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.
The Origins of the Foundation Stories Genre in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Eastern Mediterranean
This article examines two types of foundation narrative prevalent in the biblical literature in light of as-yet-undiscussed parallels from ancient Greek and Mediterranean texts. The first type, embodied in the Genesis narratives and Greek genealogical traditions, portrays the founders as leaving a distant land to settle peacefully in a new land. The second is exemplified by the central hexateuchal theme of the Israelites’ migration to Canaan by dispossessing the native population as well as the Dorian migration traditions. Several factors indicate that the foundation story genre also became central and foundational in other small kingdoms around the Mediterranean—as indicated, for example, by the Phoenician–Luwian inscriptions referring to bt Mpš/Mopsus and related classical sources. The popularity of the genre in the ancient Mediterranean is striking in light of the fact that, while experiencing tribal migrations and wanderings, the great Mesopotamian and Egyptian kingdoms never represented themselves as “immigrants.” It is suggested that this genre may have emerged with the rise of the new, small-scale kingdoms in the Mediterranean basin toward the end of the second millennium b.c.e. The Phoenician and Greek colonization enterprises of the first third of the first millennium b.c.e. in particular increased awareness of the newly emerging states and focused attention on ethnic identity.