This included, but was not confined to, politicians from across the political spectrum, doctors, lawyers and social scientists. 2 By ‘cultural script’, in this instance, I refer to a commonly accepted set of assumptions about what it meant to be ‘infanticidal’ between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, beliefs that were shared by a diverse cohort of English and Welsh men and women.
Despite Elaine Scarry’s famous suggestion that ‘Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability’, 1 recent scholarship has emphasised that pain is indeed both ‘shareable’ through visual, textual and oral means, and that it is assigned historically and culturally specific meanings by those who witness and experience it. Pain - both physical and emotional - was central to the cultural script of infanticide in England and Wales between 18.
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