ePrints

Detective Fictions: The ‘baby-farming detective’ in Britain, 1867–97

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jim HinksORCiD

Downloads

• Accepted version [.pdf]

Licence

This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Oxford University Press, 2022.

For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.

Abstract

This article examines a series of investigations into the activities of women engaged in the provision of paid childcare and collectively labelled with the term ‘baby-farmer’. This paper looks at the practice of writers representing themselves as ‘baby-farming detectives’. Along with exploring the use of the detective investigation as a stylistic device, it will contend that the strictures it imposed informed the relationship these writers have with paid child-carers. The article also explores how the notion of ‘detectives’ and ‘suspects’ spoke of an assumed right to subject working-class women to inspection. It concludes that these detective fantasies were ultimately unsuccessful as they were unable to solve either the cases they encountered, or the symbolic problem of baby-farming, leaving these narratives curiously unresolved and their writers impotent. This article not only seeks to explain how and why the link between pecuniary childcare and infant murder was forged and maintained but asserts that this narrative technique has wider implications for scholars of nineteenth-century culture.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Hinks J

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Journal of Victorian Culture

Year: 2022

Volume: 27

Issue: 1

Pages: 15-29

Print publication date: 01/01/2022

Online publication date: 09/11/2021

Acceptance date: 02/04/2018

Date deposited: 08/10/2024

ISSN (print): 1355-5502

ISSN (electronic): 1750-0133

Publisher: Oxford University Press

URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcab044

DOI: 10.1093/jvcult/vcab044

Altmetrics

Share