Читать книгу The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed - Judith Flanders - Страница 6

IN THE SEGREGATION that permeated the Victorian house, the reception rooms were always considered the main rooms – they presented the public face of the family, defining it, clarifying its status. Bedrooms, to perform their function properly, were expected to separate servants from employers, adults from children, boys from girls, older children from babies. Initially, smaller houses had had only two bedrooms, one for parents and young children, one for the remaining children, with servants sleeping in the kitchen or basement. To accommodate the increasing demands for separation, houses throughout the period grew ever taller.

In addition, the older fashion of the bedrooms serving as quasi-sitting rooms was, in theory at least, disappearing. The Architect said that using a bedroom for a function other than sleeping was ‘unwholesome, immoral, and contrary to the well-understood principle that every important function of life required a separate room’.¹ In actual fact, bedroom function was regulated rather less rigidly than the theory of the times advocated. Throughout the period, as well as being rooms for sleeping, for illness, for sex,^* for childbirth, bedrooms served more than one category of family member. Alfred Bennett, growing up in the 1850s in Islington, slept on a small bed beside his parents’ bed.^* So did Edmund Gosse, until his mother developed breast cancer when he was seven; after she died, he slept in his father’s room until he was eleven. In small houses this was to be expected. Thomas and Jane Carlyle’s procession of servants slept in the back kitchen, or scullery, from 1834 (when the Carlyles moved into their Cheyne Row house) until 1865 (when an additional bedroom was incorporated in the attic). The house was fairly small, but they had no children, and for many years only one servant. Even in large houses with numerous servants it was not uncommon to expect them to sleep where they worked. As late as 1891 Alice James reported that a friend, house-hunting, had seen ‘a largish house in Palace Gardens Terrace [in the new part of Kensington: this was not an old house] with four reception rooms and “eight masters’ bedrooms”; when she asked the “lady-housekeeper” where the servants’ rooms were, she said: “downstairs next the kitchen” – “How many?” “One” – at [her] exclamation of horror, she replied: “It is large enough for three” – maids: of course there was the pantry and scullery for the butler and footman.’²

Like the Carlyles, it is probable that these unknown employers themselves had separate bedrooms. Even couples who shared a room often found it desirable for the husband to have a separate dressing room for himself – this was genteel: that is, what the upper middle and upper classes did, even if the shifts many had to go through to carve out this extra space often reduced the genteel to the ludicrous. (See Adolphus Crosbie’s dressing room on page xlv.) Linley and Marion Sambourne, an upper-middle-class couple living in a fairly large house in Kensington, shared a bedroom, with a separate dressing room next door for Linley.^* Their two children, a boy and a girl, slept in one room on the top floor, next to the parlourmaid, while the cook and the housemaid slept in the back kitchen.³ When the children grew too old for it to be considered proper for them to share a room, Linley’s dressing room became his son’s room, and their daughter remained in her childhood bedroom: this was all fairly standard.

Yet even when the occupancy was dense, Mrs Haweis, an arbiter of fashionable interior decoration in several books, was firm about segregation of function: ‘Gentlemen should be discouraged from using toilet towels to sop up ink and spilt water; for such accidents, a duster or two may hang on the towel-horse.’⁴ That this warning was necessary implies that ink was regularly used in a room where there was a towel rail, and from Mrs Haweis’s detailed description that could only be the bedroom. This was clearly an on-going situation. Aunt Stanbury, Trollope’s resolutely old-fashioned spinster in He Knew He Was Right twenty years later, loathed this promiscuous mixing: ‘It was one of the theories of her life that different rooms should be used only for the purposes for which they were intended. She never allowed pens and ink up into the bed-rooms, and had she ever heard that any guest in her house was reading in bed, she would have made an instant personal attack upon that guest.’⁵

Bedroom furniture varied widely, from elaborate bedroom and toilet suites, to cheap beds, furniture that was no longer sufficiently good to be downstairs in the formal reception rooms, and old, recut carpeting. Mrs Panton describes the bedrooms of her youth in the 1850s and 1860s with some feeling – particularly

the carpet, a threadbare monstrosity, with great sprawling green leaves and red blotches, ‘made over’ … from a first appearance in a drawing-room, where it had spent a long and honoured existence, and where its enormous design was not quite as much out of place as it was in the upper chambers. Indeed, the bedrooms, as a whole, seemed to be furnished as regards a good many items out of the cast-off raiment of the downstairs rooms.⁶

As the daughter of W. P. Frith, an enormously popular painter, Mrs Panton had hardly grown up in a house where the taste was either lacking or unable to be achieved through scarcity of money. Nor was her childhood home, to use one of her favourite words, ‘inartistic’: this make-do-and-mend system was the norm.

