Flat feet, inveterate habits and the productive body

One of the bleakest sentences I have ever read about another human being is: 'she is too flat-footed to carry a tray'. That is all we know of one of the orphans leaving George Muller's New Orphan Homes in Bristol, in the mid-1800s.

The 'orphs', as they were colloquially known in the city, were categorised by the institution aged 14-18, for their suitability for work as servants (girls) or apprentices (boys). While the evangelical organisation's own museum claims all young people were found work or returned to relatives, my archival research for my history doctorate revealed otherwise. Reading the institution's Dismissal Books, I found that they were categorised into either recommendable, unrecommendable, or 'able to earn their bread' but not fit to be recommended – in other words, able but not fit enough for brand Muller.

How I made sense of all this is largely thanks to a chance encounter with The Psychologist…

The dismissal books

But first, back to the orphs, and the large 19th-century Dismissal Books in which these categorisations were written. The recommendables – like my own great grandfather, orphan no.458 – were sent off to work, in his case as a tailor in what was then the Bristol Lunatic Asylum, later a war hospital in which he adapted the clothing for soldiers returning from war missing an arm or a leg.

The 'able but unrecommendable' orphans could do something, the institution suggests. Work 'for common family in country' perhaps, as a farm hand or maid of all work. For the girls specifically, there was dressmaking – an occupation so notoriously financially precarious that protest cartoons, songs and poems such as Thomas Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' highlighted the exploitative and exhausting conditions dressmakers were under. So many turned to sex work to survive, that brothels were jokingly known as 'sewing circles' and it is thought that this is where we get the expression, the 'seamy side' of things.

Those who are not recommendable and deemed unable to earn their keep, without a willing relative to house them – and few could afford another mouth to feed – are sent to the workhouse. This is 'where they belong', the Dismissal Books confidently claim. 19th-century social order must be maintained. The unrecommendables were not just flatfooted but short-sighted, lazy, wilful, too short, obstinate, sluggish, 'slovenly and saucy'. Or they had undesirable 'inveterate habits' of mutism, hysteria or enuresis, otherwise known as bedwetting.

You don't have to be a psychologist to consider why orphans would be wetting the bed, or mute, or even saucy when faced with a traumatic bereavement and a sudden move to a strict evangelical institution. But here, character, disability and illness are conflated as if connected, yet separated from the context of their lives. Many were 'odorous' due to diseases such as ozena, in which the nasal cavities are eaten away – a disease largely caused by malnourishment and unhygienic conditions.

A complicated culture

Victorian orphanages are not all gruel and Oliver Twist but nor are they the benevolent and kindly places of care the institution itself implied in its museum. Muller's was of course part of the complicated culture of the time, the particular 19th-century mix of evangelicalism, scientific progress, sentimentality and eugenicist thinking, through which the population of the British Empire – including the homegrown working class – were themselves categorised. A time when the 'innocent child' was a popular subject of poetry, art and literature whilst actual, homeless children were talked about as a public nuisance as if city pigeons. Such children were referred to – handily 'othering' them – as street Arabs.

The expert authority of the rational, white, elite English male in categorising the fit and unfit, the sane and mad, civilised and uncivilised, deserving and undeserving, was reinforced through the church, the hospital, and the law courts, as well as through orphanage managers, industrial school heads, and Poor Law governors.

That's what I was seeing in the archives. But as a historian, I struggled to find a theoretical framework that made sense of all this. Then reading my partner's copy of The Psychologist whilst avoiding writing up my analysis chapter draft transformed my PhD.

'Symbolic dismemberment'

Writing about work post-COVID-19 in the November 2020 issue of The Psychologist, Maria Kordowicz argued that 19th-century values of productivity still helped shape our working lives and identities. She referenced Blayney's work on 'industrial physiology' which in turn led me to Guery and Deleule's book, The Productive Body, a little-known work which had influenced Michel Foucault's ideas on language, discipline and power, which were key to my thesis.

Guery and Deleule's notion of the productive and fragmented body focuses on the ways in which labour was – and remains – conceptualised within the context of 19th-century imperialist capitalism. They argue that through authoritative discourses of 'expert' knowledge, including physiology and psychology, the body was judged in fragments – mind, physicality, ability – essentially in terms of its productivity. 

In other words, the working person was defined – and defined themselves – in terms of factory production. There was a standard (fitness, normality) and those who didn't fit, were spoiled goods. Indeed one of Muller's orphs was actually referred to as 'spoiled' – not in the mollycoddled sense we might use the word today, but in factory terms, spoiled produce, no good for work. Guery and Deluele refer to this process as 'symbolic dismemberment'.

We can see how this explains the ways in which the Muller institution could judge a person in terms of their flat-footedness, their lack of height, their 'unfit' mind. We can hear echoes of this in the ways in which we see the body today, particularly in so-called health and fitness adverts and social media posts where we are encouraged to work on our abs, or when the shoulder is the new elbow or whatever in fashion magazines. We can see it in the ways we talk about ability and disability, perhaps. 

