On 21 December 1751, Archibald Acheson (1718–90), M.P. for Trinity College, presented a motion to the Irish House of Commons requesting leave to introduce a bill ‘for the more effectual transportation of felons and vagabonds to his majesty’s plantations in America’.Footnote 1 As a result, a committee comprising Acheson and John Digby, M.P. for Kildare, was instructed to prepare the heads of a bill. This was unremarkable; it was the sixth time the law on transportation had been addressed since George II had ascended the throne.Footnote 2 However, when ‘heads’ were presented on 29 January 1752, their remit had been augmented to include provisions to ‘prevent … the pernicious practice of kidnapping children, and seducing people on board ships and transporting them to America’.Footnote 3 The parliamentary record is silent on the process whereby the scope of the legislation was extended to embrace child kidnapping, and on what was proposed, but it can confidently be surmised that the object was to elevate the offence from a misdemeanour to a felony.Footnote 4 In the event, the measure failed to make it to the statute book,Footnote 5 but the fact that the kidnapping of children for conveyance across the Atlantic was singled out indicates that it was perceived to be an issue requiring the attention of lawmakers.
In fact, the Irish parliament did not legislate in respect of the matter at any point during the fifty years spanning the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century when the kidnapping of children, either for the West Indies or the crown’s American colonies, can be located. It was equally indecisive subsequently when, beginning in the 1780s, the ‘stealing of children’ in order to deprive them of clothing (and any other goods with a cash value they had on their person) displaced kidnapping as a hazard affecting children. Statistically, fewer children were targeted for ‘kidnapping’ and ‘stripping’ than were victims of infanticide,Footnote 6 or experienced injury (physical and psychological) at the hands of abusive adults, but these two ‘villainous’ practices provide a window on how children in Ireland were treated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They are relevant too to the argument, advanced by Elizabeth Foyster, that if the enhanced attention to the material and emotional needs of children identifiable in the eighteenth century supports the conclusion that childhood acquired greater definition in the eighteenth century, it was not only not universally shared, it ‘may also have put them in a new position of possible harm and danger’. Arising from her exploration of child ‘stealing’ in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, Foyster suggests that the phenomenon attests to societal naiveté when it came to ‘the dangers … children faced’ and ‘the realities of urban living’ and that ‘the new world of childhood’ (identified by J. H. Plumb) was ‘a new world of but not for children’.Footnote 7 It is not possible to emulate Foyster’s approach in the Irish instance, as there is no equivalent to the Old Bailey Proceedings that have permitted her to interrogate the variety of individual motives that fuelled child stealing, but even the more sketchy reconstruction of child kidnapping and child stripping that the Irish evidence permits, supports her conclusion that the emergence of a model of childhood that was cherishing and child-centred was neither linear nor straightforward, and that the manipulation and abuse of children was not only not enduring but also possessed of its own particular history.Footnote 8
Child kidnapping emerges out of the evidential shadows in Ireland in the 1720s and 1730s.Footnote 9 Though it could hardly have happened in the absence of indentured servants among the expanding migrant traffic on the eighteenth-century Atlantic, kidnapping involved a different, albeit overlapping nexus of interests, that included the ‘villains’ who abducted the children, the ‘kid-merchants’ who orchestrated the business, and the ships’ captains who commanded the vessels on which the children were conveyed to the colonies where their economic value was realised, and they were destined to live out their lives. By comparison, children who were taken up in order that they might be stripped of their clothes, and valuables should they be wearing them, enjoyed a reasonable prospect of being reunited with their families. This was not invariable, however. Some were deprived of life by perpetrators who concluded that the death of the child was their best security against discovery. Furthermore, Foyster’s account of the impact of child stealing in England upon its victims cautions against assuming that it was ever less than life changing.Footnote 10 The involvement of mendicants, who were widely perceived as one of the drivers of this activity, raises another dimension – the taking of children for use as a source of labour. When they did not seize children simply to acquire their clothes and valuables, beggars were suspected of doing so to acquire a human prop to assist them in their ongoing quest for alms, but some may have been sold to chimney sweeps to meet the demand in this, and other economic niche areas, in which children laboured. The apprehension of children under twelve for sexual purposes is still more tenebrous, but perhaps it is significant that it seldom features in the press. What is clear is that the interruption of trade with the American colonies for the duration of the American War of Independence,Footnote 11 and the contraction of the trade in indentured servants in the 1780s, had a palpable impact on the pattern of criminal activity targeted at children as the preference accorded free labour from this point not only deprived child kidnapping of its economic rationale but also ensured that those who perceived of children as an opportunity shift their focus to child ‘stripping’, which effectively displaced it during the decade 1785–95. The paucity of reported instances implies that it was hardly pursued during the insurgency-torn years of the 1790s, but, if so, it resumed in the early nineteenth century and following Dublin, which was long its primary location, it emerged subsequently as an identifiable problem in Limerick, Cork and Belfast. In this Ireland resembled England, where the problem of child stripping is also identifiable in towns and cities during the nineteenth century.Footnote 12
I
The matter of fact manner in which the Belfast News-Letter reported on 27 March 1739 that ‘a man was taken up and committed to Newgate [prison, in Dublin] for kidnapping children’ indicates that child kidnapping was a recognised feature of the Irish social landscape by that date.Footnote 13 Yet the tantalising character of the report poses more questions than it provides answers. How many children? Who was the man, and what was his motivation? What purpose and what destination had he in mind for the children concerned? One could conclude, based on a comparable report in the short-lived Dublin Evening Post six years earlier to the effect that McEvers, ‘a noted kid-merchant … and another man were committed to Newgate, by … the Lord Mayor [Humphrey French], for illegally sending people over to the West Indies’, that this most recent offender operated in a comparable way.Footnote 14 If so, he was one of a range of interests – agents, shippers, merchants and others – that sought to profit from the developing pattern of emigration that caused an estimated 210,000 people to leave Ireland for Britain’s North American colonies in the century prior to 1775. In keeping with the economic circumstances of most, and following on the pattern established in England in the seventeenth century, a majority of Irish emigrants travelled as indentured servants or as ‘redemptioners’. Comprising an imposing 78 per cent of the c.210,000 who settled in colonial North America, their ranks also embraced the estimated c.10,000 felons and vagrants ordered for transportation, who were also sold into indentured servitude.Footnote 15
The demand for labour in the crown colonies in America and the West Indies dovetailed with the expanding volume of shipping on the Atlantic Ocean to provide ‘kid-merchants’ and ship captains with the incentive as well as the opportunity to augment their complement of adult passengers with kidnapped children. Since the data do not exist with which one might construct a profile of those who departed Irish ports, it is not possible to calculate the potential scale of the traffic, but there are a number of relevant related trends. Based on the fact that 3.79 per cent (26 out of 686) of the ‘fugitive notices’ issued in respect of Irish indentured servants in the colony of Pennsylvania between 1729 and 1760 concerned children, one could hypothesise that something in the region of 6,000 children travelled to North America as indentured servants. Viewed from another vantage point – the perspective of Ireland – one could conclude based on the reports that 50 children were ‘liberated’ in 1781 that perhaps 2,500 kidnapped children were transported over a half century, but this crude extrapolation makes no allowance for the fluctuating pattern of emigration or the ostensibly intermittent nature of kidnapping, and it is equally likely that the actual figure is measured in hundreds than in thousands. The reality is that its scale is beyond recovery and that any figures advanced are little more than informed guestimates.Footnote 16
