Victorian justice
Claire Phillips considers an account of how the Victorian justice system clamped down on children who went astray.
Christine Kelly Edinburgh University Press, 2019 256 pages
Hardcover £75.00
ISBN: 9781474427340
Before the 1850s, the majority of juvenile criminals returned to their families each night following attendance at a day school. Household Words, a journal edited by Charles Dickens, praised this practice in 1851. But within a few years, children convicted of criminal offences, destitute children, and those simply thought to be on the wrong path in life had become inmates at reformatory and industrial schools. Led by Sheriff William Watson, campaigners argued forcefully for a return to the day school model. However, an 1884 Royal Commission largely ignored Watson’s pleas