The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  By the end of the century, however, it was noticed that children were being treated by their parents in a much more kindly way. It was still believed, as John Locke taught in his Some Thoughts Upon Education, that the small child should be ruled by ‘fear and awe’; and there were still those who agreed with Hannah More that it was ‘a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may perhaps want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions’. But it was now more generally held that the power that parents exercised by right over their offspring should be maintained by ‘love and friendship’. ‘He that would have his son have a respect for him and his orders,’ Locke insisted, ‘must himself have a great reverence for his son.’ The elaborate politeness of demeanour in a parent’s presence was no longer required; and children were beginning to be recognized not as miniature adults in constant need of correction but as immature beings whose feelings should be understood and whose concerns and interests catered for. Children’s books, written to entertain rather than educate or elevate, were now produced in large quantities; board games which were both instructive and amusing began to appear; so did geographical jigsaw puzzles, while dolls’ houses and dolls with changeable clothing began to be mass-produced. Children playing with hoops and hobby horses were introduced regularly into family portraits.

  In many conservative homes children were still soundly whipped. One of the sisters of the Prince of Wales, who was born in 1762, recalled how she had seen both him and his brother, Prince Frederick, ‘held by their tutors to be flogged like dogs with a long whip’.38 And the children of Mrs Thrale, the eldest of whom was born in the same year as the Prince of Wales, had to grow accustomed to being beaten by their mother and knocked about by her fists when they misbehaved or failed to learn their lessons properly. But such treatment was now the exception rather than the common rule. Most parents were not only prepared to give more time to their children but also to heed the advice of James Nelson, author of the influential Essay on the Government of Children of 1756, who condemned ‘severe and frequent whipping’ as very bad practice: ‘It inflames the skin, it puts the blood in a ferment; and there is besides a degree of ignominy attending it, which makes it very unbecoming.’ Yet even so, Nelson believed that in his day less harm was being done to children by harsh punishment than by extreme permissiveness; and undoubtedly there were houses in which the antics of uncontrolled children profoundly shocked their parents’ guests. One such child was the adopted son of the eccentric Princess Caroline, William Austin, who was dangled over the dining-room table to snatch his favourite sweetmeats from the dishes, knocking over the guests’ wine glasses in the process.

  Once he cried for a spider on the ceiling [Lady Hester Stanhope recalled], and, though they gave him all sorts of playthings to divert his attention, he would have nothing but the spider. Then there was such a calling of footmen, and long sticks, and such a to-do … The P [rince] ss used to say to Mr Pitt, ‘Don’t you think he is a nice boy?’ To which Pitt would reply, ‘I don’t understand anything about children.’39

  While ‘Willikin’ was allowed to play on the dining-table, another notoriously indulged child, the son of Henry Fox, first Lord Holland, was permitted to enjoy himself under it; and on one occasion at Holland House, when the children entered the dining-room towards the end of the meal at a grand dinner party, he expressed an urgent desire to climb into the cream bowl. At his father’s request it was placed on the carpet so that he could paddle about it in his petticoats to his heart’s content. At a subsequent dinner party at Holland House a pig roasted at the kitchen fire was served with the traditional apple in its mouth and a note in verse from the chef: ‘While at the fire I foam’d and hiss’d, A fox’s cub upon me piss’d.’ The guests greeted this intelligence with applause.40 Such extravagant indulgence towards a child did not always cause as much harm as James Nelson predicted. Lord Holland’s son grew up to be that most delightful statesman, Charles James Fox. William Austin, however, died in a Chelsea lunatic asylum.

