Both Parson Woodforde and William Holland regularly churched women. On one occasion, Holland recorded a conversation with a Mr Hurley: ‘A civil man but an odd spoken one and an Anabaptist. His wife desired to be churched by me. Yes returned I, if you bring your child to be christened, otherwise not, for why should a person be indulged with the offices of the Church in one case who despises them in all other cases?’56 The actual ceremony varied from place to place, but was primarily a blessing. While in Lincolnshire in 1791, the traveller John Byng witnessed such a service: ‘In the church, this evening, were two women church’d by the clergyman…in the space of two minutes: which office I did not know could be thus huddled over, privately, in a church?’57
Inevitably, the parson charged a fee, but Woodforde frequently returned the money to poor women, particularly ones with large families. He routinely performed this rite, as in March 1787 when ‘I read prayers, preached and churched a woman this morning at Weston Church – gave the woman her d6 [sixpence]…very soon after I mounted my horse and went to Witchingham, and there read prayers, churched one woman…Recd. for churching the woman at Witchingham 0: 0: 6.’58 And a week later: ‘I read prayers and preached this afternoon at Weston C[hurch]. Also churched 2 poor women…I gave the two poor women the churching fee.’59
Most children were baptised in church soon after birth, and so mothers waiting to be churched could not attend. The baptism ceremony, the sacramental rite admitting an individual to the Christian Church, included naming the child, as it still does today. Although births were not registered, baptisms had to be recorded in parish registers.60 Private baptisms at home also took place, particularly where the baby was too ill to be brought to church. Having privately baptised baby Frances in June 1783, Woodforde performed a church baptism for her three months later: ‘I walked to church this morning between 11 and 12, and publickly baptised Mr Custance’s little maid by name Frances Anne. Lady Bacon and Lady Beauchamp stood Godmothers, and Mr Custance stood proxy.’61 He also baptised illegitimate (‘spurious’) children privately, as in December 1786: ‘I privately named a spurious child of one Mary Parkers this morning by name John. The fathers name I could not get intelligence of.’62
William Holland lamented the plight of one destitute pregnant girl who had been forcibly returned to her home parish of Over Stowey: ‘A worthless girl in the poor house is in a sad state. She has begun to be in labour but when it will end is a melancholy consideration. She was brought home to the parish by an order with every kind of disease about her, the child they say is already dead. She at times suffers a great deal and has neither comfort nor a word of pity from any one around but indeed medical assistance she has.’63 The next morning he was taken aback:
While I was at breakfast this day the sad young woman whom I spoke of the day before was brought to bed of a fine girl to the astonishment of everyone for it was supposed that the child was dead. It was brought to me while I was at breakfast to be baptised and so I left breakfast and went to the kitchen, and poured water on its face and baptised the child but the mother had the itch and many other bad disorders [so] that I did not care to handle it much.64
The baby did not survive, and Holland was called on to bury her one week later.65
It was rare to give babies more than one name, and so Jane Austen and most of her contemporaries had no middle name. William Wilkinson’s new baby had two names – Sarah Frances, after her mother Sally and her aunt Fanny, the popular pet-names for Sarah and Frances. In Northanger Abbey Isabella and Catherine become such good friends that ‘They called each other by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked.’ Unless they were very close, it was customary to address most people by their title and surname, and because of such formality Jane Austen was frustrated at being ignorant of the Christian name of a woman she knew only as Miss Wapshire from Salisbury, who was soon to be married. ‘I wish I could be certain that her name were Emma,’ she told Cassandra; ‘but her being the eldest daughter leaves that circumstance doubtful.’66 In upper-class families, it was usual to call the eldest unmarried daughter ‘Miss’, so those who did not know the family well might be unaware of her Christian name, which was the case here. In fact, she was Mary Wapshare, and on 12 December 1800 she married the widowed naval captain Sir Thomas Williams in Salisbury Cathedral.
