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* School of History and Geography, Dublin City University, [email protected]
On 21 December 1751, Archibald Acheson (1718–90), M.P. for Trinity College, presented a motion to the Irish House of Commons requesting leave to introduce a bill ‘for the more effectual transportation of felons and vagabonds to his majesty’s plantations in America’. 1 As a result, a committee comprising Acheson and John Digby, M.P. for Kildare, was instructed to prepare the heads of a bill. This was unremarkable; it was the sixth time the law on transportation had been addressed since George II had ascended the throne. 2 However, when ‘heads’ were presented on 29 January 1752, their remit had been augmented to include provisions to ‘prevent … the pernicious practice of kidnapping children, and seducing people on board ships and transporting them to America’. 3 The parliamentary record is silent on the process whereby the scope of the legislation was extended to embrace child kidnapping, and on what was proposed, but it can confidently be surmised that the object was to elevate the offence from a misdemeanour to a felony. 4 In the event, the measure failed to make it to the statute book, 5 but the fact that the kidnapping of children for conveyance across the Atlantic was singled out indicates that it was perceived to be an issue requiring the attention of lawmakers.
In fact, the Irish parliament did not legislate in respect of the matter at any point during the fifty years spanning the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century when the kidnapping of children, either for the West Indies or the crown’s American colonies, can be located. It was equally indecisive subsequently when, beginning in the 1780s, the ‘stealing of children’ in order to deprive them of clothing (and any other goods with a cash value they had on their person) displaced kidnapping as a hazard affecting children. Statistically, fewer children were targeted for ‘kidnapping’ and ‘stripping’ than were victims of infanticide, 6 or experienced injury (physical and psychological) at the hands of abusive adults, but these two ‘villainous’ practices provide a window on how children in Ireland were treated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They are relevant too to the argument, advanced by Elizabeth Foyster,...