Narratives of Marginalization: The Emigration of Poor Children in Late Nineteenth-Century England

During the late-nineteenth century child-emigration schemes were used by a number of charities in England to send pauper children as farm-hands to rural Canada. Officially, child emigration was framed as an attempt to rescue at risk children from degrading and dangerous urban surroundings; however the motives of such programs also stemmed from a desire to populate and settle the British Empire and provide much needed labor for Canadian farms. Through the use of personal correspondence produced by emigrated children this paper traces and reconstructs the narratives of child emigrants as they transitioned from existence at the margins of English society to new lives at the margins of empire in rural Canada. This correspondence is supported by a transnational source base of UK and Canadian documents, which includes newspapers, census data, and annual reports from foster homes. In mapping out the interlocking motives for emigration, this paper explores the discourses created by both Canadian and British authorities about child emigration programs. Utilizing the narratives of those who went through this process, the paper addresses the extent to which the lived experience of emigration did or did not reflect those discourses. Finally, the paper looks at how children adapted to new family, communal, and cultural settings, and follows their processes of assimilation, acceptance, and transition from British childhood to Canadian adulthood.