Josephine McDonagh is Reader in Romantic and Victorian Culture in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of De Quincey's Disciplines (1994) and George Eliot (1997) and co-editor of Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2001).

• List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Note on references; List of abbreviations; Introduction: plots and protagonists; 1. Child murder and commercial society in the early eighteenth century; 2. 'A squeeze in the neck for bastards': the uncivilised spectacle of child-killing in the 1770s and 1780s; 3. 1789/1803: Martha Ray, the mob, and Malthus's Mistress of the Feast; 4. 'Bright and countless everywhere': the New Poor Law and the politics of prolific reproduction in 1839; 5. 'A nation of infanticides': child murder and the national forgetting in Adam Bede; 6. Wragg's daughters: child murder towards the fin de siècle; 7. English babies and Irish changelings; Appendix: on the identity of 'Marcus'; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

'… in-depth study.' The Times Higher Education Supplement