By mid-century, bedrooms were beginning to be furnished to the standards of the reception rooms, where possible. This meant a good carpet, furniture (mahogany for preference) that included a central table, a wardrobe, a toilet table, chairs, a small bookcase and a ‘cheffonier’, a small, low cupboard with a sideboard top. The bed, if possible, was still four-postered, with curtains. There was also a washstand, in birchwood (which, unlike darker woods, did not show water stains), with accoutrements, a pier glass, and perhaps a couch or chaise longue. In Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, in which he reworked some of his childhood memories from the Potteries of the 1870s, the master bedroom of the town’s chief linen-draper was splendid with ‘majestic mahogany … crimson rep curtains edged with gold … [and a] white, heavily tasselled counterpane’.⁷

Multi-functionality: a suggestion for a bedroom writing table with, over it, a combination bookshelf and medicine case for when the bedroom was required to double as a sickroom.

Heal’s and Son, the great furniture shop on Tottenham Court Road, suggested a bedroom furnished in Aesthetic style for the prosperous. Note that by 1896 the bed has no hangings, and gas jets illuminate the dressing mirror, although not the bed, which still has no bedside table.

The range of furniture varied with income and taste. A mahogany wardrobe cost anything from 8 to 80 guineas, while an inexpensive cupboard could be made in the recess of the chimney breast, simply using a deal board, pegs and a curtain in front. Trays and boxes for storing clothes were common – hangers were not in general use until the 1900s (when they were referred to as ‘shoulders’), so clothes either hung from pegs or were folded. Small houses and yards of fabric in every dress meant that advice books were constantly contriving additional storage: in hollow stools, benches, ottomans. Even bulkier items were folded: Robert Edis, another interiors expert, recommended that halls should have cupboards ‘with shelves arranged for coats’.⁸ ‘Ware’ – shorthand for toilet-ware – also came in a range of qualities. The typical washstand had towel rails on each side, and often tiles at the back to protect against splashing water. It was expected there would be a basin, a ewer or jug, a soapdish, a dish to hold a sponge, a dish to hold a toothbrush, a dish to hold a nailbrush, a water bottle and a glass. A chamber pot might be of the same pattern as the ware. Mrs Panton recommended that identical ware should be bought for most of the bedrooms, as breakages could then be replaced from stock – breakages of bedroom items, she implied, were frequent. A hip bath might also live in the bedroom, to be filled by toilet cans: large metal cans of brass or copper, which were used to carry hot water up from the kitchen.

No room was finished without its ration of ornaments: Mrs Haweis said that even without much money one could have a pretty room: ‘A little distemper in good colours, one or two really graceful chairs … a few thoroughly good ornaments, make a mere cell habitable.’⁹ Mrs Caddy, in her book on Household Organization, suggested that, as with the furniture and carpets, second best would do for the bedroom – ‘light ornaments … which may be too small, or too trifling, to be placed with advantage in the drawing room’.¹⁰ Certainly the desire for small decorative objects was no less upstairs than down. Marion Sambourne’s dressing table in the 1880s had on it five jewel boxes, a brush-and-comb set, a card case, two sachets, six needlework doilies, three ring trays, a pin cushion and a velvet ‘mouchoir case’.¹¹

Bedside tables as we know them were not current. In sickroom literature, nurses were always being advised to bring a table to the bedside to hold the medicines. Mrs Panton, with her love of soft furnishings, suggested for the healthy ‘a bed pocket made out of a Japanese fan, covered with soft silk, and the pocket itself made out of plush, and nailed within easy reach’, to hold a watch, a handkerchief etc., and then, as an innovation which required explanation, ‘furthermore … great comfort is to be had from a table at one’s bedside, on which one can stand one’s book or anything one may be likely to want in the night’.¹²

