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• CHAPTER XVIII •

THE NURSERY

I

In the early 1960s, in a hugely influential book called Centuries of Childhood, a French author named Philippe Ariès made a startling claim. He declared that before the sixteenth century, at the very earliest, there was no such thing as childhood. There were small human beings, of course, but nothing in their lives made them meaningfully distinguishable from adults. “The idea of childhood did not exist,” he pronounced with a certain finality. It was essentially a Victorian invention.

Ariès was not a specialist in the field, and his ideas were based almost entirely on indirect evidence, much of it now held to be a little doubtful, but his views struck a chord and were widely taken up. Soon other historians were declaring that children before the modern period were not just ignored but actually weren’t much liked. “In traditional society, mothers viewed the development and happiness of infants younger than two with indifference,” declared Edward Shorter in The Making of the Modern Family (1976). The reason for this was high infant mortality. “You couldn’t permit yourself to become attached to an infant that you knew death might whisk away,” he explained. These views were almost exactly echoed by Barbara Tuchman in the best-selling A Distant Mirror two years later. “Of all the characteristics in which the medieval age differs from the modern,” she wrote, “none is so striking as the comparative absence of interest in children.” Investing love in young children was so risky—“so unrewarding” was her curious phrase—that everywhere it was suppressed as a pointless waste of energy. Emotion didn’t come into it at all. Children were merely “a product,” in her chilling view. “A child was born and died and another took its place.” Or as Ariès himself explained, “The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children in order to keep just a few.” These views became so standard among historians of childhood that twenty years would pass before anyone questioned whether they might represent a serious misreading of human nature, not to mention the known facts of history.

There is no doubt that children once died in great numbers and that parents had to adjust their expectations accordingly. The world before the modern era was overwhelmingly a place of tiny coffins. The figures usually cited are that one-third of children died in their first year of life and half failed to reach their fifth birthdays. Even in the best homes death was a regular visitor. Stephen Inwood notes in A History of London that the future historian Edward Gibbon, growing up rich in healthy Putney, lost all six of his siblings in early childhood. But that isn’t to say that parents were any less devastated by a loss than we would be today. The diarist John Evelyn and his wife had eight children and lost six of them in childhood, and were clearly heartbroken each time. “Here ends the joy of my life,” Evelyn wrote simply after his oldest child died three days after his fifth birthday in 1658. The writer William Brownlow lost a child each year for four years, a chain of misfortune that “hast broken me asunder and shaken me to pieces,” he wrote, but in fact, he and his wife had still more to endure: the tragic pattern of annual deaths continued for three years more until they had no children left to yield.

No one expressed parental loss better (as no one expressed most things better) than William Shakespeare. These lines are from King John, written soon after Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died at the age of eleven in 1596:

Grief fills the room up of my empty child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

These are not the words of someone for whom children are a product, and there is no reason to suppose—no evidence anywhere, including that of common sense—that parents were ever, at any point in the past, commonly indifferent to the happiness and well-being of their children. One clue lies in the name of the room in which we are now.* Nursery is first recorded in English in 1330 and has been in continuous use ever since. A room exclusively dedicated to the needs and comforts of children would hardly seem consistent with the belief that children were of no consequence within the household. No less significant is the word childhood itself. It has existed in English for over a thousand years (the first recorded use is in the Lindisfarne Gospels circa AD 950), so whatever it may have meant emotionally to people, as a state of being, a condition of separate existence, it is indubitably ancient. To suggest that children were objects of indifference or barely existed as separate beings would appear to be a simplification at best.

That isn’t to say that childhood in the past was the long, carefree gambol we like to think it now. It was anything but. Life was full of perils from the moment of conception. For mother and child both, the most dangerous milestone was birth itself. When things went wrong, there was little any midwife or physician could do. Doctors, when called in at all, frequently resorted to treatments that only increased the distress and danger, draining the exhausted mother of blood (on the grounds that it would relax her—then seeing loss of consciousness as proof of success), padding her with blistering poultices or otherwise straining her dwindling reserves of energy and hope.

