay as a matchbox maker was not by itself enough to support them all. Lydia S. was a Lancashire weaver of 16 when in February 1901 she decided to leave home, probably in exasperation with her mother's drinking. Mother and brother were left destitute by her departure, thrown from their lodgings and found sleeping in waterclosets. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was called in, and the boy was placed by magistrate's order in an emigration home. Henry E. and his brother Robert were admitted when they were 8 and 9 so that their widowed mother could find a situation in service. There was one other brother in the family, an errand boy who had been their sole support. His dependants being cared for elsewhere, this 13-year-old continued on his own at his job.²¹

But commonly among the labouring poor, school-leavers were expected to be contributors to the family income. They surrendered their wages to their parents as a matter of course, not as an exceptional response to a particular family crisis. Their role as contributors was shaped by patterns of earning capacities generally understood and traditions about family responsibility generally respected among British working people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²²

Young men and women taking up their first jobs often turned over the whole of their earnings to their parents. Alexander Paterson, observing South London in 1911, described ‘each boy and girl’ being impelled by ‘some unwritten law’ to ‘bring back their wages to the mother’. Robert Roberts remembers from his boyhood in Salford that ‘most Edwardian elders in the lower working class’ demanded their children's earnings ‘as a natural right—a prerogative unchanged from the previous century’. This pattern changed, as did so much else, among working people during the First World War, but in Manchester in the 1920s, although ‘the old custom was slowly dying’, boys felt obliged to follow it still, to ‘tip up the wages’ to their parents and count as their due only the sixpence or shilling they received back in ‘spends’.²³

Boys and girls who turned over their pay packets unbroken were accepting a traditional working-class description of the life-cycle that characterised children as debtors. Contributors were acknowledging the obligations they had accumulated as care-takers and dependants, making restitution to the family economy for the burden they had been in their earlier years. After leaving school, children were expected ‘to compensate parents for all the “kept” years of childhood’, and sons and daughters of working-class families commonly accepted the responsibilities this parental expectation implied. Joseph Kett describes a ‘jarring mixture of complete freedom and total subordination’ in nineteenth-century American youngsters. The same dilemma characterised the last stage of a British labouring childhood.²⁴

Not only did parents control their children's earnings, but they often chose the school-leaver's first job as well. Unskilled and semiskilled labourers with thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children were beginning to notice their own physical strength fading, to anticipate declines in their own earnings at manual work. As parents they wanted the best for the family income, which sometimes meant manoeuvring teenagers into dreary but steady jobs they heartily detested. Parents counted low-paying apprenticeships the prerogative of skilled labourers' children and a luxury the families of poorer workers could not afford. Walter Greenwood wanted to work with his hands. His mother insisted that in Manchester, with short-time, strikes and lock-outs, a white-collar job was preferable. A neighbour girl, Hetty Boarder, wanted to work in a theatre. Her mother insisted she had a responsibility to take a more regular job. Greenwood at 14 took the work his mother found him as a pawnbroker's clerk; Hetty went not into the theatre but into a steam laundry.²⁵

In London, the interests of parents and school-leavers were more generally in harmony. The best-paid work for a boy of 14 in a commercial city—street work as a van-boy, a newsboy, a runner for the post office, or a beer-boy at a work-site—offered exactly the variety, the freedom, the movement, that ‘element of adventure’ the school-leaver coveted, while also providing that immediate boost to family income parents urgently required. The conflict in London emerged later when the position both school-leaver and parent agreed upon was filled by a younger lad leaving the sixteen-year-old in a ‘blind-alley’, unskilled, wanting ‘a man's wage and … only fit for a boy's job’.²⁶

Although contributors' first wages went entirely to their mothers, after a time some fixed weekly sum was usually agreed upon, and young men and women kept the rest for clothing, entertainments or their ‘future’. Boys were usually expected to pay more to their parents than girls. Helen Bosanquet, a London social worker, thought this was because they ate more. It may also have been because they had done less for the family in the preceding care-taker stage.²⁷ Charles Booth thought that contributors and their mothers set a fixed weekly sum for board and lodging when mothers might ‘otherwise “make a profit”’ from the whole of their sons' and daughters' earnings. Aware that his readers might misconstrue this as a mercenary or callously calculative arrangement, Booth added by way of caution that ‘though it may savour more of business than the family tie’, this approach to family finances was ‘natural enough’ and had ‘become customary’ among the labouring poor.²⁸

In their later years at home older children in York commonly contributed ‘a sum for board and lodging equivalent to that paid by ordinary lodgers’, in the 1890s from five to ten shillings a week. But sons and daughters were less expensive to keep than lodgers because they demanded less furniture and space of their own and were less likely to default in their payments to the household exchequer. An earning child added only from 2s 10d to 3s 8d to the expenses of the household.²⁹ Young men and women paid no more to live at home than they would have paid to live elsewhere, often a bit less. Yet their families were better off for their presence and their payments because their contributions exceeded the cost of their keep.

For these young people childhood was drawing to a close. Their debts were almost extinguished. They had very nearly earned the autonomy of adults. They no longer took direction from their parents about the kind of work they did and paid less heed than they had when younger to direction about the kind of company and hours they kept. Older boys came to expect the extra rations to keep up their strength which male breadwinners were allowed. Domestic quarrels and the discomfort of the dwelling might drive young men and women in their late teens from home into lodgings. Alternatively, they left to marry, according to the family order of things, in their early twenties when their ‘kept’ years of childhood had been fully repaid.³⁰

Through the duration of the juvenile immigration movement, childhood among the British labouring poor changed. On one hand working-class childhood became a concern of public policy. State regulations affecting children's employment, school attendance and health became more stringent. The state came to be described as the parents' partner in the important national work of child-rearing. On the other hand working people came to want more schooling for their sons and daughters and to think of children 6 to 12 less as workers and more as helpers than they had previously. By Edwardian times more children were cared for by adults as dependants than during Victoria's reign; care-takers more often helped at home in addition to, rather than instead of, going to school; more contributors began to work full-time at 14 rather than 12. Nevertheless working people continued to describe the debts children must repay parents before they might become autonomous adults as a matter of ‘custom’, ‘natural right’ and ‘unwritten law’.³¹ The influence of the poverty cycle upon the seasons of a labouring childhood had not disappeared.