  In many of the wretched overcrowded homes of the poor the arrival of yet another baby was a disaster. Elder brothers and sisters might be put out as servants or to some other kind of child labour from the age of seven or even six, but even so it often proved beyond the means or the wit of parents to feed a further child. Unwanted babies were left out in the streets to die or were strangled and thrown on to dung heaps or into open drains. Those that survived were an irksome charge upon the parish and were put out to parish nurses, notorious as gin drinkers, who were known to maim or disfigure them so that when they were old enough to go out begging they might by exciting pity be the more successful. These nurses made further profit out of their charges by hiring them out to beggars at four pence a day; but if a baby appeared too sickly to survive and thus fail to become an ultimate source of profit to the nurse it was soon despatched by ‘the infernal monster’ who would ‘throw a spoonful of gin down the child’s throat which instantly strangles the babe. When the searchers come to inspect the body and enquire what distemper caused death, it is answered “convulsions”.’ The Sessions Papers of the period are full of terrible stories of wanton cruelty to children, of children being starved by drunken parents or parish nurses, being forced to become prostitutes at the age of eleven or twelve when they were already ‘half eaten up with the foul distemper’ of venereal disease, being ferociously beaten as apprentices in workshops.

  It was the sight of babies exposed in the streets, abandoned by their parents and left to die on dunghills that persuaded Captain Thomas Coram, a shipwright and master mariner, to devote the rest of his life to the welfare of poor children. With the assistance of various rich patrons he took over some houses in Hatton Garden in 1741, and then arranged for the building of a foundling hospital in Lamb’s Conduit Fields. Originally intended for limited numbers of children, the hospital was misguidedly opened to children all over the country in 1756. Word of this new, unique hospital soon spread fast and children appeared in such immense numbers, being dumped on the doorsteps in baskets brought from as far away as Yorkshire, often dying and sometimes dead, that it proved impossible to cope with them. In the first four years of its being opened as a hospital for the whole country, about 10,000 children died in it. Rules of admission had, therefore, to be made: only the first children of unmarried mothers were to be admitted; the babies had to be less than a year old; the fathers must have deserted both mother and child; and the mothers must have been of good repute before their ‘fall’. Babies accepted were sent out to foster-parents in the country until they were four or five years old and were then brought back to the hospital to be educated. The governors arranged indentures for the boys when they reached the age of fourteen and thereafter supervised their apprenticeship.

  Coram died in 1751, his private finances having fallen into such sad disarray that he was obliged to depend upon an annuity of £161 paid for by his friends. The foundation of his hospital had, however, proved the urgent need for such an institution, and by prompting numerous other philanthropic endeavours, was a turning point in the social history of the eighteenth century.41

  36 Sex

  I was really unhappy for want of women [James Boswell wrote in his journal a few days after his arrival in London in 1762]. I thought it hard to be in such a place without them. I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak. I gave her a shilling, and had command enough of myself to go without touching her. I afterwards trembled at the danger I had escaped. I resolved to wait cheerfully till I got some safe girl or was liked by some woman of fashion.1

  For a time Boswell did wait, but when he thought he had found a ‘safe girl’ in a handsome actress from Covent Garden Theatre, he contracted gonorrhoea from her, the third time he had suffered from this complai
nt, the two previous infections taking ten weeks and four months respectively to cure. When he was cured of this infection he picked up a whore in St James’s Park and, on this occasion, he did ‘engage in armour’ but he found that a sheath, which he had never worn before, dulled his satisfaction, though the girl who submitted to his ‘lusty embraces’ was ‘a young Shropshire girl, only seventeen, very well looked’. The next week, however, he wore a sheath again when he strolled into the Park and took the first whore he met, an ugly, thin girl whose breath smelled of spirits. He ‘never asked her name’. Thereafter he regularly ‘performed concubinage in armorial guise’ with a variety of whores, with ‘a strong, plump, good-humoured girl called Nanny Baker’, with ‘a jolly young damsel’ whom he picked up at the bottom of the Haymarket and engaged upon Westminster Bridge, with a ‘low, abandoned, perjured, pilfering creature’ who picked his pocket in Privy Garden, with several streetwalkers who patrolled the courts in the Temple, and with a ‘fine fresh lass’, an officer’s daughter, born in Gibraltar. There were also two pretty girls who asked him to take them with him to a tavern – where in a private room he bought them wine, fondled them and then took them ‘one after the other, according to their seniority’ – and a monstrous big whore whom he had ‘a great curiosity to lubricate as the saying is’ after he met her in the Strand. But after she had displayed ‘all the parts of her enormous carcase’ to him in a tavern, she asked so much that he declined and walked off ‘with the gravity of a Barcelonian bishop’. ‘I had an opportunity tonight,’ Boswell added, ‘of observing the rascality of the waiters in these taverns. They connive with the whores, and do what they can to fleece the gentlemen. I was on my guard, and got off pretty well. I was so much in the lewd humour that I felt myself restless and took a little girl into a court; but wanted vigour. So I went home, resolved against low street debauchery.’

