Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900

Josephine McDonagh examines the concept of child murder in British culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by analyzing texts drawn from economics, philosophy, law, and medicine, as well as literature. McDonagh highlights the ways in which child murder echoes and reverberates in a variety of cultural debates and social practices. She traces a trajectory from Swift's A Modest Proposal through the debates on the New Woman at the turn of the twentieth century by way of Burke, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, among others.