Behold the Lord thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and possess it … Moreover, your little ones shall go thither and upon them will I give it, and they shall possess it.³²

The majority of these children are the offal of the most depraved characters in the cities of the Old Country … I say this country young as it is should put its foot upon the importation into this country of that class of people.³³

The belief that agricultural work is pure and purifying, that rural life is innocent and peculiarly blessed by the gods, is very old. In the nineteenth century this ancient idealisation of agriculture, the association of rural life with morality and city life with corruption, of agriculture with nature's bounty and commerce with man's capacity to destroy, gained new force in Britain. Industry replaced trade as the mainstay of urban growth. The landscape and the physical health of workers were blighted in industrial districts. The more ugly and congested cities became, the more the countryside seemed the reservoir from which civic, moral and spiritual virtue sprang; the more those seeking to solve the problems of the cities turned to the countryside for solutions; the more rural communities saw expanding cities as a threat to their way of life.³⁴

The two most publicised contemporary back-to-the-land proposals, William Booth's farm colonies and Rider Haggard's agricultural settlements in the Dominions, were designed to rescue urban working-class men and their families. From mid-century on, agricultural training became a particularly important part of child-saving as well. The origins of the practice were continental. In the wake of the revolutions of 1848 two German Protestants, Pastor Fliedner of Kaiserwerth and Johann-Heinrich Wichern of Hamburg, had begun to place destitute and criminal youngsters in the countryside to separate them from the city breeding grounds of atheism and radical politics. Many British evangelicals engaged in city missions with children visited Kaiserwerth and Wichern's Rauhe Haus. Annie Macpherson wrote often about the lessons she had learned from them. Following the German model many later Victorian institutions for children were built outside cities, often with farms attached to provide fresh food and outdoor work to strengthen the characters and constitutions of urban children. Several rescue homes which sponsored child emigrants also ran agricultural training programmes in Britain. Quarrier's village at Bridge of Weir, the National Children's Home at Bolton, Lancashire, and Fegan's institutions at Stony Stratford and Goudhurst are examples.³⁵

A like-minded American, Charles Loring Brace, met Wichern in Germany in 1851, returned to found the New York Children's Aid Society in 1852, and began placing city youngsters in the midwestern states in 1854. Brace argued that ‘the best of all asylums for the outcast child’ was ‘the farmer's home’, that the family life of the countryside was ‘God's reformatory’. His faith in rural virtue was so unquestioning that from 1854 until 1891 he sent 86,000 New York children west to places found for them through newspaper advertisements. Macpherson visited Brace's circle in New York in 1866. Rye inspected the midwestern part of the work in 1868. By 1870 both were placing British city children in Canadian country homes and echoing Brace's insistence that the ‘cultivators of the soil’ were the best parents for the children of the urban poor.³⁶

British evangelical child-savers' notions about agricultural Canada, like Brace's descriptions of the rural midwest, were highly idealised, romantic, naturalist and thus easily integrated with popular contemporary analogies between children and young plants. Barnardo called Canada a ‘fair garden-like country, yielding abundantly’. Macpherson and Birt liked to refer to emigration as ‘spring transplanting’. Their colleague Samuel Smith saw children ‘planted in a quiet farm’ and saved from the towns by an enlivened interest in animals, flowers and gardens.³⁷ The sponsors of child emigration claimed that plentiful food and the ‘grand Canadian air’ made ‘slender sickly saplings’ thrive and transformed pallid city boys into ‘brawny sun-burnt’ lads as different from their former selves as ‘chalk from cheese’, that agricultural work ‘depauperised’, ‘unworkhoused’ and gave young people pride in ‘honest industry’.³⁸

The child emigrants' institutional guardians saw Canada as a frontier society unburdened by class distinctions where their youngsters would have free schooling and opportunities, despite their working-class parentage, to rise to the ‘highest levels’ of Canadian society. In ‘a new country recently recovered from the forest’ where everything was ‘rough and ready’, children were expected to learn a ‘spirit of independence’. Barnardo, Stephenson and Macpherson emphasised particularly the equality within Canadian households, arguing that because servants shared table and sitting room with colonial employers their young wards would be treated as family, sharing ‘with the farmers’ own family work and food, school and play’.³⁹

Most important, British advocates of child emigration described Canadians as more pious, moral and temperate than Britons. Barnardo claimed never to have seen beer or wine in any Canadian home. Family worship was said to be more common in the Dominion than in the Mother Country, family life ‘more wholesome, practical, kindly and humanising’, more loving and more often a path to ‘personal godliness’. More Canadians than Britons were said to practise their faith and be willing to shelter needy children in order to lead them to Christ.⁴⁰ Thus Canada seemed the ideal welcoming place for the outcast child.

Documentation on individual masters and mistresses is difficult to find. Applicants for boys and girls sent descriptions of their own families and the child they needed, together with a reference from their clergymen and a small fee to the home's representative. The homes did not interview prospective employers. Master and child typically encountered each other first on a railway station platform. Youngsters whose placements were unsuccessful were sometimes returned to the home, more often sent on direct by train to their next place. Employer's applications and references have rarely been preserved; the case records identify them only by name and postal address.

The British agencies admitted that most masters and mistresses wanted youngsters for the work they could do, but the financial terms upon which children were indentured varied considerably. Most rescue home children were placed on farms, although some girls worked in small towns and a small number of teenagers were found domestic situations in cities. We do know that the societies were not fastidious in their selection of situations, fundamentally because they believed rural homes were intrinsically good places for children, additionally because numbers of the young emigrants had physical limitations or difficulties in adjusting to Canada which restricted their options and their British guardians' latitude for choice.

The first distribution homes for young emigrants, Rye's Our Western Home at Niagara-on-the-Lake and Macpherson's Marchmont at Belleville, were established in two of Ontario's oldest agricultural districts, regions settled by British Loyalists after the American Revolution. This central Canadian focus remained a feature of the juvenile immigration movement throughout its history.

There were homes in other parts of the Dominion. Macpherson's sister, Louisa Birt, placed her parties in Nova Scotia before she acquired her home at Knowlton, Quebec, in 1877. J. T. Middlemore, after experimenting with a farm home near London, Ontario, moved his Canadian headquarters to Fairfax Station near Halifax. Several other smaller organisations also established homes in the Maritimes, probably because these locations minimised their transportation costs. On the other hand their proximity to homestead lands made western locations seem attractive. Barnardo ran two Manitoba branches, a city home in Winnipeg and a farm school at Russell. The London children's Aid Society also placed youngsters from Winnipeg. The Roman Catholic dioceses found situations for some children through Manitoba and Saskatchewan orphanages.

But the largest emigration agencies placed most of their boys and girls in southern Ontario, western Quebec and Quebec's Eastern Townships, south of Montreal. Barnardo's main home for boys was in Toronto, that for girls in Peterborough. J. W. C. Fegan's Canadian branch was also in Toronto. Macpherson placed her youngsters from headquarters at Galt and then Stratford, leaving Marchmont to the care of Ellen Bilbrough and her husband Robert Wallace for Glasgow and Manchester children. The Methodist National Children's Home worked out of Hamilton. Quarrier built his Canadian branch, Fairknowe, at Brockville. The Church of England Waifs and Strays Society joined Birt in the Eastern Townships with homes for both girls and boys at Sherbrooke. Most Catholic children were placed out from institutions in Ottawa and Montreal.

