Child Murder and British Culture 1720 1900

Josephine McDonagh examines the concept of child murder in British culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by analyzing texts drawn from economics philosophy law and medicine as well as literature. McDonagh highlights the ways in which child murder echoes and reverberates in a variety of cultural debates and social practices. She traces a trajectory from Swift''s A Modest Proposal through the debates on the New Woman at the turn of the twentieth century by way of Burke Wordsworth Wollstonecraft George Eliot George Egerton and Thomas Hardy among others.