by Abrams, Fran
For the majority of youngsters, schooling at the end of the nineteenth century was a hit-and-miss affair, attendance punctuated by periods of absence necessitated by children’s roles as contributors to the family purse. For many, school was little more than an irrelevance – something they had to do until they were thirteen and could go to work full-time.
A dangerous world for a child
And while both the state and the voluntary sector had intervened repeatedly to make children’s lives safer during the nineteenth century, the life of the child in England was still a perilously fragile thing. As the New Year dawned over St John’s Church in Wortley, Leeds, in 1891, the mood was one of celebration. A working group of the church ladies’ committee had planned an entertainment: the girl members of the local Band of Hope had prepared a performance entitled ‘Snowflakes’, symbolizing winter. Parents had been pressed into service to make pure white costumes from cotton wool, and each girl was to carry a Chinese lantern with a candle inside.
Minutes before the performance was due to begin, with an audience of about 100 gathered in the church hall, the fourteen little performers were flitting about excitedly in their dressing room. Suddenly, a waft of air from an open door flung a spark on to the dress of nine-year-old Emily Sanderson. Within seconds she was on fire. As the other girls rushed to escape, they too were engulfed by the flames. The audience watched in sheer horror as the leader of the Band of Hope, Eli Auty, and the school Caretaker, George Brookes, tried in vain to save the terrified, screaming girls.
By the end of the evening four were dead and a further dozen were in a critical condition. Over the following days, the newspapers grimly recorded the rising death toll: Caroline Steel, aged nine; Clarissa Roberts, aged eleven; Emily Lister, aged thirteen; Ethel Fieldhouse, aged fourteen; Maggie Kitchen, aged twelve; Ada Whitteron, aged eleven; Florence Brookes (sister of George), aged nine; Elizabeth Tingle, aged twelve; Harriet Riley, aged eleven; Julia Anderson, aged nine; Emily Sanderson, aged nine. With eleven dead, the ‘Wortley Calamity’ became a major national event. Queen Victoria, a mother of nine herself, sent a telegram inquiring about the condition of the survivors.
Death hung heavy over the Victorian era, and many of the households struck down by this disaster would have experienced the loss of a child already. Even with the death rate starting to drop, thanks to improvements in public health and a cleaner water supply, one child in six still died before the age of one year.24 Huge numbers of adults were carried off by infectious disease or childbirth, leaving many youngsters orphaned. To the modern eye, the response to the deaths in Wortley was a strange mix of grief and pragmatism. Local parishioners collected money to place a memorial cross in the churchyard where many of the children were buried, and the newspapers, both local and national, followed the harrowing slow decline of the burned girls in some detail.
Yet the account of the catastrophe by the Vicar, William Brameld, in the parish magazine a few weeks later would strike the modern reader as nothing short of extraordinary. In their understandable distress, too many parishioners had failed to see the bright side, he wrote. Many people had worked hard to set up the ‘sale of work’ which the entertainment was designed to support: ‘It seems to me that there is a real danger of forgetting in the presence of the terrible calamity, the loving labour, the hard work, the helpful and self-denying goodwill of all our parochial workers, which was making our sale so bright and prosperous.’
The sale had opened a couple of days earlier and had raised an impressive seventy-four pounds, three shillings and seven pence before being brought to a premature end, he reported. An earlier performance of ‘Snowflakes’ had gone well: ‘There was a brightness and a “go” about the proceedings . . . There can be no doubt that the theatricals were an immense success.’ The parish magazine did not even feature a separate list of the dead, including them instead in the list of burials for the month.
Parents in those days had to harden their hearts – a family of eight or nine children in a poor area might expect to lose two or three in infancy. The Wortley Calamity was never even mentioned in Parliament, while surely in the modern age it would have led to a change in the law. The Coroner in the case was very critical of the organizers, and pointed out that the 1889 Children’s Charter required the licensing of children’s entertainments. But because the Wortley children had not been paid, the clause did not cover them. Had it applied, he said, the district factory inspector would have been obliged to attend to ensure that nothing dangerous was being planned.
