Between 1833 and 1841 the Children’s Friend Society, a London-based philanthropic organization, sent some eight hundred children from England to the Cape, where they were apprenticed to local settlers. This article focuses on two of them: Alfred Brooks, aged thirteen or fourteen, and twelve-year-old Elizabeth Foulger. Both of these children appear in archival traces because they transgressed and were subsequently disciplined by their masters. The article argues that a series of binaries shaped these young migrants’ lives: between infant and adult, black and white, and colonizer and colonized. The in-between status of the CFS apprentices had the potential to disrupt increasingly rigid hierarchies at the colonial Cape, during a time of significant social and political turmoil. The context of slave emancipation, as well as concerns over juvenile delinquency in London, affected these children’s experiences. Concerns over their categorization illustrate the complicated range of positions that migrant workers in the British empire could hold beyond simply ‘free’ and ‘unfree’. Thinking through the position of these young white emigrant workers in the post-emancipation Cape sheds light on the fragility of classed, gendered, racialized, adult and free identities in that context.

中文翻译：

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介于两者之间的儿童：1830 年代从英格兰到开普敦的儿童移民

1833 年至 1841 年间，总部位于伦敦的慈善组织“儿童之友协会”将大约 800 名儿童从英格兰送到开普敦，在那里他们向当地定居者当学徒。本文重点介绍其中两个：13 或 14 岁的 Alfred Brooks 和 12 岁的 Elizabeth Foulger。这两个孩子都出现在档案痕迹中，因为他们犯了罪并随后受到了他们的主人的惩罚。文章认为，一系列的二元对塑造了这些年轻移民的生活：介于婴儿和成人、黑人和白人、殖民者和被殖民者之间。在严重的社会和政治动荡时期，粮安委学徒的中间地位有可能破坏殖民地开普敦日益僵化的等级制度。奴隶解放的语境，以及对伦敦青少年犯罪的担忧，影响了这些孩子的经历。对他们的分类的担忧说明了大英帝国的移民工人可以持有的复杂职位范围超出了简单的“自由”和“不自由”。通过思考这些年轻的白人移民工人在解放后的开普敦的地位，揭示了在这种情况下阶级、性别、种族、成人和自由身份的脆弱性。