Names were chosen for being traditional, for their biblical associations, for being names of royalty or perhaps those of dead siblings. They tended to perpetuate long-established family names ranging from the plain Jane to the uncommon Cassandra. In June 1783 Woodforde recorded: ‘I privately named a child this morning of Dinah Bushell’s by name Keziah, one of Job’s daughters names…I privately named a child of Brands of East Tuddenham, by name John this afternoon.’67 For boys, common names included John, James, George, Joseph, Richard, Thomas and William, while Anne (or Ann), Sarah, Susan, Jane, Elizabeth, Mary and Hannah were popular names for girls. When commenting on a novel written by her niece Anna, Jane Austen said: ‘I like the scene itself, the Miss Lesleys, Lady Anne, & the music, very much. Lesley is a noble name.’68
In January 1807 Jane Austen wrote to Cassandra from Southampton: ‘I cannot yet satisfy Fanny as to Mrs. Foote’s baby’s name, and I must not encourage her to expect a good one, as Captain Foote is a professed adversary to all but the plainest; he likes only Mary, Elizabeth, Anne, &c. Our best chance is of “Caroline”, which in compliment to a sister seems the only exception.’69 This was Captain Foote’s second marriage, to Mary Patton, having divorced his first wife. Shortly afterwards, at Southampton, the baby was in fact baptised as Elizabeth.
Babies, both male and female, were traditionally immobilised from birth in tight swaddling bands of cloth, in the mistaken belief that this prevented crooked limbs, a condition that was actually rickets caused by vitamin D deficiency. In order to minimise soiling by urine and faeces, the baby might not be completely swaddled, and periodically the cloths were removed for drying or washing. In a treatise on caring for babies, published in 1781, William Moss advised against tight swaddling: ‘In dressing a newborn child…great care ought to be taken that no part of the body or limbs be tight bound, or closely confined by rollers or any part of the dress…children thrive much better without it, and are much more likely to be free from deformity.’70
By the 1790s the practice of swaddling was on the decline. Instead, babies were dressed in gowns or tunics, and all wore bonnets or caps, so that in Emma, ‘Mrs Weston, with her baby on her knee…was one of the happiest women in the world. If any thing could increase her delight, it was perceiving that the baby would soon have outgrown its first set of caps.’ Moss recommended ‘foundling dresses’:
The number of PINS used in the dress of a child is sometimes very great; but when tapes or strings can be substituted for them, they are much preferable. The foundling dresses, so called from being first invented at the foundling hospital, for the sake, no doubt, of convenience and dispatch, are come much into use. They draw and tye with strings, and are otherwise so contrived, that very few pins become needful in putting them on…the risque of pricking and wounding the tender bodies of children is avoided.71
Mass-produced safety-pins were as yet unknown, so these garments developed by London’s Foundling Hospital were the best option. When babies were ready to crawl they progressed from long gowns to short clothes, and so when Cassandra was almost six months old in 1773, Mrs Austen noted that ‘she…puts on her short petticoats to-day’.72 Some babies may have had clouts or diapers (strips or squares of linen cloth) wrapped round them – the word ‘nappy’ was not then used – also fastened with pins or ties. Impoverished families might have used rags, but the amount of laundry needed would have made this burdensome.
