Review: Cossins, The Baby Farmers (2013)

[truepenny]

The Baby Farmers by Annie Cossins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a fascinating book about the Victorian practice of baby farming (where unmarried mothers paid people to "adopt" their babies, the babies then being left to die from a combination of starvation, neglect, and opium. Or strangulation, which was quicker. Baby farmers "adopted" multiple babies at a time, where the money they were making from these "adoptions" wasn't sufficient to support them, so they had to kill them to make way for the adoption of more babies.) John and Sarah Makin were baby farmers in Sydney, who through a long chain of remarkable circumstances, were tried and convicted of a murder that wasn't even proven to have been committed, since the prosecution proved neither the baby's identity nor that the baby's death was murder (Both judge and jury got very confused over the subject of the baby's identity; the idea that there were properly two entities, one being the child Horace Amber Murray and one being the body found and labeled Baby D, got so persistently elided together that the judge ended up stating as a given something that the jury was supposed to determine: whether or not Baby D was Horace Amber Murray.) Remarkably, the Makins' appeal failed. (The appellate judges also apparently failed to grasp the distinction between Horace Amber Murray and Baby D.) Both the original trial judge and the appellate judges were guilty of a miscarriage of justice, for however much it's clear that the Makins were responsible for the deaths of a minimum of 13 babies (that being the number of clandestine burials Constable James Joyce exhumed), it's not clear that those deaths were willful murder. Ironically, the state had a case of manslaughter against the Makins where the baby was identified and the cause of death (starvation) was known, but that case was not pursued because the Makins were (wrongly) convicted of murder first. John Makin was executed, and Sarah Makin served eighteen years in the hellish conditions of a late 19th century Australian prison.

Cossins tries a little too hard to be an engaging writer, but she does a good job with the legal issues in the Makins' trial, and she uses statistics on infant mortality and illegitimate children in the 1880s and 1890s (also some careful research on syphilis) to excellent effect.



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