Media: BOOK - paperback, 168 pages
Author: E. Watkins & B. Godfrey
Year: 2018
ISBN: 9781526738080
Publisher: Pen & Sword

How were criminal children dealt with in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Over this hundred-year period, ideas about the way children should behave – and how they should be corrected when they misbehaved – changed dramatically, and Emma Watkins and Barry Godfrey, in this accessible and expert guide, provide a fascinating introduction to this neglected subject.

They describe a time in which ‘juvenile delinquency’ was ‘invented’, when the problem of youth crime and youth gangs developed, and society began to think about how to stop criminal children from developing into criminal adults. Through a selection of short biographies of child criminals, they give readers a direct view of the experience of children who spent time in prisons, reformatory schools, industrial schools and borstals, and those who were transported to Australia.

They also include a section showing how researchers can carry out their own research on child offenders, the records they will need and how to use them, so the book is a rare combination of academic guide and how-to-do-it manual. It offers readers cutting-edge scholarship by experts in the field and explains how they can explore the subject and find out about the lives of offending children.

Contents:
1. Introduction
2. The Concept of 'Juvenile Delinquency'
 - The Legal Definition of Childhood
 - Good and Bad Children
 - The Youth 'Crisis' or the Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century
 - The 'Invention' or 'Discovery' of Juvenile Delinquency?
 - Juvenile Gangs
 - The Best Kind of Boy, the 'Hooligan'
 - Girls and Young Women
 - Into the 1920s and 1930s
3. Dealing With Wayward Children
 - Early Nineteenth Century Imprisonment
 - Transportation
 - Parkhurst
 - The Female Factories
 - Reformatory and Industrial Schools
 - Borstal
4. Researching Children's Lives
 - Juveniles of Trial
 - Transported Young Convicts
 - Confined Juveniles
 - Children in Reformatory and Industrial Schools and young Adults in Borstal
 - Criminal Petitions
 - Non-Criminal Records
 - Newspapers
 - Non-Criminal Institutions
 - Recreating Children's Lives
 - Telling the Story
 - What Can We Learn?
 - Ethics
5. Life Stories
 - 1. John Hudson (b. 1774) and William Gadsby (b.1822)
 - 2. Letitia Padwick (b.1815)
 - 3. William Asgill (1824-1875)
 - 4. Ellen Miles (alias Smith/Jackson) (b. 1827)
 - 5. James McAllister (1827-1855)
 - 6. John Lee (b.1829)
 - 7. John Press (b. 1831)
 - 8. Eliza White (1832-1847) and Elizabeth Jones aka Walford (1828-1905)
 - 9. Hannah Mary Dowse (b.1833) and Pleasance Temperance Neale (b.1832)
 - 10. Horatio Nelson Branch (b.1836)
 - 11. Ann Gill (b.1842)
 - 12. Anthony Kehoe (1844-c.1901)
 - 13. Stanley Charles Selway aka William Brown (b.1853)
 - 15. Thomas Priest (1854-1890)
 - 16. Joseph Tomlinson (1860-1920)
 - 17. Lottie Gallon (b.1867) and Elizabeth Arnold (b.1848)
 - 18. Stephen Swain (1870-1953)
 - 19. William Brisbane (1882-1976)
 - 20. Thomas Henry Platt (b.1884)
 - 21. Elizabeth Barratt (b.1896), Alice Midgley (b.1902) and Henry Burrows (b.1881)
 - 22. John O'Sullivan (1896-1916)
 - 23. George Edwards (1904-1937)
 - 24. Walter Davenport (1906-1976)
 - 25. Jane Jones (b.1908)
 - 26. Brendan Behan (1923-1964)
6. Conclusion
Further Reading
Index