‘I have told her that it was neglected, and asked her why’ : Working-class Women and Discourses of ‘Bad Motherhood’ in England and Wales, 1870–1939

Abstract

On 20 November 1871, Susan King, aged 44, was tried at the Central Criminal Court in London for the manslaughter of Alice Butcher, a seven-month-old infant who had been left in her care. 1 The child’s mother, a single woman named Annie Butcher, testified that the baby had been entrusted to King since she was a fortnight old. Butcher had been given an allowance by the child’s father that covered the six shillings a week charged for Alice’s care, as well as the offer to provide any new clothing that might be required. 2 Despite this, however, and the fact that Butcher was always careful to keep up with maintenance payments, Alice was appallingly neglected. Far from providing the loving and attentive environment that Butcher had hoped for her daughter, Susan King seems to have become infamous within her neighbourhood in Islington for alcohol abuse, a foul temper, and – above all – because she continually failed to provide the infant with either adequate food or even the most rudimentary care, generally leaving the baby in the charge of one of her own preadolescent daughters while she went out drinking. 3 Although King insisted at her trial that Alice had been well-looked after and that the charges had been trumped up out of spite, courtroom testimony proved damning. Emma Mills, a married mother of five children who had lodgings in the same house as King, had been so appalled by the way the baby was treated that she had argued vehemently with the other woman more than once about the matter: ‘I have told her that it was neglected, and asked her why […]’. 4 So too had Emma Watson, another neighbour who had warned King more than once that the baby was visibly emaciated. Watson had been roundly abused in response. When these exchanges had no effect, Mills reported the matter to the authorities, and when the Islington relieving officer visited King’s home on 18 September he immediately removed Alice from the house and placed her with an another local foster mother, Mrs Jane Wells. 5 Wells was so outraged by Alice Butcher’s condition – by this time, so underweight her bones were visible beneath the skin, she had been covered in excrement, and left in clothing so foul it had to be burned – that the morning after having taken the baby in, she went round to berate King herself. 6 Despite her best efforts to nurse the baby back to recovery over the following three weeks, Wells was unable to restore her to health, an experience which still distressed her deeply when she was giving witness testimony at the subsequent trial. On 13 October, Alice died from inflammation of the lungs, exacerbated by her emaciated state and by King’s neglect over the preceding months. 7 Convicted of manslaughter, Susan King was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment with hard labour at Westminster Prison.