A History of Infanticide in Britain c. 1600 to the Present

Scottish Women and the Hangman’s Noose

“…She added that the increase may be attributed to a combination of an increased sensitivity to illegitimacy and a reaction to a perceived increase in the commission of the crime of child murder. 56 This rise in the sheer number of women brought before the central criminal courts in the mid-eighteenth century may also be linked to an increase in the control exercised by the central courts in the wake of the 1747 Heritable Jurisdictions Act, particularly in northern Scotland. This study has shown that the volume of business brought before the Northern Circuit was greater than elsewhere in the country in the mid-eighteenth century, even the High Court in Edinburgh, although punishing the crime of child murder did not prompt the same urgency evident in the suppression of the other offences discussed in Chap.…”

‘Noisy, restless and incoherent’: puerperal insanity at Dundee Lunatic Asylum

“…Cases such as Mary’s, and others reported in the newspapers, tended to illustrate a wider public sympathy towards women who found themselves pregnant and desperate. In the local newspaper article on Mary’s attack, the full weight of the report’s disgust was directed at her father and the revulsion felt at an ‘assault by a man on his own daughter’, but little was made of her attempts to give birth in solitude in an outhouse, an act consistent with an intention to dispose of the baby soon after – women who had concealed their pregnancies were obliged to ‘give birth in private, in silence and without assistance’ (Kilday, 2013: 59). The case against her father collapsed, and Mary found herself in the lunatic asylum when the authorities perhaps rather conveniently side-stepped the issue.…”

“…Nakamura’s work, using records of Ticehurst and Hanwell asylums, focused on puerperal insanity as a concept through which to explore Victorian psychiatric ideas related to the treatment of women, while Quinn drew on records of asylums in Devon to relate the rise of this diagnosis to ‘middle-class constructions of the idealisation of maternity’ (Quinn, 2003: 2). More recently, Kilday (2013) and Cossins (2015) have examined the puerperal insanity diagnosis in cases of infanticide.…”

The History of Mum and Dad: Recent Historical Research on Parenting in England from the 16th to 20th centuries

“…One line of investigation is the way in which understandings of the mental and emotional state of mothers and the impact of class, employment and shame in causing new-born infant murder affected the courts' conviction and punishment patterns. 38 A new direction in research is on fathers who killed their children. A comparison of attitudes towards such men in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum and the Old Bailey between 1864 and 1890 suggests that men considered by witnesses to have been good fathers who worked hard before they killed their child were understood to be insane since they had no motive for the murder.…”