The surviving records for the later period confirm the foregoing account of maternal mobility and freedom. In 1816 both Eliza Whitaker and Anne Robbins complained that ‘family concerns’ had eaten into letter-writing time.99 In the same year Elizabeth Addison wrote wistfully about her lapsed oil painting in terms strikingly similar to those used by the harassed Bessy Ramsden of the 1760s: ‘I fear it will be a long time before I can resume my studies in that way, for whenever I fix to begin something occurs to employ my time – more than ever, Surely when my 3 little boys go into trousers then I can begin.’100 The picture which emerges from the Barcroft network is an altogether consistent one. Ellen Parker's letters had a familiar tendency to end abruptly: ‘[Elizabeth] … is crying to Mama to nurse her, therefore you will excuse a short, hasty & uninteresting letter.’ After worried complaints about her erratic correspondence, Ellen Parker had to impress upon her querulous aunts the real limits on her time: ‘recollect there is only myself to superintend our domestic concerns and with them, my Nursery and frequent additions to my Family I have not always at my command the [grea]test part of a Morning or afternoon, which is the time my lengthy epistles generally occupy.’ However, from the same pen comes a reminder that even the arguably closeted mother of the 1810s and 1820s was prepared to persevere when determined. Taking advantage of the improved road and coach network across the Pennines, Ellen Parker travelled alone in 1817 from Selby to Colne (forty-five miles away) to introduce her baby son Ambrose to her Colne aunts. She refused to find the journey an inconvenience and was determined not to be confined to a nursery on arrival, asking for ‘an old clothes basket – There must be one with a handle too, to carry [Ambrose] about in.’101 Throughout the period, the smothering potential of maternity is fully evident; nevertheless women's efforts to surface were as vigorous in the 1820s as in the 1750s and earlier.
After childbirth itself, life-threatening illness was the supreme trial that parents faced. Contagion circulated all about eighteenth-century parents, invading their nurseries and doubtless their nightmares. As inevitably as the ripening of the fruit, epidemics of dysentery, typhoid, enteric fever, spotted fever, putrid fever and smallpox (to name but a few) scourged the cities and towns of Georgian England through late summer to the first frosts. Diptheria and typhus raged in the winter. The emotional cost of illness was dear to both parents; the father's panic was as conspicuous as the mother's anguish when the lives of beloved babies hung in the balance. Yet, of course, the full burden of nursing fell to the mother. Indeed, most letters relating the facts of family illness to the kindred were written by men, as women could not be spared from the bedside. The extent to which a mother's role was interchangeable with that of sick-nurse is demonstrated here by the correspondence of the London Ramsdens. That the metropolitan experience was not necessarily exceptional is confirmed by the tragic history of the Gossip family of Skelton, Yorkshire. The experience of both families bears detailed reconstruction here to convey one of the monumental concerns of adult life. Witnessing the acute suffering of one's children was a virtually universal ordeal, capable of obliterating every other thought in the head of the near-helpless parent, yet, strangely, it is a test which merits barely a sentence in many accounts of genteel life and philosophy.
