Lydia Murdoch

Bio: Lydia Murdoch is an academic researcher from University of Oxford. The author has contributed to research in topics: Welfare & Variolation. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 7 publications receiving 102 citations.

Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London

Abstract: With his dirty, tattered clothes and hollowed-out face, the image of Oliver Twist is the enduring symbol of the young indigent spilling out of the orphanages and haunting the streets of late-nineteenth-century London. He is the victim of two evils: an aristocratic ruling class and, more directly, neglectful parents. Although poor children were often portrayed as real-life Oliver Twists - either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy parents - they, in fact, frequently maintained contact and were eventually reunited with their families. 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. 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. With a critical eye to social issues of the period, Murdoch urges readers to reconsider the stereotypically dire situation of families living in poverty. While reformers' motivations seem well-intentioned, she shows how their methods solidified the public's anti-poor sentiment and justified a minimalist welfare state that engendered a cycle of poverty. As they worked to fashion model citizens, reformers' efforts to protect and care for children took on an increasingly imperial cast that would continue into the twentieth century.

Carrying the Pox: The Use of Children and Ideals of Childhood in Early British and Imperial Campaigns Against Smallpox

Abstract: Recent scholarship has done much to advance the history of smallpox inoculation and vaccination, but the human carriers used to convey the live lymph from place to place call for more attention. Most were children, and their histories demonstrate how new concepts of childhood proved instrumental in the extension of medical developments and global imperial networks. This essay examines the children used to transmit anti-smallpox technologies, staring with Lady Wortley Montagu’s popularization of inoculation in England in the eighteenth century and extending through British efforts to bring cowpox vaccination to South and East Asia in the early 1800s. Emerging ideals of child innocence helped establish inoculation and vaccination as safe and effective treatments across distinctions of race, class, and place. At the same time, however, medical professionals reinscribed hierarchies of class and race upon children’s bodies. Elite, white children saved from smallpox especially became associated with ideals of parental, domestic affection, while working-class, orphan, and indigenous children more often served the role of children of the state—the test subjects and global carriers of both vaccine matter and the ideals of liberal imperialism. In histories of smallpox, children are often featured as beneficiaries of vaccination, but they were also agents in the eradication of the disease. In the eighteenth century, their infected bodies provided the pustule needed to protect populations through variolation (also called inoculation or engrafting), the practice of transmitting smallpox matter from infected to healthy individuals with the goal of creating resistance to full-blown attacks. After Edward Jenner’s 1798 publication on the cowpox vaccine, human chains of children—particularly poor, orphan, and native children—served as the primary vectors for transmitting the vaccine by land and by sea over long distances. Recent scholarship has examined the routes, technologies, local adaptations, and popular resistance associated with smallpox vaccination, but the human carriers used to convey the live lymph from place to place call for more attention. Most were children, and their histories can be better

"The Dead and The Living": Child Death, the Public Mortuary Movement, and the Spaces of Grief and Selfhood in Victorian London

Abstract: In nineteenth-century London, a broad coalition of urban reformers—including journalists, architects, medical officers of health, coroners, police court magistrates, and inquest juries—called for the construction of public mortuaries in order to remove the dead from working-class homes in the days, sometimes weeks, before burial. Their goal was to protect urban populations—especially the most vulnerable, young children—from the spread of contagious diseases. However, the campaigners for public mortuaries made their case by claiming that working-class burial and grieving practices, particularly Irish Catholic wakes, threatened the moral as well as physical state of childhood—accusations that no doubt fuelled working-class resistance to burial reforms. Furthermore, conflicts over the burial of deceased infants and stillborns suggested that child humanity and selfhood were best realized not in working-class domestic spaces, but through public venues such as mortuaries. The campaign to build public mortuaries and separate the dead from the living thus highlighted the fundamental role of the modernized urban public sphere in shaping Victorian ideals of childhood associated with dependence, sentiment, and human interiority.

Daily Life of Victorian Women

Abstract: Explores the complexities of the lived experiences of Victorian women in the home, the workplace, and the empire as well as the ideals of womanhood and femininity that developed during the 19th century. * Gives extensive attention to the experiences of working-class women as well as elite women * Examines the connections and seeming contradictions between ideology and experience-for example, why did the Victorian concept of women as the "angel in the house" remain so powerful if the reality of women's experiences was largely unlike this ideal? * Spotlights topics from recent scholarship on women and imperialism * Provides clear, engaging information for undergraduates and general readers that is easily searchable by topic Includes many primary source selections and illustrations, making it a valuable classroom resource

