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

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СКАЧАТЬ bread, flour, baked flour’. Some mothers could afford to buy the new pre-prepared farinaceous foods, and Mrs Beeton thought these best if available. Dr Chavasse, in 1861, followed the same route, but told mothers how farinaceous foods could be prepared at home. He suggested that mothers boil breadcrumbs in water for two to three hours, adding a little sugar. When the child reached five to six months, milk could be substituted in part for the water, with more milk added as the child got older, until the dish was almost all milk. Otherwise he suggested taking a pound of flour, putting it in a cloth, tying it tightly, and boiling it for four to five hours. The outer rind was then peeled off and the hard inner substance was grated, mixed with milk, and sweetened. He also liked ‘baked flour’, which was simply that: flour baked in the oven until it was pale brown, then powdered with a spoon; he also approved of baked breadcrumbs. Both formed the basis of a gruel with water and a small amount of sugar. He disapproved of broth, which others recommended, and he was firm that the milk for all the above foods must come from one cow only, otherwise it would turn ‘acid and sour and disorder the stomach’.⁷³ For this the mother was to make an arrangement with a dairy that ‘her’ nominated cow would be the only one used to supply the milk for her household, which was not to come from the mixed output of all the cows in the dairy. (For the likelihood of this being carried out, see the discussion of food adulteration, p. 243ff.)

      Mrs Warren, a few years later, suggested a German prepared food for two-month-old babies: a mixture of wheat flour, malt flour, bicarbonate of potash (to be bought at the chemist), water and cow’s milk.⁷⁴ A decade after that, an instructional guide for nursery maids (so-called, but more likely for their employers) recommended patent food – ‘Swiss milk’ and ‘Dr. Ridge’s food’ – as a matter of course.⁷⁵ By the late 1890s a birth announcement inserted in The Times would automatically bring a flood of sample proprietary products, including patent foods, from firms keen to get the new parents’ custom.⁷⁶

      This at least alleviated the kind of situation one doctor found himself in in 1857. He wrote, ‘When I see the ordinary practice of a nursery … I am astonished, not that such numbers die, but that any live! It was but a day or two ago that a lady consulted me about her infant, seven weeks old who was suffering from diarrhoea. On enquiry what had been given it I was told that … she had given it oatmeal. She could hardly believe that oatmeal caused the diarrhoea.’⁷⁷

      While patent foods were new, other infant care continued much as before. Many books and journals addressed questions that implied that bathing young babies was dangerous: Chavasse assured mothers that, while babies should not be put in a tub, they could be sponged all over, although only their hands, necks and faces needed soap.⁷⁸ Mrs Pedley, the author of the influential Infant Nursing and the Management of Young Children (1866), agreed that soap was not necessary, ‘except in those parts which are exposed to injurious contact’⁷⁹ – one rather hopes that this is a discreet reference to their bottoms: Dr Chavasse’s babies must have been awfully smelly.

The amount of clothes the baby wore, even in summer, would have ensured that all smells lingered. Mothers were told that every infant needed a binder, which was a strip of fabric – usually flannel, sometimes calico or linen – which was swathed around the baby’s stomach and was variously said to keep its bowels warm, its bowels compressed, or its spine firm.⁸⁰ Throughout the century doctors and advice writers argued against these binders, never particularly convincingly. Even Mrs Bailin, a prominent clothing reformer, thought babies needed to wear one, although instead of linen she recommended Jaeger fabric,^* which would give ‘just enough pressure to prevent the protrusion of the bowels’.⁸²

Between what babies were said to need in the way of clothes and what they actually had was a large gap. A list given by Mrs Panton included 12 very fine lawn shirts; 6 long flannels for daytime, 4 thicker flannels for nightwear; 6 fine long-cloth petticoats; 8 monthly gowns of cambric, trimmed with muslin embroidery on the bodice; 8 nightgowns; 4 head-flannels;^† 1 large flannel shawl, to wrap the child in to take it from room to room; 6 dozen large Russian diapers (to be used as hand towels for 3–4 months first to soften them up); 6 flannel pilches (triangular flannel wrappers that went over nappies); 3–4 pairs woollen shoes; 4 good robes; 4 binders. As well as this a nursery needed at the ready thread, scissors, cold cream, pins, safety pins,^* old pieces of linen, a large mackintosh (i.e. waterproof) sheet, 2 old blankets and 3 coarse blanket-sheets.⁸⁵

      Fulminations about these overloaded infants abounded:

      a broad band is so rolled on as to compress the abdomen, and comes up so high on the chest as to interfere both directly and indirectly with free breathing; then come complex many-stringed instruments of torture, while thick folds of linen, flannel or even mackintosh, curiously involve the legs; over all comes an inexplicable length of garment that is actually doubled on to the child, so as to ensure every form of over-heating, pressure, and encumberment. After a month of this process, aided by hoods, flannels, shawls, and wraps of all kinds, a strange variation is adopted; the under bands and folds are left, but a short outer garment is provided, with curious holes cut in the stiffened edges, so as to make sure that it shall afford no protection to legs, arms, or neck … ⁸⁶

      Yet most mothers no more were able to achieve this magnificence than they were able to achieve what today we assume was standard for every nineteenth-century middle-class child: the separate nursery.

* It has been suggested that I am more interested in S-bends than I am in sex. For the purposes of social history this is so, and I do not plan to discuss sex at all. There is a great deal to say on the little we know about the Victorians’ attitudes to sex, but I am not the person to do it. For S-bends, however, see p. 293.

* Alfred Rosling Bennett (1850–1928) was one of the earliest telephone engineers, and author of such books as Telephone Systems of Continental Europe (1895), as well as a memoir of his childhood, London and Londoners in the Eighteen-Fifties and Sixties (1924). He also invented a caustic-alkali-and-iron battery in 1881.

* Linley and Marion Sambourne’s house has been preserved with the reception rooms left almost entirely as they were furnished towards the end of the nineteenth century. It now belongs to the Victorian Society, and is open to the public.

* Holland was a hard-wearing linen fabric, usually left undyed. It was much used in middle- and upper-class households to cover and protect delicate fabrics and furniture.

* Many books worry away at the location of matches, and it is understandable that it was essential to be able to find them in the dark. Mrs Panton suggested not only that the box should be nailed over the head of the bed, but that it should first be painted with enamel paint, and a small picture be cut out and stuck on it as decoration. Our Homes, written by Shirley Forster Murphy, who in the 1890s was the London County Council’s chief medical officer, СКАЧАТЬ