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

so considerable, that an infant breathing the same air cannot possibly carry on its healthy existence while deriving its vitality from so corrupted a medium.’ This was always the case, but it was exacerbated at night, when doors and windows were closed, ‘and amounts to a condition of poison, when [the baby is] placed between two adults in sleep, and shut in by bed-curtains’.⁶⁴ However, the separation of the child from the mother in its own space was nothing but a hoped-for ideal: the space was rarely available. Without a nurse, to get any sleep at all, mothers had to share their bedroom with the child they were feeding. Mrs Beeton was not keen on this: she thought there was a risk that, while the mother was asleep, the child would continue to feed, ‘without control, to imbibe to distension a fluid sluggishly secreted and deficient in those vital principles which the want of mental energy, and of the sympathetic appeals of the child on the mother, so powerfully produce’. The mother, on waking, was then ‘in a state of clammy exhaustion, with giddiness, dimness of sight, nausea, loss of appetite, and a dull aching pain through the back and between the shoulders. In fact, she wakes languid and unrefreshed … caused by her baby vampire.’⁶⁵

      Breastfeeding, indeed, she thought ‘a period of privation and penance’,⁶⁶ which continued for between nine and fifteen months. Many other advice books echoed this idea of the suffering of the mother in various ways, or considered pre-empting the penitential period altogether, suggesting not only that bottle-feeding brought improved health to the child and mother, but that ‘In these days of ours few women … have sufficient leisure to give themselves up entirely to the infant’s convenience; and here I maintain that a woman has as much right to consider herself and her health, and her duties to her husband, society at large, and her own house, as to give herself up body and soul to a baby, who thrives as well on the bottle.’⁶⁷

There are no statistics for the number of women breastfeeding their children instead of bottle-feeding, or, as it was known, bringing them up ‘by hand’.⁶⁸ However, with the advent of prepared foods and cheaper glass bottles, the shift to bottle-feeding began. Mrs Beeton, by 1860, was already a little squeamish: a child protractedly nursing was ‘out of place’ and ‘unseemly’.^*69 (Dr Chavasse also disapproved of postponed weaning, but his concern was that women who fed their child for more than a year exposed themselves to consumption.)⁷⁰ Mrs Beeton thought bottle-feeding ‘more nutritious’, and that the babies ‘will be thus less liable to infectious diseases, and more capable of resisting the virulence of any danger’. Breastfed children might develop ‘infantine debility which might eventuate in rickets, curvature of the spine, or mesenteric [intestinal] diseases, where the addition to, or total substitution of, an artificial … aliment’ would help.⁷¹ This might have been true, in particular among lower-income families where the women were not able to get sufficient food themselves, although these were the ones who could least afford patent food.

      Until bottles arrived, the standard infant food was a bread-and-water pap, sweetened with sugar and fed to the baby on a spoon. The slowness and difficulty of this method made it unattractive to many mothers: partly for the time every feeding took, and also because it was difficult to ensure that the baby was receiving sufficient food. Bottles were more convenient, enabling lower-middle-class mothers with both a baby and other small children to feed the former without taking too much time out from an already arduous day. Unknowingly, these bottles caused illness. Sterilization became widespread only in the 1890s. Before rubber nipples became common later in the century a calf’s teat nipple, bought at the chemist, was tied on the bottle and ‘When once properly adjusted, the nipple need never be removed till replaced by a new one’ – roughly once a fortnight, or even several weeks ‘with care’.⁷² And mothers, particularly in the lower income groups, could not always afford appropriate food for their children. Women living right up to a small income would perhaps be at the limits of their own physical endurance without breastfeeding their children as well, but processed foods, particularly in the early days, were expensive, and what the right kinds of food were was not always obvious.

      Manufactured baby food began to appear in the 1860s. By the 1870s promotions like this one, for ‘Dr Ridge’s food for mothers’ ducks’ (p. 25) were common. Note that it promises to cure babies’ indigestion, a worrying indication of what they were being ted.

      In the 1860s it was mostly home-made varieties of baby food that were on offer: Mrs Beeton suggested ‘arrowroot, bread, flour, baked flour’. Some mothers could afford to buy the new pre-prepared farinaceous foods, and Mrs Beeton thought these best if available. Dr Chavasse, in 1861, followed the same route, but told mothers how farinaceous foods could be prepared at home. He suggested that mothers boil breadcrumbs in water for two to three hours, adding a little sugar. When the child reached five to six months, milk could be substituted in part for the water, with more milk added as the child got older, until the dish was almost all milk. Otherwise he suggested taking a pound of flour, putting it in a cloth, tying it tightly, and boiling it for four to five hours. The outer rind was then peeled off and the hard inner substance was grated, mixed with milk, and sweetened. He also liked ‘baked flour’, which was simply that: flour baked in the oven until it was pale brown, then powdered with a spoon; he also approved of baked breadcrumbs. Both formed the basis of a gruel with water and a small amount of sugar. He disapproved of broth, which others recommended, and he was firm that the milk for all the above foods must come from one cow only, otherwise it would turn ‘acid and sour and disorder the stomach’.⁷³ For this the mother was to make an arrangement with a dairy that ‘her’ nominated cow would be the only one used to supply the milk for her household, which was not to come from the mixed output of all the cows in the dairy. (For the likelihood of this being carried out, see the discussion of food adulteration, p. 243ff.)

      Mrs Warren, a few years later, suggested a German prepared food for two-month-old babies: a mixture of wheat flour, malt flour, bicarbonate of potash (to be bought at the chemist), water and cow’s milk.⁷⁴ A decade after that, an instructional guide for nursery maids (so-called, but more likely for their employers) recommended patent food – ‘Swiss milk’ and ‘Dr. Ridge’s food’ – as a matter of course.⁷⁵ By the late 1890s a birth announcement inserted in The Times would automatically bring a flood of sample proprietary products, including patent foods, from firms keen to get the new parents’ custom.⁷⁶

      This at least alleviated the kind of situation one doctor found himself in in 1857. He wrote, ‘When I see the ordinary practice of a nursery … I am astonished, not that such numbers die, but that any live! It was but a day or two ago that a lady consulted me about her infant, seven weeks old who was suffering from diarrhoea. On enquiry what had been given it I was told that … she had given it oatmeal. She could hardly believe that oatmeal caused the diarrhoea.’⁷⁷

      While patent foods were new, other infant care continued much as before. Many books and journals addressed questions that implied that bathing young babies was dangerous: Chavasse assured mothers that, while babies should not be put in a tub, they could be sponged all over, although only their hands, necks and faces needed soap.⁷⁸ Mrs Pedley, the author of the influential Infant Nursing and the Management of Young Children (1866), agreed that soap was not necessary, ‘except in those parts which are exposed to injurious contact’