What is less obscure is the suggestion that the ‘practices’ of moving foundling children from rural to city parishes and vagrants to sea ports, and an attitude of mind that identified abduction as a solution to tricky domestic problems, encouraged recourse to child kidnapping.Footnote 17 Saliently, the publication of narratives of the lives of James Annesley (1715–60), who was abducted in 1728 at the behest of his uncle, Richard, fifth Baron Altham, and conveyed to New Castle, Delaware; and of Laetitia Pilkington (1712–50), whose mother-in-law conspired with her son to sell their children to a shipper bound for New York in the late 1730s, elevated it in public consciousness at the very moment that accounts of the practice are locatable in the press.Footnote 18 As a result, when a spate of child kidnappings was reported in 1750–51, the public was accepting not only of claims that the ‘practice hath been carried on for some time’, but also that the manner in which children that were being ‘shipped privately, and transported to America’ demonstrated that the traffic was organised.Footnote 19 This was implicit also in the report of a trio of incidents in 1750 in which ‘two little boys’, ‘two young girls’, and ‘a child’ were taken, and (in two of the three cases) gagged by individuals variously denominated as ‘hulking’, ‘genteelly dressed’, and ‘villains’.Footnote 20
Though these accounts were not printed with the intention of alarming the urban communities where most child kidnappings took place, the public response demonstrates that this was not easily avoided because the practice contravened the values that the populace at large espoused. The most obvious testament to disapproval was the administration of popular punishment to those caught in the act and to those who engaged in the allied practice of child stripping. Thus the man who was intercepted in Ship Street, Dublin in September 1750 with ‘two young girls … in a coach’ ‘was dragged out of the coach and severely used’.Footnote 21 Fifteen years later, ‘a female vagabond … detected stripping a child in Smock Alley, … was very roughly handled by the populace’, while in 1768 Mary Spencer, who made ‘a practice of stealing children’, was subjected to ‘a most severe ducking’ for ‘decoying a boy of four years’.Footnote 22 In the interval, newspapers counselled ‘parents …, masters and mistresses’ to ‘keep … their children and servants at home in [the] evenings, and not let them ramble abroad’. But their advice was largely ignored, as several newspapers acknowledged when they conceded at the height of the 1750–51 episode that ‘the trade of kidnapping children still continueth, notwithstanding the many cautions given in the papers against those wretches who steal children’.Footnote 23
A prolonged period of servitude in the American colonies or the West Indies was arguably the worst case scenario for a child who was kidnapped in mid eighteenth-century Ireland. A hardly less traumatic, but less extended, fate was to be taken up, brought to an isolated location, stripped and left naked, or next to naked, and dependent, if one was to be restored (expeditiously or at all) to one’s family, on the kindness of strangers.Footnote 24 This practice was sufficiently rarely reported during the mid-eighteenth century to discourage generalisation, but it could be the case, as evidenced by the experience of the young boy who was brought from Dublin to Waterford in the autumn of 1750, that a child was taken up by a ‘strolling beggar’ with more nefarious intent. In most instances then and later, children abducted for the purpose of depriving them of their clothing were abandoned once the deed was accomplished, but since the child located at Waterford in 1750 had his hair ‘cut off’, it is reasonable to assume that the person responsible did not intend to turn ‘the boy adrift’, though this was the outcome in this case.Footnote 25
At any event, the perception that beggars were complicit in a portion of these and allied behaviours that contravened the expanding ideal of childhood reinforced the negative stereotype of beggary. ‘Strolling beggars’ were viewed with particular unease because their peripatetic lifestyle contravened the settled domestic ideals of the respectable, and because their tendency to congregate in public spaces – including the streets and squares of the towns and cities in which the ‘nobility and gentry chiefly reside’ – collided with the vision of an ordered streetscape that the authorities increasingly prioritised.Footnote 26 Moreover, beggars were identified with a spectrum of anti-social activities, of which child stealing was among the more reprehensible. ‘Strolling beggars of both sexes frequently commit crimes of this kind’, it was observed pointedly towards the end of the account of the experience of the young boy who was detected on the Waterford road in 1750. Yet, the report made clear, he might have fared worse as beggars who engaged in such activities could not be depended on to rest content with depriving their victims of their clothing and their liberty; had they it in mind to introduce the child to their way of life they ‘often break the limbs of children to distort them, and move compassion’.Footnote 27 Though frequently invoked, the spectre of children being mutilated in order to increase their value in questing for alms was rarely substantiated. Yet it guided official thinking, and legislation enacted in 1750 empowered officials in Dublin ‘to take away all children of beggars, and to put them into the Protestant Charter Schools’, in anticipation that it would be ‘of the utmost advantage to this kingdom, as it will create industry, prevent idleness, thieving, robbery and murder, and hinder those thieving wretches from being a burthen to the publick’.Footnote 28
While officials were oblivious to the irony of the fact that they promoted a policy that was predicated on the principle of separating children from their parents (when they extolled the settled family as the ideal unit) because they did not approve of the family dynamic that bound those who made their livelihood by begging, those motivated by mercenary motives to kidnap children entertained still fewer scruples. The fall-off in the number of reported incidents of kidnapping during the mid-1750s suggests that it was pursued less actively at that point than it had been earlier in the decade, but the advice offered to parents to ‘keep their children within doors’ in the summer of 1753 as ‘many people have for some years past been deprived of their children by the horrid practice of kidnapping’ indicates that it remained a real and substantive fear.Footnote 29 The fact that a majority of the children that were targeted in the 1760s came from the poorer sectors of society may have eased the anxieties of the respectable, but there was little scope for complacency, if that is what obtained, and it was not manifest in 1768 when two children were identified on Rogerson’s Quay in the custody of a man who had it in mind ‘privately [to] convey … them to America’.Footnote 30 Persuaded that ‘the old villainous practice of kidnapping children from their parents’ continued unaltered, it was reported in advance of the 1769 parliamentary session that legislation would be prepared making it a ‘felony without benefit of clergy to sell, to steal, to kidnap, or to force any child, or any other person whatever, without their own consent, or those of their parents, guardians, or nearest of kin, to indent or go abroad to any other parts of the world’. It was not to be, however; the premature prorogation of the session ensured that no such legislation was readied still less enacted.Footnote 31
The failure once more of parliament to address the matter is consistent with the conclusion that those in power (and a majority of M.P.s) did not perceive child-kidnapping as a sufficiently serious offence to warrant its addition to the statute book. They were certainly less predisposed to sanction the perpetrators than the population at large. The Dublin populace manifested its enduring displeasure with the practices of kidnapping and stealing children by continuing to punish those that were caught in the act during the late 1760s. Yet, it adhered equally steadfastly to its disinclination to involve the authorities by handing over those who were responsible.Footnote 32 Child kidnapping was not the only offence to which the populace responded in this manner, to be sure. The populace often responded negatively to infanticide, and was disposed to take a dim view of the egregious abuse of children, as Vere and Neale Molloy found out when they were tried for serious child neglect in 1762, but it drew the line at supporting the prosecution of those responsible.Footnote 33 It may be, as was the case with the London crowd, that this was a manifestation of popular disapproval of the sanctions provided for by law rather than alienation from the system, but if so, the failure of the populace and lawmakers to establish a shared attitude diminished the capacity of both to prevent the kidnapping of children. Those charged with enforcing the law are also not exempt from criticism. Yet it would be misleading to imply that officials turned a blind eye to the practice, based on the readiness with which those suspected of involvement were consigned to Newgate Prison, Dublin in the 1760s.Footnote 34 The problem was that the sanctions available did not constitute an effective deterrent because those brought to trial were usually tried for nothing more serious than assault in the absence of a denominated offence of child kidnapping.
