Infanticide and Baby-farming in Victorian England

This book explores the social and cultural responses to infanticide and baby-farming in Victorian England, focusing particularly on the Torquay Murder of 1865 and the two women accused of committing the crime; Mary Jane Harris and Charlotte Winsor.

This open access book explores the tragic case of the Torquay Murder of 1865, when the body of a young boy was discovered abandoned on the outskirts of Torquay in Devon, England. Having identified the child as three-month-old Thomas Harris, local police arrested the child’s mother, Mary Jane Harris, and his nurse, Charlotte Winsor, and charged them both with murder.

Drawing on a range of original sources including police and inquest reports, court and prison records, witness depositions, newspaper accounts, census records, medical texts, Home Office documents and letters, Mark Jackson carefully reconstructs the complex story of this murder and explores the personal and political consequences of Britain’s first baby-farming scandal. Situating the case within the national infanticide crisis it coincided with, and exploring the debates it provoked around illegitimacy laws, abolishing capital punishment and regulating the practice of adoption, this book examines the impact this landmark trial had on British law and society.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Exeter, UK.

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