Not infrequently babies became stuck. In such an eventuality, labor could go on for three weeks or more, until baby or mother or both were spent beyond recovery. If a baby died within the womb, the procedures for getting it out are really too horrible to describe. Suffice it to say that they involved hooks and bringing the baby out in pieces. Such procedures brought not only unspeakable suffering to the mother but also much risk of damage to her uterus and even graver risk of infection. Considering the conditions, it is amazing to report that only between one and two mothers in a hundred died in childbirth. However, because most women bore children repeatedly (seven to nine times on average) the odds of death at some point in a woman’s childbearing experience rose dramatically, to about one in eight.

A woman giving birth in the eighteenth century (note the way modesty is preserved by the sheet pulled around the doctor’s neck) (photo credit 18.1)

For children, birth was just the beginning. The first years of life weren’t so much a time of adventure as of misadventure, it seems. In addition to the endless waves of illness and epidemic that punctuated every existence, accidental death was far more common—breathtakingly so, in fact. Coroners’ rolls for London in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries include such abrupt childhood terminations as “drowned in a pit,” “bitten by sow,” “fell into pan of hot water,” “hit by cart-wheel,” “fell into tin of hot mash,” and “trampled in crowd.” The historian Emily Cockayne relates the sad case of a little boy who lay down in the road and covered himself with straw to amuse his friends. A passing cart squashed him.

Ariès and his adherents took such deaths as proof of parental carelessness and lack of interest in children’s well-being, but this is to impose modern standards on historic behavior. A more generous reading would bear in mind that every waking moment of a medieval mother’s life was full of distractions. She might have been nursing a sick or dying child, fighting off a fever herself, struggling to start a fire (or put one out), or doing any of a thousand other things. If children aren’t bitten by sows today, it is not because they are better supervised. It is because we don’t keep sows in the kitchen.

A good many modern conclusions are based on mortality rates from the past that are not actually all that certain. The first person to look carefully into the matter was, a little unexpectedly, the astronomer Edmond Halley, who is of course principally remembered now for the comet named for him. A tireless investigator into scientific phenomena of all kinds, Halley produced papers on everything from magnetism to the soporific effects of opium. In 1693, he came across figures for annual births and deaths in Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland), which fascinated him because they were so unusually complete. He realized that from them he could construct charts from which it was possible to work out the life expectancy of any person at any point in his existence. He could say that for someone aged twenty-five the chances of dying in the next year were 80 to 1 against, that someone who reached thirty could reasonably expect to live another twenty-seven years, that the chances of a man of forty living another seven years were 5 ½ to 1 in favor, and so on. These were the first actuarial tables, and, apart from anything else, they made the life insurance industry possible.

Halley’s findings were reported in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, a scientific journal, and for that reason seem to have escaped the full attention of social historians, which is unfortunate because there is much of interest in them. Halley’s figures showed, for instance, that Breslau contained seven thousand women of child-bearing age yet only twelve hundred gave birth each year—“little more than a sixth part,” as he noted. Clearly the great majority of women at any time were taking careful steps to avoid pregnancy. So childbirth, in Breslau anyway, wasn’t some inescapable burden to which women had to submit, but a largely voluntary act.

Halley’s figures also showed that infant mortality was not quite as bad as the figures now generally cited would encourage us to suppose. In Breslau, slightly over a quarter of babies died in their first year, and 44 percent were dead by their seventh birthday. These are bad numbers, to be sure, but appreciably better than the comparable figures of one-third and one-half usually cited. Not until seventeen years had passed did the proportion of deaths among the young of Breslau reach 50 percent. That was actually worse than Halley had expected, and he used his report to make the point that people should not expect to live long lives, but rather should steel themselves for the possibility of dying before their time. “How unjustly we repine at the shortness of our Lives,” he wrote, “and think our selves wronged if we attain not Old Age; where it appears hereby, that the one half of those that are born are dead in Seventeen years.… [So] instead of murmuring at what we call an untimely Death, we ought with Patience and unconcern to submit to that Dissolution which is the necessary Condition of our perishable Materials.” Clearly expectations concerning death were much more complicated than a simple appraisal of the numbers might lead us to conclude.