Within central Canada some placement patterns can be seen. Catholics settled their wards in areas of western Quebec and eastern Ontario where the Catholic church was strong, priests were numerous and ‘a more Catholic atmosphere’ prevailed. Some youngsters were sent to French-Canadian families, a difficult predicament for English-speaking girls and boys, justified on the grounds that rural Quebeckers were particularly ‘faithful and loyal to their religion, and steady and persevering in their work’. After 1904 the separate English diocesan committees consolidated their Canadian work through Ottawa, and placed most of their children with Irish-Canadian families in the mixed agricultural and lumbering districts of the Ottawa Valley.⁴¹ The Waifs and Strays Society preferred Anglican households for their children and found many Church of England parishioners among the gentry settlers of the Eastern Townships. Quarrier of Glasgow chose Brockville because the surrounding countryside had been settled by Scottish pioneers, and Scots cultural and religious influences remained strong in the region. The other Protestant homes would not place their wards with Catholic families but otherwise did not discriminate in their choice on the basis of denomination. Barnardo's, whose work was larger than any other, sent children throughout Ontario. Fegan, Rye, Macpherson and the National Children's Home served the more immediate districts surrounding their distribution centres.⁴²

Farmers in southern Ontario and western Quebec were at that time more strongly affected by rural-urban migrations and the declining size of farm families⁴³ than the Maritimes or the west and hence more troubled by agricultural labour shortages. Whereas Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island retained a surplus of rural workers between 1880 and 1920⁴⁴ and immigrants intending to enter agriculture swelled the farm labour force of the prairie provinces, in the longest-settled rural districts of English-speaking central Canada proprietors claimed they had increasing difficulties finding hired boys and girls and in consequence especially welcomed the immigrant children.⁴⁵

In many respects the British evangelicals' view of the agricultural society their young wards entered was correct. Rural Ontario did have a strong puritanical streak. Farm families did tend to be pious abstainers. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union began in 1874 in Owen Sound, Ontario, in a district in which many Barnardo, Fegan and Macpherson children were placed. In the 1890s more than forty thousand Ontario residents belonged to temperance organisations.⁴⁶ The churches were the most important institutions in rural communities. And although they were not as likely as the British child-savers to be evangelicals, Ontarians did take their religion seriously.

Social historians have since described rural central Canada after Confederation as a place not unlike that Macpherson, Barnardo, Birt and Samuel Smith portrayed, a world of ‘sturdy independent men’ who tilled their own hundred acres

before the opening of the West had introduced pure commercial agriculture, before modern power had been applied directly to the farm, before the process of suburbanisation had begun, but after the hardships and the crudities of the pioneer age had been overcome.⁴⁷

Yet the arcadian image of the Canadian countryside was called into question soon after the child emigration movement began. The child-savers' own agricultural idealism caught them out. More clear-eyed British observers protested that the British homes substituted simple faith for the scrupulous supervision their young wards required. In Canada, what is more, critics who shared the evangelicals' belief that the city was evil and the countryside innocent concluded that youngsters raised in the worst British slums were a medical and moral threat to rural Canada.

The first extended debate over child emigration began after Andrew Doyle, the senior inspector deputed by the Local Government Board to investigate charges against Miss Rye, filed his report in February 1875. Doyle was sixty-five years old and had worked for twenty-six years to strengthen the workhouse system in districts under his charge. He opposed boarding-out in British households for pauper children and wanted even the children of widows admitted to workhouse schools on the ground that youngsters received better training and better supervision in institutions. He was a man who idealised order and suspected informality.⁴⁸

And he found much to suspect in Canada. While acknowledging the good intentions of the British child-savers and their Canadian friends, Doyle noted that Miss Rye and Miss Macpherson were placing children in homes about which they knew little and then supervising them imperfectly or not at all. In visits to four hundred British boys and girls in Ontario and Quebec he claimed to have found an intolerable incidence of ill-treatment, overwork and physical abuse. He thought the programme worth continuing, especially for young children, but only if a well-regulated system replaced the well-meaning voluntarism which placed young people at risk.

He recommended for Canada the same kind of programme he would have established in a British parish: enlarged distributing homes in which children would stay for long periods after they arrived, with infirmaries and industrial training courses, institutions certified like industrial schools and periodically scrutinised like workhouses. He wanted each prospective situation vetted by an official familiar with the community, preferably a member of the local county council. He wanted youngsters once placed to be regularly visited by expert independent observers such as provincial district school inspectors.⁴⁹

In England in 1875 these suggestions were not contentious.⁵⁰ Boarded-out children received that kind of training and protection in Britain. However, Doyle's report was condemned as not ‘suitable to the social conditions or agreeable to the feelings and habits of thought of the people of Canada’.⁵¹ Rural members of Parliament interpreted the recommendations as a plan to extend the English workhouse system into Canada.⁵² The press described it as a plot by ‘British Bumbledom’ to leave the countryside ‘pock-pitted with Beadles’ and strewn with red tape.⁵³

No workhouse system existed in the parts of Canada where the child immigrants were placed. Rural beliefs in voluntarism were strong. Doyle implied that neighbourly concern would not sufficiently protect young strangers in the back concessions, and that class distinctions in the countryside led the community to treat pauper children differently from the children of proprietors. Both implications rankled.⁵⁴ Canadians believed, as the British child-savers did, that the neighbourly and democratic traditions of their agriculturalists were beyond reproach. The government offered to send members of the existing immigration field staff once to visit children sponsored by English parishes, but declined to do more, claiming that further regulation would trespass upon the integrity of Canadian families and be antithetical to Canadian ‘social habits’.⁵⁵

With the exception of the controversy surrounding Doyle's report, during the first three decades of its history there was no forceful or sustained opposition to the juvenile immigration movement in Canada. References to the failings of the philanthropists' policies frequently appeared in the press and before Parliament, but they were most often observations offered in passing as examples of weaknesses in broader immigration and child welfare policy or instances drawn briefly from the periphery of the commentator's concern. The pattern was an unfortunate one for the young people involved. Individual children bore the burden of heightened public censure, but the group as a whole did not benefit from the badly needed reforms that systematic well-articulated criticism might have brought.

In central Canadian rural areas two groups spoke out publicly against child immigration: county sheriffs and gaolers, and country doctors who were Dominion members of Parliament. They argued from a defensive position, sharing their constituents' fears that the rapid growth of the cities and the declining pre-eminence of agriculture threatened their political influence, their economic security, the vitality of their community institutions and their distinctive way of life. They suspected the urban pasts of children from British slums and feared for their effect on the healthy, peaceful countryside.

