The Lives of Infamous Children: Living Children's Roles in Cases of Suspicious Infant Deaths and Infanticide in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Ontario

In December of 1886, Leonard Gillard and Abraham Pickering were called as witnesses to a coroner's inquest on the body of an unknown female infant found in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Like many other inquests, this one was held at the City Morgue with the body in front of the jury, coroner, and witnesses. Both boys gave sworn evidence and signed their testimony with a less than confident hand. Gillard's age was recorded as 9, but Pickering's exact age was unrecorded. Gillard reported that he found the body in a biscuit box tied with string in a garden on Howard Street across from the recently constructed Rose Avenue fire station. Pickering was called to the scene by Gillard, and together they took the body in its box to a field at the corner of Glen Road and Howard Street. The boys reported that they moved the body to a building where they emptied the contents of the box. What happened afterwards remains a mystery. Gillard told the coroner's jury that he found the body days before he reported it, but not why he delayed in doing so or what occurred in the meantime. The boys were the only witnesses at the inquest, save for a medical doctor who provided the evidence from a post-mortem examination. The doctor described an advanced state of decomposition of the body, a still-attached umbilical cord, and a crushed skull. The jury came to the verdict of “found dead,” and the case was closed. ¹

The 1886 inquest file is thin, and the children's testimony was brief, but they document living children's involvement in cases of suspicious infant deaths and alleged infanticide. Along with other coroner and criminal case files, the 1886 inquest suggests children's involvement not as accused perpetrators, but as witnesses, accomplices, and advocates. Children places of play, loafing, and paid and unpaid work overlapped with places of infant abandonment and disposal of infant remains. Children could be involved in helping to dispose of infant remains from births in their households and were otherwise witnesses to girls’ and women's reproductive crises. In rare cases, they advocated for their mothers who had been accused of infanticide. Although children's relationship to violence and death in the period has often been seen through the lens of anti-cruelty and child saving with its focus on the identification, correction, and treatment of juvenile offenders, looking at children on the margins of cases involving violence and death offers an opportunity to understand the ordinariness of such experiences. These encounters with dead bodies did not seem to motivate strong feelings of sympathy, protection, or outrage. Rather the evidence, as limited as it is, suggests there was nothing particularly extraordinary or unusual about children's roles in aspects of infant death, even if they were not everyday experiences. These moments of discovery and testimony were not so against the grain of modern childhood as to become a point of common concern.

The title of this article is a modification of philosopher Michel Foucault's short essay from 1977 translated into English and published as “The Lives of Infamous Men” in 1979. Foucault asserted the historical usefulness of a few lines of a life in an incomplete dossier for their ability to reveal encounters with power. The “strange poems” consist of briefly marked evidence of “lives of a few lines or a few pages, countless misfortunes and adventures, gathered together in a handful of words. Brief lives, chanced upon in books and documents.” ² He concluded that the tiny fragments of lives in minor texts were “not even the skeleton of a genre.” Each fragment “belongs rather,” he wrote, to “disorder, noise and sorrow, the working of power on lives and the discourse which is born from it.” ³ They did not matter less. These scraps of evidence are “fragments of discourse trailing the fragments of a reality.” ⁴ They expressed the theatre of everyday violence, family conflict between parents and children, and the “spaces of family disorder” that roped together home and street. ⁵ Unlike the children who appear in Disorderly Families, a book Foucault assembled with French historian Arlette Farge that followed the 1977 essay, however, the children involved in investigations of dead infants in Ontario were not the reason for intervention, but the trigger. ⁶ Their actions and inactions could be the lynchpin for suspicion and investigation and compel adults to action. Children became briefly infamous when they broke the news of the discovery of a body and disclosed the secret and shame it purportedly indicated. In part, their infamy was the result of children's direct encounter with power unmitigated by other adults and produced by their own initiative.

The brief testimony produced in the files is truly fragmentary. Historians of childhood and children have long been open and reflective of the nature of their research, specifically their methodological issues and innovations, and parts of these conversations have been related to the elusive qualities of children's voices and their relationship to agency. ⁷ Criticism of the field has sometimes emphasized methodological limits and not the innovation by scholars in the field. ⁸ Yet, as Foucault's essay serves to remind scholars, men's lives, too, could be difficult to research and write. Claims that children are removed from their own histories by simply growing up suggest a false binary based on the idea of a permanent, unchanging state of adulthood. As anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler's recent work on colonial aphasia reveals, loss, disassociation, disremembering, and difficulty speaking of and recalling the past are core elements of history. ⁹ At what point in life does one become and remain a reliable narrator? The fragmentary and incomplete record of strange poems may be the dominant genre of the field and, while children's voices are fewer in the inquest and court records, they suffer from the same sort of quotidian archival issues from destruction files and clerks’ bad penmanship to a subject crafting a story aware of their own context and vocality. ¹⁰ Nevertheless, drawing out the testimony of children at inquests and courts serves as a reminder that children's lives—their work, their play, and their place in households and families—were enmeshed with the adult world and, in situating children in the context of the inquest room and the court, further demonstrates that children's history was not a separate vein but part of the most ordinary and extraordinary displays of power.

