The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

(#litres_trial_promo) Those lower down the ladder reflected the same views in smaller ways. Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of the then-struggling Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, referred to their first child as ‘the small stranger within our gates’.

(#litres_trial_promo) As the daughter of a Methodist minister, she knew the original Bible verse, and was not just thoughtlessly parroting the standard usage whereby a baby was ‘a little stranger’. Deuteronomy 14:21, detailing the laws concerning food, says, ‘Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself: thou shalt give it to the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it.’ Was the stranger within the gates a second-class citizen?

Possibly not: but the expression does reinforce the shift that has occurred over the past 150 years, from a parent-centred universe to our own child-centred one. In earlier centuries households were run by adults for adults. Children were an integral part of a functioning economic unit – whether as providers of labour in less prosperous families or as potential items of value in the business and marriage markets for the wealthier. Children were to be trained and disciplined, both to promote their own well-being and to promote the well-being of the family unit. In addition, various of the more fundamentalist versions of Christianity had said that to spare the rod was not simply to spoil the child in practical matters, but to spoil his soul. Original sin, thought the Evangelicals, meant that all children were born needing to find salvation.

In less religious houses this developed into a sense of authority for authority’s sake. Samuel Butler wrote of his father’s childhood early in the century, as well as his own, in his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1873–80):

If his children did anything which Mr. Pontifex disliked they were clearly disobedient to their father. In this case there was obviously only one course for a sensible man to take. It consisted in checking the first signs of self-will while his children were too young to offer serious resistance. If their wills were ‘well broken’ in childhood, to use an expression then much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience which they would not venture to break through …

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As the century progressed, improved standards of living meant that many children who would earlier have gone out to work now had a childhood. Further, Rousseau’s theories of child education, promoting the ideal of individual development in natural surroundings, struck a chord, and converged with the Romantic movement’s eloquence on the innocence and purity of childhood. Many books agreed with the Revd T. V. Moore in his ‘The Family as Government’ in The British Mothers’ Journal, when he advised parents that ‘The great agent in executing family law is love.’

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Yet while physical coercion was used less as the century progressed, and persuasion more, there was little doubt about the virtues of authority and obedience. Frances Power Cobbe, a philanthropist and worker for women’s rights, outlined in her Duties of Women what was to be expected from a child by way of obedience:

1st. The obedience which must be exacted from a child for its own physical, intellectual, and moral welfare.

2nd. The obedience which the parent may exact for his (the parent’s) welfare or convenience.

3rd. The obedience which parent and child alike owe to the moral law, and which it is the parent’s duty to teach the child to pay.

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Moral law was to many synonymous with religious law. It enshrined the duty of obedience owed to God. The head of the family derived his authority from God; the wife of the head derived hers from the head; and so on. Any disobedience subverted this notion of order. Therefore disobedience was, of itself, subversive, and it was the idea of rebellion that needed to be punished, not whatever the act of disobedience itself was. Laura Forster, a clergyman’s daughter (and later the aunt of E. M. Forster), noted that ‘We were expected to be obedient without any reason being given’, but she tried to give extenuating circumstances: ‘we shared our mother’s confidence as soon as we were of a suitable age, and I think this helped to give us the conviction that we all had that nothing was forbidden us capriciously, and that some day we should know, if we did not understand at the time, why this or that was forbidden’.

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Most parents felt that discipline could not begin too early. A mother or nurse’s refusal to feed her infants except at stated hours taught the infants the benefits of ‘order and punctuality’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Having their crying ignored taught babies self-restraint: Mrs Warren said that, if a child cried for something, on principle it should never be given – ‘even a babe of three months, when I held up my finger and put on a grave look, knew that such was the language of reproof.’ Instead of beatings, which children earlier in the century might have routinely expected, children were told of the disappointment they caused, to their parents and to God. Mrs Warren suggested that children who were disobedient should be told they were breaking the Fifth Commandment, by not honouring their fathers and mothers;

(#litres_trial_promo) Mary Jane Bradley, wife of a master at Rugby School, told her son that ‘God was looking at him with great sorrow and saying “that little boy has been in a wicked passion, he cannot come up and live with me unless he is good”.’

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Corporal punishment, although lessened in force and frequency, vanished only slowly over the next hundred years. When Mary Jane Bradley’s son Arthur (nicknamed ‘Wa’) was three, ‘He was not good yesterday and surprised me by saying, “Wa was naughty in London Town and Papa and Mama did whip Wa very hard” – I did not believe he could have remembered anything so long ago [three months before]. This whipping certainly had its effect. It was the first and last.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Louise Creighton, who said that in her own childhood she was never beaten, but put in a dark cupboard that induced only boredom, punished her own children in a way she acknowledged ‘may be considered brutal by some people. Cuthbert was a very mischievous boy, & used to play with fire & cut things with knives, so when he played with fire I held his finger on the bar of the grate for a minute that he might feel how fire burnt, & when he cut woodwork with his knife I gave his fingers a little cut.’ Despite what might today be described as savagery, she thought it important to end, ‘I never whipt any child.’

