The specter of the “baby-farmer”—an ill-defined term describing women who took in other people’s children in exchange for money—occupied a central place in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination. Interest in such women was periodically piqued by cases of infant murder, most notably Amelia Dyer, the so-called “ogress of Reading” executed in 1896. Like many other women who offered pecuniary adoptions, Dyer had made use of the great innovations of Victorian journalism: the classified advertisement. Even the most august publications of this period contained notices placed by pecuniary adopters seeking infants. Such was the ubiquity of these advertisements that Joshua Stuart-Bennett asserts that “it seems remarkable, if not entirely absurd” (4) that all these advertisements were placed by women who intended to willfully murder these infants. As such, Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London attempts to “shine a light upon a relatively hidden but widespread marketplace of motherhood” (7).

Stuart-Bennett’s approach to this ambitious task is to assemble an impressive collection of 838 newspaper advertisements drawn from the London press across the period 1800–1919. This is no small undertaking and constitutes a fascinating new source base. Given the sheer volume of these advertisements, Stuart-Bennett argues that they should be treated as a “conventional and mundane feature of everyday life” rather than “infanticide for hire that authoritative commentators sought to propagate” (5). Stuart-Bennett unfolds this argument across three research-based chapters. Chapter 2 attempts to deconstruct these advertisements within the context of the cult of female respectability, Chapter 3 considers the need for so-called “baby-farmers” to present and negotiate the respectability of their services. Chapter 4 examines how the marketplace for pecuniary childcare served as a way of managing “the crisis of respectability” caused by problematic motherhood (20). Chapter 5 is theoretical in approach and asserts that the premature death of infants entrusted to “baby-farmers” were not the product of the individual pathologies of the women who undertook them, but a “mundane extension of what was essentially an industry of disposal” aimed at preserving the norms of respectable society that stigmatized birth outside marriage (21).

While the source material is unquestionably rich, it is narrow and arguably too slight to sustain a monograph. The decision to focus so heavily on the newspaper advertisements has a constraining effect. Stuart-Bennett is keen to champion their work as a history from below, but even allowing for this, it is curious that Stuart-Bennett does not make more extensive use of the 33 “baby farming” cases they identified in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, given the extensive witness testimonies contained within. Alongside this, a recognition that pecuniary childcare did not occur in a vacuum and was shaped by shifting regulatory and enforcement practices would have added greater nuance. It would have also given a better sense of what changed over the 120-year period covered by this research.

Even with these self-imposed constraints, there feels like there is more to be said. Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London differs from most other accounts of “baby farming” in that it spans the period 1800–1919, rather than focusing on the period between the British Medical Journal’s interventions on the topic in the late 1860s and the passage of the 1908 Children Act. Given this extended time span, Stuart-Bennett could have made a meaningful contribution by exploring the pre-1868 period more rigorously.

Stuart-Bennett’s background is in criminology and it is no surprise that one of the book’s strengths is its engagement with theory. Stuart-Bennett’s exploration of bricolage and intertextuality in the advertisements that appeared in the London press is both innovative and well-articulated (72–73). However, Stuart-Bennett is less surefooted when it comes to the nuance and specificity of the material they are examining. This study is confined to London, and, while there are sound practical and intellectual reasons for this, a greater degree of caution in how these findings can be applied across time and place would be wise, particularly as London was very much an outlier in how it responded to the Infant Life Protection Acts of 1872 and 1897.

Stuart-Bennett concludes that the history of baby farming was embedded in a wider social, cultural, and historical milieu, linked to notions of respectability and identity management (120). This is a reasonable inference, but it is not an original one. The claim that “unlike any other account of the practices associated with baby-farming, this book has demonstrated that this phenomenon in its entirety cannot possibly be properly understood solely with reference to a few isolated criminal cases” will surprise those familiar with the historiography of this topic (120). Scholarship has moved on from Lionel Rose’s problematic Massacre of the Innocents (1986) and from the mid-1990s onward, scholars such as Arnot (1994) and Ross (1993) have taken great pains to place pecuniary childcare providers within a wider web of class, gender and economic relations, rather than “narratives of pathology and monstrosity” (3). Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London would also benefit from a more rigorous engagement with more recent scholarly works, which are either absent from the bibliography or glossed over. A closer reading of Swain (2005, 2018), Grey (2009), Ballinger (2000), and Homrighaus (2001, 2003) would have given Stuart-Bennett an opportunity to make more nuanced claims about the originality and contribution their own work makes to the field.

While this work is ambitious in its aims, the shortcomings in both scholarship and methodological approach are difficult to completely overlook. Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London paints with too broad a brush, draws conclusions that are not wholly supported by evidence, and fails to communicate a sense of change of time. This tendency, combined with a lack of rigorous engagement with the relevant literature, means that Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London obscures more than it reveals about a complex and contested cultural practice.