Physicians and the local constabulary raised similar concerns. Urban life, and slum life in particular, was described by both doctors and sheriffs as an insidiously degenerative physical condition. Peter McDonald, the Liberal member for Huron, argued in 1888 that children selected from ‘districts where immorality, crime and syphilitic disease prevailed’ would ‘be tainted with the same poisons when brought’ to Canada. William Thomas Trunks Williams, chief of police of London, Ontario, thought child immigrants from the slums went ‘wrong through hereditary taint’ which made them both physically weak and unable morally to resist temptation.⁵⁶

The southwestern Ontario doctors arguing before the Commons Agriculture and Colonisation Committee in 1888 for strict medical screening of child immigrants condemned children most for carrying the ‘virus of syphilis’ or ‘syphilitic tendencies’ into the countryside. This emphasis is curious because social diseases were not at all common among the child immigrants, certainly by comparison with eye, skin and lung infections. But the accusation of syphilis allowed descriptions of the personally degenerative effects of a disease to be linked with condemnations of the promiscuity presumed to be characteristic of slums. The sense of contagion so vague and powerful made certain children who were presumed to be syphilitic the embodiment of everything rural people feared about the growing cities. The home children became harbingers of the physical degeneration, moral decay and family breakdown associated by threatened farmers with urban life and industrial work.⁵⁷

For so apocalyptic a view of child immigration the members of Parliament recommended a very mild remedy: medical screening of prospective emigrants. Pre-sailing physicals were instituted in 1888, and attestations to the children's ‘good health’ were required at the port of landing. However, the health of rescue home children sent to Canada did not markedly improve.⁵⁸

County sheriffs linked disease and criminality through a conception of class as conveniently loose as the physicians' notions of syphilis. Children came from a bad class, a criminal class, a lunatic class, a class ‘imbued with crime since infancy’. The ‘criminal nature’ of the child immigrants was formed by their class, so that like syphilis criminality was partly the result of defective rearing by depraved parents and partly an inescapable genetic burden, a ‘hereditary taint’. Thus the rural police who dealt with child immigrants expected little more in the way of moral reformation than country doctors expected of physical rehabilitation. Appearing before the Ontario Prison Reform Commission in 1891, nine years after large-scale child immigration began, the sheriffs of Wellington, Huron, Bruce, Middlesex and Peel counties were already convinced that a good deal of the drunkenness and prostitution in their districts was a result of the child immigrants' presence and predicted that the province's prisons and asylums would soon be overflowing with the refuse of the rescue homes.⁵⁹ These grim forecasts were set down in the public record and circulated widely through the provincial press, but the Prison Reform Commission, concerned largely with urban ills, recommended no specific remedies for this country disorder, and none was forthcoming for another seven years.

Few children were placed in urban areas, but the predicament of those who were so clearly revealed public policy weaknesses that they often figured prominently in city controversies, most frequently in discussions of abuses in the Dominion immigration system or provincial programmes to care for neglected and dependent young persons.

The most sustained urban opposition to juvenile immigration came from labour. During the 1880s through the newly formed Dominion Trades and Labor Congress skilled workingmen's organisations protested against the harmful effects of indigent immigration upon settled wage-earning families. Child immigration was upheld as a particularly damaging aspect of a generally unacceptable practice. The Dominion government encouraged immigration through subsidised trans-Atlantic fares, free railway transport inland and, in the case of the child immigrants and many similar organised parties, per capita payments to the recruiting agencies. To craftsmen plagued by intermittent unemployment, the bonus system seemed as redundant as the labourers it brought to Canadian cities. The rescue home children were cited as examples of how ‘troublesome and destructive’ such immigrants could be, and the homes' staffs held up as models of the deceitful and self-serving behaviour to be expected of such foreign agents. Representatives of organised labour alleged that British philanthropists brought out children who ‘sported a fair growth of whiskers’ and farm apprentices who showed a marked inclination for urban wage labour, and that their emigration programmes were motivated not by ‘European benevolence’ but by the shrewd calculation that such an imposition ‘upon Canada's generosity’ would relieve their own governments of unregenerate paupers.

Thus the categories of unwelcome immigrants coalesced. Each year between 1885 and 1890 the Dominion Trades and Labor Congress demanded that ‘paupers, indigents and orphans from abroad’ be denied government assistance and refused admission if imperial authorities should attempt ‘to unload’ them on Canadian shores. These protests had some effect. The assistance to child immigrants was not stopped, but as part of general reductions in immigration spending the Ontario system of railway passes was suspended in 1884 and Dominion passage assistance withdrawn in 1888.⁶⁰

The labour movement was most concerned with child immigrants as competitors in the labour market. But in their opposition was a mingling of empathy. The rural apprentices' working conditions did reflect those of the factory system at its worst. Labour representatives grouped Ontario farmers with all capitalists and described the child immigrants as ‘mere drudges’, ‘no better than slaves’ until their indentures were completed. And as reports of ill-treatment multiplied, the plight of the children was used to condemn imperialism: ‘the Great British nation so lost of all morals and Christianity [as to] lose the soul of a child for a few dollars’; the homes were claimed to be mere pawns of the great landowners of Britain who would rather ‘get rid of their undesirable population than offer them justice at home’.⁶¹ However, labour accounts of the child immigrants' experience strengthened other labour causes; they did not further the children's own cause.

Until 1896 Dominion officials were extremely reluctant to put any further barriers in the way of a work they judged ‘the most valuable and least costly of all immigrations’. From 1893 agencies were required to demonstrate that they had an appropriate distribution home in Canada, but no stipulations concerning the quality of after-care were made. The most conspicuous cases of abuse were stopped. For example, W. J. Pady, who from 1889 to 1894 dumped poorly clothed young immigrants in Montreal and Winnipeg claiming as his reception home his son's small board shanty at Emerson, Manitoba, was prohibited from bringing more children to Canada. The required inspections of workhouse children in the first year after placement were duly made, but by temporary staff rather than seasoned immigration officials or by men unfamiliar with the areas through which they travelled. Visits were usually undertaken in winter when personnel could be spared and sleighing was easy, but when farm work too was slack and the conditions of children's employment could not accurately be judged. Reports on these inspections reached the Canadian branch agencies indirectly through the English Local Government Board and the English Boards of Guardians, so that pauper children were often left in unsuitable homes for a year or more after their removal was recommended.⁶²

During the 1890s national attention focused increasingly upon settling the west. Wholesale condemnation of the immigration system was no longer a tenable position for responsible labour leaders. As an alternative in 1891 the Knights of Labor put forward a policy which conceded the need to assist western homesteaders while condemning aid that would increase competition between agricultural or industrial wage labourers. The deepening depression in the next four years made urban labour councils resist this suggestion. But by 1896 D. J. O'Donoghue and Alfred Jury of the Toronto Trades and Labor Council, seeking more labour influence in the rising Liberal Party, engineered a strategic compromise. The Dominion Trades and Labor Congress programme for 1896 was consistent with the priorities of the new Liberal administration under Wilfrid Laurier, recommending that ‘a very liberal system of colonisation … be inaugurated’ while condemning the ‘character of immigrants encouraged and assisted’ in the past.⁶³