Mrs Panton’s bed was a brass half-tester, which had fabric curtains only at the head, lined to match the furniture. This was in keeping with the style of the later part of the century. As more became known about disease transmission, home decorators were urged to keep bedroom furnishings to a minimum, although this frequently given advice must be compared to actuality. A list of objects in Marion Sambourne’s room included a wardrobe, a cupboard to hold a chamber pot, a towel rail, a sofa, a box covered in fabric, two tables, a bookcase, a linen basket, a portmanteau, a vase, two jardinières, plus ten chairs and the dressing table with its display.¹³ For not all agreed that bed-hangings were unhealthy: Cassell’s Household Guide as late as 1869 thought that draughts were more of a worry than the hangings that kept them away from the sleeper.¹⁴ In general, however, four-posters were vanishing. Even if people were not switching to simple iron or brass beds, as advised, they were at least replacing the traditional heavy drapery with beds with only vestigial curtains. The simplified lines of such beds were disturbing to some: Mrs Panton advised that ‘If the bare appearance of an uncurtained bed is objected to’, one could mimic the more familiar style by putting the startlingly naked bed in a curtained alcove.¹⁵ Likewise, while carpets did not disappear entirely, they were modified so that they could be taken up and beaten regularly, or rugs were substituted, so that the floor could be scrubbed every week.

As the second half of the century progressed, hygiene became the overriding concern. Mrs Panton, still distressed about bedroom carpets, remembered a carpet that had spent twenty years on the dining-room floor, ‘covered in holland in the summer,^* and preserved from winter wear by the most appallingly frightful printed red and green “felt square” I ever saw’. When it was no longer considered to be in good condition, it was moved to the schoolroom, then demoted once more, to the girls’ bedroom. (Note that the schoolroom, a ‘public’ room for children, got the carpet before the children’s bedroom did.) After that, it was cut into strips and put by the servants’ beds, ‘and when I consider the dirt and dust that has become part and parcel of it, I am only thankful that our pretty cheap carpets do not last as carpets used to do, for I am sure such a possession cannot be healthy’.¹⁶

As suggested by Heal’s for a servant’s bedroom. Instead of modern peacock-feather wallpaper (p. 5), the servants make do with old-fashioned flowers, and plain deal furniture replaces the more elaborate versions given to their employers. Many of the middle classes slept in rooms much like these.

Hygiene was not just a matter of dust. Three things were paramount: the extermination of vermin (which encompassed insects as well as rodents), the protection from dirt of various kinds, and the proper regulation of light. Gas lighting was not recommended for bedrooms. If gas was used, the servants lit the bedroom lights in the evenings while the family was still downstairs; by bedtime much of the oxygen in the room would have been depleted by it; the fireplace, being seldom if ever lit, added no ventilation, and in cold weather, with closed windows, a headache was the least the sleeper could expect to awake to. A single candle, brought upstairs on retiring, was the approved bedroom lighting, but for the more prosperous a pair of candlesticks on the mantel, and another on the dressing table, ‘with the box of safety matches in a known position, where they can be found in a moment’, was more comfortable.^*18

The lack of lighting was complicated by the fact that the bed needed to be positioned carefully to meet the conflicting demands of health and privacy. The bed should be ‘screen [ed], and not expose [d]’ by the opening of the bedroom door, and yet at the same time, it could not be placed in a draught from the window, door or fireplace, nor should there be overmuch light (which could be ‘trying’ when the occupant was ill).¹⁹ Given these many requirements, and the limited floor plans of most terraced houses, these niceties were probably acknowledged more in the abstract than they were practised.

Protection from dirt was still more difficult. Dust was not just the airborne particles, causing no particular damage, that we know. Our Homes warned that

Household dust is, in fact, the powder of dried London mud, largely made up, of course, of finely-divided granite or wood from the pavements, but containing, in addition to these, particles of every description of decaying animal and vegetable matter. The droppings of horses and other animals, the entrails of fish, the outer leaves of cabbages, the bodies of dead cats, and the miscellaneous contents of dust-bins generally, all contribute … and it is to preserve a harbour for this compound that well-meaning people exclude the sun [by excessive drapery], so that they may not be guilty of spoiling their carpets.²⁰