The want of a specific sanction, notwithstanding, the decline in reported incidents in the early 1770s suggests that the large number of ‘servants and redemptioners’ seeking passage on board the many ships then plying the Atlantic Ocean may have prompted a contraction in the kidnapping of children for transportation abroad.Footnote 35 Since something comparable had occurred in the 1750s in England, as well as Ireland, the paucity of reported cases cannot be taken as evidence that the phenomenon was in irrevocable decline.Footnote 36 The detection of ‘a woman … kidnapping a child in High Street’ Dublin in 1773 indicates that it was not discontinued.Footnote 37 It is also apparent that public awareness of the issue remained at an elevated level. The publication of accounts of child kidnappings in England and France, and its invocation in 1773 by the author of a public letter to John Hely-Hutchinson, who compared the strategy the newly-appointed provost of Trinity College employed in pursuit of self-advancement to that of ‘kidnappers [who] decoy children with sugar plums and tinceled [sic] baubles’, certainly highlighted its continuing topicality.Footnote 38
As a metaphor for Hely-Hutchinson’s brazen pursuit of preferment, kidnapping was not wholly inapposite, though its invocation would have registered more strongly if there were more cases, and they were classic expressions of the phenomenon.Footnote 39 And yet it is ironic that it was invoked at this point as, first, the level of demand for berths in the early 1770s dimmed the need for ship’s captains to engage in the illegal trafficking of children, and, second, the outbreak of war between the colonists and Great Britain in 1776 interrupted the emigrant trade.Footnote 40 Indeed, it might have brought about the cessation of the practice of kidnapping children for transportation abroad, if the incentive, provided by the prospect of financial gain, had not continued to appeal, and the option of the crown’s West Indies dependencies did not remain.Footnote 41 This was manifested spectacularly in April 1781 in a sequence of reports, the most remarkable of which concerned a woman ‘taken up … in Thomas Street [Dublin] with no less than five children’, whom she had ‘seduced to go with her by giving them gingerbread cakes etc’. The number of participants in this incident assured it of notice, but more was to come, as the woman was induced by the abuse she experienced at the hands of the crowd – ‘after stripping her and dragging her about the street, [they] cut off her ears’ – to confess ‘to have taken up no less than twenty seven children’ in a fortnight and to identify the ‘house on one of the quays’ from which they were ‘liberated’.Footnote 42 This was, by some measure, the largest number of kidnapped children reported in a single incident, but the fact that two other female procurers, who were secured in comparably comprising circumstances in the same week, purportedly pointed the authorities to eighteen and eight children at other quayside locations suggested that the trade in transporting children to the West Indies was either especially well organised at this point (as some believed to be the case), or that the anticipation of an early conclusion to hostilities in America had raised expectations that trade with the colonies must soon recommence, and that those who were ready to take full advantage would be commensurately rewarded.Footnote 43 This was the conclusion arrived at in certain quarters; in a further report at the end of April concerning an unnamed woman ‘committed to the New Prison for kidnapping four children’, it was specifically remarked that the children were taken ‘with [the] intent to dispose of them for the colonies’.Footnote 44
Because the numbers cited in the reports produced in April 1781 dwarf all others, it is tempting to dismiss this episode – which is unprecedented in the annals of Irish child kidnapping – as fantastical. And yet, because the details upon which this account is reconstructed are drawn from four, or five,Footnote 45 separate news stories, and the incident was reported by three reputable newspapers – the Freeman’s Journal, Hibernian Journal and Hibernian Chronicle – it possesses credibility. Furthermore, the testimony provided to Alderman James Shiel by Bridget Mooney, who was one of three women detained for kidnapping on 26 April, that she had received ‘thirty pounds from a [ship’s] Captain in the harbour for that purpose’, adds to the credibility of a remarkable set of reports.Footnote 46 It also suggests, if true, that the ‘trade’ in kidnapped children may have been significantly larger and more successfully managed during the 1740s, 1750s and 1760s than the surviving evidence suggests. It seems improbable, based on the accounts located to date, that children were routinely shipped out of Dublin port in the numbers encountered in April 1781. But, it is relevant to note that ten ‘youths’ were located in a cellar in London in 1782 where they were gathered ‘in order to be shipped off to India’.Footnote 47 In any event, taken together with the evidence for the activities of kid-merchants earlier in the century, and the ongoing, if discontinuous activity in the interval, the discovery of so many female procurers in 1781 supports the conclusion not only that that the kidnapping of children for sale in colonial North America and the West Indies may have been larger than initial estimates suggest, but also that it was merely one manifestation of a pattern of child exploitation that existed independently of the particular configuration of trade and communication that defined the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy.