If skilled labouring men gained a useful ally in the new government, the child immigrants did not. Laurier's appointee to the Interior portfolio and the Immigration Branch, Clifford Sifton, formerly attorney general of Manitoba, found reasons in good business principles and sound accounting practice to share labour's criticism of assisted urban immigrants. He regarded the English city-dweller as wanting in skill and tenacity in the only role which would not displace working Canadians, that of agricultural proprietor, and hence sympathised with labour's characterisations of juvenile immigration as ‘one of the most objectionable features of the system pursued by the late Government’.⁶⁴ Sifton appointed a labour representative, Alfred Jury, as Canadian immigration agent at Liverpool and commissioned a report from him on the workings of the British emigration homes. In 1900 a separate division of the Immigration Branch was established, responsible specifically for the annual inspection of English Local Government Board wards and generally for the oversight of the child immigration agencies.⁶⁵

The fourth and most persuasive group of Canadian critics of child immigration consisted of urban middle-class reformers. Their arguments were not substantially different from those put forward by rural sheriffs and physicians and urban labour leaders. But the directors of city children's aid societies and houses of industry, their board members, businessmen such as the distiller William Gooderham, professors such as Goldwin Smith and the wealthy ladies of the National Council of Women, lodged their complaints on different grounds. Like labour leaders they viewed the child immigrants as unwelcome competitors, not so much for jobs as for good rural foster homes in which to place the growing numbers of neglected and dependent Canadian youngsters. As a matter of professional or social responsibility they questioned the quality of care British apprentices received, both from their masters and mistresses and from their institutional guardians, comparing British practice unfavourably with contemporary North American standards in child-saving. For propertied urban Canadians whose wealth was grounded in secondary manufacturing protected by the tariff, the children were illustrations of the grime, poverty and class conflict bred by free trade in Britain. As much as their rural contemporaries, urban observers saw the child immigrants as ‘evil influences’, the bearers of ‘evil habits’ acquired by birth or early nurture in a degenerate society and unlikely after emigration to be unlearned.⁶⁶

The urban reformers had more influence than rural officials, however, and from 1896 onward they convinced successive provincial governments, which had jurisdiction over the welfare of immigrants once they arrived in Canada, to pass protective legislation for the British children. The model Act was passed in Ontario in 1897. It required that agencies settling children in the province maintain complete case records, visit youngsters yearly, screen children for ‘vicious tendencies’ and physical and mental infirmities, accept responsibility for wards who became public charges within three years of landing in the province and promptly investigate reports of ill treatment. Employers who found children unsuitable were obliged to return them to the agency rather than evicting them to fend for themselves, and school boards which had previously balked at admitting rescue home children into their classrooms were obliged to receive them. Manitoba and Quebec passed this legislation soon afterwards and similar protection was offered to British children in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 1905.⁶⁷

To critics of the child migration movement these Acts seemed a step ‘long needed and in the right direction’, but they proved ineffective. No staff was hired specifically to enforce them. Provincial departments concerned with child welfare gave priority to the problems of native-born young people. The moribund Ontario legislation was in fact unobtrusively removed from the statute books during a revision two decades later. It passed away unlamented, indeed unnoticed.

The British rescue home children became symbols of everything Canadians feared most about newcomers to the Dominion. Although as individuals they gradually learned how to wear down their unwelcome differences and trade on their employers' need for labour, as a group they were never quite able to allay the rural suspicion of the cities and the class from which they came or the distrust of those mysterious absent parents who begot them and then assigned their care to others. Urban men and women who knew individual home children only at a distance reinterpreted rural reports in light of their own concerns. They gave those suspicions and particular complaints general policy significance, and urban elaborations in turn fed back into country fears. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, as the child migration programme expanded, few of these criticisms helped the immigrant child. Rather, they made increasingly dubious the advantages of being a Briton and a child as an immigrant to Canada. They heightened the tensions of the apprenticeship years and left home children with a heavier burden to carry.

Notes

1. Paul de Rousiers, The Labour Question in Britain (Macmillan, London, 1896), p. 35.

2. David Rubinstein, School Attendance in London, 1870-1904 (University of Hull, Hull, 1969), pp. 59, 73; Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London (Macmillan, London, 1902-4), I, vol. 3, p. 219; Public Archives of Canada (PAC), Charlotte Alexander Papers, vol. 2, case of Ellen Smith; Alexander Paterson, Across the Bridges (Edward Arnold, London, 1912), p. 38.

3. Booth, Life and Labour, I, vol. 2, pp. 20-1; L. G. Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty, 3rd ed. (Methuen, London, 1905), pp. 42-3, 125, 159, 195; Arthur Newsholme, The Elements of Vital Statistics, 3rd ed. (Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1899), pp. 127-8, 131, 134-5; Margaret Alden, Child Life and Labour (Headley Bros., London, 1908), p. 19; Paterson, Across the Bridges, p. 35; Reginald Bray, Town Child (T. F. Unwin, London, 1907), p. 94.

4. Helen Bosanquet, Rich and Poor (Macmillan, London, 1896), p. 79; A. L. Bowley and A. R. Burnett-Hurst, Livelihood and Poverty (G. Bell and Sons, London, 1915), pp. 29, 31; Neil McKendrick, ‘Home Demand and Economic Growth: a new view of the role of women and children in the industrial revolution’, in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives (Europa, London, 1974), pp. 158, 201; Bray, Town Child, p. 90; Booth, Life and Labour, I, vol. 1, pp. 140-6.

5. Benjamin S. Rowntree, Poverty. A Study of Town Life (Macmillan, London, 1901), pp. 52-85, 136-7; Frances Collier, The family economy of the working classes in the cotton industry 1784-1833 (Chetham Society, Manchester, 1965), pp. 50-2; Economics Club, Family Budgets (P. S. King and Son, London, 1896), pp. 59, 61; Florence Bell, At the Works (Edward Arnold, London, 1907), pp. 49-50; Bosanquet, Rich and Poor, pp. 78-9; John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974), p. 97; Michael Anderson, Family Structure in nineteenth century Lancashire (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971), pp. 166-7; Jack London, The People of the Abyss (Macmillan, London, 1904), p. 290.

6. Anderson, Family Structure, pp. 66, 75, 131, 160; Michael Anderson, ‘Family and Class in Nineteenth-Century Cities’, Journal of Family History, vol. 2, no. 2 (1977), p. 148.

7. Anderson, Family Structure, pp. 11-12, 76-8; Michael Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 302; Anderson, ‘Family and Class’, pp. 147-8; Michael Katz, ‘Essay Review’, Journal of Social History, vol. 7, no. 1 (1973), pp. 90-2; Standish Meacham, A Life Apart (Thames and Hudson, London, 1977), pp. 158-9.

8. Margaret Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (Rockliff, London, 1958), p. 63; Anderson, Family Structure, p. 74; Barnado 228 B 3.94, 573 B 3.05, 994 G 10.08, 934 G 8.05, 903 G 9.03, 882 G 9.98.

