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

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">⁴⁴ While this may have been how those who could afford it behaved, they knew (for they were regularly told) that it was not healthy. Mrs Warren, yet another prolific advice writer, who specialized in works aimed at lower-income middle-class families, wrote of pregnancy in 1865:^*

      Before the birth of my first child I was irritable, peevish and self-indulgent: to work was a burden; all my baby clothes were put out to make, for I did not know how to cut them out or make them up … I lay on the sofa all day under pretence of weakness – indeed, in the latter part of the time to move from one room to the other was a journey hardly to be accomplished. I could eat and drink well enough, and often idly desired dainties … ⁴⁵

      But by the end of the century Maud Berkeley, from a comfortably prosperous home, painted a frieze on the new nursery walls when seven months’ pregnant, then spent the last month making bedding for the crib.⁴⁶

      The expectant mother also needed to prepare her own clothes. By the 1840s, the idea that corsets needed to be worn throughout the pregnancy was beginning to disappear. While the corsets lingered for many, at least now women were told that they could have expandable lacings over the bosom, and steel stays should be replaced by whalebone. They were also, luckily, told that stays during labour were not a good idea, although a chemise, a flannel petticoat and a bed gown were all expected of a woman in the later stages of labour, not to mention ‘A broad bandage, too, [which] must be passed loosely round the abdomen as the labour advances to its close … it should be wide enough to extend from the chest to the lowest part of the stomach.’⁴⁷

      For households that could afford it (and only the more prosperous of the middle classes could), a monthly nurse was engaged. She arrived a month before the baby was due, and stayed until it was three months old, if the parents could afford her that long. Her tasks were to keep the bedroom clean, wash the baby’s clothes, and wait on the mother. She also cared for the baby throughout the night, bringing it to the bedroom to be fed if it was not sleeping there, or feeding it herself if it was bottle-fed.

      The nurse was also useful for morale and for practical information, as gradually through the century women were being pushed out of the previously almost entirely female sphere of childbirth. When Dickens’s first child was born, in the late 1830s, Catherine Dickens’s sister, Mary (aged seventeen), and Dickens’s mother were both present at the birth. This behaviour was not just for the middle classes: Prince Albert was at Queen Victoria’s bedside at her first confinement in 1841;⁴⁸ Gladstone was at his wife’s bedside for all six of his children’s births, beginning with his first son in 1840. But by the 1860s Dr Chavasse condemned the idea of anyone except the doctor and nurse being in attendance. Not even the pregnant woman’s mother was encouraged to be present.⁴⁹ If women went back to their mother’s for their first child, as many (including Marion Sambourne) did, it was likely that even then she was no longer in the room during labour.

The increasing professionalization of medicine meant that experienced midwives were being squeezed out of middle-class childbirth. Doctors liked attending childbirths – they saw it as a good way for a young practitioner to forge a bond with a newly set up family which, with luck, would continue for the rest of the family’s lifespan. For this reason they fought the possibility of midwives being formally qualified.^*50 Even if half to three-quarters of all births were still attended by midwives, that would mean that by the end of the century as many as three-quarters of a million women a year were being attended by a doctor – possibly the bulk of the middle classes.

      Another reason to have a doctor was the increasing use of chloroform. It had been administered safely as early as 1847; in 1857 it gained wide recognition when Queen Victoria was given it during childbirth. Yet the drug still had to be defended repeatedly: it was not generally accepted until the late 1870s – the delay being caused not by women, who were clamouring for it, but by doctors, who were deeply resistant.⁵¹ It was not so much the danger – medicine had not reached a stage where practitioners expected to save every patient – as the immorality of the drug: did not Genesis 3:16 remind women everywhere that, for Eve’s sin, ‘in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’? Dr Charles Meigs, two years after chloroform was first administered successfully, spoke for many in his profession: ‘To be insensible from whisky, gin, and brandy, and wine, and beer, and ether and chloroform, is to be what in the world is called Dead-drunk. No reasoning – no argumentation is strong enough to point out the 9th part of a hair’s discrimination between them.’⁵² Not all felt this way. Both Charles Darwin and his friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker were, in the old-fashioned manner, present when their wives gave birth but – new style – they administered the chloroform themselves.

      Despite this divergence on medical treatment, both women and doctors agreed in regarding childbirth as an illness. Mrs Panton called it a ‘plight’, and warned that ‘Naturally these times are looked forward to with dread by all young wives.’⁵³ The lower middle classes, and a substantial swath of the more prosperous, did not have the servants to permit them to lie in bed for weeks (or even days). And it was they – overburdened with heavy housework which they performed themselves, and with the care, feeding, clothing and education of children – who would probably have benefited from time in bed. Some were forced to remain in bed, whether or not they had servants: Emily Gosse was unable to leave her room for six weeks.⁵⁴

Prosperous middle-class women, on the other hand, were expected to stay in bed after the birth for at least nine days; those who got up earlier did so, it was supposed, not because they felt well enough, but out of ‘bravado’, and they were considered to be acting foolishly, because ‘the strength and health of the mother’s whole life depend upon judicious treatment at such a critical time’.⁵⁵ Louise Creighton, an upper-middle-class woman married to an Oxford fellow,^* accepted this fully. She gave birth to her second child in 1874, and a month later a close friend who had also just had a child came to visit. ‘We spent the afternoon happily together wondering which was the most fit to get up & ring the bell when we needed anything.’⁵⁶ Ursula Bloom noted that, in her upper-middle-class family, after giving birth the women were kept flat on their backs and fed with a feeding cup, a china cup with a partial covering and a spout, through which the recumbent patient could drink. The windows remained closed, and small sandbags were laid along the edges of the frames to keep out any draughts. A lamp was left burning all night, and the monthly nurse slept on a sofa in the room. This lying-in lasted a month, and was then followed by churching, which no men attended (and seems to have been relatively uncommon – Bloom came from a clergy family).⁵⁷ The woman was usually faint and weak at the end of the month: without any fresh air or exercise, and with only an invalid diet, all the while breastfeeding, it was to be expected.

      Serious illness always lurked. Although women had a slightly longer life expectancy than men throughout the period, all joined in regarding them as the frailer vessel. The most dangerous time was childbirth: childbed fever (or puerperal fever, now simply septicaemia) was the most common cause of death in childbirth. From 1847 to 1876, 5 women per 1000 live births died, with puerperal fever causing between a third СКАЧАТЬ