Compounded with this, coal residue was omnipresent, both as dust when coals were carried to each fireplace and then, after the fires were lit, as soot thrown out by the fire, blackening whatever it touched. The most common system of protection was to cover whatever could be covered, and wash the covers regularly. However, as the covers became decorative objects in themselves, they became less and less washable. Dressing tables, for example, were usually covered with a white ‘toilet cover’. Mrs Panton recommended, as more attractive, her own version, which was a tapestry cover, ‘edged with a ball fringe to match’. She also had ‘box pincushions’ made out of old cigar boxes to hold gloves and other small objects: the boxes were given padded tops, and were then covered in plush, velveteen or tapestry, and fringed ‘so that the opening is hidden’. These covers were now themselves in need of covers: tapestry could be brushed and dabbed with benzene or other dry-cleaning fluids, but it could not be easily washed; nor could velvet or plush, and especially not fringes. Yet Mrs Panton was deeply concerned with airborne dirt: she noted that ‘in dusty weather particularly, and especially if we drive much’, it was impossible to keep a hairbrush clean – ‘our brushes look black after once [sic] using’. She suggested that three hairbrushes be kept in rotation: one to start the day clean; the second to be washed and set out to dry for the following day; and one spare to lend a friend should she need it.²¹ If hair, covered by a hat, got so dirty on a single outing, the amount of dust and dirt that landed on clothes and furniture is almost inconceivable.

The extermination of vermin was an even more pressing problem, and, apart from the kitchen, beds were the most vulnerable places in the house. Bedding was rather more complicated than we have learned to expect. Mattresses were of organic fibre: horsehair mattresses were the best; cow’s-hair ones were cheaper, although they did not wear as well; even less expensive were wool mattresses. A straw mattress, or palliase, could be put under a hair mattress to protect it from the iron bedstead.²² Chain-spring mattresses were available in the second half of the century, but they were expensive, and they still needed a hair mattress over them. It was recommended that a brown holland square should be tied over the chains, to stop the hair mattress from being chewed by the springs. The hair mattress itself then needed to be covered with another holland case, to protect it from soot and dirt. If the bed had no springs, a feather bed – which was also expensive, hard to maintain, and a great luxury – could be added on top of the mattress. An underblanket, called a binding blanket, was recommended over the hair mattress.

After the basics (all of which needed turning and shaking every day, as otherwise the natural fibre had a tendency to mat and clump), the bedding for cold, usually fireless rooms consisted of an under sheet (tucked into the lower mattress, not the upper, again to protect from soot), a bottom sheet, a top sheet, blankets (three to four per bed in the winter), a bolster, pillows, bolster-and pillow-covers in holland, and bolster- and pillow-cases.

With all of this bedding made of organic matter, it is hardly surprising that bedbugs were a menace. Oddly, the usually fastidious Mrs Haweis thought that blankets needed washing only every other summer, although sheets needed washing every month –‘the old-fashioned allowance’ – if on a single bed; if two people were sharing a bed it was every fortnight. Not all the sheets were changed at once: bottom sheets were taken off, as were the pillow-and bolster-cases, and the top sheet was moved down and became the bottom sheet for the next fortnight.^* It was recognized that it was impossible to go to bed clean: Mrs Haweis noted that pillowcases needed to be changed ‘rather oftener [than the sheets], chiefly because people (especially servants) allow their hair to become so dusty, that it soils the cases very soon’.^†23

The main cleaning of bedding came twice a year, in the spring and autumn cleanings, when it was recommended that the mattresses and pillows were taken out and aired (and, every few years, taken apart, the lumps in the ticking broken up and washed, and the feathers sifted, to get rid of the dust).^*24 Clearly, this kind of work could take place only with substantially more space and labour than many, if not most, middle-class households could afford. As was often the case, the advice books were describing the daily routines of upper-middle-class houses, or an ideal world that did not exist at all.^†

It was not, however, enough simply to clean the bedding as well as possible. Although vermin had always been present, for some reason in the eighteenth century their numbers increased,²⁵ possibly because of rapid urbanization. After a vigorous war against them, by the 1880s Mrs Haweis could say that fleas were not expected in ‘decent bedrooms’, although ‘at any minute one may bring a stray parent in from cab, omnibus, or train’;²⁶ consequently vigilance had to be maintained, and the bed itself had to be examined regularly. And examine the Victorians did. Beatrix Potter wrote with an air of doom fulfilled about a Torquay hotel, where she was holidaying:

I sniffed my bedroom on arrival, and for a few hours felt a certain grim satisfaction when my forebodings were maintained, but it is possible to have too much Natural History in a bed.