And we can also see it in the way we are encouraged not to reject capitalism but to cope with it: not to join unions and call for less stressful and exploitative conditions – funnily enough, Muller forbade his apprentices and servants to join unions – but to join in 'mindfulness week' or to 'work smarter', or to take upon ourselves the often impossible challenge of a healthy work-life balance.

Another key resource is often mentioned in British Psychological Society journals. Van der Kolk's vivid description of living with trauma in the body in his 2015 book The Body Keeps the Score could be mapped onto the Muller judgements. A 19th-century child who was 'stubborn' or 'sluggish' could be interpreted through 21st-century understanding as traumatised, frozen: Van der Kolk even talks of how the limbic system becomes 'sluggish' when managing trauma. 

To read that book then return to the Dismissal Books, made reading these accounts even more heartbreaking (having your heart broken by your research is another story altogether). Such categorisations are Victorian critiques of understandable responses to trauma and bereavement, maybe even abuse. Here in the Dismissal Books such responses are literally dismissed: as failings and 'inveterate habits', as wilfulness, laziness, or silliness, as general failures of character.

It is common now to see the roots of psychology as embedded in the racist and patriarchal ideologies of the British Empire. Historical case studies like this provide a vivid demonstration of how that actually worked in practice. The children aren't just labelled as recommendable or unrecommendable; such categories dictate their destinies, literally determining which child went on to live or die. 

We don't know any more about the flat-footed orphan at the start of this article, other than she will have been sent from the orphanage aged about 16 to the workhouse. Death rates were high, as you can imagine, and such children were already malnourished. Not that it was much better as a 'maid of all work' for Muller's 'common' artisanal families who took on such hired help (workhouse and orphanage servants were not deemed suitable to serve middle-class families). For them, life expectancy was around the mid-twenties.

Seeing my archival research through these psychological approaches thus provided insight into 19th-century attitudes and categorisations, and into how psychology as a discipline is implicated in capitalist exploitation of the working and 'fit' body.  Guery and Deleule describe how psychology as a disciplinary discourse works to legitimate capitalist productivity as 'the way things are'. Van der Kolk offered a contemporary interpretation of these historical categorisations and offers new ways of engaging with historical material, at least to me.

To the modern-day

The idea of being unrecommendable due to disability or mental health issues or otherwise, makes me wonder about how much the Victorian notion of 'character' at work in these archives can be mapped onto the current idea of 'resilience' – something Kordowicz also picks up in her discussion on work post-Covid. For young people today this word is now loaded with a new form of 19th-century judgment, implying that not thriving productively at school is 'the new unrecommendable'.  

To not be resilient is to not be productive (passing exams, progressing) and somehow again, your responsibility, as if trauma, poverty and other structural inequalities do not count. As was quoted in a more recent The Psychologist article by Laura Sambrook and colleagues in the November 2023 issue – yes, I kept on reading them – poverty can be as much an adverse childhood experience as trauma.

These links are particularly pertinent when it comes to children in care today. As a foster carer and a lecturer on education and the care experience, I know we can still hear (and find ourselves using) terms such as troubled children and problem families, again as if the label is incontrovertible and the problem within the individuals – not far from the judgements handed out by the Victorian orphanage. 

I see how publicly a care-experienced child lives, their situation often openly discussed by a series of carers, teachers and social workers. Not a bad thing in itself of course, but a process of publicly applied categorisations nonetheless. I know there is still an 'othering' of the care experienced student, a lack of understanding of what such young people need to thrive and succeed at school and to get to university (only 14 per cent of all care leavers progress to HE and they make up approximately 6 per cent of the total student population). We as educationalists fail them, but they fail the exams. Again, another form of 'expert' categorisation at work.

All this makes me think that more collaborative research between psychology and history would highlight how prejudice and limited expectations regarding care experienced young people still persist. These 19th-century ideas continue to cast a long and enduring shadow, from the archives to the job centre. How much potential there would be in engaging with the archives in collaborative and interdisciplinary ways, how exciting it would be to include care experienced young people themselves in such research. 

Historians like me need psychology to fully explore these stories, and to fully appreciate the ways in which they continue to be told. And wherever we come from, we all need to listen to those involved. Until we do so, any real progress supporting care experienced pupils and students will also be far too flatfooted.

Dr Kate Brooks is Programme Leader, MA Professional Practice, School of Education, Bath Spa University, and author of Critical Histories in Care and Education (Routledge, February 2025). [email protected].

Key sources

Blayney, S. (2019). Industrial Fatigue and the Productive Body: the Science of Work in Britain, c. 1900–1918. Social History of Medicine, Volume 32, Issue 2, May, p.310–328.  
Brooks, K. (2023). 'She appears a promising child…' PhD Thesis Bath Spa University. Available at 10.17870/bathspa.00015281
Guéry, F. & Deleule, D. (2014). The Productive Body (Winchester: Zero Books).
Kordowicz, M. (2020). You are more than your productivity. The Psychologist. 
Sambrook, L., Roks, H., Tait, J., et al. (2023). 'Childhood trauma stories tend to be buried in medical notes…' The Psychologist.