A further complication of the figures—and a sound reason for women limiting their pregnancies—was that just at this time women across Europe were dying in droves from a mysterious new disease that doctors were powerless to defeat or understand. Called puerperal (from the Latin term for child) fever, it was first recorded in Leipzig in 1652. For the next 250 years doctors would be helpless in the face of it. Puerperal fever was particularly dreaded because it came on suddenly, often several days after a successful hospital birth when the mother was completely well and nearly ready to go home. Within hours the victim would be severely fevered and delirious, and would remain in that state for about a week until she either recovered or expired. More often than not she expired. In the worst outbreaks, 90 percent of victims died. Until late in the nineteenth century most doctors attributed puerperal fever either to bad air or lax morals, when in fact it was their own grubby fingers transferring microbes from one tender uterus to another. As early as 1847, a doctor in Vienna, Ignaz Semmelweis, realized that if hospital staff washed their hands in mildly chlorinated water deaths of all types declined sharply, but hardly anyone paid any attention to him, and decades more would pass before antiseptic practices became general.

For a lucky few women, there was at least some promise of greater safety with the arrival of obstetrical forceps, which allowed babies to be repositioned mechanically. Unfortunately their inventor, Peter Chamberlen, chose not to share his invention with the world, but kept it secret for the sake of his own practice, and his heirs maintained this lamentable tradition for a hundred years more until forceps were independently devised by others. In the meantime, untold thousands of women died in unnecessary agony. Forceps were not without risks of their own, it must be said. Unsterilized and clearly invasive, they could easily damage both baby and mother if not wielded with the utmost delicacy. For this reason, many medical men were reluctant to deploy them. In the most celebrated case, Princess Charlotte, heir presumptive to the British throne, died giving birth to her first child in 1817 because the presiding physician, Sir Richard Croft, would not allow his colleagues to use forceps to try to relieve her suffering. In consequence, after more than fifty hours of exhausting and unproductive contractions, both baby and mother died. Charlotte’s death changed the course of British history. Had she lived, there would have been no Queen Victoria and thus no Victorian period. The nation was shocked and unforgiving. Stunned and despondent at finding himself the most despised man in Britain, Croft retired to his chambers and put a bullet through his head.

For most human beings, children and adults both, the dominant consideration in life until modern times was purely, unrelievedly economic. In poorer households—and that is what most homes were, of course—every person was, from the earliest possible moment, a unit of production. John Locke, in a paper for the Board of Trade in 1697, suggested that the children of the poor should be put to work from the age of three, and no one thought that unrealistic or unkind. The Little Boy Blue of the nursery rhyme—the one who failed to keep the sheep from the meadow and the cows from the corn—is unlikely to have been more than about four years old; older hands were needed for more robust work.

In the worst circumstances, children were sometimes given the most backbreaking of jobs. Those as young as six, of both sexes, were put to work in mines, where their small frames allowed them access to tight spaces. Because of the heat and to save their clothes, they often worked naked. (Grown men also traditionally worked naked; women usually worked naked to the waist.) For much of the year, those who worked in mines never saw sunlight, which left many stunted and weak from vitamin D deficiencies. Even comparatively light labor was often dangerous. Children in the ceramics factories of the Potteries in the Midlands cleaned out pots containing residues of lead and arsenic, inducing a slow poisoning that condemned many to eventual paralysis, palsies, and seizures.