9. Paterson, Across the Bridges p. 35.

10. Bray, Town Child, pp. 86, 100-1; Helen Denby, ‘Children of Working London’, in Bernard Bosanquet (ed.), Aspects of the Social Problem (Macmillan, London, 1895), p. 37; Paterson, Across the Bridges, p. 36; Bosanquet, Rich and Poor, p. 101; Bell, At the Works, pp. 49-50; Magdalene Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (G. Bell and Sons, London, 1914), p. 191; Liverpool 4, pp. 121-2.

11. Bosanquet, Rich and Poor, pp. 108-9; Walter Greenwood There was a time (Jonathan Cape, London, 1969), p. 70; George Sims, How the Poor Live (Chatto and Windus, London, 1889) p. 22; Booth, Life and Labour I, vol. 3, p. 219; Barnado 949 G 5.06, 680 B 7.07, 637 B 8.06, 835 G 6.00. For a comparable rural example see Jennie Kitteringham, ‘Country work girls in nineteenth-century England’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Village Life and Labour (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1975), p. 84.

12. Rubinstein, School Attendance, pp. 59-60; Hewitt, Wives and Mothers, p. 158; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971), pp. 22-3; Barnardo 221 B 10.93.

13. Kathleen Woodward, Jipping Street (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1928), p. 12; Booth, Life and Labour, I, vol. 3, p. 230; Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 27, 113; P. G. F. Le Play, Les ouvriers européens (L'imprimerie impériale, Paris, 1879), vol. 1, pp. 275-6; Reginald Bray, ‘The Boy and the Family’, in E. J. Urwick (ed.), Studies of Boy Life in Our Cities (J. M. Dent, London, 1904), pp. 70-9; Margaret Davies, Life as we have known it (Hogarth, London, 1931), p. 4.

14. Meacham, Life Apart, p. 175; Greenwood, There was a time, pp. 38, 66; Quarrier History 9, p. 165; Quarrier Emigration 6, pp. 302, 389; Barbardo 24 B 1.85, 132 B 3.91, 204 B 6.93.

15. Paterson, Across the Bridges, pp. 69-70; Bray, ‘The Boy and the Family’, pp. 86-7.

16. Rubinstein, School Attendance, pp. 71, 73-4; Bowley and Burnett-Hurst, Livelihood and Poverty, p. 107; O. Jocelyn Dunlop, English Apprenticeship and Child Labour (T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1912), pp. 314-16.

17. Sims, How the Poor Live, p. 18; A. Watt Smythe, Physical Deterioration (John Murray, London, 1904), pp. 133-4; Booth, Life and Labour, I, vol. 3, p. 235; Rubinstein, School Attendance, p. 61; Meacham, Life Apart, pp. 169-72.

18. George Sims, Living London (Cassell and Company, London, 1902), p. 90; Sims, How the Poor Live, pp. 19-23; Rubinstein, School Attendance, p. 61; S. J. Gibb, The Problem of Boy Work (Wells, Gardner and Co., London, 1906), pp. 11-12; Bosanquet, Rich and Poor, pp. 155-6; Booth, Life and Labour, I, vol. 3, p. 230.

19. Nettie Alder, ‘Children as Wage-earners’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 73 (May 1903), p. 927; Gillian Sutherland, Elementary Education in the nineteenth century (Historical Association, London, 1971), pp. 34-5; Bowley and Burnett-Hurst, Livelihood and Poverty, p. 107; Meacham, Life Apart, pp. 172-4; de Rousiers, Labour Question, pp. 166-7, 320-1; Woodward, Jipping Street, p. 93.

20. Barnardo 960 G 10.06, 885 G 4.03, 844 G 7.00, 64 B 8.87, 85 B 6.88, 244 B 6.94, 291 B 4.96, 331 B 9.97, 427 B 7.01, 435 B 9.01, 465 B 7.02, 611 B 9.05, 616 B 3.06, 681 B 7.07.

21. Barnardo 332 B 9.97, 205 B 6.93, 440 B 9.01.

22. Joan W. Scott and Louise A. Tilly, ‘Women's Work and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society an History, vol. 17, no. 1 (1975), pp. 50-5; Louise A. Tilly, Joan W. Scott and Miriam Cohen, ‘Women's Work and European Fertility Patterns’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 6 (1976); Le Play, Les ouvriers européens (1855), p. 28, (1879) I, pp. 275-6.

23. Paterson, Across the Bridges, p. 22; Roberts, Classic Slum, p. 52; Greenwood, There was a time, p. 184.

24. Roberts, Classic Slum, p. 52; Kett, Rites of Passage, p. 29. The emphasis here on a longer-term cycle of reciprocation at the core of attitudes towards the family in the stable working class clearly differs from Anderson's theories concerning short-run calculative orientation. Family Structure.

25. Greenwood, There was a time, pp. 102-3, 110-11.

26. Rowntree, Poverty, pp. 59-60; Arthur Greenwood, Juvenile Labour Exchanges and After-care (P. S. King and Son, London, 1911), pp. 7-8; Paterson, Across the Bridges, p. 80; Gibb, Boy Work, pp. 3-5; Booth, Life and Labour, II, vol. 5, p. 319; Children's Home, Report 1890-1, p. 4.

27. Bowley and Burnett-Hurst, Livelihood and Poverty, p. 66; Rowntree, Poverty, p. 30; de Rousiers, Labour Question, pp. 166, 311; Bosanquet, Rich and Poor, p. 88; Charles E. B. Russell, Manchester Boys (University Press, Manchester, 1905), p. 15; Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (Jonathan Cape, London, 1935), p. 57; Peter N. Stearns, ‘Working-class women in Britain, 1890-1914’, in Martha Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and Be Still (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1972), p. 110; Booth, Life and Labour, II, vol. 5, p. 319; Bray ‘The Boy and the Family’, pp. 88-9.

28. Michael Katz has responded in this way to a similar analysis in Michael Anderson, Family Structure, without, I would argue, due regard for the particular context of family life among the labouring poor. Katz, People of Hamilton, pp. 300-2; Katz, ‘Essay Review’, pp. 90-2; Anderson, ‘Family and Class’, pp. 146-8; Booth, Life and Labour, II, vol. 5, p. 320.

29. Rowntree, Poverty, pp. 86, 110; Anderson is in error in fixing the upper limit of the earning child's cost to the household at 3s 8d, Anderson, Family Structure, p. 128; Booth, Life and Labour, II, vol. 5, p. 323.

30. Paterson, Across the Bridges, p. 15; Greenwood, There was a time; Anderson, Family Structure, pp. 128-9; Booth, Life and Labour, IV, vol. 17, pp. 43-6; Bray, ‘The Boy and the Family’, p. 89; Roberts, Classic Slum, p. 52; Rowntree, Poverty, p. 113; Bosanquet, Rich and Poor, p. 78; Laura Oren, ‘The Welfare of Women in Labouring Families: England, 1860-1950’, Feminist Studies, vol. 1 (Winter-Spring 1973), p. 110.