A startling (though not necessarily comprehensive) record of children's illness and the toll on the family is provided by the Ramsden letters between 1764 and 1774. ‘A Married Life I find is full of cares’, sighed Bessy Ramsden in August 1764, reporting the two weeks she had just spent nursing her fevered daughter Betsy. Unbeknownst to her, this lament heralded a decade of intermittent sickness in the Charterhouse nursery. From October to December of that year Mrs Ramsden attended both Betsy and her brother Billy who had contracted smallpox. Under the circumstances, William Ramsden feared his wife would nurse herself ill, but was proud to report that she ‘performed her Part like an experienced Matron’. When the two children caught the measles in December 1765, William had to complete Bessy Ramsden's abandoned letter explaining ‘one or the other [of her children] are upon her lap almost all day long’. The next year the children apparently recontracted measles from the Charterhouse schoolboys; Bessy was busy in the nursery for the whole month of December. The year 1767 was a particularly gruelling one. When the Charterhouse matron was dismissed that year, Mrs Ramsden found herself responsible for the welfare of ‘about fortty boys … to make mend wash & nurse when sick’, besides the care of her own family. Her own children suffered a series of undiagnosed illnesses, were repeatedly taken to the doctor and bled. William reported Bessy (herself pregnant and ill) had not ‘a hand, or even a finger to spare’. She spent at least three weeks in October so completely confined to the nursery that at the first signs of recovery she was wild to get out of the house.102
When Tom, the new baby, caught the whooping cough in June 1768, the Ramsdens received the advice of two physicians, ‘besides good women's nostrums in abundance.’ Bessy Ramsden spent a fearful fortnight in February 1769, ‘wholly taken up with her own little boy’; Tom was so ill the Ramsdens prepared to lose him. In fact, the worst was yet to come. In May 1770 Billy contracted scarlet fever, which then spread from Betsy to Tom and from him to the new baby Dick. With all four children ‘set on fire’ throughout the summer holidays, William had to second Bessy in the sickroom. ‘In all my Distress,’ declared William, ‘Providence has [been] very indulgent to me by sparing her Health.’ In September 1772 the family fled the smallpox which had broken out next door, but to no avail, as the two youngest boys succumbed. Tom was left scarred, while Dick suffered upsetting recurrences until April 1773:
Mrs Nurse has held up a Miracle, many a time has my heart ached for Her while the Mind was on the Stretch between Hope and Fear, the machine kept a going; tho' I coud perceive it wearing down daily. The worst was to be apprehended when we came to ruminate on what was past.
By 1774 Bessy Ramsden could justifiably say ‘they have now thank God, gone thro all the deseases that children [are] liable too’, while William Ramsden concluded in more poetic vein, ‘what bitter Sweets are these Olive branches.’ Obviously the London experience could be extreme, as the Ramsdens acknowledged, waxing dramatic on the infections swirling in the air of the metropolis and the importance of rural escape in high summer. Yet, illness could still scythe through the provinces. Seventy children were reported dead in the Colne smallpox epidemic of 1776, while ‘prodigious numbers’ were carried off in a further outbreak in 1782.103
The large Gossip family of Skelton and later Thorp Arch was mortified by disease in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Anne Gossip bore eleven children between 1732 and 1745, but only one outlived her. Harrowingly, four treasured babes died in their mother's arms before seeing a second birthday; an infant boy was stillborn; a fine boy was lost aged eleven; and two sons perished in their twenties. Friends and relatives sympathized with ‘the constant fears’ plaguing ‘poor Mrs Gossip’, for the threat of mortal illness hovered over this newly landed family like the mythical sword.104 When William Gossip was away from his wife and ‘our little flock’, he turned his eyes homeward in an ecstasy of hope and dread. In June 1746 Gossip was alarmed at Buxton when naught but silence met the six letters he had despatched; was something the matter with the children? – he could not help but wonder. In 1750, when Anne Gossip was again separated from her husband and one of her sons, she also needed constant reassurance: ‘I long to know how you and poor Jack do.’105 Terrible decisions had to be taken to preserve the children. In August 1746, when one son threw off a mild strain of smallpox with comparative ease, Anne Gossip decided to expose the other under the supervision of an apothecary in Ripon. To her terrified dismay the dreaded ‘pestilence’ took a vicious hold. William Gossip despatched letters of support and advice by every other post: ‘I heartily pity my dearest life, who I am sure must have been in a terrible fright for my poor Willy: God almighty bless and preserve you both, & give blessing to the means used for his Recovery.’
Happily, in this instance, ‘God almighty's mercy & goodness’ along with Anne Gossip's ‘tender care’ restored the little boy. By October a relieved father found cause for cautious optimism: ‘I hope now the fruit season is over, my lads will recover their good looks…’106 But as we already know, further affliction awaited this doomed family. Nineteen years and many unrecorded tragedies later, William Gossip groaned ‘Will our misfortunes never end!’ His son Tom had fallen into fits, Wilmer was delirious, Randy was ‘almost paralysed to death’ and his own stoic philosophy was near exhausted. ‘I wish I could send you a line of comfort but I cannot with any truth… I am yr almost heart broke W. Gossip’. As he concluded, ‘a melancholy catalogue indeed.’107 Providence did not temper the wind to these Yorkshire lambs.