II
The conclusion of the War of Independence in the autumn of 1783 was followed by a surge in emigration to America as the combination of pent up demand and a difficult economic environment in Ireland caused many who might not otherwise have contemplated leaving to undertake the Atlantic passage.Footnote 48 Significantly, there were few if any kidnapped children in their ranks, as the demand for berths meant that shippers encountered few problems filling the available space, with passengers willing to pay the high fares they sought.Footnote 49 Furthermore, ‘the decline of indentured servitude’ in the northern states of the newly independent nation meant that demand for labour in this form contracted with the result that when reports of child abduction reappear in the Irish press in 1785, they are of a different character to those of the pre-war years.Footnote 50
This only became clear with time. When the Dublin Morning Post and the Freeman’s Journal reported in the summer of 1785 that ‘the infamous practice of kidnapping children is continued with impunity through this city’, the presumption was that it was a resumption of the familiar practice, and that it involved a comparable cast of kidnappers, ‘kid-merchants’ and ships’ captains.Footnote 51 Since these reports coincided with a concerted campaign by those newspapers close to the Irish administration to diminish the attraction of the United States in the public imagination, attention was inevitably drawn to ships in Dublin Bay that were suspected of ‘receiving persons who should be kidnapped for the American slave trade’. Indeed, it was heralded as a triumph in certain quarters in May 1786 when the negative attention directed at one vessel caused it to haul anchor and ‘sail … in ballast to some northern port’.Footnote 52 Emboldened by this result, and heartened by reports (a year later) that a Dublin hairdresser had located his missing son, and a number of other boys, on a ship in the bay, the city’s magistrates were exhorted to keep ‘a strict eye on all vessels bound to America, in order to put a stop to such an infamous traffic’.Footnote 53 There is no evidence to suggest that officials complied, but there was no let-up in the number of reports of kidnappings, abductions and seductions or warnings to parents ‘to be watchful’. Quite the opposite, the Castle press, with the Freeman’s Journal and Volunteer Evening Post in the vanguard, persisted in the claim that children were being taken up and ‘sent’, it was alleged in 1787, ‘to the American plantations’, to ‘the back settlements of America’, and other remote destinations in the ‘land of savages’.Footnote 54
The frequent reiteration of these claims supported the impression, expressed in the Volunteer Evening Post in 1787, that there were ‘numerous female kidnappers’ at work in the city of Dublin.Footnote 55 In reality, the evidence might equally have permitted a contrary interpretation, but assertions to the effect that ‘the infamous practice of kidnapping children is continued with impunity’ accorded better with the message Dublin Castle and its agents in the public sphere sought to convey. The conflation of child kidnapping with the only slightly less contentious practice, attributed to ‘seducing kidnappers’, of ‘enticing’ artificers to emigrate to America added to the negative perception.Footnote 56 The suggestion that boys were being specifically targeted was an additional refinement since it complemented the inference that kidnap victims were destined for the colonial frontier, and the generally anti-American rhetoric indulged in by the Volunteer Evening Post, Freeman’s Journal and other papers that perceived the full emigrant ships as a criticism of the Irish administration’s stewardship.Footnote 57 Had they been less intent on diverting attention from the country’s political and economic difficulties, they might have identified problems closer to home that provided would-be emigrants and child stealers with plenty of incentive to leave. The country had largely cast off the effects of the subsistence crisis of 1782–4 by the mid-1780s, but the increase of 92 per cent (from 2,566 in 1784 to 4,934 in 1787) in the number resident in the Dublin House of Industry, and calls during the late 1780s for the exemption of houses with a single hearth from the hearth tax confirm that those in the lower socio-economic categories were slow to experience the effect of recovery.Footnote 58 There was, moreover, as the House of Industry figures attest, and the preoccupation with removing ‘the swarms of sturdy beggars’, ‘their squaws and bantlings’ from the streets confirm, a particular problem in the ‘metropolis’, which explains why a majority of the reports of child kidnapping were carried in the newspapers based in the capital and involved individuals resident there.Footnote 59
This is not to suggest that these newspapers concocted the reports of child kidnapping carried on their pages from the summer of 1785. The perception that child kidnapping was a reality was genuine, and the Castle press was not duplicitous when it called upon magistrates to ‘put a stop to this worse than savage practice’, and upon the citizenry ‘to unite in order to stop the further progress of this alarming grievance’.Footnote 60 The populace did not, to be sure, require any encouragement to intervene to rescue children when kidnappers were detected in the act.Footnote 61 Moreover, though some were permitted ‘to depart without any punishment whatever’ or ‘found an opportunity to escape’, others experienced the sharp end of popular justice.Footnote 62 For example, when the woman responsible for the attempted abduction of the five-year-old daughter of ‘an eminent shopkeeper [resident] near the Haymarket in Dublin city was interrupted in May 1787, ‘the populace … tying a rope under her arms, dragged her to the river, where she received a severe ducking before they suffered her to depart’.Footnote 63
It is likely that the woman who experienced the wrath of the crowd in this instance sought not to kidnap, but to steal the clothing of the child that was her target, since, contrary to the impression fostered in Castle-funded newspapers, few kidnapped children were embarked for the United States in the 1780s. The liberal Dublin Evening Post, which had sustained a pattern of impartial and accurate news reportage over a decade by this point, signalled as much when instead of echoing the claim that ‘the infamous practice of child kidnapping … [was] for the purpose of selling them to the masters of vessels bound to America’, it pointed out, beginning in May 1787, that children were being ‘decoyed … for the purpose of stripping them’.Footnote 64 Unable to maintain the pretence that this was not the case, most newspapers (the Volunteer Evening Post most notably) did not hesitate to acknowledge that ‘an old practice has been revived’, but this was not the unanimous opinion.Footnote 65 The Freeman’s Journal acknowledged this possibility in 1788, when it conceded that a report ‘propagated these few days past relative to the kidnapping of children … is found to be a falsehood’. But it was not until September 1789, when the post-war emigration spike to the United States was over and the paper had ceased its routine vilification of the young republic, that it openly avowed that ‘the kidnapping of children … is not for the purpose of selling them to the masters of vessels sailing from any of our ports to America, as falsely and absurdly believed by the generality of people, but for the wicked design of plundering them of their wearing apparel’.Footnote 66 This was a significant volte-face from a newspaper that had cultivated the impression that ‘the inhuman practice of kidnapping children’ was sustained by a confederacy of ‘female monsters’, ruthless men and villainous ships’ captains, when the conditions that had sustained the phenomenon for half a century no longer obtained.Footnote 67 The contracting demand for indentured servants, allied with the cessation of the option of transporting felons to North America, deprived ships’ captains of the incentive to conceal the transport of children as well as the opportunity to ‘sell’ them once they arrived in America, and the practice was all but brought to a conclusion as a result.Footnote 68
Though the acknowledgement by the Castle press that the kidnapping of children for transportation abroad sale was significant, the popular conviction that had encouraged newspapers in this interest to seek to exploit the practice for their own purposes proved more enduring. It was in evidence in the summer of 1791 when an isolated call was issued for the ‘suppression’ of ‘the trade of kidnapping for the American plantations’ because of ‘the most horrid oppression’ to which ‘slaves and [indentured] servants’ were subjected on the Carolina frontier.Footnote 69 And it was afforded more sustained expression in the summer of 1794, when the city of Dublin was plunged into ‘constant alarm’ by a series of accounts ‘of the villainy of several women who have taken up the infamous trade of kidnapping’, which the authorities were obliged to acknowledge had no basis in fact because the trade in children to North America was no more.Footnote 70
If so, the cessation of the practice of kidnapping children for transportation across the Atlantic did not release children from the exploitative attention of adults. The emergence into prominence of the ‘stripper’, as the women who pursued the practice of kidnapping children in order to acquire their clothes were now termed, demonstrated that there were still those who continued to target children.Footnote 71 And just as was the case when kidnapping was at its peak, the decoying of children in order to deprive them of their clothing did not supersede child stealing completely. Both practices continued to be pursued, not least because a number of employments that were reliant upon child labour continued to incentivise child theft. This notwithstanding, the mid-1780s constitute something of a turning point in the story of child exploitation as it was then that child stripping displaced child kidnapping as the greater threat to the liberty of children.