31. Anna Davin is studying this important transformation among the working-class girls and women of London. I am grateful to her for sharing her unpublished work with me; see Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, no. 5 (1978), pp. 9-65; Bray, Town Child, pp. 104-6, 116; Paterson, Across the Bridges, p. 37; Rubinstein, School Attendance, p. 73; Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working class culture and working class politics in London, 1870-1900; notes on the remaking of a working class’, Journal of Social History, vol. 7, no. 4 (1974), pp. 486-7. These policy changes are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8.

32. Deut. I, 21, 39.

33. Canada, House of Commons, Journals (1888), ‘Report of the Agriculture and Colonisation Committee’, pp. 10, 12-14.

34. Paul F. Johnston, ‘In Praise of Husbandry’, Agricultural History, vol. 11, (1937), pp. 80-95; Paul F. Johnston, ‘Turnips and Romanticism’, Agricultural History, vol. 12 (1938), pp. 233-4; Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (Yale, New Haven, 1957), pp. 77-81; Charlotte Erickson, ‘Agricultural Myths of English Immigrants’, in O. F. Ander (ed.), In the Trek of the Immigrants (Augustana College Library, Rock Island, 1964), pp. 60-70.

35. William Quarrier, ‘The Cottage Principle’, Occasional Paper, no. 1, (1870); Annie Macpherson, ‘Winter Labour for Spring Transplanting’, Occasional Emigration Papers, no. 12 (Nov. 1872), p. 1; Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, II (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973), pp. 525-6; Kathleen Heasman, Evangelicals in Action (Bles, London, 1962), pp. 96-9; ‘Institution of deaconesses at Kaiserwerth’, English Woman's Journal, vol. 3, no. 14 (1859), pp. 95-104; Alexander G. Scholes, Education for Empire Settlement (Longmans, London, 1932), p. 16.

36. R. Richard Wohl, ‘The “Country Boy” myth and its place in American urban culture: the nineteenth-century contribution’, Perspectives in American History, vol. 3 (1969), pp. 107-21; Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them (Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, New York, 1872), pp. 223-5; Miriam Z. Langsam, Children West: A History of the Placing-Out System of the New York Children's Aid Society, 1852-1890 (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, 1964); Times, 29 March 1869; Christian, 4 August 1870; Canada, House of Commons, Journals, ‘Immigration and Colonisation Committee Report’, IX (1875), App. 4, p. 22; Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children, II, p. 562; Lillian Birt, The Children's Homefinder (Nisbet, London, 1913), p. 18.

37. George Needham, Street Arabs and Gutter Snipes (Hubbard, Philadelphia, 1888), p. 285; ‘The Colonies and our Waifs', Night and Day, vol. 9 (1885), p. 30; Liverpool Sheltering Homes, Report (1882), p. 9; Annie Macpherson, ‘Winter Labour for Spring Transplanting’; ‘Report of the Departmental Committee appointed by the Local Government Board to inquire into the existing systems for the maintenance and education of children under the charge of managers of district schools and Boards of Guardians in the Metropolis’, Br. P. P. 1896, XLIII (Mundella Committee), vol. 2, p. 674.

38. Needham, Street Arabs, pp. 305, 345; Annie Macpherson, Summer in Canada (p. p., London, 1872), pp. 25, 27; Christian, 27 Oct. 1870, p. 11; ‘Mundella Committee’, p. 692; Our Waifs and Strays, Aug. 1887, p. 3; Annie Macpherson, Canadian Homes for London Wanderers (p. p., London, 1870), p. 7.

39. Macpherson, Canadian Homes, p. 34; ‘Climbing the Ladder’, National Children's Homes, Report (1888-9), p. 7; ‘Emigration’, Children's Advocate, no. 22 (Oct. 1881), p. 148; ‘The Canadian Mail’, Children's Advocate (Nov. 1884), pp. 204-6; William Bradfield, Life of Thomas Bowman Stephenson (C. H. Kelly, London, 1913), p. 136.

40. S. L. Barnardo and James Marchant, Memoirs of the late Dr. Barnardo (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1907) pp. 164-5; E. Bans and Arthur Chilton Thomas, Catholic Child Emigration to Canada (privately printed, Liverpool, 1904); Norman Hamilton Papers (private possession of Professor Graeme Patterson, Department of History, University of Toronto), E. Crisp to N. Hamilton, n. d., approx. April 1870; Bradfield, Stephenson, p. 135; Christian, 30 July 1874, 25 July 1878; ‘Mundella Committee’, vol. 2, pp. 668-70; PAC RG 17 527/58308, Samuel Smith before Henry Matthews, Home Secretary, 11 Feb. 1887; ‘English Orphans in Canadian Homes’ (1894), in PAC RG 76 119/22857.

41. Bans and Thomas, Catholic Child; PAC RG 76 285/252093, 112/22578; Our Boys and Girls, vol. 1, no. 1 (1896), p. 6; ‘Report by the Departmental Committee appointed to consider Mr. Rider Haggard's report on agricultural settlements in British colonies’, Br. P. P. 1906, LXXVI, vol. 2, p. 262; Edward St John, Manning's Work for Children (Sheed and Ward, London, 1929), p. 79.

42. These patterns are apparent in the agencies' choices of placements for the pauper children they undertook to settle in Canada for British Boards of Guardians. See PAC RG 76 133/32405 (1896), 164/45794 (1897), 190/69918 (1898), 266/222479 (1902), 324/318481 (1904), 434/652682 (1907).

43. Jacob Spelt, Urban Development in South-Central Ontario (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1972), p. 154.

44. Douglas C. A. Curtis, ‘Out-migration from New Brunswick, 1871-1921’, unpublished paper; Kenneth Buckley, ‘Historical estimates of internal migration in Canada’, in E. F. Beach and J. C. Weldon (eds), Conference on Statistics, 1960 (University of Toronto, Toronto, 1962).

45. The demand for child immigrant labour is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.

46. Graeme Decarie, ‘Something Old, Something New: Aspects of Prohibitionism in Ontario in the 1890s’, in Donald Swainson (ed.), Oliver Mowat's Ontario (Macmillan, Toronto, 1972), p. 154; G. P. de T. Glazebrook, Life in Ontario (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1971), pp. 204-7.

47. A. R. M. Lower, Canadians in the Making (Longmans, Don Mills, 1958), pp. 327-8; see similarly, Glazebrook, Life, p. 173.

48. Times, 25 Dec. 1888; Thomas Mackay, A History of the English Poor Law (P. S. King, London, 1904), p. 382; PRO, MH 32, vol 20, ‘Doyle Correspondence’.

49. ‘Report to President of Local Government Board by Andrew Doyle, Local Government Board Inspector, as to the emigration of pauper children to Canada’, Br. P. P. 1875, LXIII, pp. 18, 20, 23, 30, 32.