The Gossips saw their worst nightmares realized, but in their anxieties they were not unusual. In Pontefract Jane Scrimshire worried about childish ‘distempers’, whether her children fell ill or not. Her social life was similarly curtailed, not only by the sick-room, but by the mere risk of infection. After the death of a friend's child from a ‘bad sort’ of measles, Michael Scrimshire went alone to visit his relations in Bradford, as his wife refused to leave her children for longer than a night. Mrs Scrimshire also had to warn off Elizabeth Parker from visiting Pontefract, on account of infection, ‘I Can't in Conscience Conceal we have the Smallpox within two doors of us’, and when trying to lure her back insisted ‘we're Clear of all Distempers except the Consumption and that not a Bodily Complaint’.108 In the event, the visit was cancelled because of illness in the Parker nursery. Meanwhile, regular bulletins issued from the northern grammar schools on the incidence of disease among the boys. When a ‘filthy distemper’ broke out at Bradford Grammar School in 1757, Anne Stanhope refused to take her son back to school until she had been over herself to confirm ‘that they are all thoroughly clear’.109
Half a century later maternal preoccupation with sick children and the sinister stirrings of infection in the locality were still standard themes of women's letters and diaries. When her children were ill at home in the 1790s, Anna Larpent suffered ‘extreme anxiety’ and attendance at the sick bed ‘emply'd every moment of my time, every thought of my mind’. Meanwhile, her household business went undone and presumably her journal unwritten until somewhat later. ‘The utmost care being necessary claimed my attendance on the child, altho he was certainly gradually recovering, yet I can enter on no employment, for he was still in the lowest anxious state.’ At school the risk of infection was ever-present; the irrupution of fever at the boys' school in Cheam provoked a frantic dash to withdraw the children.110 Ellen Parker's experience in the 1820s was analogous to that of Bessy Ramsden in the 1760s. Despite the fact that her children were vaccinated for smallpox, scarcely a month went by without one of her numerous children succumbing to, or recuperating from illness. Her letters catalogue dangerous coughs, irruptions in the face, outbreaks of typhus fever and Ellen's chronic fear and fatigue, which of course she dismissed with the traditional female selflessness: ‘my little indisposition merely proceeded from a slight cold and the broken rest & anxiety the baby occasioned, but was altogether so trivial…’111 In the same decade, the Greene family apprehensively experimented with inoculation for smallpox convinced of the inefficacy of vaccination, only to see their darling baby daughter suffer horribly. Together they struggled to rationalize the decision they had taken: ‘The inefficacy of Vaccination in preventing small pox daily experience shews, the Medical Men who were Strenuous in its Favor, are now at a dead Pause, Dr Pope, our friend at Staines, has six nieces just recovering from the small pox all of them were vaccinated some years ago.’112 Yet, however many times a child's life hung in the balance, even a single vigil at the bedside was intensely real to its mother and father.113 For to be a parent was to be keenly exposed to the vagaries of fate.
Still, child-rearing was not unremitting misery, it was widely recognized that caring for children could be profoundly rewarding and highly amusing. Self-conscious domesticity was no invention of the early Victorians. A studied maternity was relished by Jane Pellet in the 1750s who sent kisses to ‘little Marmouset (as lady G. Calls it)’, emulating the tender, blushing motherhood which redeems the lively Charlotte Grandison in Sir Charles Grandison. The satisfactions inherent in the most routine aspects of family life were proclaimed again and again by the Ramsdens of the Charterhouse in the 1760s and 1770s: ‘On my left hand sits Madam darning of stockings, on my right is our heir apparent reading the News; Betsy is making a Cap for her Doll, Tom and Dick are playing at Marbles on the carpet. To say more of Ourselves will be needless.’114 The fascinations of child-rearing were canvassed as readily at the end of the period: ‘I hope your little treasure and may I say your little companion is going on well,’ wrote a friend of Eliza Whitaker's in 1816, ‘engaging your attention by a thousand interesting little ways, he is just growing into the fascinating age.’115 Proud parenthood radiated from the young mothers and fathers of the Greene clan in the 1820s: ‘Willm & Ann are so proud of their little Girl, that they seem almost jealous of the Group that are advancing to put her nose out of joint. He, in the pride of his heart said the other day “They'll none of them have a nicer child than ours” They will all think the same of their own, I dare say.’116 Ellen Weeton Stock's letter-books leave no doubt that she lavishly cherished her dumpling of a baby girl:
My little Mary improves, and is the delight of all; she is just 16 months old. She does not say a word yet, notwithstanding which, she has a thousand little engaging actions. Her hair is very light, and curls all over her head like a little mop; and she is all over so fat and so soft. I have many a kiss in the course of the day, and many a laugh at her little droll ways; her father would be quite lost without her, and I am sure, so should I. I wish I had another … but hush! don't tell.117
From the first, Mary Stock provided her parents with sensual compensation for their disastrous marriage. Abundant affection and sentimental pleasure were widely expressed by genteel parents. Yet for all the sentimentality, the more compelling impression which emerges from their manuscripts is one of gritty emotional endurance. The cumulative impact of reading letters and diaries written in both joy and affliction is to bring home the sheer stamina upon which these parents had to draw. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that fond parents gave of themselves partially and warily with one eye on the bills of mortality and the other on a comfortable old age. Lawrence Stone's assertion that high infant and child mortality cauterized parental affection is doubtful, and his belief that ‘the value of children rises as their durability improves’ highly questionable. Few Georgian parents could stem self-sacrificing emotion when confronted with a stricken child: ‘Most willingly wou'd I make a pilgrimage barefoot as far as my legs would carry me, to get the poor little Fellow cured’, supplicated Reverend Ramsden in 1772. It was not for nothing that Dr Johnson listed ‘tenderness, parental care’ as one of his dictionary definitions of love.118
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The production and rearing of children had a transforming effect on genteel women's lives, all but obliterating their past selves and public profile, but the vista from the conjugal bed was far from clear. Established pregnancy was as unpredictable in its outcome as it was inexorable in its progress. The biological bore quite differently on different women. True, biology was mediated by culture: it was the custom of denying the neonate colostrum which could lead to starvation in an enfeebled infant and often milk-fever in the mother. Yet physical factors beyond a mother's immediate control often determined family fortunes – the breadth of her pelvis, or the outbreak of an epidemic were not directly subject to the dominion of discourse. When medicinal waters failed to give Barbara Stanhope a child, she had come to the frontier of culture's power over nature. Needless to say, the notion that aspects of biological experience lay beyond human management would not have surprised the genteel. That the hand of God was seen to determine so much is testimony enough to their powerful sense of
culture's limits. Submission to one's natural lot was the keynote of genteel maternity. From smallpox to shirt-making, the epoch of motherhood is minutely catalogued in women's records, but rarely is the totality of maternity put into words and never is it questioned. But then motherhood was not a discrete event, or the work of a day, it was the quintessential labour of love which knew no clock and spent itself in endless small services, a thousand little nothings. In its boundless details, mothering swamped genteel matrons even as it defined them.
This chapter has focused on the trials and pleasures of motherhood, in an effort to recreate one of the dominant employments of genteel women, but all this should not be taken to imply that a father's feelings for, or involvement with his children was negligible. William Ramsden's paternal satisfaction gushed from his pen in 1763, writing
from the arm of my Wife's easy Chair, a Situation I wo'd not change [with] the King of Prussia: no, nor (with a Man a Million more times to be envy'd) with George the 3rd king of Grt Britain: my good Woman at the same time with Glee in her Eye, contemplating her little Boy, who also in his turn seems as happy as this World can make him, only [with] his Leather Bottle. Pardon this Gossip, Good Madam Parker, but the Air of a Nursery is Infecting.119
Ramsden often took sole responsibility for his children in the evenings when his more sociable wife skipped out to card-playing parties and, in a crisis, seconded her efforts in the sick-room. William Gossip was, in his own words, a ‘very affectionate papa’, to whom the expression of tenderness came easily. Willy was his ‘dear Jewel’, while Jack was his ‘Poor Rogue’ of whom he quipped ‘he does provoke me sometimes, yet I think I love him too’. Of his suffering Wilmer, he asked ‘Does he take notice of my not being with him? I am afraid the dear creature should think himself neglected by me.’ Moreover, Gossip preached to his sons what he practised himself: ‘my dear needs never be ashamed of showing affection to your relations’; apparently with some success, as his adult son George refused to take a foreign army posting, for fear that he would miss seeing his children grow up.120 Across the northern networks, male correspondents dwelt with anxiety and pride on developmental hurdles cleared and crises overcome. Paternal investment could be profound.
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