Childhood and imperial training, 1875–1914

Take them away! Take them away! Out of the gutter, the ooze, the slime, Where the little vermin paddle and crawl, Till they grow and ripen into crime. Take them away from the jaws of death, And the coils of evil that swaddle them round, And stifle their souls in every breath They draw on the foul and fetid ground. Take them away! Away! Away! The bountiful earth is wide and free, The New shall repair the wrongs of the Old Take them away o’er the rolling sea. (Horsley qtd. in Wagner, 1982, p. 100) When Reverend John Horsley, the first secretary of the Church of England's Waifs and Strays Society, penned this poem in 1887, he framed it with the title “The Departure of the Innocents.” Yet, historians of assisted juvenile emigration have often emphasized the Victorian characterization of the rescued children as “little vermin,” rather than accepting Horsley's portrayal of the children as “innocents.” Certainly, an explanation for the increase in the number of children assisted by voluntary societies to the British dominions and crown between 1880 and 1914 remains necessary. During these years, the number of children sent to Canada from Great Britain quickly and dramatically swelled, from approximately 500 to 1,500 per year, while smaller emigration programs resumed to New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia (Parr, 1980, p. 33). This increase in assisted emigration has been understood as a response to the declining economic conditions in England. As the late 19th-century industrial slump deepened, poor children were increasingly perceived to be the “raw materials from which the ‘dangerous classes’ were formed” (Parr, 1980, p. 33). By physically removing the children from England, it is argued that emigration enthusiasts sought to prevent the children from sabotaging the nation. By 1888, when 2,104 children were removed to Canada in a single year, the rationale that emigration would save both the children and England from future corruption was firmly in place. Yet while this anxiety about increased criminality in the face of a faltering economy was a critical factor leading to the substantial growth of juvenile emigration in the 1880s, it does not adequately explain why juvenile emigration continued to escalate when the economy improved after 1895.

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