Doctor Barnardo: Champion of Victorian Children, by Martin Levy

Doctor Barnardo: champion of Victorian children

Author: Martin Levy

ISBN-13: 978-1445609232

Publisher: Amberley

Guideline Price: Sterling25

‘Let’s start with you. Could you do it? Could you take it on?” This is the challenge Martin Levy throws down to the reader in the middle of his account of Dr Thomas Barnardo’s difficult work with homeless children in 19th-century London, and it is typical of the intimate tone of the book. The author was born and reared in what he calls the “Barnardo manor” in the East End of London in the 1930s, and this work is a labour of love, albeit tough, clear-eyed, critical love.

Thomas Barnardo – Levy calls him “TJ” throughout, which makes him sound very Irish – was born in Dublin in 1845 to a family of furriers. His father’s surname had been adapted from the more prosaic Barnett, which, Levy tells us authoritatively, had been changed in its turn from the Jewish Bar Nathan. Thomas Barnardo’s maternal grandparents were Catholic O’Briens, but both Jew and Catholic were subsumed in the resolutely respectable Protestantism of Barnardo’s parents.

In his teens Barnardo’s Protestant convictions deepened, and he decided to become a doctor and to volunteer for the Anglican China mission. To do this, he had to go to London. He never finished his medical studies, nor did he reach China, because in the East End he was drawn firstly to setting up alternatives to public houses for the working-class population and secondly to his life’s work, “rescuing” homeless children.

He acquired the help of some powerful friends, such as Samuel Smith, Lord Cairns and Lord Shaftesbury; there is a vivid description of how Barnardo, Shaftesbury and a few others found 73 boys sleeping under tarpaulin one night in 1867 in Billingsgate.

The Barnardo philosophy that no destitute child would ever be turned away meant that he set up homes for girls, too, but it also led to overcrowding and what would now be called aftercare problems.

Canadian scheme
The solution was the notorious Canadian emigration scheme, with which Barnardo's name would forever be associated. It began about 1870, and the children sent were sometimes as young as six. It usually involved live-in service on farms, but it was badly run and badly supervised, and Levy speculates that although a quarter of these young emigrants got a good start, another half had a "hard time" and another quarter "went pear-shaped".

This last phrase gives a clue to the style of the book. Reading it is like listening, spellbound, to a lecturer who is so on top of his subject that he can bring in jokes, asides and anecdotes from personal experience without ever losing the thread of his narrative.

Levy describes his book as nonacademic, by which he must mean that it has no footnotes, though a bibliography is supplied at the end. He deviates from academic practice in paraphrasing quotes from Barnardo’s writings, but he tells us he is doing so. He constantly calls the reader’s attention to context, however, whether converting the prices or costs of the time into modern values or explaining, with his characteristic immediacy, the homelessness caused by urban improvement: “Compensation? You must be joking!”

He spends nearly three fascinating pages discussing the signatures on Barnardo’s parents’ marriage certificate, giving the reader a better insight into the varying levels of education in Barnardo’s milieu of upwardly mobile traders than any description.

This kind of care is taken throughout the book in every detail to do with Barnardo’s life, especially in the court cases to do with children’s religious affiliation, where Barnardo showed his extreme anti-Catholicism.

Industrial schools
When it comes to the bigger picture of child welfare, there are a few inaccuracies and omissions. Contrary to Levy's claims, there were government-funded free schools for children in both Britain and Ireland before 1870. As far as homelessness was concerned, Mary Carpenter had been running ragged schools for "perishing children" since 1850. The industrial schools, which, like Barnardo's schools, taught trades, were well under way in Britain by the time Barnardo started his schemes. His home for boys at Stepney Causeway, which was, like Artane in Dublin, teaching several trades by the end of the century, had a daily regime that seems to have been as tough as that at any industrial school. Levy does not claim that Barnardo was a pioneer, but by ignoring the wider landscape of childcare initiatives he gives this impression, perhaps unwittingly.

Levy is, however, refreshingly hard on his subject; one of the nicer things he says about Barnardo is that he was a “religious bigot and a far from totally honest litigant”. He spun fantastic stories about the children he was trying to “protect”, through the courts, from their Catholic relatives, and he was never actually a doctor.

But the author’s mainly positive verdict on Barnardo is hard to quarrel with. Whatever hope homeless children had of a stable life after a spell with Barnardo, they had none at all if they stayed on the street, where exposure, disease, malnutrition, prison and premature death awaited them. And if this is true of Barnardo’s schemes, it has to be true of all the childcare provisions for children in the 19th century, however harsh or punitive they might now appear to be.

