Victorian Origins of Juvenile Delinquency: A Canadian Experience

THE VICTORIAN SOCIAL CONSCIENCE was troubled on many accounts, and perhaps no more so than by the plight of delinquent youngsters. Few causes cut so deeply into the delicate weave of moralism and economy out of which much nineteenth-century social policy was fashioned. The demographic and economic revolutions that transformed western European societies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had combined to encourage a radical redefinition and revaluation of childhood and youth. (1) Within middle-class families children assumed a more conspicuous and integrated role. Moreover, the family provided many Victorians with an archetypeemotional, organizational, and ideological-with which to interpret their experience of social change. Their anxiety about that change is well revealed by the energy and dismay with which many reformers responded to the spectacle of an unprecedented number of other people's children surviving-and thriving-unrestrained in society at large. Not surprisingly, the solution they devised was the creation of surrogate institutions for the lower classes appropriately analogous to middle-class family life. The Province of Canada in the middle of the nineteenth century comprised (in abbreviated form) the present day provinces of Ontario and Quebec. With the notable exceptions of a handful of relatively sophisticated urban centres such as Toronto and Kingston, much of the English-speaking settlement of Canada West had only recently emerged from the pioneer era. The decade of the 1840s had