The public were well aware that children were vulnerable – on an almost daily basis, the papers carried a series of tiny items detailing the latest accidental deaths. From the Bury and Norwich Post, for example: five-year-old Emma Copsey, her father in jail and her mother forced to work, died when she went too close to the fire and her clothes caught fire; the little son of George Malyon tried to drink from a boiling kettle while his mother was at work in another room; two-year-old John Adams choked to death on a plum given to him as a treat by a neighbour.
Infectious disease, too, lurked around every corner. Once it struck, it could go through a household within days. Atkinson Skinner, the Headmaster of Huggate school in North Yorkshire, recorded in his diary the progress of his wife’s young sister through typhoid:
30 September 1887: ‘Ada was very bad. We despaired of her life three times. Today she seems to be mending but in her case appearances are treacherous and we are anxiously awaiting the subsidence of her fever before feeling she is safe.’
15 October: ‘Various people all took turns at sitting up – the fever abated and Ada at times seemed to us to be recovering. She wandered at intervals, but at other times she seemed perfectly conscious of everything passing around her. Bronchitis and ulcerated throat set in after the fever. These she could not overcome, and she gradually sank. She died at 2.40 p.m.’
A week later, Skinner’s little daughter May was taken ill: ‘May was so poorly and fretful after her mother left that I sent for her to return at night.’
25 October: ‘As May was getting worse we had the doctor up today. He said he feared she was starting in the fever.’
On 26 October, he recorded simply: ‘May very bad.’
Another week, and ulceration of the bowels had set in. For the Skinners, there was a happy ending and May did finally recover. But for countless other families – many of whom could not afford the doctor – there was none.
Alice Foley, born in 1891 in Bolton, remembered death as something that had always hung around her childhood ‘at a distance . . . something awful and mysterious’: ‘Occasionally a school play-mate fell sick and died . . . The day before the funeral we trooped into the house of mourning to gaze our last on the dead face of our companion and after the burial we vulgarly pressed round the door in eager expectation of a piece of funeral currant bread.’ Then one day, her brother, who was sixteen and working, came home in terrible pain. The doctor diagnosed appendicitis and advised an operation. ‘But when father came home he stubbornly refused to accept the medical opinion, saying in his bigotry that “if the boy had to die he should remain with his family”.’25
The poorest were always the most vulnerable, and many a parent must have agonized about the cost before calling a doctor. Seebohm Rowntree reported26 that in one impoverished York parish a third of all children died before they were a year old. Across the city, a quarter of the poor failed to make their first birthday, compared with fewer than one in ten among the ‘servant keeping class’. Rowntree also measured the children he studied, and found that a thirteen-year-old boy from a poor household was shorter than the average by three and a half inches. He weighed just 73 pounds – eleven pounds less than a boy from a well-off family.27 It was hardly surprising – Rowntree’s examples of the diets of poor families were striking. A carter’s family, living on a pound a week, had no fewer than seven meals during a week consisting solely of tea and bread, and a further seven at which there was also butter and
bacon – though if Alice’s experience was typical, the bacon might well have been solely for the breadwinner of the family. On better days, the family might have potatoes, eggs, onions, Yorkshire pudding or kippers to add to their diet. In another family, where the wife was a casual cleaner earning an average of 11 shillings a week, there were a total of six out of twenty-eight mealtimes when the family had anything at all to add to its staple diet of bread or potatoes with dripping – butter on a good day – and tea or coffee.28
The child mortality statistics for the end of the nineteenth century reveal that the overall death rate was falling: a child aged four was now substantially more likely to survive than in the mid-century. Yet, intriguingly, the danger for a child under one year was just as high as it had been fifty years before. Why? In his book The Massacre of the Innocents,29 Lionel Rose suggests a likely explanation for this: infanticide. Tiny children have always been vulnerable, of course – even today, the recorded homicide rate is twice as high among infants under one year as among the population as a whole. Yet, in 1900, the infant murder rate was a shocking fifteen times the expected level.