“Suppressed Grief”: Mourning the Death of British Children and the Memory of the 1857 Indian Rebellion

Abstract: K atherine Bartrum, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Somerset, had been living in India for less than a year with her husband Robert, an assistant surgeon, when the Indian Rebellion began in May of 1857. In June, Bartrum and her infant son joined other British women and children in leaving the military station at Gonda for the Residency buildings in Lucknow. She remained there during what became known as the siege of Lucknow. In the following months, she suffered the death of her husband in combat and nursed her son through cholera. When the siege ended in November 1857, Bartrum traveled with other British survivors to Calcutta, where her son Bobbie died days before she set sail alone for England. For Bartrum and many other British participants in the Great Rebellion, the deaths of family members, particularly children, revealed not only the violence at the heart of the imperial project but also the ultimate instability of British domestic life and identity within the imperial context. During the worst moments of the conflict, the frequency of child death

The Afterlife of Empire

Abstract: “Quietly dazzling. . . . In this gripping account of welfare’s postcolonial history, Jordanna Bailkin throws the archives wide open and invites us to walk through them with new eyes—and with renewed appreciation for the intimate connections between empire and metropole in the making of contemporary Britain. The Afterlife of Empire challenges us to reimagine how we think and teach the twentieth century in Britain and beyond.” Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “A brilliant contribution to the history of twentieth-century Britain. It does what no other book has done: narrating the end of empire and the rise of the postwar welfare state together, while placing the stories of ordinary people—children, adolescents, parents, husbands, and wives—at the heart of this account. With this book, Bailkin transforms our understanding of how some of the most critical issues of twentieth-century British history were not just perceived, but lived.” stephen j. brooke, York University The Afterlife of Empire investigates how decolonization transformed British society in the 1950s and 1960s. Although usually charted through diplomatic details, the empire’s collapse was also a personal process that altered everyday life, restructuring routines and social interactions. Using a vast array of recently declassified sources, Jordanna Bailkin recasts the genealogy and geography of welfare by charting its unseen dependence on the end of empire, and illuminates the relationship between the postwar and the postimperial. Jordanna Bailkin is Giovanni and Amne Costigan Professor of History and Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the University of Washington. Berkeley Series in British Studies, 4

Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918

Abstract: (1995). Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 75-76.

The Politics of Life: Governing Childhood

Abstract: This article uses Foucault's analysis of bio-politics to explore continuities between child- saving and child rights and the connection of both to the racial governing of childhood. It shows how the birth of the modern idea of childhood coincided with shifts in governance from sovereignty to bio- politics, or a politics of life. This shift was the ground on which new practices of philanthropic concern acted on the child to produce new ideas about the child's special capacities and vulnerabilities. These novel practices of governance generated new forms of resistance and new sites of struggle. One strand of these new forms of resistance was the assertion of rights to health, welfare and life. It is in the context of struggles over these new kinds of rights, rather than an older conception of political rights, that the shift to the figure of the rights-bearing child should be understood. The shift from sovereignty to bio-politics was also central to the production of sex/sexuality and race as the truth of the modern subject, and the child appeared as a key figure in these new discursive constructions. Several movements in scholarship, policy and practice have shifted the terrain of childhood in the last twenty years. These include the almost universal ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereafter the UNCRC or The Convention) and the accompanying shift towards a 'rights-based approach' in child welfare (Freeman, 1998, p. 434), as well as the founding of a new social studies of childhood that has insisted on the importance of recognising children's agency in the constitution of their social and cultural worlds (James et al, 1998, p. 6). These movements have generated a number of theoretical problems, including understanding why childhood governance shifted from child-saving to child-rights and how subject positions other than age intersect with the governance of childhood (Prout & James, 1997, p. 8). This artilce explores these two theoretical problems through an examination of childhood as an object constituted through government and, in particular, a politics/governing of life, or what Foucault named 'bio-politics' (Foucault, 1998, p. 2008). My argument is that the emergence of the modern idea of childhood coincides with shifts in governance from sovereignty to bio-power or a politics of life. This shift to a politics of life was the ground on which new practices of philanthropic concern acted on the child to produce new ideas about the child's special capacities and vulnerabilities (Chen, 2005). These novel practices of governance generated new forms of resistance and new sites of struggle. One strand of these new forms of resistance was the assertion of rights to health, welfare and life. It is in the context of struggles over these new kinds of rights, rather than an older conception of political rights, that the shift to the figure of the rights-bearing child should be understood. The shift from sovereignty to bio-politics was also central to the production of sex/sexuality and race as the truth of the modern subject (McWhorter, 2004), and the child was a key figure in these new discursive constructions.