Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924

John Kendle is a history professor at St. John’s College, University
of Manitoba.

First published in 1980, this pioneering piece of research and analysis
added immeasurably to our knowledge and understanding of the juvenile
emigration movement from the United Kingdom to Canada during the heyday
of the British Empire. Parr placed her study firmly in context as she
examined the nature of working-class life and the motivations of the
individuals and the philanthropic organizations responsible for moving
some 80,000 children across the Atlantic between 1868 and 1924. These
issues were carefully scrutinized in four of the eight chapters, while
the experience of the children in Canada, along with the shifts in
policy that occurred in the 20th century, were explored in the final
four chapters.

It was clear from Parr’s study that idealism had not been a
significant underpinning of either end of the emigration enterprise.
Stereotypes about both working-class life and the capacities of young
and/or single mothers had often resulted in “philanthropic
abduction” and excessive missionary zeal. In Canada, most of the
children had been viewed simply as an extra pair of hands to assist with
the remorseless round of chores endemic to agricultural life. Labouring
Children was an important addition to Canadian, British, and Imperial
historiography based on scrupulous scholarship and rigorous analysis.

For this welcome reprint, Parr was asked to re-examine her assumptions
in view of the some 15 years of activity by the “new social
historians” and the postmodernists, who have been looking at some of
the same themes as well as posing, and answering, questions about the
nature of history and of historical inquiry. Parr’s introduction will
prove challenging and useful for students and younger scholars. However,
since much of the poststructuralist theorizing and writing to which she
refers seems almost deliberately obscure, she is not always able to
render the ideas derived from that work in the same crisp, cogent prose
that is the hallmark of her book. In the end, one is left asking if Parr
would really do it any differently if she began her research today.