Age is crucial to histories of infanticide. Infanticide has tended to be defined as involving the death of a newborn or recently born child, although the term lacked robust definitions in the nineteenth century. In nineteenth century Ontario at least, it was not subject to rigorous definition or debate but was generally used to describe the death of an infant near or at its birth, usually by its mother. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, doctors and other writers sometimes conflated it with abortion or used a more expansive term of child murder. Scholars have debated and elaborated on the term infanticide and its use, with English historian Mark Jackson preferring the more recent language of “new born child murder.” ¹¹ My preference for the term infanticide rests on a rather technical point that murder involved the killing of a living person and cases of infanticide often failed to prove the infant was live born. Infanticide retains a capaciousness rooted in the quotidian problems of reproduction and women's bodies. The age of women accused of perpetuating infanticide has been noted by researchers studying cases from across the Americas and Britain. They have, individually and collectively, demonstrated the disproportionate representation of young, unwed, and working-class women in the records. ¹² In studies of infanticide, sustained analyses of age are less common than descriptions like young or youthful in part because age was haphazardly recorded in legal files in the nineteenth century and, in part, because infanticide has often been studied as part of legal history and women's history, especially as it relates to the history of reproduction. ¹³

The history of childhood is significant for the history of infanticide. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the idea of childhood changed in parts of the Anglo-Atlantic with the growth of sentimental childhood and related reform movements like child saving and anti-cruelty. The humanitarian push to preserve sentimental childhood gave rise to what American historian Susan J. Pearson has described as sentimental liberalism where the state's power extended through private organizations merging sympathy and politics. ¹⁴ Yet, the discourse of child protection or anti-cruelty humanitarianism rarely appears in cases of infanticide. In part, this absence can be explained by the centrality of pain and suffering to anti-cruelty and child protection discourses when, beginning in the 1870s, a scientific consensus emerged that infants did not feel physical pain. ¹⁵ That infants seemed to lack reason and emotion kept their status under liberalism's expansion of rights in a state of ambiguity. Furthermore, for all the emotional saturation of childhood and sentimentality in public discourses of infanticide, these ideas and feelings were largely unrecorded in court and inquest transcripts. Reform movements related to infants after the “discovery” of infant mortality tended to focus on infant feeding, scientific motherhood, and public health surveillance of infant care. Although infant mortality and infanticide were sometimes conflated in the registration of vital statistics and the categorization and recording of infant deaths, other than baby farming, infanticide remained not an “event” but largely a series of unconnected, tragic cases. ¹⁶

Focusing on the brief appearances of living children in the files draws them from the margins to the center of infanticide cases. Collectively, they suggest how death was part of childhood. In popular literature from fiction to temperance tracts, the dying child became a cultural trope that helped to forge ideas of modern childhood. ¹⁷ Living children provided evidence for sentimental appeals for reform, while dead children grouped in statistics provided empirical measurements of the scale of the problem. The deaths of children and infants, whose mortality rates were tracked under vital statistics legislation, became some of the crucial data used to discover the problem of poor health and premature death, motivate social change, and measure success. Often taken up alongside other sanitary and public health reforms, infant and child mortality were understood as preventable with better protection from contagious diseases through hygiene and vaccination as well as improved housing and the education of mothers. As British historian Lydia Murdoch reveals in her work on child death and public mortuaries, middle-class values conflicted with long-standing working-class mortuary rituals and practices held in domestic spaces. That children were present in the same domestic spaces as dead bodies and mortuary rituals, like the Catholic wake during which alcohol was consumed, raised fears not only of the spread of contagious diseases but also of emotional and physical neglect. ¹⁸ Historians have documented exceptions where child death became a trauma or triggered the pursuit of legal redress or reform in the name of protecting children. ¹⁹ In Viviana Zelizer's classic work on sentimental childhood, it was evidence from the deaths of children that allowed her to trace the changing “social value of children” from precise calculatable financial loss of labor to pricelessness sentimental value. ²⁰ Dead and dying children had huge metaphorical and allegorical power. By the late nineteenth century, the expanded state and individual parents sought to separate living children from death. In a crucial article on the shift, historian David Pomfret notes that by the twentieth century, “sweeping death from living children's experiences became a key deliverable, not only of the modern nation state, but also the modern parent.” ²¹ Yet, the living and dead interacted in a variety of spaces and the desire to remove children from death. In some communities like those of interwar spiritualists, living and dead children met through séances, and adults witnessed dead children grow in the afterlife. ²² Looking closely at the fragmentary but suggestive evidence from inquests and criminal trials of suspected infanticide provides a means for historians to analyze the ongoing relationship between living and dead children, both relatives and strangers, and how the aim to separate the dead from the living remained incomplete, at least for some children. Some children's intimate encounters with the remains of violent or suspicious deaths or what historian Bonnie Lucero calls the material “remnants of women's reproductive crises” were not regarded by authorities as traumatized victims, representatives of modern disorder, or tragedies. ²³ Rather, they were witnesses, sometimes diminished in capacity, but capable of giving an account of themselves—of their actions and the events in which they participated or witnessed.

