The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

was that laundry sent out to washerwomen would come back infested,³³ and, for the same reason, secondhand furniture was distrusted – ‘How can we know we are not buying infection?’³⁴

Even if the major infections – cholera, typhoid, diphtheria – were set to one side, the women who used these bedrooms spent, by the 1870s, approximately twelve years of married life either pregnant or breastfeeding: they were often, in terms of health, at a disadvantage in the bedroom. Women had an average of 5.5 births (although somewhat fewer children were born alive), with 80 per cent of women having their first child within a year of marriage.^†36 Marriage and motherhood were virtually synonymous to many.

      Advice literature, which proliferated in all walks of life, really came into its own regarding childbirth. Motherhood, the books implied, was a skill to be acquired, not innate behaviour. Nor was it to be acquired simply by watching one’s own mother. Books on this subject in the early part of the century were written by clergymen, and were most concerned with the spiritual aspects of child-rearing. In the second half of the century motherhood was ‘professionalized’, and doctors, teachers and other experts took over. A Few Suggestions to Mothers on the Management of their Children, by ‘A Mother’ (1884), was confident that mothers could not act ‘without knowledge or instruction of any kind … [the belief that they could] is one of the popular delusions which each year claims a large sacrifice of young lives.’³⁷ It was not just ignorance these books wanted to combat. For their authors, what women knew was even more suspect than what they did not know: mothers ‘are cautioned to distrust their own impulses and to defer to the superior wisdom of the medical experts’.³⁸

      The first signs of pregnancy were not easy to detect. Mid-century, Dr Pye Chavasse, author of Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Offspring (a book so popular it was still in use at the turn of the century) and other similar works, gave the signs of pregnancy, in order of appearance, as ‘ceasing to be unwell’ (i.e. menstruate); morning sickness; painful and enlarged breasts; ‘quickening’ (which would not have been felt until the nineteenth week); increased size. That meant that no woman could be absolutely certain she was pregnant until the fifth month. As early as the 1830s it had been known to doctors that the mucosa around the vaginal opening changed colour after conception, yet this useful piece of information did not appear in a lay publication until the 1880s, and the doctor who wrote it was struck off the medical register – it was too indelicate, in its assumption that a doctor would perform a physical examination. Neither doctors nor their patients felt comfortable with this.³⁹ Discussion itself was allusive. Mrs Panton, at the end of the 1880s, felt she could ‘only touch lightly on these matters [of pregnancy]’ because she didn’t know who might read her book. Kipling, from the male point of view, was very much of his time when he wrote, ‘We asked no social questions – we pumped no hidden shame – / We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came –’.⁴⁰

      It would be pleasant to be able to refute the idea that middle-class Victorians found in pregnancy something that needed to be hidden, but that really was the case. Pregnancy for them was a condition to be concealed as far as possible. Mrs Panton called her chapter on pregnancy ‘In Retirement’, and never used any word that could imply pregnancy. Instead, it was ‘a time … when the mistress has perforce to contemplate an enforced retirement from public life’.⁴¹ Ursula Bloom, who told her upper-middle-class mother’s story, noted that ‘it would have been unpropitious if a gentleman had caught sight of her … Even Papa was supposed to be ignorant of what was going on in the house … He did not enquire after Mama’s nausea … and her occasional bursts of tears.’⁴² The class aspect was important. Cassell’s Household Guide warned expectant mothers:

      When a woman is about to become a mother, she ought to remember that another life of health or delicacy is dependent upon the care she takes of herself … We know that it is utterly impossible for the wife of a labouring man to give up work, and, what is called ‘take care of herself,’ as others can. Nor is it necessary. ‘The back is made for its burthen.’ It would be just as injurious for the labourer’s wife to give up her daily work, as for the lady to take to sweeping her own carpets or cooking the dinner … He who placed one woman in a position where labour and exertion are parts of her existence, gives her a stronger stage of body than her more luxurious sisters. To one inured to toil from childhood, ordinary work is merely exercise, and, as such, necessary to keep up her physical powers.⁴³

Seclusion and lack of exercise during pregnancy were givens for many in the upper reaches of society. At the very top of the pyramid. Queen Victoria complained to her daughter that ‘the two first years of my married life [were] utterly spoilt by this occupation! I could … not travel about or go about with dear Papa.’⁴⁴ While this may have been how those who could afford it behaved, they knew (for they were regularly told) that it was not healthy. Mrs Warren, yet another prolific advice writer, who specialized in works aimed at lower-income middle-class families, wrote of pregnancy in 1865:^*

      Before the birth of my first child I was irritable, peevish and self-indulgent: to work was a burden; all my baby clothes were put out to make, for I did not know how to cut them out or make them up … I lay on the sofa all day under pretence of weakness – indeed, in the latter part of the time to move from one room to the other was a journey hardly to be accomplished. I could eat and drink well enough, and often idly desired dainties … ⁴⁵

      But by the end of the century Maud Berkeley, from a comfortably prosperous home, painted a frieze on the new nursery walls when seven months’ pregnant, then spent the last month making bedding for the crib.⁴⁶

      The expectant mother also needed to prepare her own clothes. By the 1840s, the idea that corsets needed to be worn throughout the pregnancy was beginning to disappear. While the corsets lingered for many, at least now women were told that they could have expandable lacings over the bosom, and steel stays should be replaced by whalebone. They were also, luckily, told that stays during labour were not a good idea, although a chemise, a flannel petticoat and a bed gown were all expected of a woman in the later stages of labour, not to mention ‘A broad bandage, too, [which] must be passed loosely round the abdomen as the labour advances to its close … it should be wide enough to extend from the chest to the lowest part of the stomach.’⁴⁷

      For households that could afford it (and only the more prosperous of the middle classes could), a monthly nurse was engaged. She arrived a month before the baby was due, and stayed until it was three months old, if the parents could afford her that long. Her tasks were to keep the bedroom clean, wash the baby’s clothes, and wait on the mother. She also cared for the baby throughout the night, bringing it to the bedroom to be fed if it was not sleeping there, or feeding it herself if it was bottle-fed.

      The nurse was also useful for morale and for practical information, as gradually through the century women were being pushed out of the previously almost entirely female sphere of childbirth. When Dickens’s first child was born, in the late 1830s, Catherine Dickens’s sister, Mary (aged seventeen), and Dickens’s mother were both present at the birth. This behaviour was not just for the middle classes: Prince Albert was at Queen Victoria’s bedside at her first confinement in 1841;⁴⁸ Gladstone was at his wife’s