The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

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Ten years later she gave up that particular war: when the servant’s bed was again found to be swarming, she sold the old wooden bed and bought an iron one: ‘The horror of these bugs quite maddened me for many days.’

(#litres_trial_promo) That, she thought, was that – until a few years later Carlyle complained about his own bed. Jane was initially confident:

Living in a universe of bugs outside, I had entirely ceased to fear them in my own house, having kept it for so many years perfectly clean from all such abominations. But clearly the practical thing to be done was to go and examine his bed … So instead of getting into a controversy that had no basis, I proceeded to toss over his blankets and pillows, with a certain sense of injury! But on a sudden, I paused in my operations; I stopped to look at something the size of a pin-point; a cold shudder ran over me; as sure as I lived it was an infant bug! And, O, heaven, that bug, little as it was, must have parents – grandfathers and grandmothers, perhaps!

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The carpenter was called to dismantle the bed. The usual system at this stage was to take the pieces of the bed, and all the bedding, into an empty room, or outside, wash the bed frame with chloride of lime and water, and sprinkle Keating’s powder everywhere; then wait and repeat daily for as long as necessary. If the infestation was out of control, the bed and mattress were left in an empty room which was sealed to make it airtight, and then sulphur was burned to disinfect the bed and the surrounding area, to prevent the spread of the problem to the walls and floors.

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Another anxiety was that laundry sent out to washerwomen would come back infested,

(#litres_trial_promo) and, for the same reason, secondhand furniture was distrusted – ‘How can we know we are not buying infection?’

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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.

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(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 –’.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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:

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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 …

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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.

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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.’

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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;

(#litres_trial_promo) Gladstone was at his wife’s bedside for all six of his children’s births, beginning with his first son in 1840. But by the 1860s Dr Chavasse condemned the idea of anyone except the doctor and nurse being in attendance. Not even the pregnant woman’s mother was encouraged to be present.

(#litres_trial_promo) If women went back to their mother’s for their first child, as many (including Marion Sambourne) did, it was likely that even then she was no longer in the room during labour.

The increasing professionalization of medicine meant that experienced midwives were being squeezed out of middle-class childbirth. Doctors liked attending childbirths – they saw it as a good way for a young practitioner to forge a bond with a newly set up family which, with luck, would continue for the rest of the family’s lifespan. For this reason they fought the possibility of midwives being formally qualified.

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(#litres_trial_promo) Even if half to three-quarters of all births were still attended by midwives, that would mean that by the end of the century as many as three-quarters of a million women a year were being attended by a doctor – possibly the bulk of the middle classes.

Another reason to have a doctor was the increasing use of chloroform. It had been administered safely as early as 1847; in 1857 it gained wide recognition when Queen Victoria was given it during childbirth. Yet the drug still had to be defended repeatedly: it was not generally accepted until the late 1870s – the delay being caused not by women, who were clamouring for it, but by doctors, who were deeply resistant.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not so much the danger – medicine had not reached a stage where practitioners expected to save every patient – as the immorality of the drug: did not Genesis 3:16 remind women everywhere that, for Eve’s sin, ‘in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’? Dr Charles Meigs, two years after chloroform was first administered successfully, spoke for many in his profession: ‘To be insensible from whisky, gin, and brandy, and wine, and beer, and ether and chloroform, is to be what in the world is called Dead-drunk. No reasoning – no argumentation is strong enough to point out the 9th part of a hair’s discrimination between them.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Not all felt this way. Both Charles Darwin and his friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker were, in the old-fashioned manner, present when their wives gave birth but – new style – they administered the chloroform themselves.

Despite this divergence on medical treatment, both women and doctors agreed in regarding childbirth as an illness. Mrs Panton called it a ‘plight’, and warned that ‘Naturally these times are looked forward to with dread by all young wives.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The lower middle classes, and a substantial swath of the more prosperous, did not have the servants to permit them to lie in bed for weeks (or even days). And it was they – overburdened with heavy housework which they performed themselves, and with the care, feeding, clothing and education of children – who would probably have benefited from time in bed. Some were forced to remain in bed, whether or not they had servants: Emily Gosse was unable to leave her room for six weeks.

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Prosperous middle-class women, on the other hand, were expected to stay in bed after the birth for at least nine days; those who got up earlier did so, it was supposed, not because they felt well enough, but out of ‘bravado’, and they were considered to be acting foolishly, because ‘the strength and health of the mother’s whole life depend upon judicious treatment at such a critical time’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Louise Creighton, an upper-middle-class woman married to an Oxford fellow,

(#ulink_d2139fbc-e6d4-5f13-9e2b-95f7e6b704ee) accepted this fully. She gave birth to her second child in 1874, and a month later a close friend who had also just had a child came to visit. ‘We spent the afternoon happily together wondering which was the most fit to get up & ring the bell when we needed anything.’