III
The report in the Dublin Morning Post of 31 March 1785 that ‘one of those reproaches to human nature, who have for some time past made a practice of stripping children’ had been detected in Temple Lane ‘carrying off a little girl’ illustrates that apprehending children in order to deprive them of their clothing did not simply fill the vacuum left by the cessation of the transportation of kidnapped children. Child theft did not cease, but whereas the opportunities offered by the labour market in the American colonies and Caribbean ensured it exceeded child stripping until the mid-1780s, it was exceeded by the latter thereafter.Footnote 72 This explains the comparative paucity of instances of child stripping in Ireland prior to the 1780s, though the identification of Irish examples from the 1750s, 1760 and 1770s, and in England extending back to the 1670s, illustrates that it represented an intensification of a phenomenon with a long history.Footnote 73
Be that as it may, the standard modus operandi when it came to prominence in the 1780s and 1790s was for an adult, generally a woman, to lure a child, or on occasions two or more children,Footnote 74 using sweets, ginger bread, fruit or the promise of a reward or a toy as bait, to an entry, porch, alley, passage, empty house, stable, open ground, churchyard, or other ‘bye place’ usually at a safe remove from the child’s residence, where it was ‘stripped’ of its clothing and ‘robbed’ of any items of material value – earrings were especially popular – it had in its possession, following which it was abandoned.Footnote 75 In most instances, it was not necessary to have recourse to physical violence, because this was not required to induce the child (most of whom were between the ages of three and sixFootnote 76 ) to co-operate.Footnote 77 This is not to imply that violence was not threatened or that the process was violence free. When the daughter of a linen draper from Mary Street, Dublin, ‘made some resistance’ in 1787, she was ‘threatened [with] murder if [she] persisted’.Footnote 78 The following instances are illustrative of the ‘practice’ as it was pursued in the final decades of the eighteenth century:
Last Friday [29 April 1785], a woman decoyed the child of Mr Dunn, of Anglesea Street, about six years of age, into Cook Street, and stripped it of an entire suit of fustian, with which she went off. A clergyman passing by made strict enquiry after the parents, to whom he restored the child, first providing cloaths, instead of those taken by the above miscreant.Footnote 79
At about one o’clock last Monday [17 August 1789], a little girl, the daughter of a grocer in King Street, standing at the shop door, was decoyed by a female, and brought into an entry near the place, and robbed of her earrings, frock, skirt and buckles; and the same day the daughter of an ale-draper in Exchequer Street, a fine child of about five years old, was seduced in like manner from her parents door into an entry in said street, where the little creature was completely stripped and left naked.Footnote 80
A beautiful young female child, whose parents name is Reilly, and live in Tighe Street, not quite four years old, was inveigled away on Thursday [3 April 1790] evening a few streets off, stripped entirely naked, and left in an entry. Friday morning a bell was sent out offering a reward for finding the child, when a woman, who had humanely given it lodging, brought it to the much-afflicted father and mother.Footnote 81
A majority of the children that were stripped were soon restored to their parents because the perpetrator had achieved her object once she had taken possession of the clothes and other valuables that the child possessed. The motive in such instances was purely financial. A substantial proportion of the population of Ireland was ‘miserably poor’. The quality of the clothing they wore was, as a consequence, Arthur Young famously observed, ‘so ragged that their nakedness is scarcely covered’.Footnote 82 There was, as a result, a vigorous market in the pawn and sale of second-hand clothing, some at least of which was conveyed by thieves to dealers in ‘old clothes’ or to ‘persons who bought old clothes etc, and were probably long in the same villainous practice’, who cared little from whence it came.Footnote 83 Moreover, the sums that could be realised incentivised the practice. When Mary Conolly was tried at the Dublin quarter sessions in the summer of 1794 for kidnapping the daughter of John Stockdale, the three items of clothing she stole – the bonnet, coat and shift – were valued at 5s. 5d.Footnote 84 Gold earrings, pearl necklaces, and shoe buckles were obviously worth more, though pawning inevitably resulted in the realisation of only a proportion of the value; when Judith Curran sought to exchange ‘a frock and petticoat’ she had ‘stripped’ of a two-year- old in Belfast in 1822, she ‘pawned them for 10d.’Footnote 85
If the prospect of garnering a proportion of the value of the clothing or jewellery on the second-hand clothes market or from a pawnshop ensured the expeditious restoration of most child victims of stripping, this was not always the case. A minority of the children decoyed were never recovered, either because the abductors were so alarmed by the consequences of discovery that they took steps to pre-empt this possibility, because the children were lost, or died of hypothermia or other causes, or because the adult responsible had something in mind other than the theft of clothes. Because children possessed an economic value, above and beyond the clothes and jewellery they wore, as beggarsFootnote 86 or as a source of labour, the phenomenon of child stealing persisted through the late eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century. Consistent with Elizabeth Foyster’s investigation of ‘child abduction’ in England, the motivations of child stealers ranged greatly. Some were personal; others were opportunist; most were prompted by economic calculation.Footnote 87 One destination of a minority of Irish (and English) stolen children was to be sold to a chimney sweep. The ‘usual price’ charged by those who engaged in ‘this … traffic’ was ‘a guinea and a crown’s worth of drink’ per child, and, though it was condemned as ‘iniquitous’ by the respectable, it did not prevent its occurrence. The claim that ‘some female wretches’ addicted to alcohol ‘dispose[d] of their own children to persons of that profession [chimney sweeps] from the accursed fascination to spirituous liquors’ might seem apocryphal, but examples from both the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indicate that it was more than a moral tale.Footnote 88 A still more tragic fate was to die or be killed. This possibly was the misfortune of the six-year-old girl, dressed ‘extremely neat’, who ‘was whipped off from her parents door at Temple Bar’ in June 1787, and who had not been restored to her family several days later; of the ‘young child’ who was carried off in 1791 by a man ‘who could not be prevailed upon to tell what he had done with the child, from whence it is feared the fellow has wickedly disposed of it, so as not to be recovered’, and of the five-year-old child that was taken dead out of a canal where, in 1801, it had been ‘thrown by a strolling women after she stripped it’.Footnote 89 It certainly was the fate of a child, ‘about three or four years old’, who was taken by ‘a strolling woman, commonly called a loughshool’,Footnote 90 named Cath McBeagh, from a location near Omagh, County Tyrone in the summer of 1788. Having been taken into custody when she was discovered with ‘part’ of a child’s apparel ‘in her possession’, McBeagh refused to cooperate with the authorities for the good reason that she had something to hide. However, her obduracy did not save her, for when the missing child was located the following morning ‘lying at the back of a ditch near the town with its throat cut from ear to ear, and stabbed in many parts of the body’, ‘the inhuman wretch’ was detained in anticipation that she would be brought to trial.Footnote 91
