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

one rather hopes that this is a discreet reference to their bottoms: Dr Chavasse’s babies must have been awfully smelly.

The amount of clothes the baby wore, even in summer, would have ensured that all smells lingered. Mothers were told that every infant needed a binder, which was a strip of fabric – usually flannel, sometimes calico or linen – which was swathed around the baby’s stomach and was variously said to keep its bowels warm, its bowels compressed, or its spine firm.⁸⁰ Throughout the century doctors and advice writers argued against these binders, never particularly convincingly. Even Mrs Bailin, a prominent clothing reformer, thought babies needed to wear one, although instead of linen she recommended Jaeger fabric,^* which would give ‘just enough pressure to prevent the protrusion of the bowels’.⁸²

Between what babies were said to need in the way of clothes and what they actually had was a large gap. A list given by Mrs Panton included 12 very fine lawn shirts; 6 long flannels for daytime, 4 thicker flannels for nightwear; 6 fine long-cloth petticoats; 8 monthly gowns of cambric, trimmed with muslin embroidery on the bodice; 8 nightgowns; 4 head-flannels;^† 1 large flannel shawl, to wrap the child in to take it from room to room; 6 dozen large Russian diapers (to be used as hand towels for 3–4 months first to soften them up); 6 flannel pilches (triangular flannel wrappers that went over nappies); 3–4 pairs woollen shoes; 4 good robes; 4 binders. As well as this a nursery needed at the ready thread, scissors, cold cream, pins, safety pins,^* old pieces of linen, a large mackintosh (i.e. waterproof) sheet, 2 old blankets and 3 coarse blanket-sheets.⁸⁵

      Fulminations about these overloaded infants abounded:

      a broad band is so rolled on as to compress the abdomen, and comes up so high on the chest as to interfere both directly and indirectly with free breathing; then come complex many-stringed instruments of torture, while thick folds of linen, flannel or even mackintosh, curiously involve the legs; over all comes an inexplicable length of garment that is actually doubled on to the child, so as to ensure every form of over-heating, pressure, and encumberment. After a month of this process, aided by hoods, flannels, shawls, and wraps of all kinds, a strange variation is adopted; the under bands and folds are left, but a short outer garment is provided, with curious holes cut in the stiffened edges, so as to make sure that it shall afford no protection to legs, arms, or neck … ⁸⁶

      Yet most mothers no more were able to achieve this magnificence than they were able to achieve what today we assume was standard for every nineteenth-century middle-class child: the separate nursery.

* It has been suggested that I am more interested in S-bends than I am in sex. For the purposes of social history this is so, and I do not plan to discuss sex at all. There is a great deal to say on the little we know about the Victorians’ attitudes to sex, but I am not the person to do it. For S-bends, however, see p. 293.

* Alfred Rosling Bennett (1850–1928) was one of the earliest telephone engineers, and author of such books as Telephone Systems of Continental Europe (1895), as well as a memoir of his childhood, London and Londoners in the Eighteen-Fifties and Sixties (1924). He also invented a caustic-alkali-and-iron battery in 1881.

* Linley and Marion Sambourne’s house has been preserved with the reception rooms left almost entirely as they were furnished towards the end of the nineteenth century. It now belongs to the Victorian Society, and is open to the public.

* Holland was a hard-wearing linen fabric, usually left undyed. It was much used in middle- and upper-class households to cover and protect delicate fabrics and furniture.

* Many books worry away at the location of matches, and it is understandable that it was essential to be able to find them in the dark. Mrs Panton suggested not only that the box should be nailed over the head of the bed, but that it should first be painted with enamel paint, and a small picture be cut out and stuck on it as decoration. Our Homes, written by Shirley Forster Murphy, who in the 1890s was the London County Council’s chief medical officer, was more modern, and recommended a new invention, ‘Blamaine’s Luminous Paint’, which could be applied to a clock face, ‘a bracket for matches, or a small contrivance for holding a watch’. He went on, in an excess of enthusiasm, that it could also go on bell pulls, letter boxes (one assumes for streets still not lit with gas), signposts and street signs. Maybe Mr Pooter and his red-enamel paint were not so far-fetched.¹⁷

* This system, known as ‘top to bottom, bottom off’, was still being vised in British boarding schools in the 1980s – and possibly still is.

† The idea that servants were especially dirty – without the congruent idea that this was because they were doing the dirtiest work – is one that will be explored in Chapter 4.

* For airing and its purpose, see pp. 104 and 118–19 and 130.

† This continues today. Cheryl Mendelson’s remarkably successful book Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House (2001) was quite confident not only that its readers regularly washed all the tins their food came in before opening them, and then the tin-opener after every use, but that before starting to cook sensible people washed their hands in a room outside the kitchen, to avoid ‘cross-contamination’.

* Sulphur was also burned to disinfect rooms after illness (see p. 317–18). It is still used today as a bactericide – in the preservation of wine and dried fruits, for example – but its effectiveness as sulphur dioxide (as it becomes on burning) may be in doubt.³¹

† To disperse another myth regarding middle- and upper-class women, it should be noted that a small but statistically significant percentage of births in the first year of marriage – some 12 women per 1000 – had a child within seven and a half months of marriage.³⁵

* Note that her first-person narrative was a literary device: the personal details of her ‘I’ changed from book to book.

* As a consequence, continental Europe had professionally qualified midwives decades before Britain – which did not find the need, finally, until the beginning of the twentieth century. As things stood for most of the nineteenth century, midwives had to be licensed, but this was a Bishop’s Licence, indicating moral rather than professional qualities. To receive it the midwife had simply to be recommended by any respectable married woman, take an oath to forswear child substitution, abortion, sorcery and overcharging, and pay a fee of 18s. 4d.

*