  On one occasion he was persuaded not to use a sheath by a girl who said ‘the sport was much pleasanter without it’; and the next day he much regretted the lapse, though he suffered no serious ill effects. A few years later, however, having been persuaded by General Clark that medicinal oil was as effective a protection as a condom, he contracted gonorrhea again after making love to two girls at the same time. This was his ninth infection, but it was not his last. In 1769, during a visit to a Dublin brothel, he caught the disease again, and had to go to London for another tedious and painful cure which included the application of a camphor liniment and mercury plaster to his genitals, daily doses of a pint of Kennedy’s Lisbon Diet Drink which cost half a guinea each, and minor surgery.2

  The condoms – Casanova called them ‘English overcoats’ – which might have saved Boswell from several of his infections had not been in use in England for long, though they were widely used in France where Mme de Sévigné commended them in 1671. They had not been available to Samuel Pepys and were little used at all until the eighteenth century when advertisements urged ‘gentlemen of intrigue’ to buy ‘those bladder policies or implements of safety, which infallibly secure the health of customers’. Made of sheep gut or fish skin, they were secured in place by a red ribbon tied around the scrotum, and were sold at first at a shop in St Martin’s Lane, then at others in Half Moon Street and Orange Court, Leicester Fields, where they were advertised as being supplied to ‘apothercaries, chymists, druggists etc … ambassadors, foreigners, gentlemen and captains of ships etc going abroad’.

  They seem rarely to have been used in Boswell’s day as contraceptives. By far the most common form of birth control remained coitus interruptus; and, although not a reliable method, it was much more efficacious than most other measures employed. Quacks offered powders which if taken with warm ale prevented conception. Folklore advocated various spices, the juice of the herb savin, commonly known as Cover Shame, as well as marjoram, rue, parsley, thyme, bracken and lavender, either taken singly or in specified proportions. Honeysuckle was recommended in both Nicholas Culpeper’s edition of the College of Physicians’ Directory and in the almanacs of John Swan who advised his readers that its juice, drunk continuously for thirty-seven days, would render a man sterile for ever. Rue was said to make him impotent. A man’s sexual desires could also be dampened by castor oil, lettuce, and a mixture of radish root and agaric, boiled in barley water and drunk when cool.3

  Women were told they might inhibit conception by using uterine douches composed of castor oil, camphor and rue, or pessaries of ground bitter almonds. These would kill the seed which it was supposed was secreted by the ovaries – the counterpart of a man’s testicles – the existence of the female ‘egg’ then being unknown.4 Men were counselled to bathe their penises in vinegar or henbane juice, or even to be cupped to reduce the heat of the blood and, therefore, the generative power of their semen. Both men and women were told that conception was less likely if intercourse were performed with much violent activity. When conception occurred an abortion might be induced by the means whereby Lady Alderley brought about hers: ‘a hot bath, a tremendous walk, and a great dose’.5

