The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

(#litres_trial_promo) Ursula Bloom noted that, in her upper-middle-class family, after giving birth the women were kept flat on their backs and fed with a feeding cup, a china cup with a partial covering and a spout, through which the recumbent patient could drink. The windows remained closed, and small sandbags were laid along the edges of the frames to keep out any draughts. A lamp was left burning all night, and the monthly nurse slept on a sofa in the room. This lying-in lasted a month, and was then followed by churching, which no men attended (and seems to have been relatively uncommon – Bloom came from a clergy family).

(#litres_trial_promo) The woman was usually faint and weak at the end of the month: without any fresh air or exercise, and with only an invalid diet, all the while breastfeeding, it was to be expected.

Serious illness always lurked. Although women had a slightly longer life expectancy than men throughout the period, all joined in regarding them as the frailer vessel. The most dangerous time was childbirth: childbed fever (or puerperal fever, now simply septicaemia) was the most common cause of death in childbirth. From 1847 to 1876, 5 women per 1000 live births died, with puerperal fever causing between a third and a half of these deaths. There was no cure available: doctors merely prescribed opium, champagne, and brandy-and-soda, trying to ease the passing, rather than making a vain attempt to cure a mortal illness.

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In Vienna in 1795 Ignaz Semmelweis had radically cut the number of deaths from septic poisoning among his patients by insisting that anyone who entered his wards first scrubbed with chloride of lime. A paper on the subject, noting his results, was read before the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1848,

(#litres_trial_promo) but general acceptance was extremely slow: after the Female Medical Society in 1865 warned doctors against coming from dissecting rooms straight to childbed. The Lancet dismissed their suggestion as ‘all erroneous’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Instead, doctors insisted that ‘mental emotion’ and overexcitement were what caused death – women suffered in childbirth because they led ‘unnatural lives’, and therefore they were entirely responsible for their failure to thrive.

(#litres_trial_promo) Many women colluded with this attitude: Mrs Warren’s imaginary narrator was ill after the birth of her child because, according to her monthly nurse, she ‘shouldn’t have eaten all sorts of fanciful trash, but kept yourself to pure wholesome food, for a depraved appetite soon comes’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The ideas behind this comment were sound enough, but the ‘depravity’ of the mother’s thoughtlessness added the requisite moral as well as a physical dimension to women’s illness.

With childbirth being regularly repeated, one can see the women’s insistence on their weakness as making a certain amount of sense, even if it was not always phrased in ways that today we feel an immediate bond with. Mrs Panton was vehement that the mother ‘should be the first object of every one’s care until she has been for at least a fortnight over her trouble, and I trace a good deal of my own nervous irritability and ill-health to the fact that after my last baby arrived I had an enormous quantity of small worries that the presence in the house of a careful guard would have obviated’. The monthly nurse, she went on, should be ‘a dragon of watchfulness’ who keeps ‘away all those small bothers which men can never refrain from bringing to their wives, regardless that at such times the smallest worry becomes gigantic’. It was essential that, ‘if at no other time can we obtain consideration and thought, it is imperative that for at least three weeks after the arrival of a baby the wife should have mental as well as bodily rest, and that she should be absolutely shielded from all domestic cares and worries’. The querulous tone was unattractive, but when she pointed out that, by the time a woman had had her fifth or sixth child, her husband might have become so used to the event that he would ‘so depress and harass his wife by his depression that she may slip out of his fingers altogether’, one does feel for the overburdened woman.

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There was not much escape, either. Mrs Beeton was firm that babies should not sleep with either their nurse or their mother: ‘The amount of oxygen required by an infant is so large, and the quantity consumed by mid-life and age, and the proportion of carbonic acid thrown off from both, 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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Breastfeeding, indeed, she thought ‘a period of privation and penance’,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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(#litres_trial_promo) (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.)

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.’

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’

(#litres_trial_promo) – 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#ulink_7a764d47-272f-5ac7-b7ba-4ef40979a558) which would give ‘just enough pressure to prevent the protrusion of the bowels’.

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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;

(#ulink_00f95305-c519-508b-9e32-6c0aa596b601) 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,

(#ulink_2c00670e-78c4-5721-baa7-5c84fc0f8943) old pieces of linen, a large mackintosh (i.e. waterproof) sheet, 2 old blankets and 3 coarse blanket-sheets.

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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 …

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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.

* (#ulink_e8136734-2a87-5c7a-af7f-20889fa341e3) 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.