The Archive, the Law and the Evidence

The history of infanticide is incompletely documented in Ontario, as is likely the case elsewhere. Investigations into infanticide triggered the production of case files and records that provide a means to evaluate the history directly related to a dead infant. Living children's roles in these investigations can be glimpsed through the absences and silences that are part of the production of history. ²⁴ The main archive that holds many of the files was only established in 1903 and was underfunded with the archivist having limited powers to attain records. ²⁵ As a result, the preserved files are somewhat piecemeal and irregular. Nevertheless, an examination of 350 inquest records, 150 criminal trials, a survey of major newspaper dailies, and six capital case files reveals snippets of testimony, descriptions, and suggestive details that document the lives of living children's interaction with dead infants.

Inquests were held by coroners, who had the power to open an investigation into a suspicious death to determine cause of the death and potential culpability, while informally they could diffuse community gossip and scandal. Until 1893, coroners could commit suspects for trial in cases of homicide and manslaughter, a power they lost with the first Criminal Code of Canada, 1893. A coroner's inquest was held with the body present, before a jury of local men, and with witnesses the coroner summoned. They could be held in private homes, taverns, hotels, or local morgues. Inquest records provide details on the circumstances surrounding the birth and death of an infant through the testimony of girls and women, family members, employers, neighbors, midwives, and doctors. Inquest records include only responses to questions and not the questions. Each persons’ testimony was recorded before being reviewed and signed by the witness. Indictment file records are often incomplete and sometimes consist of inquest records with few other details from the trial. Verdicts, witness testimony, and other crucial material are incompletely recorded. The most fulsome files are often from capital cases where girls and women were tried and found guilty of homicide, a verdict that carried an automatic death penalty. As these cases were reviewed by federal cabinet, and often drew significant public attention, files contain far more information including court transcripts as well as letters and petitions from members of the public.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the legal context of pursuing cases of suspected infanticide changed. Between the end of 1831 and 1948, there was technically no crime of infanticide in Ontario. In late December 1831, the colonial legislative assembly of Upper Canada (a colonial precursor to the province of Ontario) repealed the 1624 statute on the murthering of bastards, which had been in operation in the colony since the end of the eighteenth century. Until 1948 when infanticide was re-introduced into the Canadian Criminal Code, cases of suspicious infant death tended to be tried as homicide or concealment. Depending on the preference of prosecutors, however, girls and women suspected of causing an infant's death could also be charged with abandonment and, after the introduction of the first Criminal Code in 1893, neglect to obtain assistance in childbirth. ²⁶ From the existing records, it seems clear that while boys and men could face charges in cases of infant deaths, women and girls, especially young, unwed ones, were disproportionately represented in alleged cases of infanticide. The term infanticide, however, remained in common usage with popular salience and was used in courts, newspapers, medical jurisprudence, and other texts.

Witnesses at criminal trials were sworn in using a Bible. They were expected to tell the truth or suffer punishment meted out by God. The Canada Evidence Act of 1893 stated that “a child of tender years” who does not, “in the opinion of the Judge, Justice, or other presiding Officer, understand the nature of an oath” may give unsworn testimony, if they demonstrate “sufficient intelligence to justify the reception of the evidence and understands the duty of speaking the truth.” Cases could not be decided alone on child testimony and any evidence required corroboration. ²⁷ Children as young as four testified in Canadian courts. ²⁸ The requirement for corroboration has been described by eminent Canadian legal historian Constance Backhouse as having a “dubious rationale.” Canadian law was indebted to English common law and centuries of British jurists like seventeenth-century legal scholar Matthew Hale. Requiring corroboration reflected “the idea that women and children were inherently untrustworthy.” Children were presumed to be taken by flights of imagination, poor recollection and poor powers of observation, as well as their inability to respond to questions and their lack of developed morality. ²⁹ Children were also seen to be naturally deceptive. It was not necessarily, then, the desire to protect children but rather a question of their competence that structured the relationship between child witnesses and inquests and courts.