Rose quotes an exchange during an inquest in Lambeth in 1895, presided over by the first medically qualified coroner, Athelstan Braxton Hicks. Hicks – son of the doctor who gave his name to shadow contractions in pregnancy – would later go on to publish a study on infanticide. The parents of the dead child in this case, a Mr and Mrs Wigden, had appeared before Hicks not twelve months earlier following the death of an earlier child, and had received a caution. This time, the jury returned a verdict of accidental death.
HICKS: Accidental death, gentlemen? Nothing else?
FOREMAN: No, sir.
HICKS: You are perfectly satisfied it was a pure accident?
FOREMAN: Yes, sir.
HICKS: Very well, Mrs Wigden, you can go on smothering your children as much as you like, the jury say. The foreman says it was a pure accident, and the jury says, after all these warnings, it doesn’t matter. Well, gentlemen, if you think that is a proper thing to do, by all means say it was an accident; but we may as well hold no inquests at all – it is a perfect farce.
Hicks, working alongside the NSPCC, came to the conclusion that drink was partly to blame. Infants were most likely to die on a Sunday, he discovered, and he suggested ‘overlying’ by drunken parents falling on to their children in shared beds on Saturday nights. The death rate among children born to mothers in prisons was much higher, also, than for the children born to the non-alcoholic. But there is no doubt the deliberate smothering of babies was common at the time – especially so among one particularly vulnerable group: the illegitimate.
As a ‘fallen woman’, an unmarried mother in Victorian times had few choices. The chances were she would find little comfort or support at her family home, upon which she would be deemed to have brought shame. To make matters worse, under a ‘Bastardy Clause’ in the 1834 Poor Law Reform Act, illegitimate children were the sole responsibility of their mother – not their father – until they were sixteen. If a child’s desperate mother could not support him, she had no alternative but to turn to the workhouse. Hardly surprising, then, that an enormous proportion of children born out of wedlock died young. One study – based on a sample of children born in Manchester between 1891 and 1894 – found that almost four out of ten died before their first birthday. That made the illegitimate child two and a half times more likely to die than the average child.30
Again, a read between the lines in any local paper would reveal a familiar but gruesome pattern: the Bury and Norwich Post reported, for instance, in June 1882, how a Mr J. Bloomfield, a farmer, noticed something in the village pond near Leavenheath in Suffolk. Having retrieved the object with a hoe, he found it was a girl child with her throat slashed. ‘Elizabeth Murrels, a domestic servant in the employ of the headmaster of the Royal Grammar School in Colchester, was charged with the murder of an infant,’ the article concluded.
This sort of thing had gone on since time immemorial. But in the 1890s a peculiarly Victorian scandal broke which ultimately would lead to reform. Searching for a solution to their problems, the mother of an unwanted child would often turn to a foster-mother – or, as she was more commonly known at the bottom end of the market, a baby-farmer. The notion of the ‘farming’ or ‘sweating’ of babies dug deep into the nation’s fears about children’s vulnerability – not to mention the concern, at a time when the education of girls was growing along with the clamour for the vote – that women of independent means could prove dangerous. And, of course, most of the children taken in by this particular class of professional woman were born outside wedlock.