50. Times, 10 Mar. 1875; Saturday Review, reprinted in Leader (Toronto), 12 Apr. 1875.

51. PAC RG 76 65/3115, Privy Council Report, 5 July 1875; Globe, 4 May 1875.

52. Canada, House of Commons, Journals, ‘Immigration and Colonisation Committee Report’, vol. 9, app. 4, p. 10.

53. ‘Immigration Report’, 1875, pp. 10, 13-14, 16, 40; Mail, 9 July 1875; Globe, 19 Mar. 1875, 6 Apr. 1875, 4 May 1875; Daily Leader, 5 April 1875, 25 May 1875; PAC RG 76 65/3115, Privy Council Report, 5 July 1875.

54. ‘Immigration Report’, 1875, pp. 16, 40-3; Privy Council Report, 5 July 1875; E. A. Bilbrough, British Children in Canadian Homes (p. p., Bellville, 1879), p. 19.

55. PAC RG 76 65/3115, Privy Council Report, 5 July 1875.

56. ‘Prison Reform Commission’, Ontario Sessional Papers (OSP) 1891, no. 18, p. 540; Canada, House of Commons, Journals, 1888, app. 5, ‘Report of Agriculture and Colonisation Committee’, p. 15.

57. Neil Sutherland, Children in English Canadian Society (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1976), pp. 28-33; ‘Agriculture and Colonisation Committee’, 1888, pp. 10-15; PAC RG 25 A-7 v. 498, John Colmer to the Under-secretary of State, Colonial Office, 28 June 1888; RG 17 395/42680, Maria Rye to John Lowe, 12 February 1884; Night and Day, 1887, p. 92; ‘Special Report on the Immigration of British Children’, OSP, 1898 (69), pp. 10-11; ‘First Conference on Child-Saving’, OSP, 1895 (29), p. 32.

58. PAC RG 17, v. 1566, John Carling to Charles Tupper, 9 July 1888; RG 76 51/2209, John Lowe to J. R. Hall, 14 May 1892; 65/3114, T. M. Daly to A. M. Burgess, 13 March 1895; ‘Report on Agricultural Settlements in British Colonies’, Br. P. P. 1906, LXXVI, p. 310.

59. ‘Prison Reform Commission’, OSP 1891 (18), pp. 498, 515, 540-1, 633, 637, 701.

60. PAC, Canadian Trades and Labor Congress, Report of the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, 1883; 1886; 1887, pp. 28-9; 1888, pp. 19,23; PAC, Toronto Trades and Labor Council, Minutebooks, MG 28 I 44, v. 1, 21 October 1887, 6 January 1888, 2 March 1888, 16 March 1888, 20 April 1888, 1 June 1888, 20 July 1888; PAC RG 17 443/48382, Charles Tupper to John Pope, 4 June 1885; 593/67020, clippings from the Toronto Mail, 6 October 1888, including detailed report of the proceedings of the Trades and Labor Council meeting of 5 June 1888; 602/68070, G. W. Dower to the Secretary of State, 12 January 1889; 629/71381, Dower to Minister of Agriculture, 2 December 1889; ‘Prison Reform Commission’, OSP 1891 (18), p. 744; PAC RG 17, v. 1658, John Lowe to G. W. Dower, 25 February 1889.

61. PAC, Toronto Trade and Labor Council Minutebooks, 2 September 1887, 19 October 1888, 17 November 1893, 1 January 1894, 19 October 1894, 4 December 1891, 6 October 1893; Leslie E. Wismar (ed.), Proceedings of the Canadian Labor Union Congresses: 1873-1877 (privately published, Montreal, 1951), report of the immigration committee for 1875; PAC, Dominion Trades and Labor Congress, Report of the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, August 1890; ‘Prison Reform Commission’, OSP, 1891 (18), p. 744; ‘First Conference on Child-saving’, OSP, 1895 (29), p. 34.

62. PAC RG 76 81/7017, John Lowe to J. R. Hall, 4 July 1892; 65/3115, L. Periera to each immigration agent, 27 July 1893; 81/7017, Periera to John Colmer, 7 December 1893, and same to same, 24 January 1894; 64/2932, W. J. Pady file; 65/3115, Periera to Sergeant, General Manager of Grand Trunk Railroad, Manitoba, 12 January 1895; 96/12557, W. Boardman to L. Fortier, 19 April 1894 and Periera to Hoolahan and Doyle, 24 April 1896; 65/3115, A. Burgess to W. Scott, 30 July 1896; 30/674 L. Periera to Robert Wallace, 13 October 1893.

63. PAC, Dominion Trades and Labor Congress, Report of the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, 1890-96; PAC, Toronto Trades and Labor Council Minutebooks, 17 April 1891, 5 February 1892, 6 October 1893, 19 October 1894; PAC RG 17 121/23624, ‘Trades and Labor Council opposition to juvenile immigration’.

64. David John Hall, ‘The Political Career of Clifford Sifton, 1896-1905’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1973, pp. 187, 189, 608, 610, 619, 904-6; Note Sifton's comments on D. J. O'Donoghue to Clifford Sifton, 26 March 1897, PAC RG 76 121/23624.

65. PAC, Toronto Trades and Labor Council Minutebooks, 11 March 1897; PAC RG 76 119/22857, L. Periera to John Colmer, 31 January 1899; 28 L. G. B., Br. P. P., p. 10; PAC RG 76 65/3115, Joseph Chamberlain to Lord Aberdeen, 12 June 1896; A.M. Burgess to R. W. Scott, 30 July 1896; A.M. Burgess to Clifford Sifton, 29 January 1897.

66. Michael Bliss, A Living Profit (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1974), pp. 107-8; Toronto Trades and Labor Council Minutebooks, 6 July 1894; ‘Prison Reform Commission, 1891’, 744, 687, 616, 41, 44, 729, 687, 215; ‘First Conference on Child-saving, 1895’, 33-4, 39-40; PAC RG 76 129/28735, Lady Aberdeen to A.M. Burgess, 18 April 1896, Burgess to Aberdeen, 2 May 1896, and Aberdeen to Burgess, 30 May 1896; PAC, Aberdeen Papers, Lady Aberdeen's Journals, v. 10, resolutions of the third annual meeting of the National Council of Women, 14 May 1896; v. 11, President's Memorandum on the business transacted at the Halifax meetings of the National Council of Women, 1897.

67. Ontario, Statutes, 1897, c. 53; Manitoba, 60 Victoria 1897, c. 1; Quebec, 62 Victoria 1899, c. 47; PAC RG 76 63/2869, Middlemore Home, Report (1905), pp. 18-20; Nova Scotia, Revised Statutes, 1900, c. 118; Statutes, 5 Edw. VII, 1905, c. 40; New Brunswick, Statutes, 5 Edw. VII, 1905, c. 13.