When children testified, their evidence held less legal weight than adults and was often taken as unsworn testimony. Although a leading manual for coroners conducting inquests in Ontario published in 1864 declared that “the age of the child is immaterial” to whether they were a competent witness, they still required individual evaluation. If the coroner positively assessed their understanding of religious belief—and presumably the eternal consequences of untruthfulness under oath—the child could be declared competent. ³⁰ After the passing of the Canada Evidence Act, the manual was revised to include the fact that unsworn evidence could be given by children of tender years deemed incompetent, but it must be corroborated by other evidence. ³¹ The manual stated

the evidence of such child may still be received though not given upon oath if in the opinion of the coroner such child is possessed of sufficient intelligence to justify the reception of the evidence and understands the duty of speaking the truth. ³²

This standard of assessing a potential witness to determine competency was shared with other groups, including “idiots,” “lunatics,” and “infidels.” ³³

The imperfect preservation and archiving of files along with the statutory and cultural frameworks for children's participation in trials are barriers to telling their full historical involvement in cases of suspected infanticide. Children's actions were circumscribed in the making of the documents and likely some were lost in the assembly of the archive. Furthermore, it is difficult to impossible to know how many child witnesses were dismissed or deemed incapable of testifying or whose discoveries went ignored and uninvestigated. Yet, the documents that are available reflect what historian Mona Gleason has discussed of the relationality of children to adults as “the messier ‘in between’ more nuanced and negotiated exchanges between and among children, in intergenerational alliances, as well as relationships outside the nuclear family.” ³⁴ Inquest rooms and courts were regularly attended by adults, but the presence of children mattered too. Children had moments of infamy speaking to their experience in legal settings in cases where they played important enough roles to be called as witnesses. At times, their presence was documented only in the recollections of adults giving testimony who described children's roles in suspicious cases of infant death. At other times, children testified by responding to an adult's question. At other times still, they took the initiative to write to adults to document facts as they saw them in a case to plea for mercy. For all the concerns over children's credibility, they did testify, and their words and actions were recorded by and through adults. This evidence suggests that children comprehended their world enough to meet the strict measures of the law and that their testimony warranted at least some consideration.

Caring for Infants, Witnessing Births, and Discovering Infant Corpses

Instances of girls’ involvement in suspicious infant deaths occurred close to home in the available records. Girls could be expected to assist women to care for infants and at times bear responsibility for the maintenance of a fragile infant's life. In 1853, two women arrived on the doorstep of John Morrison with an infant “in good health” born to “a daughter of James Sutton.” The unnamed and unwed daughter of Sutton said John Morrison, a married man, was the father of the child. Whether it was her choice or her father's choice to send the infant to the putative father is unclear. Nevertheless, family members taking the child to Morrison's home and leaving it there was likely a message of who should bear responsibility for the little life. ³⁵

The actual care of the infant fell to Morrison's own daughter, Jane Morrison, who was fourteen years old at the time, as her mother was not inclined to care for the infant. Jane Morrison told the inquest that she cared for the baby by feeding it sugar milk and water, but that she could also tell it was unwell. She gave the infant a dose of castor oil and kept the infant in her bed during the nights. The infant lacked clothing, but Jane Morrison crafted a makeshift solution of a woolen shawl and a cotton bandage. She told the coroner that on the night the infant died that she had held it and nursed it. Ultimately, she seemed to take responsibility for the infant's death. She testified that “she thinks if the child had been her own[,] she would have taken better care of it” and that “the child was not well enough clothed but [she] intended [that] if she had to keep the child to have got more clothing for it.” The jury did not find Jane Morrison responsible for the death of the infant, but they did scold her mother. The inquest ruled that the unnamed infant “came to his death for want of proper care in the way of clothing and nursing.” It continued, “Mrs. Morrison[,] his wife[,] did not nurse or take such care as a child of its age required.” ³⁶ Implicit in the ruling is the suggestion that the infant's care fell to an adult woman, who presumably had more experience nursing infants. John Morrison escaped with nary a mention or indication of his responsibility in the matter.

This fragment of the lives of the Suttons and Morrsions reflected disordered family relations, a sexual scandal, and the girls and women who bore the weight of the scandal and worked to mitigate the damage. As another inquest jury did, however, this one recognized the youthfulness of Jane Morrison and her inability at a young age to care for an infant alone. Five years later, at other inquest into an infant “said to be born of Elizabeth Thorndike” in the Village of Oakwood, the care of infants by other children also came under scrutiny. Thorndike delivered an infant who reportedly only lived a few minutes. She gave birth alone and the coroner's jury issued an extraordinary verdict. The infant was declared to have died from want of assistance after birth and Thorndike's parents were blamed for leaving her alone save for her fourteen-year-old sister “who had no instruction [on] what to do should anything occur.” ³⁷ These cases suggest that while girls were expected to help care for infants in their households, they were not seen as legally responsible or having the necessary skills simply by way of their biological sex. This reflects, as American historian Felicity Turner asserts, that nineteenth century men and women did not hold biologically essentialist beliefs in pregnancy. ³⁸ Childbirth and infant care may have been seen as women's natural duties, but they clearly required acquired skill, instruction, or informal education.