The least envied child workers of all were the chimney sweeps, or “climbing boys,” as they were also known. They started earlier, worked harder, and died sooner than any other group. Most began their short careers at about the age of five, though the records show one boy articled into the profession at three and a half, an age at which even the simplest tasks must have been confusing and frightening. Little boys were needed because flues were tight and often wildly convoluted. “Some,” writes John Waller in The Real Oliver Twist, “turned at right angles, ran horizontally or diagonally, even zig-zagged or plunged downward before rising up toward the stack. One London chimney switched direction an amazing fourteen times.” It was brutal work. One method of encouraging the boys not to slack was to light a pile of straw in the grate to send a blast of heat up the chimney after them. Many climbing boys ended their short careers stooped and ruined by the age of eleven or twelve. Cancer of the scrotum seems to have been a particular occupational hazard.

In such a harsh and hopeless world, the case of Isaac Ware stands out as a happy miracle. Ware’s is a name that crops up regularly in architectural histories of the eighteenth century, for he was the leading building critic of the age and his opinions carried a great deal of weight. (It was he, you may remember from our visit to the cellar, who helped make red brick unfashionable in the mid-eighteenth century by pronouncing it “fiery and disagreeable to the eye.”) But Ware was not born to a life of eminence. He started, in fact, as a street urchin and chimney sweep, and owed his polish and success to a single extraordinary act of kindness. In about 1712, an anonymous gentleman—never formally identified but more or less universally assumed to be the third Earl of Burlington, the builder of Chiswick House and one of the tastemakers of the age—was walking up Whitehall in London when he spotted a young sweep making a sketch of the Banqueting House on the pavement with a piece of charcoal. The drawing showed such extraordinary talent that Burlington tried to examine it, but the boy, thinking he was in trouble, burst into tears and made to rub it out. The gentleman calmed him, engaged him in conversation, and became so impressed with the boy’s natural brightness that he purchased the boy’s freedom from his employer, took him into his own household, and began the long process of turning him into a gentleman. He sent him on a grand tour of Europe and had him trained in all the refinements of life.

Under this tutelage Ware became an accomplished if not brilliant architect, but his real gift was as an arbiter and thinker. His several important books included a respected translation of Palladio’s Quattro libri, and The Complete Body of Architecture, which became a kind of bible of taste and discernment for professionals and amateurs both. Yet he never entirely shed his humble origins. When he died in 1766, his skin, it was said, still bore the indelible sooty stains of the chimney sweep.

Ware was, needless to say, an exception. Most children were wholly at the mercy of their employers and were sometimes treated in the most shocking manner. In one briefly notorious case, a farmer at Malmesbury, Wiltshire, hit on the idea of castrating two of his young apprentices and selling them to an opera company as singers. He was thwarted in the second part of his ambition, but unfortunately not before he had successfully snipped his way to the first.

Until well into the nineteenth century children received almost nothing in the way of legal protection. Before 1814, no law forbade the theft of a child, for instance. In Middlesex in 1802, a woman named Elizabeth Salmon, after abducting a child named Elizabeth Impey, was charged with stealing the child’s cap and gown because that was the only part of the offense that was illegal. Because abduction carried so little risk, it was widely believed that Gypsies stole children and sold them on, and there appears to have been some truth in that. A celebrated case was that of a Mary Davis, a woman of good background who in 1812, by chance, found her lost son sweeping a chimney at the inn where she was staying.

The Industrial Revolution only made matters worse, at least at first. Before the 1844 Factory Act reduced the workday for children, most worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week. Some worked even longer, particularly during busy periods when it was necessary to meet large orders. Apprentices at one mill in 1810 were discovered to be at their machines from 5:50 a.m. till after 9:00 p.m., with a single meal break of thirty to forty-five minutes for dinner, and that was sometimes taken while standing at machines. Diet almost everywhere was often barely adequate to sustain life. “They have Water Porridge for Breakfast and Supper, and generally Oatcake and Treacle, or Oatcake and poor Broth, for Dinner,” an inspector reported. In some factories, discomfort was both chronic and considerable. Some materials, like flax, had to be kept moist as they were being worked, so some of the workers were permanently drenched by spray off the machines. In winter it must have been unbearable. Nearly all industrial machinery was really dangerous, but especially when those working around it were starved and exhausted. Some children reportedly were so tired that they hadn’t the energy to eat and sometimes fell asleep with food in their mouths.