Neither toilet training nor diapers figured in childcare and midwifery manuals, suggesting that most babies soiled their bedding or gowns. All Moss says is that babies ‘ought to be dry and clean; for which purpose it will be necessary to renew and change them very freq
uently’.73 Had they worn diapers, babies would probably have suffered much more than the occasional soreness mentioned by him: ‘A child will sometimes have his backside red, inflamed, and sore, by the frequency and sharpness of his stools…Take of, extract of lead, and brandy, each thirty drops; put them into a small vial with four ounces (or eight tablespoonful) of water. With a little of this, aired by the fire in a teacup, let the parts be bathed, once or twice a day, with a soft linen rag.’74
There was no tradition of babies being given soft toys and other playthings apart from rattles. Instead, they were sedated with proprietary soothers, especially Dr Godfrey’s Cordial. Such concoctions contained opium, morphine and a mercury compound like calomel and were widely advertised, as in the Derby Mercury for March 1775:
The Original GODFREY’S GENERAL CORDIAL, is a Medicine which answers to its Name, having a general Tendency to the curing [of] Diseases…This CORDIAL is of the greatest help to weakly Women, when they are with Child, to prevent Miscarriages…Also it’s of excellent Use for young Children that are weakly and restless, and breed their Teeth hardly; and for those that are inclined to the Rickets, &c.75
Moss was especially critical of such medication:
There are a number of quack medicines imposed upon the public under various titles, as Godfrey’s cordial, &c. &c.…but as their compositions are as mysterious and difficult to discover as their good qualities, nothing more can be said in their favour…There is a drug however upon which, it is well known, their chief efficacy depends; and that is, opium; hence it happens they all have a stilling or sedative power…I have known Godfrey’s cordial given to children, successively for months, with no other design…than keeping them quiet in the nights…The abuse of spiritous liquors, and quack medicines of the opiate or composing kind, may be observed to happen most frequently…with children who are nursed [away] from home.76
Child mortality was high, and particularly with the scant knowledge of hygiene, young babies were especially vulnerable to gastro-intestinal disorders as well as untold infectious diseases. In London, the baby Sally Wilkinson initially thrived and was doted on by her parents, but at the age of ten months she fell sick. William learned from his wife that after showing signs of recovery, his daughter was again unwell: ‘she has not kept her food so well on her stomach. Last night I was told to get some sago powder and give her some port wine in it which I did and gave her some of the wine in the same arrowroot…and once or twice today I gave her a little savoury biscuit rather too soon after taking the stuff with the wine in it that it made her so sick which with the little fever the wine occasioned alarmed me a little.’77 This medical advice came from Mr Thomson, the doctor who had delivered the baby, but his remedies were proving harmful. A few days later her mother Sarah wrote:
She has taken two or three doses of physic…for Mr T said her bowels were in a bad state and must be thoroughly cleansed before she would get better. Which of course must be the case. Last night she got into a nice perspiration which I hoped would do her a wonderful deal of good. She is, dear creature, very weak this morning…Mr T has ordered her asses milk and today he said she was to take some gravy that ran out of roast beef or mutton which she has done and sucked some beef.78
One week later, on 25 September 1808, their brother-in-law James Brothers broke tragic news to William:
It is with much pain I am obliged to acquaint you with the little baby’s death. She died this morning between 10 and 11…There was one comfort, if in such a case such a thing is possible, that she did not any of the time appear to suffer from pain, but her death seemed to be occasioned by gradual weakness. Sally and Fanny are as you may well suppose in great affliction, but yet I am happy in telling you, they bear it, considering how much their distress must be heightened by your absence, better than I could have supposed.79
It was rare for any family not to suffer the death of at least one child. In his commonplace book, Matthew Buckle recorded intricate details of his family tree, in which we see that his relatives and ancestors experienced numerous tragedies. At the age of forty-two in February 1803, Buckle married his wife Hannah, who would give birth to seven children in the space of thirteen years. Their first, an unnamed daughter, was born on Christmas Eve 1803 and died ‘one week and five days’ later. The next child was Louisa, born in 1804, followed by Emma in 1807, Frances in 1809, Eleanor in 1811, Mary in 1814 and finally a boy, Christopher, born in 1816.80 Keeping track of families was important. In 1782 Carl Philipp Moritz, a twenty-six-year-old German pastor, teacher and prolific writer, was travelling for seven weeks through England, mainly on foot. At Nettlebed in Oxfordshire he attended a church service: ‘The prayer-book, which my landlord lent me, was quite a family piece; for all his children’s births, and names, and also his own wedding-day, were very carefully set down in it.’81
Lack of proper information made it impossible to be certain about the size of England’s population, and commentators gave opinions based on imprecise figures obtained from records such as local surveys, assessments of houses for the window tax and on the Bills of Mortality – tallies of the number of burials and causes of death compiled by parish clerks in London and elsewhere, originally to monitor the spread of plague. Records of baptisms and burials did not give a true picture, and some were convinced the population was getting smaller, even though places like London were expanding. In 1783 Dr Richard Price calculated that the population of England and Wales was five million maximum: ‘Let…the number of houses in England and Wales be called a million, and the number of people will be four millions and a half, or five millions at most.’82 London’s expansion, Price believed, was due to mass immigration from the surrounding countryside: ‘The more London increases, the more the rest of the kingdom must be deserted; the fewer hands must be left for agriculture.’83 He was partially correct, because there was massive movement into cities and towns, especially of families seeking work in the new factories, boys bound as apprentices and girls looking for positions as servants.