Levy’s fresh and vigorously contextualised account of one man’s tireless efforts for homeless children should make us re-evaluate all those other efforts too.

Caitriona Clear lectuers in history at NUI Galway. Her most recent book is ‘Let’s start with you. Could you do it? Could you take it on?” This is the challenge Martin Levy throws down to the reader in the middle of his account of Dr Thomas Barnardo’s difficult work with homeless children in 19th-century London, and it is typical of the intimate tone of the book. The author was born and reared in what he calls the “Barnardo manor” in the East End of London in the 1930s, and this work is a labour of love, albeit tough, clear-eyed, critical love.

Thomas Barnardo – Levy calls him “TJ” throughout, which makes him sound very Irish – was born in Dublin in 1845 to a family of furriers. His father’s surname had been adapted from the more prosaic Barnett, which, Levy tells us authoritatively, had been changed in its turn from the Jewish Bar Nathan. Thomas Barnardo’s maternal grandparents were Catholic O’Briens, but both Jew and Catholic were subsumed in the resolutely respectable Protestantism of Barnardo’s parents.

In his teens Barnardo’s Protestant convictions deepened, and he decided to become a doctor and to volunteer for the Anglican China mission. To do this, he had to go to London. He never finished his medical studies, nor did he reach China, because in the East End he was drawn firstly to setting up alternatives to public houses for the working-class population and secondly to his life’s work, “rescuing” homeless children.

He acquired the help of some powerful friends, such as Samuel Smith, Lord Cairns and Lord Shaftesbury; there is a vivid description of how Barnardo, Shaftesbury and a few others found 73 boys sleeping under tarpaulin one night in 1867 in Billingsgate.

The Barnardo philosophy that no destitute child would ever be turned away meant that he set up homes for girls, too, but it also led to overcrowding and what would now be called aftercare problems.

Canadian scheme
The solution was the notorious Canadian emigration scheme, with which Barnardo's name would forever be associated. It began about 1870, and the children sent were sometimes as young as six. It usually involved live-in service on farms, but it was badly run and badly supervised, and Levy speculates that although a quarter of these young emigrants got a good start, another half had a "hard time" and another quarter "went pear-shaped".

This last phrase gives a clue to the style of the book. Reading it is like listening, spellbound, to a lecturer who is so on top of his subject that he can bring in jokes, asides and anecdotes from personal experience without ever losing the thread of his narrative.

Levy describes his book as nonacademic, by which he must mean that it has no footnotes, though a bibliography is supplied at the end. He deviates from academic practice in paraphrasing quotes from Barnardo’s writings, but he tells us he is doing so. He constantly calls the reader’s attention to context, however, whether converting the prices or costs of the time into modern values or explaining, with his characteristic immediacy, the homelessness caused by urban improvement: “Compensation? You must be joking!”

He spends nearly three fascinating pages discussing the signatures on Barnardo’s parents’ marriage certificate, giving the reader a better insight into the varying levels of education in Barnardo’s milieu of upwardly mobile traders than any description.

This kind of care is taken throughout the book in every detail to do with Barnardo’s life, especially in the court cases to do with children’s religious affiliation, where Barnardo showed his extreme anti-Catholicism.

Industrial schools
When it comes to the bigger picture of child welfare, there are a few inaccuracies and omissions. Contrary to Levy's claims, there were government-funded free schools for children in both Britain and Ireland before 1870. As far as homelessness was concerned, Mary Carpenter had been running ragged schools for "perishing children" since 1850. The industrial schools, which, like Barnardo's schools, taught trades, were well under way in Britain by the time Barnardo started his schemes. His home for boys at Stepney Causeway, which was, like Artane in Dublin, teaching several trades by the end of the century, had a daily regime that seems to have been as tough as that at any industrial school. Levy does not claim that Barnardo was a pioneer, but by ignoring the wider landscape of childcare initiatives he gives this impression, perhaps unwittingly.

Levy is, however, refreshingly hard on his subject; one of the nicer things he says about Barnardo is that he was a “religious bigot and a far from totally honest litigant”. He spun fantastic stories about the children he was trying to “protect”, through the courts, from their Catholic relatives, and he was never actually a doctor.

But the author’s mainly positive verdict on Barnardo is hard to quarrel with. Whatever hope homeless children had of a stable life after a spell with Barnardo, they had none at all if they stayed on the street, where exposure, disease, malnutrition, prison and premature death awaited them. And if this is true of Barnardo’s schemes, it has to be true of all the childcare provisions for children in the 19th century, however harsh or punitive they might now appear to be.

Levy’s fresh and vigorously contextualised account of one man’s tireless efforts for homeless children should make us re-evaluate all those other efforts too.

