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Informationen zum Autor Murdoch, Lydia Klappentext In Imagined Orphans, Lydia Murdoch focuses on this discrepancy between the representation and the reality of children’s experiences within welfare institutions—a discrepancy that she argues stems from conflicts over middle- and working-class notions of citizenship that arose in the 1870s and persisted until the First World War. Reformers’ efforts to depict poor children as either orphaned or endangered by abusive or “no-good” parents fed upon the poor’s increasing exclusion from the Victorian social body. Reformers used the public’s growing distrust and pitiless attitude toward poor adults to increase charity and state aid to the children. Zusammenfassung Focuses on the discrepancy between the representation and the reality of children's experiences within welfare institutions. This book argues that this discrepancy stems from conflicts over middle and working-class notions of citizenship. It urges readers to reconsider the stereotypically dire situation of families living in poverty. Inhaltsverzeichnis "A little waif of London, rescued from the streets": melodrama and popular representations of poor children From barrack schools to family cottages: creating domestic space and civic identity for poor children The parents of "nobody's children": family backgrounds and the causes of poverty "That most delicate of all questions in an Englishman's mind": the rights of parents and their continued contact with institutionalized children Training "Street Arabs" into British citizens: making artisans and members of empire "Their charge and ours": changing notions of child welfare and citizenship