Girls could also be witnesses to various events of women's reproductive crises and not only to their aftermath. In Lincoln County on February 11, 1854, an inquest opened on a female infant held by Coroner John McCallum. The case revolved around the discovery of a dead infant in a local shop. Eliza Jane Patterson testified that she was a customer at a local blacksmith shop when she noticed a dead baby. Patterson and her husband, Ambrose, testified that the body appeared to have been thrown through the shop window. A local man seemed to corroborate the Pattersons’ interpretation of the scene. Casper Piper testified that the baby's head was covered with coal dust, which he attributed to it have been thrown through an open window. Eliza Patterson's five-year-old sister reported to Patterson that the child had been born at home to Rachel Gee and “carried to and thrown into the show window.” Gee denied having been pregnant and giving birth but, as Piper testified, “after being talked to by some women, and threated to bring a Doctor” she admitted to the pregnancy. Gee testified that she was at the blacksmith shop, but that she had “slipped on the board and fell, and the child was there and then born.” Gee reported that the five-year-old girl was with her when it occurred, and that the child was stillborn. ³⁹

The five-year-old girl, likely the only witness to the event, did not testify directly. Her evidence, however, came through two other female witnesses, who had conflicting interpretations, including of where the infant was born and how its body came to be in the shop. It is unclear what the jury made of this evidence, but they did not credit Gee's interpretation. They found the infant was born alive and alleged Gee concealed the birth (a crime in Ontario), but concluded that the cause of death was unknown. Whatever the jury made of the testimony of the unnamed girl, she was part of the event that brought Gee under suspicion, and no one denied or contradicted her presence at or near the birth or death of the child.

If the sister of Eliza Patterson's account was offered as second-hand testimony, other small children appeared to give evidence directly. In one inquest held in the small community of Seymour, Ontario, the daughter of the woman suspected of birthing twins who died in suspicious circumstances testified at an inquest. Unusually, the inquest was held three years after the birth of the infants but there was no reason for the delay given in the records. The bones had to be disinterred and brought to the inquest room. The inquest focused on the 1851 delivery of twins to Johanna Brick. Brick was a housekeeper in the household of John O’Brien. At the inquest, Margaret Brick was identified only as “a little girl.” She was the daughter of Johanna Brick and recalled events from three years prior at the inquest. Margaret Brick testified that her mother gave birth to twins, a girl and a boy, and that she heard one of them cry. Hearing an infant cry had long been considered evidence of live birth, which was a crucial fact in prosecutions for infant deaths. She told the jury that she and her little sister had a short dispute over what they heard. She insisted it was the cry of an infant, while her sister declared it to be a cat. She recalled she retorted to her sister: “it is a queer cat.” Despite Brick's young age, she believed she could distinguish an infant's cry from other sounds and was confident in her interpretation.

Margaret Brick also told the inquest that she witnessed the children of John O’Brien removing the dead twins from the household in cloth she thought may have been moleskin suggesting her powers of observation and memory. Although she recalled only seeing the twins after they were dead, she did witness her mother cut the umbilical cord of one of the infants with a pair of scissors and throwing the cut string “behind the fire.” Margaret Brick saw no violence but supposed the twins were murdered because otherwise “they could not have died.” She knew where the grave of the infants was and “saw it frequently.” She was the one who brought the constable to the grave to exhume the bones for the inquest. ⁴⁰

John O’Brien was Johanna Brick's employer. He recalled Brick calling for him and showing him the remains of a dead infant to which she had recently given birth. He told the inquest that upon feeling the cold infant's body, he left the household for that of John McCann's where “he remained drinking till nearly midnight.” His then twelve- or thirteen-year-old son alongside his daughter of unstated age buried the body. The son, James Brick, testified that he did not see the bodies but dug the grave using a pick and an axe and that the ground was softening but snow covered. In explaining why he did not provide a coffin for the child, John O’Brien suggested it was because his children had buried the bodies and that the whiskey made him forget “all other things.” The jury ruled that there was no evidence of violence but that the cause of death was unknown. Margaret Brick was one of several girls whose testimony at inquests was taken to determine the life and death of an infant. In doing so, coroners recognized their role in reproductive events even as they did not recognize them as fully capable—or responsible—actors in those situations.

Boys found remains where they played and worked. In 1876, nine-year-old Arnie Schnabel testified at a coroner's inquest that as he dragged a hand sleigh on Buchanan Street on a recent Saturday morning, he witnessed a little girl in a vacant lot near Terauley Street in Toronto, Ontario. He followed to where she was and discovered a “paper parcel.” Such parcels were common in tales of suspected infanticide where individuals reported to finding first a parcel and then, in its uncovering, a body. Opening the parcel, he discovered “something wrapped up in a bloody white rag.” In the rag, he found an infant. He proceeded to the police station where a policeman took the infant and “put it in a box.” ⁴¹ The unwrapping and boxing of the body were so significant to Schnabel that he remembered and recounted each detail.

Similarly, in April of 1876, boys playing on the ice at a wharf in Toronto found an infant corpse in a matchbox next to a dead horse. One guarded the body, while the others went to find a policeman. These details mattered enough to the boys to constitute their evidence. It may have hinted at the particular gruesomeness of discovery. The coroner's jury ruled the corpse was the result of either an abortion or a premature birth and that the body, with its limbs broken to fit the box, was likely placed in the river to hid it. In a different case, three years later William Stringer testified that he saw two children and “an old lady” looking through a fence at “an awful thing” on Parliament Street. It was an infant corpse. ⁴² Stringer's description of the “awful thing” was one of the few editorial comments recorded in the files. The boys’ discoveries in these cases reflect their knowledge of an emerging state apparatus represented by police on city streets. Boys took it upon themselves to report their findings, recognizing something was strange or amiss about a box with a body. These cases also suggest that boys’ encounters with power were sometimes at their own initiative.

