Working mothers know how hard it is to find good childcare, but we’ve made huge progress since the days of the Victorian baby farmer, says novelist Tessa Harris
The Angel Makers
Ireland’s historic vote to ease the law on abortion has thrown into sharp focus the journey on the hard road to equality that women have been treading for more than a hundred years in Britain. This struggle has been highlighted to me personally as I researched my latest novel The Angel Makers, which is set in late nineteenth century England and deals with the appalling treatment of unmarried mothers.
Over the past few months I’ve been delving into the murky, and sometimes murderous, world of the Victorian ‘baby farmer’ and discovering just how far we have come in our attitudes.
The term “baby farmer” was pejorative and referred to a person, almost invariably a woman, who took in and cared for the children of other women. The occupation was a product of the age. Of course there had been wet nurses and foster carers before, but by the late nineteenth century a number of factors – not least the removal of all financial obligations from fathers for their illegitimate offspring- had combined to make life hell for unmarried mothers.
According to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 unwed mothers in England could be given food, money, or clothing from the parish only if they went to live in the dreaded workhouse. Many regarded the harsh regime and dreadful living conditions as a terrible option. Add to this the fact that orphanages only admitted children born in wedlock and it’s really not surprising that many women chose to place their infants somewhere where they could continue to work and earn money independently. Some children were fostered on a weekly basis, but others were given away for adoption. The “baby farming” industry was born.
These ‘farmers’ were often former nurses who would “care” for the child while remaining at home and looking after their own family. There were some, however, who regarded such interaction as a business transaction from which they could profit handsomely. Often a ‘premium’ of £10 was handed over by a mother for the adoption of her child. The payment was supposed to cover the farmer’s expenses, but it was seldom used to buy food for the infant.
“…stupefied by laudanum"
Alarmingly, sometimes the consigning parent understood that the baby was to be “disposed of” - in other words the farmer would be paid to neglect the infant, so that it died soon afterwards. In most cases, however, the desperate mother genuinely believed that she was placing her offspring with someone who would either care for the child herself or find adoptive parents. Nevertheless, the stark truth was few babies enjoyed a better life once they had been farmed out. Nor is it a coincidence that also at this time a number of regional charities, founded to safeguard young children at risk of abuse, amalgamated to form the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children.
One of the most notorious of these baby farmers was a widow named Margaret Waters. In the 1860s she would charge £10 to find a new home for an infant then use the money to fund her laudanum habit. She soon realized that he could also sedate her hungry charges so that they didn’t cry. It didn’t take them long to die under such conditions.
At her trial the policeman who made the gruesome discovery of several dead babies in her home, described a heart-wrenching scene. He stated: "Some half-dozen little infants lay together on a sofa, filthy, starving, and stupefied by laudanum."
“…murdered at least fifty young children”
Waters is known to have starved at least sixteen children although many other deaths are suspected. She was tried for murder, found guilty and her execution, in October 1870, was the first conviction and execution of a baby farmer in England.
If Margaret Waters was the first to be caught out, several others were to follow, including Amelia Dyer, the women on whose nefarious deeds The Angel Makers is based. Dyer was the most notorious baby farmer of them all for the very good reason that instead of allowing her charges to die of malnutrition as was so often the case, she murdered many of the children in her care in cold blood. It’s a salutary thought she was a former nurse, but what is even more remarkable is that she is thought to have murdered at least fifty young children, but up to as many as three hundred in her thirty-year career of evil.
Dyer would often take in unmarried women who, unable to hide their pregnancies any longer, would give birth in her home. Some of the infants would be murdered at birth. (Conveniently for Dyer, Victorian coroners could not distinguish between suffocation and still-birth.) Other young mothers, however, left their babies with her, thinking Dyer, or “Mother” as she was chillingly known, would find them loving homes.
After serving ten years in prison for infant neglect, however, Dyer changed her methods. Emaciated corpses were evidence of her cruelty. During the latter part of career she determined to dispose of the babies’ bodies by burying them or throwing them in the river.
When she was young, Dyer’s own daughter, Polly, asked her mother where all the babies that she ‘looked after’ went when they left their house. Dyer’s reply was that she was an “angel-maker.” She said she was “sending them to Jesus, because he wants them more than their mothers.”
Dyer’s gruesome career began in Bristol, but after several changes of name and address she ended up in a house near Reading. The discovery of a small corpse wrapped in brown paper in the nearby River Thames lead police to her house. They were greeted by the sickly stench of rotting flesh coming from the kitchen pantry and from a trunk under Dyer’s bed. The police had uncovered a baby farm and over the next few days they sifted through a tragic haul of dozens of vaccination papers left by anxious mothers thinking their babies would be cared for and huge quantities of tiny clothes. There were also cuttings of newspaper advertisements, placed by Dyer that read thus: “Married couple with no family would adopt healthy child, nice country home. Terms £10.” Another one declared: “Couple with no Child want Care of or would Adopt one.”
The police ordered a dragging operation of the Thames and for several days in the summer of 1896, ghoulish onlookers lined the river banks, their curiosity fuelled by sensationalist press coverage. When the body count rose to fifty, Dyer told police: “You’ll know all mine by the tape around their necks”. Later she even admitted: “I used to like to watch them with the tape around their neck, but it was soon all over with them."
Of course Amelia Dyer wasn’t the first baby famer to be convicted and hanged, nor sadly was she the last. Six years later two more baby farmers: Amelia Sach and Annie Walters were charged with murder in January 1903 and hanged at Holloway. Yet she remains to this day certainly the most notorious plier of this evil trade and indeed may well be the most prolific serial killer in history, having possibly murdered more than three hundred infants and young children. At her trial the court rejected her plea of insanity and she was hanged at Newgate Prison on June 10, 1896, after telling the hangman she had “nothing to say.”
There is even a theory that the Whitechapel women killed by the so-called of Jack the Ripper around the same time were actually victims of botched abortions carried out by Amelia Dyer no less.
The character of Mrs Mann in Oliver Twist was a baby farmer. Dickens described her as being “a woman of wisdom and experience; she knew what was good for children and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself.”
The sad truth was that Victorian society had a very good idea of what went on behind the closed doors of baby farmers’ homes. In 1889 the first act of parliament for the prevention of cruelty to children, commonly known as the "children's charter" was passed, but it took The Children's Act of 1908 to introduce the registration of foster parents. No doubt legislators had the horrendous case of Amelia Dyer in mind when they drew it up.
The Angel Makers, by Tessa Harris, published by Kensington, out in hardback and on Kindle on May 29, 2018.