The Quietness

From the cover of The Quietness

Debut author Alison Rattle tells us about the inspiration for her teenage novel - the dark and horrifying world of Victorian baby farming

My debut novel, The Quietness, published by Hot Key Books, is set in London in the 1870s and tells the story of two teenage girls from opposite ends of society who, for very different reasons, get drawn into the dark and horrifying world of baby farming.

Baby farming is an obscure subject to write about, and indeed a few years ago, I had never even heard of the term. I stumbled upon it when I was writing a proposal for a non-fiction book on amazing women – that is amazingly great or amazingly awful! I came across an amazingly awful character called Amelia Dyer who was hanged in 1896 for the murder of an infant in her care. She was described as a baby farmer. I went on to co-author the biography of this woman and in the process discovered that Amelia Dyer had most likely murdered upwards of 400 infants who had passed through her hands. She was probably Britain's most prolific serial killer, yet her name is virtually unheard of today.

As a baby farmer, Amelia Dyer was not alone in practising the unregulated adoption and fostering of illegitimate babies and infants. In Victorian England, women who fell pregnant outside of wedlock were judged extremely harshly. They were seen as having committed an offence against the sanctity of marriage and were viewed as an affront to morality. Single mothers often faced destitution and starvation after being kicked out of the family home for fear of scandal. They were unable to find employment and even workhouses would only accept single mothers at the discretion of the workhouse Guardians; even then they were separated from other inmates and categorised as ‘fallen women.’ Orphanages would only accept ‘respectable’ children, those who were born within wedlock and whose fathers had died.

To make matters worse, the Bastardy Clause of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, made illegitimate children the sole responsibility of the mother until the child reached the age of sixteen. Fathers were effectively freed from any legal responsibility. As a result, a woman with an illegitimate child was left with very few options. Starvation was one option, prostitution another. A third option was to turn to the services of a baby farmer.

A baby farmer was in the business of fostering or adopting unwanted illegitimate children for a one-off payment or a weekly fee. The idea being that the mother could go back to work and visit her child with the hopes of one day being in a position to reclaim that child. The harsh reality was that most single mothers knew they would never see their child again.

Baby farmers often subjected the children in their care to slow starvation; dosing them with a liquid laudanum mixture (known amongst other things as 'The Quietness') to supress their appetites and keep them quiet. Once an infant was conveniently disposed of in this way, there was always room to 'adopt' another and earn yet more money. Medical science was such that it was hard to prove the demise of these babies had been brought on deliberately. And with the high rate of infant mortality that was prevalent in Victorian England, often the deaths were not even viewed with suspicion.

Amelia Dyer went beyond starving the children in her care, and instead took to strangling them with white tape and dumping their bodies in the River Thames. It was only when she became careless and wrapped one body in brown paper that still had her address on it, that she was caught and subsequently hanged for her crimes.

Researching the world of baby farming was a harrowing but fascinating experience which took me to a variety of records offices and archives around the country. One of the most distressing documents I came across was a bundle of police files listing the number of dead babies found in every district of London during the course of one year. The bodies were found dumped on railway sidings, under bridges, on waste ground or just on the streets. Many were abandoned by desperate mothers, others were killed at the hands of baby farmers.

It was after I read the transcript of a trial that took place at the Old Bailey in 1870, of another baby farmer Margaret Waters, (tried and convicted for the murder of an infant in her care) that I became fascinated by the voice of a 14-year-old girl who had stood in the docks and given evidence. She had been a maid in the Waters' household and therefore witness to the starvation of dozens of babies. I began to wonder about this girl; about what she saw and heard. What did she think was happening to all the babies that came and went? This maid became the inspiration for Queenie, one of the two main characters in The Quietness. Through her and my other character Ellen, I was able to explore what life was like for young women in the highly repressed society of nineteenth century England, where pregnancy and childbirth outside of marriage was looked upon with such prejudice.

The title The Quietness not only describes the laudanum mixture that was commonly used to quieten babies, but I hope also describes the quietness that seems to surround the whole subject of baby farming: a horrible part of our social history that has been swept under the carpet, but deserves to be more widely acknowledged.

Read our review of The Quietnesss