At the Margins: Children, petty criminals, suicides and others in 19th century Malta and beyond, by Michael Refalo

At the Margins delves into the tragic, the unsavoury, the unusual aspects of Malta’s nineteenth century social history and beyond. As the title implies, the aim is to concentrate on those aspects which have been broadly ignored by historians: those at the margins of the larger picture. The various chapters, accordingly, look into such aspects as suicide and infanticide; children’s death and ‘illicit’ pregnancies, arson, shootings and bombings. It further focuses on particular incidents of the period, ones that study the minutiae of daily life in Malta and Gozo’s peripheries. In so doing, it privileges Gozo, an island rich in a social history that has broadly been submerged and shrouded behind political and religious narratives. As regards Gozo, the book extends its chronological span in order to highlight the often-ignored footnotes in the island’s most important genealogical manuscripts. In line with the rest of the book, this section confirms that at the margins of history lie gems which we can only ignore at the risk of falsifying the past.