Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 133

The subject of illegitimacy has become something of a historiographical relic. Since the work of the late and great Peter Laslett, historical demographers and local historians (of varying ability) have enjoyed proprietorial rights, but the subject has always begged closer textual analysis. If history has undergone a linguistic turn, this shift from the social to the cultural has had relatively little effect on the historians of Britain’s bastards. This is not to minimize the importance of demography. It is rather to observe that it is still possible to read whole articles or books on illegitimacy without being any better informed about the sexual cultures that produced the birth of children outside of marriage. It is a history of sex without much sex.

Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920 demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of this historiography – with, it has to be said, one added shortcoming. For histories of illegitimacy are also somewhat fragmented – or, as the editors of the book under review would have it, ‘diverse’ in their approach. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but it does not make for thematically coherent edited collections. Levene and her co-editors valiantly struggle (Chapter 1) to impose some retrospective order on their contributors’ essays, with reference to the emergence of ‘many common historical themes’ (deviancy, gender, power). But truly there are no common themes.

It is still a valuable volume. As the editors point out, Illegitimacy demonstrates collective innovation and range in its use of sources and methodologies: popular ballads (Chapter 2), London Foundling Hospital records (Chapters 3 and 6), settlement and bastardy examination books (Chapter 4), parish record linkage and pauper letters (Chapter 5), unmarried mothers’ petitions (Chapter 6), petty sessions records (Chapter 7), Irish Catholic parish registers (Chapter 8), linked Scottish civil register and census data (Chapter 9), and Medical Officer of Health (MOH) notifications. The results vary in their import. The chapter on ballads is more about courtship than illegitimacy: its most noticeable feature is popular literature’s relative silence on the very topic that the essay is supposed to deal with. Chapter 3, on the mortality of illegitimate foundlings, though cleverly conceived and executed, is too inconclusive about infant feeding arrangements and based on such a small sample that it is unlikely to have wider application. Chapter 8, which bizarrely constructs data only to demolish it, seems to demonstrate the unreliability rather than the usefulness of the Catholic parish registers. Chapter 5, although one of the most innovative in the collection, remains preoccupied with Laslett’s bastardy-prone sub-society thesis, even when it goes against the grain of other chapters in the collection, and tends to assume rather than closely interrogate the usefulness of the concept.

Thus Illegitimacy is the bastard child of its own historiography. It contains excellent historical demography: John Black’s nicely crafted analysis of the socio-economic typicality of the fathers of London illegitimates (Chapter 4); Andrew Blaikie, Eilidh Garrett, and Ros Davies’s groundbreaking reconstruction of the community context of Scottish illegitimacy (Chapter 9); and Alice Reid’s fascinating exploration of the mortality of illegitimate children in Derbyshire at the end of the First World War (Chapter 10). But there is relative little evidence of the impact of the new cultural history. The exception is Samantha Williams’s treatment of unmarried mothers’ petitions to the London Foundling Hospital that at least touches on narratives of seduction and the manner in which they may have impacted on these women’s testaments (Chapter 6). One chapter is hardly enough to change the overall complexion of the volume.

Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920 does not shift any historical parameters. We learn more about migration and mortality than sexual morality. Instead of wasting any more print on Laslett’s ‘bastardy-prone sub society’ – a relic if ever there was one – it would make sense in the future to deal with the meanings and languages of illegitimacy, with official and unofficial definitions, and with textual silences as well as condemnations.