They Were But Children: The Immigration of British Home Children to Canada
This essay draws attention to a little-known era in Canadian history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which nearly 100,000 British children came to this country as child labourers. Research indicates that there was political and social support in both countries, especially at the outset, for poor and/or homeless British children to be sent to live with and work for Canadian families. As a result, several benevolent societies and religious organizations developed and carried out child migration schemes, bringing children to Canada to be trained as domestic servants or farm labourers. Controversy, doubts and suspicions eventually grew around the organizations and also extended to the children, many of whom came to be looked upon as having criminal tendencies, low intellect, low moral standards, and/or being without feelings. Recent research carried out with some Home Children, as they were called, points out the devastating effects such views had on the children. Feelings of shame, unworthiness, and inferiority persisted throughout their childhoods and adult lives. 
 
Key Words: benevolent societies, British Poor Law, child labour, child migration to Canada, Home Children, Thomas Barnardo
Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London
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.
Voluntary rights and statutory wrongs: the case of child migration, 1948-67
Introduction The issue of postwar child migration has received considerable attention in recent years, culminating in a governmental inquiry in 1998 into the welfare of former child migrants sent to Australia. This inquiry was partly in response to increasing public awareness of the migration schemes stimulated by sensational coverage in the national press and media, which focused on the distressing personal stories of child migrants, rather than the political considerations surrounding the schemes. This article seeks to set child migration within a political framework, highlighting the in ̄uence of voluntary±statutory relationships in child welfare provision and the e ect this had on policy formation. A study of child migration may not, at ®rst, appear to add much to our understanding of the voluntary±statutory relationship, as few children in local authority care were migrated and there appeared to be little state involvement in the schemes. However, this fact in itself is signi®cant. Voluntary society migration schemes (like those provided by the National Children’s Home and Barnardo’s) allowed the British government to give tacit support for child migration `at one remove’ without incurring the censure of powerful interest groups who opposed child migration. By refusing to regulate the activities of the voluntary societies concerned, successive postwar governments could appear to support Australian immigration policy (which sought to encourage child migration) and avoid the diplomatic embarrassment that would have followed any restriction on child migration. Political expediency, not the welfare of the individual child, was the determining factor. In this the voluntary sector could perform a contentious service for the state, which the state could disclaim responsibility for at home and take credit for abroad. The debates between the voluntary societies involved in child migration, central government and local authority children’s departments reveal a set of relationships far more complex than models which describe the voluntary/statutory relationship as a `boundary’ or `moving frontier’. Such models portray the state and the voluntary sector as single discrete entities and presuppose a unanimity of purpose and ideology between government departments and between local and