(#litres_trial_promo) What seemed harsh changed over time. A guide to the sickroom advised, almost in passing, that if a child refused medicine, ‘at once fasten the child’s hand behind him, throw him on his back, pinch his nose to force his mouth apart, and … pour [the liquid] down his throat with a medicine spoon’. This is called acting with ‘firmness’.

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It was still, however, a different world to the one in which Mr Pontifex had ruled. Children were moving to the centre of their parents’ lives. This was displayed in graphic form over the century by the pattern books that furniture-makers and shops produced to advertise their wares. In the early part of the nineteenth century there was no furniture made specifically for children; then in 1833 Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (which, despite its name, was a very metropolitan, bourgeois publication) had a short section for children’s furniture, most of it miniaturized versions of adult objects. By the end of the century every shop and every catalogue had a full range of furniture designed specially for children’s needs.

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Different families adapted to this new ethos more or less quickly and comfortably: how quickly and comfortably was based on character and on personal and social background. Many remained convinced that the marital relationship was the primary one: Louise Creighton reported that Walter Pater’s sister had once said to her about the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward and her husband that ‘she always preferred Mary [Ward]’s company when Humphry was present, because if he was absent Mary was always wondering where he could be; but she preferred me without Max, for when he was there I was so occupied with him & with what he was saying that I was no use to anyone else … I think this was true all my life.’ She did not make the connection with her own mother’s behaviour in her childhood: when Mr von Glehn was due back from London in the evenings ‘My mother always grew expectant some time before his train arrived & was very fidgety & anxious.’ Her husband was her focus, as had been her mother’s, and ‘only the fact that I nursed [my children] kept me from going about much, and this … did prevent me sharing many of Max’s expeditions & walks which was a very real deprivation’.

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Advice books, fiction and reality converge here: Mrs Warren’s model housewife always made her children understand that when their father came home from work he was to be considered first in all things, otherwise she felt it was entirely to be expected if he became ‘cold and indifferent’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Panton believed children should have rooms where they do not ‘interfer[e] unduly with the comfort of the heads of the establishment’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Many novels touched on the same theme: in George Gissing’s New Grub Street the failed novelist Edwin Reardon looks back on his collapsing marriage: ‘Their evenings together had never been the same since the birth of the child … The little boy had come between him and his mother, as must always be the case in poor homes.’

(#litres_trial_promo) His view is that marriages prosper not because they become child-centred, but because the family can afford servants to remove the children from the adult sphere.

Mrs Henry Wood, in East Lynne, provided the clearest apologia for this adult-centred view. Mr Carlyle’s second wife expounds her views to her predecessor, Lady Isabel (for complex plot reasons currently disguised as a French governess, Mme Vine). The two women agree on this point, and as the reader has spent hundreds of pages learning to sympathize with Lady Isabel it is hard to imagine that theirs was not Mrs Henry Wood’s view too. It is worth quoting at length, for the insight it gives into the adult-centred world-view. Mrs Carlyle says:

I never was fond of being troubled with children … I hold an opinion, Madame Vine, that too many mothers pursue a mistaken system in the management of their family. There are some, we know, who, lost in the pleasures of the world, in frivolity, wholly neglect them: of those I do not speak; nothing can be more thoughtless, more reprehensible, but there are others who err on the opposite side. They are never happy but when with their children; they must be in the nursery; or, the children in the drawing-room. They wash them, dress them, feed them; rendering themselves slaves … [Such a mother] has no leisure, no spirits for any higher training: and as they grow old she loses her authority … The discipline of that house soon becomes broken. The children run wild; the husband is sick of it, and seeks peace and solace elsewhere … I consider it a most mistaken and pernicious system …

Now, what I trust I shall never give up to another, will be the training of my children … Let the offices, properly belonging to a nurse, be performed by the nurse … Let her have the trouble of the children, their noise, their romping; in short, let the nursery be her place and the children’s place. But I hope I shall never fail to gather my children round me daily, at stated periods, for higher purposes: to instil into them Christian and moral duties; to strive to teach them how best to fulfil life’s obligations. This is a mother’s task …

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Or, as the novelist Mrs Gaskell had the governess in Ruth (1853) say more succinctly to the children in her care, ‘All that your papa wants always, is that you are quiet and out of the way.’

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Marion Jane Bradley kept a diary of her children’s first years, from 1853 to 1860. In about 1891 she reread it and added a note to the manuscript: ‘I tried to make our children fill their proper subordinate places in the family – Father always to be first considered, their arrangements to be subject to his … Not to seem anxious about their health or to fuss over their comfort and convenience, but to make them feel it was proper for them to give up and be considered secondary. Of course, this is quite old fashioned …’

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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].

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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!’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) (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.)

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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