Not all boys reported found bodies—at least not initially. In 1897, The Ottawa Journal reported that local boys found the “mutilated remains of an infant” when they were bathing in the canal. They threw the remains back into the water. The body was retrieved later, after at least one of the boys told his parents, who subsequently alerted police. ⁴³ Parents’ reactions to news of their own children's discovery of infant remains seemed to have varied as well. On the morning of December 24, 1903, children in Toronto found the body of a dead infant in a vacant lot at 601 Dundas Street. After telling one of their mothers, the children were directed to inform the city police, who subsequently alerted Coroner Dr. William Archibald Young. The body was shipped to the city morgue on Frederick Street where Dr. Andrew Jerome Harrington conducted a post-mortem on Christmas Day and concluded that the infant was stillborn. ⁴⁴ Two years later, boys at play found an infant's body wrapped in newspaper under a sidewalk. ⁴⁵ Apart from city streets, the plentiful waterways provided opportunities from gruesome discoveries. Infant bodies floated to the surface or were discovered in boxes and suitcases or were stirred from the watery graves by fishing poles or other unintentional apparatus. In 1917, in Middlesex County, two boys reported to police that they found the remains of an infant on a riverbank. ⁴⁶ Boys responded to the grim findings in different ways, but their discoveries suggest an overlap between boys’ areas of play and the disposal of infant remains. Yet not all boys assisted authorities. In 1891, an infant body rolled in clothes was found in York County. Children discovered the bodies and told a local letter carrier. When the postal worker asked for their names, the children fled. ⁴⁷

Boys’ discoveries of infant bodies pass with little commentary in the files, as is likely to be expected of formal proceedings where witness testimony was taken in pursuit of truth and with little account for personal discomfort or editorial commentary. That it was boys reporting to police also suggests something of the nature of their lives where places of play and work intersected with the presence of modern state authorities. Late nineteenth century anxieties regarding modern middle-class manhood and the effeminizing effects of civilization may also have inflected these discoveries with the proper informal training of modern masculinity. Savagery was natural to boys according to theories of recapitulation and experiences of violence necessary to strengthening boys to the ill effects of modernity. ⁴⁸ To psychologist G. Stanley Hall, children's gallows humor reflected their primitiveness. ⁴⁹ For working-class boys, connections between the urban poor and savagery had existed at least since the mid-nineteenth century. The apparent naturalness needed to be watched and corrected insofar as it crossed the line into cruelty. Since infanticide had been indexed to savagery for most of the nineteenth century, boys’ discovery of infant bodies could be an inoculating exposure on the way to healthy modern manhood. Finding infant bodies, even in states of decomposition or otherwise appearing to be harmed, then was not necessarily seen as traumatic or suspicious. ⁵⁰ It was part of a process in which boys were shaped along a trajectory of manhood that exposed them to violence, inculcated them with the goodness of state power to redress it, and called on them as witnesses to give testimony in an effect that treated them as something less than adults but also something more than innocent, vulnerable children.

Children could be involved helping to dispose of the remains of infants as well. In 1897, a widow named Charlotte Sanders was charged with neglecting to obtain assistance, concealment, and murder. Sanders gave birth alone in the middle of the night while her three young, living children slept. By her account of the event, she was exhausted by the birth of the stillborn infant. Upon recovering five hours later, she prepared the body for burial. She washed the infant with water her son brought to her and dressed the infant's body. She placed it in a box her son brought to her.

Her son, John Saunders gave an unsworn account. It is likely that his lack of Sunday School attendance or regular school attendance contributed to his not taking an oath. The inquest record indicates that he did not understand taking an oath and that it was not explained to him. He told the inquest that he knew his mother was “sick”—a well-known euphemism for childbirth—but not necessarily something that John Saunders may have known. As he was in bed overnight, he did not know that she was sick in the night, and he reported that he “heard no noise.” Specifically, he did not hear an infant cry. Of the events the next morning, he recalled, “I saw a baby in the morning, it was dead.” John was asked to bury the body by his mother. She recalled, “I told my son John to dig a little place behind my house and bury the body which I believe he did about nine o’clock in the morning.” He buried the body to the depth of a spade and reported back to his mother. As had James Brick, Saunders shouldered the physical work of burying infant remains. Upon his return to the house, his mother asked if anyone saw him, and he said no. After a short trial, Charlotte Sanders was acquitted of all three charges. ⁵¹

Playing the Role of the Advocate

Children's roles varied from discovery and reporting infant corpses to infant minding and testifying to the health and life of an infant to witnessing births and burying remains. In these cases, there can be the sense or suggestion of a disorderly family dynamic simmering below the surface of the documents. Occasionally, children played a role in exposing private family dynamics by taking on the role of an advocate for someone else involved in a case of suspicious infant death. The richly documented 1919 case of Lovica Thompson reveals children's involvement in supporting their mother convicted of homicide and in attempting to mitigate patterns of abuse.