The allegation, in the report of this incident, that the woman concerned ‘has made a practice of stealing children’, indicates that there were individuals in Ireland, as in England, who were serial abductors, and that those reports, which imply that child stealing was an opportunistic crime does not afford sufficient attention to those who pursued the practice in an organised manner.Footnote 92 The targeting of ‘well dressed’ children, children with ‘new’ clothes, and children with earrings, necklaces and shoe buckles certainly supports the conclusion that a majority of children that were victims of ‘stripping’ were singled out in order to realise the value of the clothes and other redeemable goods they had on their person, and that they were of no use to the perpetrator once they had been ‘stripped’.Footnote 93 But child stripping must not be perceived in isolation; it was, after infanticide, the most high profile of a spectrum of allied offences involving children that included child stealing, child sale, and, though it was uncommon, abduction with sexual intent. The belief that coitus with an underage girl was a cure for venereal disease certainly incentivised some syphilitic men to perpetrate sexual assaults on minors, but those that were targeted for this purpose, or like twelve-year-old Mary Neal in 1788, who were abducted into the sex industry, were typically older than the child targets of ‘strippers’, and usually pursued by men with no interest in making off with either the child or the clothing they wore.Footnote 94 This is true also of a majority of the sexual assaults perpetrated on young women, though the opportunism that guided a proportion of offenders of this ilk caused some to make off with the clothing of their victim.Footnote 95 The stripping of clothes was not, as this implies, exclusively a female crime, but male involvement in stripping of children was modest by comparison with that of women, and with their earlier involvement in the kidnapping of children for foreign parts.Footnote 96
Information on the social status of the women responsible for child stripping in the 1780s and 1790s is commensurately vague, as contemporaries opted for less than precise descriptors such as ‘old’ ‘elderly’, and ‘infamous’ to identify those responsible, but the language employed is in keeping with the broader impression that this was an offence in which older women were unusually prominent.Footnote 97 The apprehension of Cath McBeagh, a ‘strolling woman’, at Omagh in 1788 is consistent with this, though otherwise there are no grounds for suggesting that the elderly were any more predisposed to the pursuit than others among the needy. It is notable, by comparison, that accounts are generally more forthcoming on the social status of the family of victims, and that they convey the distinct impression that those responsible came from the social layer beneath that of the artisans, craftsmen, and shopkeepers whose children were the primary targets of a majority of offenders.Footnote 98 This was certainly the case in the metropolitan area, from where most of the cases derive; evidence for the rest of the country is more elusive, but since the kidnapping of young children in the late eighteenth century was an urban crime first and foremost, there is little reason to challenge the logic of the fact (previously demonstrated in the case of the abduction of heiresses) that the underlying economic rationale of the practice derived from the economic and social gap that existed between the perpetrators and the victims of the crime.Footnote 99
This would account also for the condemnation and condescension that was habitually directed towards those responsible. Specific terms of derogation – ‘wretch’, ‘inhuman wretch’, ‘jade’, ‘miscreant’ and ‘cruel and depraved plunderer’ – were commonly employed in accounts, and broadly based condemnations – ‘a monster of a woman’, ‘a wretch, callous to every feeling of nature’, ‘one of those reproaches to human nature’ and ‘abandoned beings who are so callous to the dictates of nature and humanity’ – were invoked when ‘female strippers’ were being described.Footnote 100 This echoed the populace’s attitude.Footnote 101 When a ‘stripper’ was located she was as likely as not to be subjected to the wrath of the crowd, regardless of her age and circumstance. The oldest person to experience the sharp end of popular justice for this reason was a woman ‘appearing to be not less than 80 years of age’, who was dragged in the gutter in 1785; others were subjected to ‘ducking’ at a pump, public fountain or river, to be rolled ‘for some time through the kennels’,Footnote 102 to be ‘pursued and pelted’, or otherwise ‘severely handled by the mob’ as a result of which serious, even life-threatening injuries, could ensue.Footnote 103 The fact that punishments of this ilk were more frequently resorted to in the 1790s than earlier, and that the populace demonstrated greater willingness then to ‘deliver’ offenders ‘to the police’, suggests that the public’s tolerance of abuses involving the serious maltreatment of children – never great – diminished as the offence assumed a higher public profile.Footnote 104 In the interim, individuals who might have been subject to serious legal penalty were able to escape sanction because (in the absence of a denominated offence) they were charged with assault, or because officials were disposed to be lenient.Footnote 105 This does not mean that those found guilty were not punished, or that the authorities did not make it clear that the ‘stripping’ of children was a serious offence. In 1787, when Anne Codd of Dublin was ‘sentenced to be whipped from the chapel [of St Sepulchre] in Stephen Street to the corner of Back Lane in Dublin … to be confined six months, and to give two sureties, in £25 each, for her future good behaviour’ at the quarter sessions, she ‘received such a severe discipline as it is hoped may hereafter prevent such practises’.Footnote 106 A small number of others were subjected to comparable sanctions, though the capacity of the system to respond appropriately was called into question in May 1790 when Mary Burke was fined three marks and imprisoned for months at the County Dublin Quarter Sessions ‘for an assault’ for ‘carrying … away’ four-year-old Elizabeth Wolfe ‘with intent to strip her’.Footnote 107
The ‘middling sort’ was disquieted by the lenity of the sentences handed down in such cases. The observation of the judge who sentenced Mary Burke in May 1790 that the sanction was not proportionate to the offence reflected the mounting displeasure of the respectable that those who engaged in child kidnapping were not appropriately prosecuted or punished.Footnote 108 The frustration to which this gave rise was exacerbated by long delays between the commission of an offence and a court appearance, which meant that the families of victims routinely failed to sustain a prosecution. It is unsurprising therefore that before the end of the 1780s the press was calling ‘loudly for exemplary punishment’ to ‘deter … such atrocious and abominable practices’.Footnote 109 There were even calls for summary justice, and if there was little likelihood of this, the willingness of the populace to administer severe punishments in the early 1790s suggests it mirrored an expanded current of opinion.Footnote 110
In the context of the surge in the number of reports of child stripping spanning the years 1785 and 1795, the paucity of reports of the practice in the late 1790s and early years of the nineteenth century is not easily accounted for. It may be that the level of revolutionary and counter-insurgency activity during these years served to discourage the practice, though this does not sit easily with the intrinsically economic character of the phenomenon. It is significant in this context that the contraction in the pursuit spanning the second half of the 1790s came to an end during the subsistence crisis of 1799–1801. In May 1800, ‘a female child, about three years old’, was taken from outside her home on Trinity Street, Dublin, by a ‘beggar woman’ who ‘stripped [her] of every article of … apparel, except a little pair of green boots, not of sufficient value’. Three months later, another three-year-old was ‘stripped of its clothes’ ‘in an entry in Bedford Row’, also in Dublin, while a five-year-old was stripped in 1801.Footnote 111 Though these incidents came as a surprise to those that had concluded optimistically that this ‘abominable practice … [was] extinct’, child stripping was not pursued actively then, or in the years that followed the crisis of 1799–1801.Footnote 112 The publication by the Freeman’s Journal in 1802 of ‘the extraordinary tale … of Elizabeth Mary Kellen’, who was kidnapped and stripped by gypsies at Plymouth, England, attests to the ongoing public interest in the practice, but the shortage of domestic incidents is in keeping with a pattern – previously identified with respect to child kidnapping – which suggests that the targeting of children had entered an inactive phase.
This might have been sustained had economic conditions remained buoyant, but the positive trading environment that fostered increased commercial activity and brought prosperity to the kingdom during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars impacted society unevenly.Footnote 113 The intensification of child stripping that can be identified, beginning in the late 1810s, may thus be conceived of as a manifestation of the steps that a small section of the mainly urban community was prepared to take in order to obtain the wherewithal to function in an increasingly monetised economy.
