Developments in the Voluntary Sector

Abstract

Informal adoption had always existed in all social classes. Neighbours might take in the children next door when they were left orphans to save them from the workhouse. Or relatives would look after children left motherless, while their father went off to look for work. Medieval pages and Tudor apprentices grew up in families not their own; aunts, uncles, grandparents and neighbours brought up orphaned relatives and friends’ children. Middle- and upper-class families might assimilate nieces and nephews whose parents died or simply could not afford to give them a good start in life — one of Jane Austen’s brothers was adopted by a distant cousin and his wife who were wealthy and had no children.’ Nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literature abounds with ‘adoption’ stories — Silas Marner and Eppie, Miss Havisham and Estella, Mr Carrisford and Sara Crewe to mention but a few.² But with the exception of the Poor Law adoptions described in the last chapter, there were no organised programmes of widespread domestic adoption prior to the First World War except for the limited examples described here.