Lovica Thompson was born Violet Parks around 1885. In 1901, she married the forty-year-old widower James Thompson. Although she was only 16, her declared age on the marriage certificate was 18. Both of their ages remained in dispute, with some family members recalling her being a few years younger and he much older at the time of marriage. Her brother asserted that Violet was sixteen when married and that James Thompson “was a man about the age of 50 he stole her from Father and married her when Father was away.” With his first wife, James had five living children and very quickly Violet gave birth to four more plus had two, if not three miscarriages brought on by her husband's violence. By 1918, Violet and James had four living children, and she was pregnant again. ⁵²

In early 1919, Thompson fled her home and gave birth at Kingston General Hospital on February 19, under the name of Lovica Woodcock. She was released from the hospital on February 28 and the body of what was presumed to be her infant was found suffocated near a railway line by a rail worker on March 1. Thompson reported that she had tried to leave the child at the Infants Home but could not meet the requirement to stay six months in-house to nurse it, with other children at home. After her arrest, Thompson told police that she had given the baby to a stranger at the train station and did not know how it came to die. Justice Houghton Lennox, who heard the case, noted it relied entirely on circumstantial evidence, including the complicated, seemingly irrational train route Thompson took to go to her mother's house nine days post-partum.

On September 27, 1919, after a one-day trial, Thompson was convicted of homicide and, as murder carried a mandatory death penalty, was sentence to death. She was spared hanging after the federal cabinet reviewed her case and commuted her sentence to imprisonment at the Kingston Penitentiary. She was released in 1927 after further petitions were made by her family. Thompson's living children were part of this process. Her children ranged from about four to sixteen when she was arrested for homicide. Each of her children, save the youngest, wrote to various authorities including the Minister of Justice during their mother's incarceration. The letters were written between September 23, 1920 and November 12, 1925. In total, there are seventeen letters in the capital case file suggesting that the children wrote regularly, although often in a clustered effort. The letters illuminated children's advocacy for an incarcerated parent and how they undermined their father's attempts to instrumentalize them and to continue to plea for their mother's release.

The first letter in the case file is from Frank to the Governor General and is dated September 23, 1920. It opens with: “thought I would write to you and tell you the awful life my [Mother] had to live with my Father.” The letter details abuse and what Frank describes as “poundings” and “black eyes,” and continues to state that his father repeatedly expelled his mother from the household, concluding “no wonder the woman gone crazy.” He claimed: “I am only a boy fifteen but can remember seen with many black eye and please for our sake give her freedom.” ⁵³ About one month later, Frank Thompson wrote again. The letter opened:

I write to you a little boy not a long ago pleading to you for to give mercy my dear mother and was so glad to get answer from you and thank you for being so [illegible word] as to listen to a little boy letter. You told me in your letter mother would have to serve a longer time I pray to god the will not be to [sic] long and that it may speed fast as it is so hard for us little ones to get along with out our mother we are three little boys and one little girl left alone in this wide world one brother is about eleven and the other about five my mother was his second wife. ⁵⁴

Frank's claim to childhood would shift over time as he grew, got work, and achieved a measure of independence from his controlling father. Five years later, Frank wrote again noting that he was working and would be able to act as his mother's guardian should she be released to him in an assertion of adult manhood.

In a letter dated November 10, 1920, ten-year-old, Thomas Thompson wrote to the Governor General of Canada. Thomas’ letter went:

us kids thought there was something wrong with her at the time she went away some of the neighbours thinks the same. Please have mercy upon her for our sakes and don’t keep her from us to(sic) long. If you was a little boy and your mother gone you would wish her with you, so please look the same on me.

The letter included a postscript addressed again to the Governor General. It went:

Dear Sir, I forgot to tell you I was present when father made my sister Pearl write to you that my mother was not fit to be at public. I can prove a hundred people to his one the that my mother was well thought of. We dare not let him know we are writing. Or he would whip us. God may bless you if you will have mercy on my poor mother. Bye bye.

An additional postscript addressed to the postmistress at Arden, Ontario, Flora A. Pringle, directs her to give the mail to his maternal grandmother. “Mrs. Pringle if any mail comes to Arden for me please give to Mrs. Jim Parks and oblige.” Thomas was writing in secret and the consequences were potentially grave.

