Scale and the moral geographies of Victorian and Edwardian child protection

This paper explores the emergence of child protection work in Victorian Britain, using the annual reports of societies in Liverpool, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and newspaper accounts of their activities. Employing the concept of scalar governmentality I argue that the growth and extension of protection work was informed by and helped to rework existing moral assumptions about people, place and environment. This happened along two entwined trajectories. The first trajectory was an imaginative one, as intervention in individual cases was justified with reference to the broader social body. The second was territorial, seen in the expansion of child protection from town to town, and later to new colonial settings. I refer to these trajectories as a scaling up and a scaling out of child protection and I argue that the extension of protection work thus played an important role in challenging received moral assumptions about who needed protecting, where, by whom, and for whose benefit.