Adoption scholarship in history has been dominated by studies of the United States, where it has become an exciting enterprise. Canada has slowly followed with work by Karen Balcolm, Karen Dubinsky, and myself. Wonderful studies on poor youngsters in the UK by Anna Davin, Lynn Abrams, and Lydia Murdoch variously touch on adoption but A child for keeps offers an unprecedented assessment of the debates surrounding the introduction and evolution of England's legislation. The disappearance and/or inaccessibility of the vast majority of adoption records forced Dr Keating to turn to the public story of how representatives of governments and charitable groups, notably the National Adoption Society (NAS) and the National Children Adoption Association (NCAA), understood, represented, and provided for the interests of youngsters, birth parents, adopters, and society at large. The result is a good road map to English adoption from 1918 to 1945.

The introduction acknowledges the personal connection of the author, like many (most?) writers in the field, to adoption and identifies the significance of secrecy and shifting attitudes in the tale to come. Chapter 1 provides the broader critical context of falling fertility; the increased stress on domesticity, childrearing and respectability; the conditional nature of parental rights; and the significance of marital breakdown, illegitimacy and unwed mothers in these years. Here the story seems similar to Canada's. Chapter 2 considers ‘developments in the voluntary sector’, including early child protection groups such as Dr Barnardo's and, more importantly, the first societies devoted exclusively to adoption, especially the NAS and NCAA. While their interest in protecting adopters and limited attention to the best interests of youngsters and birth mothers were hardly unusual, their preoccupation with adoption and their elite patronage had no equivalent in the Dominion of Canada, though. Chapter 3 turns to the ‘pressure for government action’. This portrays a lively contest between those who defended the right of birth mothers to keep illegitimate offspring and the adoption societies, who wanted official sanction and guarantees that ‘natural’ kin could not intervene in adoptive families. As the author makes very clear, secrecy was above all in the best interests of adopters. Chapter 4 considers the origins of the 1926 ‘Adoption of Children Act’ that occasioned battles between defenders of ‘blood’ and the champions of nurture. From a Canadian perspective, the lack of apparent interest in race or religion or in matching in these debates seems quite extraordinary. Chapter 5 reviews the ‘first years of legally sanctioned adoption’ when many English couples, but also single and widowed women and men, legalized relations with girls (once again, as in other English-speaking jurisdictions, the overwhelming favourites) and boys. Just as in Canada, single adopters were a minority but, if they were women, they were also in no way unusual. Their inclusion in the interwar years reflects not support for domestic diversity but adoption's overall orientation in the first instance to adult needs. Chapter 6 describes English officialdom's chilly reception of the adoption societies that were determined to be far too fond of secrecy and too little committed to preserving original families. As the concern with international adoptions (notably the loss of English children) suggested, the exchange of children among adults was also far from effectively regulated. Chapter 7 reviews the effects of World War II. Concern turned once again, just as it had with WWI, to would-be parents' hopes for unencumbered ‘war orphans’ and the need to address rising levels of illegitimacy. New adoption acts moved toward greater secrecy and an intensified preoccupation with the rights of adopters. Unwed mothers were now to redeem themselves by forgetfulness and retreat, without their babies, back into the respectable classes. Chapter 8 offers a good summary of changing views and the mounting adherence to heterosexual domesticity in the 1950s and 1960s. By the new millennium, the battle for secrecy waged by the early adoption societies was, however, demonstrably lost, even if single parents remained hard put to support their offspring.

A child for keeps provides essential reminders that controversies regarding adoption in England, as elsewhere, have often been more about adults than children. Its details on debates and legislation make it well worth reading. It needed, however, some serious editing. It reads much like a doctoral dissertation and often fails to develop an effective narrative. In the tradition of much fine English scholarship, the author pays considerable attention to class in regulating human relations but leaves race, religion, and gender curiously, and unconvincingly, undeveloped. England was still an imperial nation in these years but that perspective on child-saving and maternity so well exposed by scholars such as Jane Lewis and Anna Davin is strangely absent. If adoption in England is to be better understood that story too should be told.