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

Of course, this is quite old fashioned …’³¹

      It was, truly, quite old-fashioned by the end of the century – for the mother, at least. Fathers remained more distant. Caroline Taylor’s father ‘had a quick temper and we children stood in fear of him. We were never allowed to express our ideas … My father had a knowledge of many subjects and was artistic and musical, but he never conversed on things to his children … Parents always assumed such dignity, and we felt so small.’³² Fifty years before, Mrs Gaskell had reflected the prevailing views in her novels, even while her personal view, in her letters and journal, had long been moving towards precisely that child-centred universe which was the opposite of the children being ‘quiet and out of the way’. Mrs Gaskell was the wife of a Unitarian minister, and the daughter of another, but there was nothing of Evangelical stringency in her attitude to her children. Although she was deeply concerned about their moral welfare, she did not see that children should suffer for it. She was very much of her time in reading numerous advice books, and she carefully considered the instructions they gave. She agreed with those that said that moral fibre was not developed by privation and denial:

      I don’t think we should carry out the maxim of never letting a child have anything for crying. If it is to have the object for which it is crying I would give it, directly, giving up any little occupation or purpose of my own, rather than try its patience unnecessarily. But if it is improper for it to obtain the object, I think it right to with-hold the object steadily, however much the little creature may cry … I think it is the duty of every mother to sacrifice a good deal rather than have her child unnecessarily irritated by anything [my italics].³³

      This was not lip-service: she wrote in her journal, when her daughter Marianne was six months old, ‘If when you [that is, the future, grown-up Marianne] read this, you trace back any evil, or unhappy feeling to my mismanagement in your childhood forgive me, love!’³⁴ This view took concrete form. Earlier, children were to give things up to their elders; now the elders deprived themselves. Because of the cost of Marianne’s schooling, and the larger house they had bought, ‘we aren’t going to furnish the drawing room, & mean to be, and are very œconomical because it seems such an addition to children’s health and happiness to have plenty of room’.³⁵

      The interest in children’s happiness was new, but children’s health had always been a concern. Mortality rates for the general population were high, but they were dropping none the less: from 21.8 deaths per 1000 in 1868, to 18.1 in 1888, down to 14.8 in 1908. The young benefited soonest: children first felt the improvements as understanding of disease transmission, a drop in the real price of food, and, most importantly, improved sanitation worked their way through the population.³⁶ (It must be remembered that until this point the most likely time of death was not in old age, but in infancy: as late as 1899, more than 16 per cent of all children did not survive to their first birthday.)³⁷ A child born in the earlier part of the century would probably have watched at least one of its siblings die; a child born in the 1880s would have had fewer siblings, and would also have had less chance of seeing them die.³⁸

This improvement, together with the increasingly child-centred world they inhabited, made parents ever more solicitous of the health of their children. It was difficult not to worry when a parent could expect to have to deal with scalds, burns, falls, children being dropped by the nursemaid,^* swallowed lotions or liniment, swallowed lucifers (matches), clothes catching fire, drowning, stings, overdoses of laudanum, paregoric, Godfrey’s Cordial or Dalby’s Carminative (all four opium derivatives), peas up the nose or in the ears, and swallowed glass or coins.⁴⁰

Some fears appeared relatively trivial, but uncertain diagnostic techniques meant that many major illnesses could not be identified and separated from minor ones. Seemingly harmless childhood ailments might end in death. Mrs Gaskell reported in her journal on Marianne’s sudden attack of croup: ‘We heard a cough like a dog’s bark … We gave her 24 drops of Ipec: wine, and Sam & Mr Partington both came. They said we had done quite rightly, and ordered her some calomel powders^† … [W]e have reason to be most thankful that she is spared to us … Poor little Eddy Deane was taken ill of croup on the same night, and died on the following Monday.’⁴¹ Poor little Eddy Deane may very well have had diphtheria: this and croup were often confused.

      Even teething, that routine, ordinary, minor fret of babydom, was a major cause of anxiety. Mrs Pedley estimated that 16 per cent of child deaths were teething-related, rather than actually from teething itself. She tried to persuade parents that it was not the malady but the cure that was killing their children. She wrote that, when their babies fretted before their new teeth began to show, worried parents decided that ‘milk no longer agrees with the child’, so they stopped the milk and instead fed the infants on unsuitable foods. This upset their digestions; they were therefore given drugs, most of which contained opium, and, not unnaturally, the babies died in convulsions – more deaths put down to that dread disease, teething.⁴² Her common sense, however, was drowned out by others who recommended syrup of poppies (Mrs Warren) or purgatives (Dr Chavasse, Mrs Beeton and Mrs Warren) or surgery – lancing the gums (all of the above).

      Mrs Beeton listed the symptoms of teething, and they included, apart from the ones we would recognize today – inflamed gums and an increase of saliva – restlessness, irregular bowel movements, fever, disturbed sleep, ‘fretfulness … rolling of the eyes, convulsive startings, labourious breathing’: pretty well everything, in fact. The answer was to give purgatives and a teething ring, put the child in a hot bath, and if necessary lance the gums, ‘which will often snatch the child from the grasp of death … [otherwise] the unrelieved irritation endanger[s] inflammation of the brain, water on the head, rickets, and other lingering affections’. Indeed, Mrs Beeton stressed that rickets and water on the brain were ‘frequent results of dental irritation’.⁴³ Mrs Beeton at least made one concession to the strength of the drugs routinely given to infants: she suggested that, before weaning, medicine could be given via the milk, the mother swallowing the appropriate dose. That was an improvement on many systems, where it was generally expected that the nurse would give the newborn infant a few drops of castor oil as soon as it was born. Mrs Gaskell followed the general trend: Marianne ‘had one violent attack … but we put her directly into warm water, & gave her castor oil, sending at the same time for a medical man, who decided that the inflammatory state of her body was owing to her being on the point of cutting her eye-teeth’.⁴⁴

      ‘Convulsions’ were a similarly created illness: death due to convulsions was common, but even at the time many attributed the deaths to the opium-based medicines used as a cure. Mrs Beeton (whose chapter on child-rearing, it should be emphasized, was written for her by a doctor) gave a description of a convulsion: ‘the infant cries out with a quick, short scream, rolls up its eyes, arches its body backwards, its arms become bent and fixed, and the fingers parted; the lips and eyelids assume a dusky leaden colour, while the face remains pale, and the eyes open, glassy, or staring’. This might last a few minutes only, and could surely describe almost any crying child. Yet the worried carers who saw a convulsion in these symptoms were advised to put the baby in a hot bath, give it a teaspoonful of brandy and water and, an hour after the bath, administer a purgative, repeated once or twice