At least they had steady work. For those dependent on casual labor, existence was an endless lottery. One-third of the inhabitants of Central London were estimated in 1750 to go to bed each night “almost Pennyless,” and the proportion only worsened as time went on. Casual laborers seldom knew when they woke in the morning whether they would earn enough that day to eat. So comprehensively dire were conditions for many that Henry Mayhew devoted a whole volume of his four-volume London Labour and the London Poor to the lowest of the low, scavengers, whose desperation led them to find value in almost anything that was dropped by the roadside. As he wrote:

Many a thing which in a country town is kicked by the penniless out of their path … will in London be snatched up as a prize; it is money’s worth. A crushed and torn bonnet, for instance, or, better still, an old hat, napless, shapeless, crownless, and brimless, will be picked up in the street, and carefully placed in a bag.

The conditions in which they lived were sometimes so squalid as to shock even the most hardened investigators. One housing inspector in the 1830s reported: “I found [one room] occupied by one man, two women, and two children, and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died in childbirth a few days before.” Poor parents habitually produced large broods, as a sort of pension policy, hoping that enough offspring would survive to support them in their dotage. By the second half of the nineteenth century, one-third of families in England had eight or more children, another third had five to seven, and the final third (the wealthier third overwhelmingly) had four or fewer. In poorer districts it was a rare household that could adequately feed everyone, so malnutrition at some level was more or less endemic. At least 15 percent of children, it is thought, had the bowed legs and pelvic distortions of rickets, and these unfortunates were overwhelmingly found among the poorest of the poor. One doctor in mid-Victorian London published a list of the things he had seen tiny infants fed—jellied calves’ feet, hard muffins soaked in oil, gristly meat they could not chew. Toddlers sometimes survived on what fell on the floor or what they could otherwise scavenge. By the time they were seven or eight, many children were sent out onto the streets to fend for themselves. By the 1860s, London had an estimated one hundred thousand “street Arabs” who had no education, no skills, no purpose, and no future. “Their very number makes one stand aghast,” one contemporary recorded.

Yet the idea of educating them was treated almost universally with abhorrence. The fear was that educating the poor would fill them with aspirations to which they were neither suited nor, frankly, entitled. Sir Charles Adderley, who was in charge of government education policy in the late 1850s, stated flatly: “It is clearly wrong to keep ordinary children of the working-class at school after the age at which their proper work begins.” To do so “would be as arbitrary and improper as it would be to keep the boys at Eton and Harrow at spade labour.”

No one better represented the harsh side of beliefs than the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), whose Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvements of Society was published anonymously in 1798 and became immediately and resoundingly influential. Malthus blamed the poor for their own hardships and opposed the idea of relief for the masses on the grounds that it simply increased their tendency to idleness. “Even when they have an opportunity of saving,” he wrote, “they seldom exercise it for all that is beyond their present necessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale-house. The poor-laws of England may therefore be said to diminish both the power and the will to save among the common people, and thus to weaken one of the strongest incentives to sobriety and industry, and consequently to happiness.” He was particularly troubled by the Irish, and believed, as he wrote to a friend in 1817, that “a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” This was not a man with a lot of Christian charity in his heart.

In consequence of the unrelentingly dire conditions, mortality figures soared wherever the poor congregated. In Dudley, in the Midlands, the average life expectancy at birth at midcentury had sunk to just 18.5 years, a life span not seen in Britain since the Bronze Age. In even the healthiest cities, the average life expectancy was 26 to 28, and nowhere in urban Britain did it exceed thirty.

As ever, those who suffered most were the youngest, yet their welfare and safety excited remarkably scant attention. There can be few more telling facts about life in nineteenth-century Britain than that the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals preceded by sixty years the founding of a similar organization for the protection of children. It is perhaps no less notable that the first named was made Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1840, a little more than a decade and a half after its founding. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children remains to this day regally unblessed.