Caitriona Clear lectuers in history at NUI Galway. Her most recent book is ‘Let’s start with you. Could you do it? Could you take it on?” This is the challenge Martin Levy throws down to the reader in the middle of his account of Dr Thomas Barnardo’s difficult work with homeless children in 19th-century London, and it is typical of the intimate tone of the book. The author was born and reared in what he calls the “Barnardo manor” in the East End of London in the 1930s, and this work is a labour of love, albeit tough, clear-eyed, critical love.

Thomas Barnardo – Levy calls him “TJ” throughout, which makes him sound very Irish – was born in Dublin in 1845 to a family of furriers. His father’s surname had been adapted from the more prosaic Barnett, which, Levy tells us authoritatively, had been changed in its turn from the Jewish Bar Nathan. Thomas Barnardo’s maternal grandparents were Catholic O’Briens, but both Jew and Catholic were subsumed in the resolutely respectable Protestantism of Barnardo’s parents.

In his teens Barnardo’s Protestant convictions deepened, and he decided to become a doctor and to volunteer for the Anglican China mission. To do this, he had to go to London. He never finished his medical studies, nor did he reach China, because in the East End he was drawn firstly to setting up alternatives to public houses for the working-class population and secondly to his life’s work, “rescuing” homeless children.

He acquired the help of some powerful friends, such as Samuel Smith, Lord Cairns and Lord Shaftesbury; there is a vivid description of how Barnardo, Shaftesbury and a few others found 73 boys sleeping under tarpaulin one night in 1867 in Billingsgate.

The Barnardo philosophy that no destitute child would ever be turned away meant that he set up homes for girls, too, but it also led to overcrowding and what would now be called aftercare problems.

Canadian scheme
The solution was the notorious Canadian emigration scheme, with which Barnardo's name would forever be associated. It began about 1870, and the children sent were sometimes as young as six. It usually involved live-in service on farms, but it was badly run and badly supervised, and Levy speculates that although a quarter of these young emigrants got a good start, another half had a "hard time" and another quarter "went pear-shaped".

This last phrase gives a clue to the style of the book. Reading it is like listening, spellbound, to a lecturer who is so on top of his subject that he can bring in jokes, asides and anecdotes from personal experience without ever losing the thread of his narrative.

Levy describes his book as nonacademic, by which he must mean that it has no footnotes, though a bibliography is supplied at the end. He deviates from academic practice in paraphrasing quotes from Barnardo’s writings, but he tells us he is doing so. He constantly calls the reader’s attention to context, however, whether converting the prices or costs of the time into modern values or explaining, with his characteristic immediacy, the homelessness caused by urban improvement: “Compensation? You must be joking!”

He spends nearly three fascinating pages discussing the signatures on Barnardo’s parents’ marriage certificate, giving the reader a better insight into the varying levels of education in Barnardo’s milieu of upwardly mobile traders than any description.

This kind of care is taken throughout the book in every detail to do with Barnardo’s life, especially in the court cases to do with children’s religious affiliation, where Barnardo showed his extreme anti-Catholicism.

Industrial schools
When it comes to the bigger picture of child welfare, there are a few inaccuracies and omissions. Contrary to Levy's claims, there were government-funded free schools for children in both Britain and Ireland before 1870. As far as homelessness was concerned, Mary Carpenter had been running ragged schools for "perishing children" since 1850. The industrial schools, which, like Barnardo's schools, taught trades, were well under way in Britain by the time Barnardo started his schemes. His home for boys at Stepney Causeway, which was, like Artane in Dublin, teaching several trades by the end of the century, had a daily regime that seems to have been as tough as that at any industrial school. Levy does not claim that Barnardo was a pioneer, but by ignoring the wider landscape of childcare initiatives he gives this impression, perhaps unwittingly.

Levy is, however, refreshingly hard on his subject; one of the nicer things he says about Barnardo is that he was a “religious bigot and a far from totally honest litigant”. He spun fantastic stories about the children he was trying to “protect”, through the courts, from their Catholic relatives, and he was never actually a doctor.

But the author’s mainly positive verdict on Barnardo is hard to quarrel with. Whatever hope homeless children had of a stable life after a spell with Barnardo, they had none at all if they stayed on the street, where exposure, disease, malnutrition, prison and premature death awaited them. And if this is true of Barnardo’s schemes, it has to be true of all the childcare provisions for children in the 19th century, however harsh or punitive they might now appear to be.

Levy’s fresh and vigorously contextualised account of one man’s tireless efforts for homeless children should make us re-evaluate all those other efforts too.