IV
Though the absence of detailed biographical information on Irish ‘strippers’ precludes the sort of family-based inquiry that has been undertaken for England, the Irish evidence points to the conclusion that economic factors lie at the heart of any explanation of the phenomenon.Footnote 114 It may be, as Elizabeth Foyster has argued of England, that ‘the transformation of the material world’ in which children were raised combined with the effects of greater commercialisation to encourage those parents with the resources to spend more money on clothing, jewellery and other goods, was the precondition for the surge in child-stripping that can be dated to the late eighteenth century.Footnote 115 The middle and upper classes in Ireland were certainly eager to savour the fruits of commercialisation, but the fact that the Irish economy was not as vigorous as its neighbour, and that the deflationary environment that followed the conclusion of hostilities in Europe in 1815 registered more acutely there, is consistent with the conclusion that the pattern of child stripping that can be identified in Ireland is bound more closely to the fortunes of an economy in which poverty was increasing.Footnote 116 It is certainly pertinent that the reanimation of a pattern of child stripping mirrors the economic challenges experienced as the promise of prosperity that was readily appealed to assist with the acceptance of the Anglo–Irish Union failed to come to pass, and serious challenges were evident in advance of the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. In keeping with the pattern identified for the decade 1785–94, most of the instances of child stripping that were reported between 1805 and 1815 took place in Dublin, but the fact that the Cork Chronicle advised parents in the summer of 1812 to be on the alert to frustrate an unnamed male who used ‘fruit and cakes’ to inveigle young children to a sheltered location in Cork city in order to deprive them of their clothes was a harbinger of the future.Footnote 117
This did not become apparent until the 1820s. In the meantime, reports of children being abducted so they could be deprived of their clothing and other negotiable belongings continued to emanate disproportionately from the Dublin metropolitan area.Footnote 118 Most conformed to the pattern with which readers of the public prints were familiar, though the involvement of John Lacy, ‘a smart looking ragged boy, of about 9 years old’, who in 1824 responded to the illness of his father, a matchmaker, by ‘stripping the jockey coat off a child in Chancery Lane’ indicated that stripping was not an exclusively female response to economic difficulties.Footnote 119 Saliently, Lacy was sentenced to a term in prison at the recorder’s court at which he was tried, which was in keeping with the fact that the Union parliament did what the Irish parliament had failed to do, and in 1814 approved legislation that made child abduction a felony punishable by seven years transportation.Footnote 120 Coincidentally, the Dublin recorder’s courts had imposed this sentence on Mary Smith, who was charged with stripping, but found guilty of child theft in 1811.Footnote 121 This was an unusual case (because the child at issue was held by its abductor for nine days), but the fact that those suspected of the offence were no longer subjected to the wrath of the canaille and that the sentence was well received by the public ensured the courts encountered no resistance when, following the intervention of the legislature, sentences of seven years transportation were routinely imposed on those found guilty of the offence. This was the sentence imposed on Bridget Byrne who was tried in 1815 for ‘seducing Ann Shannon, a girl under ten years of age, with intent to strip and steal from her person all or some articles of her wearing apparel’; on Mary Moores and Catherine Hinds in 1819 for depriving a six-year-old and a seven-year-old of ‘wearing apparel’; and of five others (Esther Byrne, Mary Collins, Maria Conway, Elizabeth Mulvaney and Margaret Kelly) who received like sentences from Dublin courts in 1828 and 1830.Footnote 122 In addition, several other offenders were sentenced to terms in prison, in some cases ‘with hard labour’.Footnote 123 The problem for the authorities was that these sentences did not function as an effective deterrent. Indeed, stripping seemed to be on an inexorably increasing curve in the capital in the 1820s as the realisation that it could be profitable caused some to pursue it in a more organised manner and on a larger scale. The detention of Mary Kelly and Eliza Kenny in 1826 ‘on a charge of having carried on a most extensive trade in stripping children’ was revealing in this respect, but they were not unique. Both Esther Byrne and Mary Collins also worked together, while Margaret Kelly was charged, in March 1830, with decoying three children, whom she left ‘nearly naked, shivering and crying with the cold’ once she had taken their clothing.Footnote 124
In point of fact, the practice had reached its nineteenth-century peak in Dublin by that point, for though examples of children being decoyed and stripped were not uncommon in the capital during the 1830s, they were fewer in number then than was the case in the 1820s and they were fewer still in the 1840s and 1850s.Footnote 125 The continuing tendency of newspapers to employ the same negative terms to describe the offence and those involved that were resorted to in the 1780s indicates that, as far as their editors were concerned, the public hostility towards those who engaged in the practice was undiluted. But the fact that the majority of those who were brought before the courts in the 1830s were sentenced to terms of imprisonment rather than to transportation would indicate that the moral outrage that the practice had long sustained eased in the capital in tandem with the evident decline in the practice.Footnote 126 There were still moments, as in the autumn of 1841 when as many as ‘nine or ten children’ were stripped by Mary Halloran – ‘a young girl of about 18’ – in one day ‘in the neighbourhood of Smithfield, King Street, Church Street etc’, which made it clear that the practice was far from moribund, but the urgency with which the Dublin Metropolitan Police pursued the offender in this instance was a measure of their determination to keep the problem within bounds.Footnote 127 This was insufficient to deter a majority of those women (many of whom were now ‘young’), tempted by the prospect of securing a small financial windfall from a local pawnshop, from engaging in child stripping, but the fall in the number of reported incidents during the 1850s indicates that even if it was not in terminal decline in the metropolitan area, it was under control.Footnote 128
The situation was not so comforting elsewhere, particularly in Belfast. As the fastest growing city in Ireland, Belfast experienced problems comparable to those that gripped Dublin in the late eighteenth century, and Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, which also had a problem with child stripping, in the nineteenth century.Footnote 129 Like these cities, Belfast was susceptible to popular panic (previously in evidence in Dublin 1785 and 1794) such as seized the ‘working classes’ of the city in 1822 on foot of ‘an absurd and unfounded rumour’ that ‘several children here have been kidnapped and carried off’. Indeed, but for the intervention of the authorities the populace of Belfast would have inflicted serious injury on the individual who was suspected (wrongly) of targeting children in this instance.Footnote 130
But if Belfast did not have a problem then, it was not long before it did. The decision of the Country Antrim assizes, in July 1822, to sentence Judith Curran to seven years transportation for seizing George Carolan, aged two, and pawning his clothes may have acted as a deterrent for a time, but it was already evident by the late 1820s that the forces that fuelled child stripping in Belfast then were as strong as they were in Dublin.Footnote 131 In the absence of official statistics the most pertinent register of this is the comparable number of reported incidents of the offence in both cities in the 1830s, but whereas the number of incidents in Dublin declined thereafter, the opposite was the case in Belfast, with numbers there exceeding those reported in Dublin in the 1840s and 1850s. Otherwise, the pattern identifiable in Belfast resembles that already described for Dublin; years with few or no incidents were followed by short-lived surges when it seemed that every child was vulnerable. This was not the reality, of course. The total number of reported incidents in both cities was modest by comparison with other more entrenched crimes but the fact that they occurred in bursts (in 1829–30, 1838, 1846–7, 1853, 1857–8, 1860, 1869) helped to sustain the perception that this was a significant problem, and was conducive to the outbursts of panic that put officials under pressure to identify the small number of persons who were invariably responsible for a majority of incidents.Footnote 132 While this served, when combined with some stern sentencing, generally to bring matters under (temporary) control, the fact that the growth in stripping children paralleled the expansion of the city, and that it was described in the summer of 1869 as an ‘almost daily occurrence’, indicates that the underlying causes proved enduring.Footnote 133 The most compelling evidence for this is the organised manner in which the activity was often pursued. The assertion by the Northern Whig that a ‘gang’ of ‘four or five persons’ was responsible for most of the child stripping that took place in the city in the late 1840s remains to be substantiated, but taken together with the later attribution of the practice to ‘a juvenile predatory class’ (in recognition of the greater involvement of young females and a smaller number of young males) it is evidence (in its echoes of the pattern of events in Dublin in the 1820s) of the similarities in the manner in which the practice was pursued in different locations at different times.Footnote 134