There was nothing new or even necessarily disreputable about the practice of baby-farming in itself – Jane Austen and her siblings were all ‘farmed out’ until they were toddlers, for example, and came to no harm from it.31 But the Victorians’ draconian poor laws, along with their equally draconian moral sensibilities, had driven many a desperate unmarried mother to ‘farm out’ her baby with a woman of unknown provenance. One option was to pay a one-off fee and to turn a blind eye to the inevitability that the child would sooner or later die of neglect or starvation, its appetite ruined by opium. It seems that a handful of these ‘farmers’ went so far as actually to expedite the process. A particularly notorious case cropped up on 30 March 1896 when a bargeman pulled a parcel from the Thames at Reading. It contained the body of a baby girl, who was later identified as Helena Fry. An examination of the wrapping revealed a label from Bristol Temple Meads Station as well as a name, Mrs Thomas, and an address. That led the police to a woman called Amelia Dyer, who had already done hard labour for the neglect of children left in her care. It emerged that, having collected the baby from Bristol, she had arrived home to Reading with a lifeless package. Subsequently, six other infants’ bodies were found, all similarly weighted and thrown into the Thames. It was reported that over the years Mrs Dyer might have killed as many as 400 babies. She pleaded insanity but was found guilty and hanged in June that year. The case caught the public imagination the way the witch trials of old must have done, and even sparked a popular ballad:
The old baby farmer, the wretched Mrs Dyer
At the Old Bailey her wages is paid
In times long ago we’d a made a big fire
And roasted so nicely the wicked old Jade.
The case led to a clamour for a change in the law, and the following year an Infant Life Protection Act was introduced, extending the registration of baby-minders to those looking after more than one child under five. Interestingly, adoptions were only to be reported to the authorities if the fee were less than £20, on the grounds that low-rent children were the most at risk. Conveniently, this protected the identities, and hence the reputations, of middle-class women who had illegitimate children.
As the Infant Life Protection Bill was debated in the House of Lords, the Bishop of Winchester rose to point out that the real issue, in his view, was not baby-farming, nor even the unmarried mothers who were forced to put their babies into the hands of such people, but the fathers who were allowed to walk away from their children without a backward glance: ‘Blame could not always be attached to the unfortunate mother, some unhappy girl who had no thought of harming her baby, but who, earning a miserable pittance, was obliged to board out the child at the least possible expense. It seemed rather that the blame went further back to the father of the infant, who so often in callous selfishness shirked all responsibility.’32
The phenomenon goes to the root of a conundrum which has shaped our thinking about children and about childhood over the past 100 years and more. To put it crudely, though the death rate was high in the late nineteenth century, so was the birth rate. Therefore, the supply of babies tended to outstrip demand. The equation was far from simple, even then – the feelings of those desperately impoverished single mothers could never have been simple. Yet parents were often forced to harden their hearts in the face of tragedy – so much so
that the extinguishing of a small, unwanted life must have seemed the best option to more than a few. The bigger issue, though – and it is one to which we will return – is the question of what a child is, or was, really for. To most Victorian parents, a child was not simply – or even mainly – an emotional asset. In the poorer family children had to pull their weight, to make a contribution to the household budget, if they were to be welcomed into the family circle.
When Forster introduced his education bill in 1870, he could not have foreseen this unintended consequence: by taking children out of the workplace and turning them into scholars, the state was diminishing their economic value to their parents. The role of the child in Western society was beginning to change, profoundly and irretrievably.
2 Cosseted Edwardians
‘Mama used to tell me that she celebrated the Relief of Mafeking sitting astride a lion in Trafalgar Square. And that I was born a fortnight later,’1 Sonia Keppel wrote of her birth. With the Victorian age all but over, Britain was preparing for a new, more frivolous era: ‘The sky was clearing fast. From decorous grey it was becoming rather a blatant blue.’
The reign of Edward VII would be shoehorned into the years between two wars – the Boer War, which ended as Edward was crowned in 1902, and World War One, which loomed large on the horizon in the years following his death in 1910. And it would be, in Sonia’s recollection at least, a brief interlude during which England would throw off the heavy garb of the previous century. Edwardian England wore its parental responsibilities with a lightness, a sense of fun, which had rarely been present before. And, for the first time, those who had the luxury of spare time began to use it – and to talk about using it – to nurture and enjoy their children.