I did not undress after the first night, but I was obliged to lie on [the bed] because there were only two chairs and one of them was broken. It is very uncomfortable to sleep with Keating’s [bug] powder in the hair.²⁷

At home, the good housewife was supposed to check the bed and bedding every week. When Thomas and Jane Carlyle moved into their Cheyne Row house in 1834, Jane claimed that hers was the only house ‘among all my acquaintances’ that could boast of having no bugs. For a decade all was well. Then in 1843 bugs were found in the servant’s bed in the kitchen:

I flung some twenty pailfuls of water on the kitchen floor, in the first place to drown any that might attempt to save themselves; when we killed all that were discoverable, and flung the pieces of the bed, one after another, into a tub full of water, carried them up into the garden, and let them steep there for two days; – and then I painted all the joints [with disinfectant], had the curtains washed and laid by for the present, and hope and trust that there is not one escaped alive to tell. Ach Gott, what a disgusting work to have to do! – but the destroying of bugs is a thing that cannot be neglected.²⁸

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.’²⁹ 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!³⁰

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.^*32

Another anxiety was that laundry sent out to washerwomen would come back infested,³³ and, for the same reason, secondhand furniture was distrusted – ‘How can we know we are not buying infection?’³⁴

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.^†36 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.’³⁷ 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’.³⁸

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.³⁹ 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 –’.⁴⁰

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’.⁴¹ 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.’⁴² 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.⁴³

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.’⁴⁴ 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:^*

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 … ⁴⁵

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.⁴⁶

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.’⁴⁷

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;⁴⁸ 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.⁴⁹ 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.^*50 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.⁵¹ 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.’⁵² 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.’⁵³ 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.⁵⁴

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’.⁵⁵ Louise Creighton, an upper-middle-class woman married to an Oxford fellow,^* 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.’⁵⁶ 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).⁵⁷ 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.⁵⁸

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 1848,⁵⁹ 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’.⁶⁰ 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.⁶¹ 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’.⁶² 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.⁶³

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’.⁶⁴ 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.’⁶⁵

Breastfeeding, indeed, she thought ‘a period of privation and penance’,⁶⁶ 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.’⁶⁷

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’.⁶⁸ 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’.^*69 (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.)⁷⁰ 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.⁷¹ 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’.⁷² 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’.⁷³ 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.⁷⁴ 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.⁷⁵ 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.⁷⁶

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.’⁷⁷

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.⁷⁸ 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’⁷⁹ – 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.

* Mandell, or ‘Max’, Creighton was one of those Victorian dynamos who so astonish us today: as a young fellow at Merton he became engaged to Louise von Glehn, the daughter of a prosperous German businessman living in Sydenham. At this time fellows of Oxford colleges had to be unmarried; Creighton was so valued that the rules were changed to keep him. He soon became the incumbent of a parish in Northumberland, then in quick succession the Rural Dean of Alnwick, the Examining Chaplain to Bishop Wilberforce, Honorary Canon of Newcastle, first Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, Canon of Worcester, Canon of Windsor, Bishop of Peterborough, representative of the English Church at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, Hulsean and Rede Lecturer at Cambridge. Romanes Lecturer at Oxford, and, finally, Bishop of London – all before dropping dead at the age of fifty-seven.

* It has been suggested that it was Mrs Beeton who first used the phrase ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place.’ Even if there are earlier instances, it was very much a feeling for the time: something out of place was something that was, both practically and morally, wrong.

* Dr Jaeger, a health reformer, towards the end of the century promoted his Sanitary Woollen Clothing, made of undyed knitted woollen fabric. Jaeger all-wool underwear became extremely popular. Mrs Haweis commended it as ‘the most economical, the most comfortable, and the most cleanly, seldom as the garments require washing (once a month, says the patentee), because they throw off at once the “noxious emanations” which soil the garments, and retain the benign exhalations’. Not everyone agreed. Jeannette Marshall, the daughter of a fashionable London surgeon, rejected them outright: ‘the workhouse colour is a great objection in my eyes’. Darwin’s granddaughter Gwen Raverat used ‘Jaeger’ as a synonym for dowdy (see p. 269).⁸¹

† Dr Chavasse among others thought that flannel caps prevented eye inflammations, ‘a complaint to which new-born infants are subject’.⁸³

* By 1866 Mrs Pedley was telling new mothers about ‘clasp-pins’, which should be used for all the baby’s wants. In 1889, however, the Revd J. P. Faunthorpe still felt he needed to explain to his readers that ‘A special kind [of pin] is known as the safety pin, which has a wire loop to act as a sheath to protect the point’.⁸⁴