In March 1921, four months after a previous letter, Thomas wrote again:

I beg of you to give her pardon for the sake of us little ones which is left here without a home and need the care of a mother. I wish I could see you I would tell you of the life she had to live. As long as I can remember the neighbours all says he always used her like a dog, father was always ordering her away from home and she did not want to go but poor mother was compelled to. If you knew how hard it is to be little and live without a mother you would have mercy on us and let her free. She is as good a mother as ever lived she never seen us go in want any of the neighbours would tell you that. ⁵⁵

In this vein, the letters make three important assertions: that Violet Thompson was a victim of abuse, that she was good mother, and that she was needed by her living children. The claim to being a good mother was notable in a case of suspected infanticide where the death of an infant was often proof of bad or selfish motherhood.

The children's letters contradicted the ones their father was writing at the time. He wrote initially to ensure Violet remained incarcerated. To support his claim, James Thompson asserted that Violet was trying to corrupt their daughter and was a bad influence in the household. The children disagreed. Frank argued that his sister Pearl was forced by her father to write to authorities and claim that their mother was best left in jail, and Pearl's later letters also contradict the claim that Violet was a bad influence. In 1921, 18-year-old spinster Pearl transitioned to wife with new, albeit limited authority and she wrote letters contradicting her father. ⁵⁶

Yet, the shift was not instant and James’ influence over the children remained, even after James changed his mind and wanted his wife to be released to keep house for him and the younger children. Three letters, dated July 29, 1921, were sent from three different family members from Port Ann, Ontario. Pearl's father, James, wrote, “My daughter got married the other day and I haven’t anyone to keep house and look after the younger ones. If you release her please notify me so that I could go to Kingston for her.” ⁵⁷ Subsequently, Pearl wrote requesting the release of her mother to care for her younger siblings as she was now married. And the second youngest child Thomas wrote an unusually short letter asking the Governor General if he “would release mother as we need her very bad to look after us and keep house.” ⁵⁸ This cluster of seemingly coerced letters was repeated. All of the letters, dated February 27, 1922, from James, Pearl and Thomas include the line “I don’t want to dictate your good judgment but we would like to have her home.” It was a line their father had used before and in none of the children's former letters did they reference needing their mother's labor.

Overall, the letters reveal the rhetorical strategies employed by the children and these include declarations of their youth and their need of a mother; the positioning of their mother a victim of sustained violence; hinting at the threat of violence hanging over them; and positioning her as a good mother and a much-needed person in their lives and home. The letters also reveal that the children were capable of distinguishing between the narratives their father wanted them to write and those they wrote in secret hoping to secure justice for their mother. They also suggest the children heard and absorbed town gossip. Further, the letters hint that the children coordinated among themselves and perhaps with other adults, like their maternal grandmother. Children's letters carried echoes of other conversations, relationships, and contexts. They also reveal how children navigated complex relationships in the vein of truth telling and that what appears as lies or falsehoods or contradictions are reflective of those relationships and the coercion and duress sometimes embedded in them. What becomes clear in the case of Lovica Thompson are some of the tactics her children used to get adults to listen in an official capacity. As such, the children here appear trying to marshal arguments to access the political in pursuit of something that looked like justice for themselves and their family. They reflect the small, persistent war of domestic violence and children's struggle to navigate the power dynamics in which they were active, if legally diminished, participants.

Conclusion

Coroner inquests, criminal trials, and newspaper coverage reveal the presence of living children in suspected cases of infanticide and their role in everything from discovering bodies to helping with their disposal, to being actively involved in allegedly hastening an infant's death and to informally advocating for women accused of murdering their infants. These cases suggest girls’ roles in women's reproductive crises and the limits on what officials like coroners saw as acceptable in those roles. Both girls and boys could assist in the aftermath, girls with attempting to care for postpartum mothers or newborns and boys with the disposal of bodies. This evidence, however, should not exclude us from considering the possibilities that girls’ relationship to authorities on the street might have a different valence than boys. Finding an infant body on the street invariably rendered boys as strangers to the problem, something not always true for girls, who, as American historian Catherine Jones documents, sometimes denounced discoveries to mitigate potential suspicion of themselves. ⁵⁹ The risks of reporting a discovery of an infant corpse may have been different for boys and girls.

The evidence of children's roles is highly fragmentary and does produce “strange poems” of life and death, care and neglect from “scattered details that have broken through.” ⁶⁰ It reveals that the lives of infamous children touched on violent deaths, uncertain lives, and questions of reproduction. These encounters suggest that grittiness, ghoulishness, and grisliness could be ordinary experiences documented only in brief notes and not rising to a sustained concern. In the end, it is difficult to know how individual children reacted to these moments, but one can speculate that they could be traumatic, exciting, frightening, interesting, or ambivalent. Children's ability to testify was legally diminished, as was the case with some other groups of people, but they still provided testimony at inquests and in courts on serious matters of life and death and they had their own relationship with power removed from sentiment and sentimentality. The lives of infamous children expose not children's conflict with the law but their qualified role within it as subjects, their ability to speak to family occurrences and relations, and the ordinary business of their lives that took them from intimate family spaces to the street and neighborhood and back again. This ensemble of events and reactions demonstrates their unmediated touches with power and their actions and reactions outside of the structures of sentimentality that sought to govern their lives.