Voluntary charities for children have long been adept at manipulating the sentiments of potential contributors. For perhaps understandable reasons they try to evoke the compassionate response that triggers a donation. The classic case of this is the well-known series of “before and after” portrait photographs of “rescued” children produced by the Barnado's charity during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. These purported to demonstrate the transformation of the ragged “waif” and “stray” into the respectable industrious child. Usually the accompanying narrative to these pictures either failed to mention the child's parents, leaving the implication, stated or otherwise, of orphan status, or demonized the parents as neglectful or abusive. In the famous words of the campaigning journalist William T. Stead, these were “Nobody's children,” until, that is, Thomas Barnado emerged as their savior, their “father.” It has been previously demonstrated by Seth Koven how these “before and after” portraits (both images taken on the same day in some cases; the infamous “before” photograph of Florence Holder adorns the dust jacket of the book reviewed here) were artistic fictions, but until now we have not had clear evidence of just how fictitious were the claims made for the origin of the majority of the cases that passed through Barnado's hands.

It is the chief value of Lydia Murdoch's book that she has been able to situate the Barnado's children of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in their family backgrounds and the circumstances of poverty that led to children entering into care. She gives voice to the rival conceptions of citizenship of the charitable social worker and of the working-class community from which the children came. In addition she explores the rhetorical construction of the “street arab” and evaluates at length the comparative institutional child-care provision of Barnado's charity and the poor law schools.

Imagined Orphans begins with Barnado's representation of the children in his fund-raising photographs as endangered innocents. The melodramatic trope was complete when the cause of their plight was identified as the harmful influence or neglect of the child's parents (rather than the structural causes of poverty). For the later Victorians this familiar and comforting narrative technique allowed the demonization of poor parents and invoked sympathy for the abandoned or abused child. However, in the words of the book's title, these were “imagined orphans” only. Using the data available to her (from Barnado's annual reports, 1898–1925), the author concludes that the proportion of long-term inmates who were true orphans or deserted or abandoned children never constituted more than one-third of admissions. At least two-thirds of those admitted had at least one parent alive: most common entrants were from single-parent families (usually the mother). This concurs with our knowledge of the family circumstances of children in poor law schools, and Murdoch makes a useful comparison here. Rather than being rescued from a life on the streets or from neglectful or abusive parents, the vast majority of Barnado's children were brought to the charity by their own parents (most commonly single parents) forced to this resort due to poverty in its various manifestations. Moreover, the image cultivated by Barnado's fund-raising literature and its use of photographs of its inmates as young street children is contradicted by Murdoch's evidence that Barnado's boys were more likely to be young adults age fourteen or over. This supports the notion of the charity being used by poor parents as a training center for their elder children in the hope that they would find a better future through employment in a trade. Ironically, many of the trades taught by the charity in its workshops were artisan skills such as blacksmithing, unsuited to the world of mechanized factory labor.

Murdoch's argument chimes with much recent thinking in welfare history. The poor are not viewed as passive victims; rather, they are presented as actively engaged in securing the best they could for their offspring by using public and private welfare institutions for mostly short-term help. Both the poor law and charity were elements in an “economy of makeshifts” essential to the survival strategies of the poor. Thus, the infamous “ins” and “outs” of the workhouse population that so worried contemporaries, including social reformers, such as Beatrice Webb, concerned about the lack of scope provided for “moral” control, were replicated in Barnado's institutions where the short-stay entrant far outnumbered orphans, deserted children, and other long-term inmates. Of course, it was the latter case that predominated in the campaigning literature of the charity. Such rhetoric shifted during the Great War as notions of imperial citizenship and national solidarity overtook earlier representations. The narrative of the abandoned street child was replaced by acknowledgment of the contributions made by poor parents to the war effort and of parents as mothers of soldiers. The group photograph replaced “before and after” portraits in the charity's propaganda.

This is a well-documented and thoughtful book, which has broader significance than for the historian of Barnado’s. It is a valuable contribution both to the history of British social welfare and also to the history of childhood.