The first proper national census of Great Britain took place on 10 March 1801, though the information requested was limited – mainly the number of people, including children, in each household, their occupations and the number of inhabited and uninhabited houses. In the town of Falmouth in Cornwall, 465 houses were occupied by 947 families, and the population comprised 3684 people – 1466 males and 2218 females. Cornwall was an agricultural and mining county, but because Falmouth was a port, only 25 were employed in agriculture, with 626 in trade, manufacture or handicraft and 3053 in the general category of ‘All other persons not comprized in the two preceding classes’.84
The 1801 census demonstrated that England’s population was actually expanding rapidly and exceeded 8,300,000 – far more than previously reckoned.85 In the 2011 census London alone had nearly 8,200,000 people, but in 1801 it was the largest city in Europe with barely a million inhabitants. The next largest places in England in 1801 were Manchester (still a town, not a city) and Liverpool. Both were expanding rapidly. Manchester’s population had risen to nearly 95,000 from just over 27,000 in 1773, and Liverpool had nearly 83,000, having risen from 34,000 in 1770.86 By 1801 one in seven of the population lived in large towns, which meant that the vast majority of people were still in rural areas.
In 1811 the census revealed that the population of England had increased by more than a million, to almost 9,500,000, and by then London had over a million inhabitants.87 In May of that year, forty-four-year-old Louis Simond, a Frenchman who had gone to America before the Revolution and was now a successful New York merchant, commented on London’s expansion:
We have spent a few days with some of our friends in Hertfordshire, 20 miles north of London. For half that distance you travel between two rows of houses, to which new ones are added every day…London extends its great polypus-arms over the country around. The population is not increased by any means in proportion to these appearances, only transferred from the centre to the extremities. This cen
tre is become a mere counting-house, or place of business.88
What is not apparent in census information is the origins of people, such as that of the black population, which in some places was so small that their presence was noteworthy. In 1808 Silvester Treleaven related how the people of Moretonhampstead in Devon reacted joyfully to the wedding of a black servant: ‘Married with licence Peter the black servant to General Rochambeau to Susanna Parker. The bells rang merrily all day. From the novelty of this wedding being the first negro ever married in Moreton a great number assembled in the church yard, and paraded down the street with them.’89 Some prejudice certainly existed on a personal level, such as that revealed by William Holland, who wrote in his diary in January 1805:
I met young [Brian] Mackey, who is come to see his father…This young man is his son by a negro woman, and has had from the father an excellent education, and is in [holy] orders and has two livings, and is in good circumstances. Pity that he should suffer his father to feel distress in his latter days. But he is so far from assisting him that in all his visits he is drawing money from him and plundering him and I fear now poor Mrs. Mackey [his stepmother] will be left without a shilling. I am not very partial to West Indians, especially to your negro half-blood people.90
The fact that ‘young Mackey’ had received an Oxford education and was parish priest of Coates in Gloucestershire is some indication that black people from a wealthy background were not necessarily handicapped by their colour.91
Holland’s dislike of Mackey was possibly influenced by his conviction that this ungrateful son was treating his father badly, although he did hold strong opinions about anyone he perceived as different. A Welshman himself, from Llanelian in Denbighshire, Holland described the Somerset people he lived among as ‘of a large size and strong, but in my opinion very slow and lazy and discontented…and very much given to eating and drinking’.92 He was repeatedly dissatisfied with the work done by his servants, referring to one of them in his diary as a ‘strange nog-headed blockhead’ – ‘nog-headed’ was Anglo-Welsh dialect for ‘wooden-headed’.93
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