Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722-1859

by Jennifer Thorn (Editor)

The essays brought together in this volume pose the How are we to understand the proliferation of writing about child-murder in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, or, more specifically, the overlap of an expanding print culture with the widely evident narration of this particular crime? Further, what are we to make of the recurrent and remarkably consistent representation of child-murder as the special province of unmarried, desperate women?
Writing British Infanticide demonstrates the ways that narratives of child-murder in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain reflect, and in certain ways elicit, complexity if not outright it was a capital crime for which most of those indicted received no punishment; a crime definitive of barbarity for which juries and many observing writers urged sympathy; a crime in which the consideration of alleged perpetrators' motivations repeatedly founders in an inability to understand the economic and the affective as related. So doing, it argues both for the role of "writing British infanticide" in an emergent professionalism dependent upon print and for the special utility of a focus upon child-murder to the evaluation of the mutual constitution of gender and class.

292 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2003

About the author

Dr. Jennifer Thorn is an Associate Professor of English and director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Gender Studies at St. Anselm College. She works in the transatlantic eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a special focus on the history of childhood, class, and race. The editor of the collection Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print,1722-1859 (2003), she is at work on two book projects, parts of both of which have been published: Phillis Wheatley and Childhood and Blind Girls and Women: Print and Progress', 1795-1902.

She joined the English Department at Saint Anselm College in 2009, after teaching at Colby College and Duke University. While at Duke, she was awarded two teaching awards, one from Duke recognizing excellence in the teaching of seniors and one from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for innovative course design, for a course on 18-century orientalism.