Belfast and Dublin were, by some margin, the main locations of child stripping in Ireland. But the reminder to the people of Limerick in 1824, following the detention of two female beggars on suspicion of kidnapping children for the purpose of assisting them in their profession, that all of those who targeted children ‘are not to be satisfied by … clothes’, indicates that the abduction of children was not confined to the most dynamic urban centres in the country.Footnote 135 There are comparatively few cases from Cork, until 1861 the country’s second city, of decoying and stripping children, but a handful of incidents in the 1830s and 1850s, and the sentencing of one ‘heartless miscreant’ to 7 years transportation in 1836, illustrates that children in the city were not at liberty to pursue their lives free of threat.Footnote 136 This was true also of Clonmel, County Tipperary, where incidents attracted attention in 1827 and 1850, and of Galway in 1852,Footnote 137 but they were unusual by comparison with Limerick. Though the population of Limerick (which stood at 56,600 in 1841) was significantly in arrear of that of Cork (92,000) at that date, it sustained a pattern of child stripping comparable to that of Belfast whose population surged from 64,000 in 1841 to 120,000 in 1861. In common with Belfast, the stripping of children began in earnest in Limerick in the late 1820s, but it was pursued only intermittently during the 1830s and 1840s, and it was not formally labelled ‘a frequent practice’ until 1850 when parents were advised not to allow their children to stray ‘outside doors without a servant’.Footnote 138 It is not apparent how this echoed with the social class at whom it was directed, but it did little to dissuade its practitioners. Child stripping achieved a new peak in Limerick in the 1850s when perhaps a dozen cases were reported, and several women were sentenced to short terms in prison as a result.Footnote 139 Indeed, one offender was ordered for transportation in 1855, but this did little to stem the tide that reduced the respectable to despair at the want of ‘scruple’ of those who chose to prey on children.Footnote 140 In the absence of obvious alternatives they appealed, in the same manner as their predecessors a century earlier, when the fear was kidnapping, upon parents not to permit ‘their children to wander out of their sight’ and called on the authorities ‘to take care that … offenders did not escape’.Footnote 141 The fact that they could do no more underlines the enduring incapacity of authorities, then as earlier, to do more than respond to the manifestations of a disposition among those who perceived of children as legitimate targets. Ireland was not unique in this respect, of course. The situation in Ireland bears comparison with England, but because the economic environment of post-Famine Ireland was so very different from that obtaining in England, the particular history of the contraction and decline of the practice requires more particular exploration than is possible here.Footnote 142
V
The abduction of children, whether for conveyance into servitude in the American colonies, for the theft of their clothing, or for other purposes, illustrates that the exploitation of children was pursued by certain social interests in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. The failure of the pre-Union Irish legislature to sanction child kidnapping is telling in this context, but the inference that the insouciance of the political elite reflected the tolerance of the public at larger must be balanced by an acknowledgement that those who were detected in the act of kidnapping or stripping were as likely as not to be subject to the wrath of the mob and taken into detention by the authorities. It is not possible to establish what proportion of suspects were brought to trial and, if found guilty, what sanctions were imposed, but the evidence from Ireland dovetails with that from Paris in 1750 to suggest that both the populace at large and the political elite were not indifferent when the welfare of children was at issue.Footnote 143 The affirmation in a quotient of reports that abduction amounted to an assault on the ‘innocence’ of the children is consistent with the conclusion that in Ireland, as in England, the eighteenth century witnessed an appreciable expansion in the awareness of the reality and significance of childhood, and the manufacture and marketing of toys, children’s clothes and school texts was part of this.Footnote 144
Yet there is a contrary, less edifying, dimension to which the kidnapping and stripping of children bears witness. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was also the era when the Foundling Hospital, which was charged by parliament with the care of orphaned and illegitimate children, permitted a level of child mortality that reached a disturbing 95 per cent in 1791. Six years later when Sir John Blaquiere spearheaded an inquiry into the operation of that institution he reported that 98.86 per cent (12,641 of 12,786) of the mainly infant children admitted to the hospital in the six years to March 1796 were either dead or unaccounted for, while the overall mortality figure during the final thirty years of the institution’s existence, 1796–1826, may have reached 80 per cent.Footnote 145 The fate of the (older) children admitted to the charter school system was not so grim, but they too were prey to physical abuse and gross neglect as well as exploitative labour practices, as both John Howard and Jeremiah Fitzpatrick pointed out to a largely disinterested political audience in the 1780s.Footnote 146 There was, as this implies, an acceptance across society of the virtue as well as utility of child labour, exemplified by the newspaper correspondent who observed in the summer of 1783, when unemployment was a compelling problem, that the identification of ‘some means of employing in a profitable manner the children of manufacturers now out of employ’ must be of social as well as economic benefit.Footnote 147
Given this context, the abduction of children to sell or to acquire their clothes may not seem so egregious, but they were not regarded tolerantly. The kidnapping of children for sale in the American colonies was pursued until the 1780s because it could be concealed within the trade in indentured servants. The contraction of this trade, due in part to changes in the American labour market, ensured that such attempts as were made to reanimate the practice after a decade long hiatus – spanning most of the 1770s and early 1780s – ended in failure. The memory of the trade proved more enduring to be sure and, as instanced by the better known ‘l’affaire des enlèvements d’enfants en 1750’ in Paris, the population remained predisposed to panic on the merest suspicion that it was about to take place into the 1790s.Footnote 148 The ease with which rumours that fuelled these panics circulated is revealing of just how firmly held the belief that children were kidnap targets, for though child stealing continued to take place, it assumed a different form and was exceeded from the mid-1780s by the practice of ‘decoying’ children in order to appropriate their clothing and other realisable assets they wore. Based on the number of cases that have been traced, it can be concluded that, in common with the kidnapping pursued in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of people who engaged in the stripping of children post-1785 was small. It was certainly never large enough to be identified as a distinct crime on the schedule of offences assembled by the constabulary from 1837, for example.Footnote 149 Furthermore, both practices were regarded with increasing negativity within the societies in which they occurred. The disposition of the populace to link kidnapping of children with the crimping activities of recruiting officers,Footnote 150 and of the respectable to liken the phenomenon to slave trafficking (which was regarded with appreciating negativity from the late 1780sFootnote 151 ) is revealing in this respect. Yet, both child kidnapping, the stripping of children and the more general phenomenon of child stealing were pursued because they possessed an economic rationale, and because, in contrast to the respectable who were in the vanguard in perceiving childhood as a phase in which children were nurtured and cared for, there were those whose circumstances were less secure, possessed of a less accommodating and more utilitarian attitude, either because they did not share the affective perspectives of the respectable, or because the grind of survival encouraged this response. What is indisputable is that the behaviours that have been identified above serve as a further caution against assuming that the history of childhood can ever be presented as a narrative of uninterrupted progress.