II

Just when it must have seemed to the poor of England that life couldn’t get much worse, life got worse. The cause of the blow was the introduction and strict implementation of new poor relief laws starting in 1834. Poor relief had always been a sensitive issue in Britain. What particularly exercised many better-off Victorians was not the sad plight of the poor, but the cost. Poor laws had been around since Elizabethan times, but it was left to each parish to decide how to administer them. Some were reasonably generous, but others were so cheap that they were known to carry sick people or women in labor into another parish so that they became some other jurisdiction’s responsibility. Illegitimate births were a particular source of official irritation, and making sure that malfeasants were both suitably punished and made to shoulder the responsibility for what they had done was an almost obsessive preoccupation for local authorities. A typical decree from a court in Lancashire—this one in the late 1600s—reads:

Jane Sotworth of Wrightington, spinster, swears that Richard Garstange of Fazerkerley, husbandman, is the father of Alice, her bastard daughter. She is to have charge of the child for two years, provided she does not beg, and Richard is then to take charge until it is twelve years old. He shall give Jane a cow and 6 shillings in money. Both he and she shall this day be whipped in Ormeskirke.

By the early nineteenth century, the problem of poor relief had become a national crisis. The costs of the Napoleonic wars had severely strained the national exchequer, and matters only worsened with the coming of peace, as some three hundred thousand soldiers and sailors returned to civilian life and began looking for work in an already depressed economy.

The solution, almost everyone agreed, was to set up a national network of workhouses where rules would be enforced consistently to a single national standard. A commission, whose secretary was the indefatigable Edwin Chadwick, considered the matter with the thoroughness typical of the age (and of Chadwick) and at length produced a thirteen-volume report. One point of almost universal consensus was that the new workhouses should be made as disagreeable as possible, to keep them from becoming attractive to the poor. One of those providing testimony offered a cautionary tale so symptomatic of prevailing thought that it is worth giving here in full:

I remember the case of a family named Wintle, consisting of a man, his wife, and five children. About two years ago, the father, mother and two children, were very ill, and reduced to great distress, being obliged to sell all their little furniture for their subsistence; they were settled with us; and as we heard of their extreme distress, I went to them to offer relief; they, however, strenuously refused the aid. I reported this to the churchwarden, who determined to accompany me, and together we again pressed on the family the necessity of receiving relief; but still they refused, and we could not prevail upon them to accept our offer. We felt so much interested in the case, however, that we sent them 4 shillings in a parcel with a letter, desiring them to apply for more, if they continued ill; this they did, and from that time to this (now more than two years) I do not believe that they have been for three weeks off our books, although there has been little or no ill health in the family. Thus we effectually spoiled the habits acquired by their previous industry; and I have no hesitation in saying, that, in nine cases out of ten, such is the constant effect of having tasted of parish bounty.

The commissioners’ report fulmigated against those “who value parish support as their privilege, and demand it as their right.” Poor relief had become so generously available, the commissioners believed, that “it appears to the pauper that the Government has undertaken to repeal, in his favour, the ordinary laws of nature; to enact that the children shall not suffer for the misconduct of their parents—the wife for that of the husband, or the husband for that of the wife; that no one shall lose the means of comfortable subsistence, whatever be his indolence, prodigality or vice.” With a zeal that came perilously close to paranoia, the report went on to suggest that a poor working man might wilfully choose to “revenge himself on the parish” by marrying and producing children to “increase that local overpopulation which is gradually eating away the fund out of which he and all the other labourers of the parish are to be maintained.” He had nothing to lose from such a strategy after all, for his children could be put to work at home and “become a source of profit to the parents if the trade is good, and, if it should fail, they are maintained by the parish.”

To make sure that the poor were never rewarded for their idleness, the new workhouses were made as strict and joyless as possible. Husbands were separated from wives, children from their parents. At some workhouses inmates were required to wear prison-style uniforms. Food was calculatedly grim. (“On no account must the diet be superior or equal to the ordinary mode of subsistence of the labouring classes of the neighbourhood,” decreed the commissioners.) Conversation in dining halls and during hours of work was forbidden. All hope of happiness was ruthlessly banished.