  All these methods were condemned out of hand by those who took the biblical story of Onan as proof of God’s disapproval of wasting seed. For them sexual intercourse, even in marriage, was to be practised only with a view to conception. As for masturbation, this was not only sinful but – with girls as well as boys – led to lassitude, indigestion, disorder of the lungs and the nervous system, boils, convulsions, epilepsy, and even death. The evils of the practice were luridly set out in Onania or the Heinous Sin of Self-pollution, and all its frightful Consequences in Both Sexes Considered, a pamphlet by an anonymous clergyman which was published in 1710 and which, fifty years later, had sold 38,000 copies in nineteen editions.6

  While masturbation could not very well be made a crime, many other sexual activities were, though not incest which did not become a secular offence until the twentieth century. In the late sixteenth century and until about 1660 constables were authorized to enter houses where they supposed fornication or adultery was taking place. They would arrest the offenders, have them put in prison or taken before a justice of the peace who might order them to be whipped or to stand penitentially in white sheets not only in church but also in the market-place. It has been calculated that between 1558 and 1603 in the county of Essex – whose population of adults was about 40,000 – as many as 15,000 people were summoned to court for sex offences, that is to say about 330 persons a year or one per cent of the adult population. In their adult lives, in fact, a quarter of all men and women in Essex were likely to be accused of some sexual offence.7

  Punishments varied in severity. Giving birth to a bastard child, which might become a burden on the parish, was often treated harshly, the father being served with a maintenance order, and, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, both he and the mother were liable to be stripped to the waist and whipped through the streets. Adultery was made a capital crime by an Act of 1650, though the man might escape execution by pleading that he did not know the woman was married, and the woman by proving that her husband had left her more than three years before. Juries were, however, disinclined to return verdicts which might result in the death of the accused; and apparently only one woman was sentenced before the Act was repealed.8 The public was less sympathetic in cases of bestiality and buggery. Bestiality had become a capital offence in 1534, and, with a brief interval, remained so until 1861.9 And for most of this period it was widely believed that such sexual union could result in the birth of monsters ‘partly having the members of the body according to the man, and partly according to the beast’. The dead body of a monster believed to have been begotten by a young man on a sheep was once nailed up as a gruesome warning in the porch of a Sussex church. Women, it was believed, could give birth to monsters, too. Anthony Wood once went to see the deformed child of an Irishwoman which was Originally begot by a man, but a mastiff dog or monkey gave the [man’s] semen some sprinkling’.10

  Buggery was still a capital offence and men fo
und guilty of this crime were liable to be pilloried as well as hanged. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seems, homosexual practices were quite rare and were regarded tolerantly. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that a Puritan crusade led to raids on homosexual brothels, and later, in 1727, under pressure from the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, to arrests, prosecutions and executions.11 In 1772 Captain Robert James was executed for sodomy; and in the 1780s one of two homosexuals pilloried in London was furiously attacked by the mob, even though the constriction of the pillory itself had led to his going black in the face and blood issuing from his nostrils, eyes and ears. When the pillory was opened he ‘fell down dead upon the stand of the instrument. The other man was likewise so maimed and hurt by what was thrown at him that he lay there without hope of recovery.’12

  While supporting severe punishments for sexual offences, seventeenth-century theologians emphasized the importance of restraint in lawful marriage. Carnal desires were not to be over-indulged; excessive passion in marriage was evil; there was to be no intercourse in Lent or on Sundays during the hours of divine service; supposedly unnatural positions in which, for instance, the wife’s body was on top of the husband’s or in which the woman was entered from behind were forbidden, as, of course, were anal and oral sex. For reasons of health, also, copulation must not take place too frequently, since the expenditure of semen weakened a man’s resistance to disease and contributed to impotence in old age. Furthermore, women, being innately lascivious, should not have their sexuality aroused too often. John Evelyn advised his son against ‘intemperance’ which would not only lead to ‘unfortunate expectations’ in his bride, but would also ‘dull the sight, decay the memory and shorten life’. It was most unwise to make love on a full stomach, in the hours of daylight, or when it was either very cold or very hot.13