Infanticide

Higgins and Flanagan severely tested Victorian ideals of female decorum and maternal instinct. Sadly the sisters were not unique, merely the products of a debased and debasing social environment. The Liverpool Review had harsh words to say about lower-class Liverpool women: ‘the steps are laden with crowds of indolent, unsexed viragoes, who, according to mood, pass coarsely humorous or pointedly insulting remarks upon the physical peculiarities of passers-by’. Like monkeys, they would sit removing the lice from each other's heads. Also, ‘when a Liverpool woman's tongue is loosed nobody in this world can rival her in the production of foul and bestial language. She is an oral cesspool – a philological sewer.’

During a tour of the south-end slums two journalists visited a dark, narrow passage known as the ‘Murderer's Court’. Two ‘sluts’ started shouting obscenities. One informed the men that she had given birth only three days earlier and was eager to start making another baby. She joked about the similarity of her newborn to one of the visitors and urged her mate to fetch the child as proof. She at least seemed happy to extend her brood. In the days before social welfare, an extra mouth to feed could cripple a family. Yet in the nineteenth century abortion was illegal, although sometimes public sympathy lay with abortionists threatened with prosecution. Chemists sold purgatives that promised to remove ‘obstructions’, a euphemism for unwanted foetuses.