The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

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      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] СКАЧАТЬ