Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

Abstract

In this thoughtful and nuanced book, Nicola Goc examines selected news narratives about infanticide published in London and penal Australia between 1822 and 1922 to reveal their interconnection with discourses on the regulation of women through the family, through law and justice, and through welfare and medicine. Newspapers were integral, she argues, in framing and influencing public opinion on infanticide as a political issue, in reporting on dramatic cases of individual infanticidal women, and in ‘‘providing a potent and shocking symbol of maternal power and a mother’s ability to subvert blood relation’’ (5). Goc uses the Foucauldian tools of critical discourse analysis to analyze newspaper accounts for what they reveal about power relations and the production of knowledge and Foucault ’s concepts of the 18th-century and 19th-century European ‘‘society of blood,’’ which zealously sought to preserve a man’s lineage. Both the demands of mothers of illegitimate children and the killing of illegitimate infants were threats to this society. Goc traces how the Bastardy Clause of the 1834 Poor Law, which denied women any maintenance from the fathers of their illegitimate children, led to a rise in infanticides by desperate women. The injustice of this law led the Times, under the editorships of Thomas Barnes and John Delane, to use examples of individual infanticides and the 1841 investigation into deplorable conditions in the lying-in room of the Seven Oaks Workhouse to campaign for reform of the law. Goc also examines the importance of 19th-century medical discourse to the political debates on infanticide, in particular, the publication of medical texts such as William Hutchinson’s A Dissertation on Infanticide and Its Relations to Physiology and Jurisprudence (1820) and Dr William Burke Ryan’s Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention, and History (1862) as well as the testimony of medical witnesses, which provided crucial evidence to determine the infant’s cause of death and the mother’s guilt. Goc also details at length in Chapter 3 the debates sparked by controversial Middlesex coroner Edwin