Inmates had to perform hours of daily work to earn their meals and shelter. One common task was picking oakum. Oakum was old rope that had been heavily coated in tar to make it usable for ships’ caulking. To pick it was simply to disentangle strands so that they could be reused. It was hard and unpleasant work—the stiff fibers could inflict painful cuts—and agonizingly slow. At Poplar Workhouse in East London male inmates were required to pick five and a half pounds of oakum per day—a quota nearly twice that imposed on prison convicts. Those who failed to achieve their targets were put on a reduced diet of bread and water. By 1873, two-thirds of the inmates at Poplar were on short rations. At Andover Workhouse in Hampshire, where inmates were made to crush bones for fertilizer, they were said to be so permanently famished that they sucked the bones to get at the marrow.

Medical care almost everywhere was scant and reluctantly granted. Twenty years after the invention of anesthetics, workhouse patients commonly underwent surgery without them, to keep down costs. Disease was endemic. Tuberculosis—both phthisis, or consumption (which affected the lungs), and scrofula (which affected bones, muscle, and skin)—was notoriously rife, and typhus was a constant fear. Because children were so weakened generally, diseases that are now minor inconveniences were then devastating. Measles killed more children in the nineteenth century than any other illness. Whooping cough and croup killed tens of thousands more, and no place was more conducive to their spread than a stale and crowded workhouse.

Some workhouses were so bad that they generated their own diseases. One vague and chronic malady—now thought to have been a combination of skin infections—was simply called “the itch.” It was almost certainly due to lack of hygiene, though poor diet would have contributed, too. Dietary insufficiencies and poor hygiene made threadworms, tapeworms, and other sinuous invaders more or less universal. A patent medicine company in Manchester produced a purgative that was guaranteed to expel, faithfully and perhaps just a touch explosively, every last unwelcome parasite in the intestinal tract. One user proudly testified that he had brought forth three hundred worms, “some of them of Uncommon Thickness.” People in workhouses could only dream of such salvation, however.

Ringworm and other fungoid infections were endemic, too. Lice were a constant problem. One treatment was to soak bed linen in a solution of mercuric chloride and chloride of lime, which made the sheets poisonous not only to the lice but also to the unfortunates who slept on them. Inmates were also often roughly sanitized upon arrival. At one workhouse in the Midlands, a boy named Henry Cartwright was deemed so malodorous that the matron ordered him thrust into a solution of sulphuret of potash in an attempt to eliminate his body odor. Instead she eliminated the poor boy: by the time he was hauled out, he had suffocated. Authorities weren’t entirely indifferent to such abuses. At Brentwood, Essex, when a nurse named Elizabeth Gillespie threw a girl down a flight of stairs to her death, she was brought to trial and sentenced to five years in prison. Even so, physical and sexual abuse, particularly of the young, was widespread.

In practice, the workhouses could only hold so many people—no more than about a fifth of England’s paupers at any one time. The rest of the nation’s indigent survived on “outdoor relief”—small sums to help with rent and food. Collecting these sums was sometimes made almost impossibly difficult. C. S. Peel notes the case of an unemployed shepherd in Kent—“an honest and industrious man, out of work through no fault of his own”—who was required to make a round trip of twenty-six miles on foot each day to collect paltry relief of one shilling and sixpence for himself, his wife, and five children. The shepherd made the trudge daily for nine weeks before eventually collapsing from weakness and hunger. In London, a woman named Annie Kaplan, left to bring up six children after her husband died, was told that she could not support six children on the meager sum she was to receive and was instructed to nominate two children to send to an orphanage. Kaplan refused. “If four’ll starve, six’ll starve,” she declared. “If I have a piece of bread for four, I’ll have a piece of bread for six.… I’m not giving anybody away.” The authorities entreated her to reconsider, but she would not, so they gave her nothing at all. What became of her and her children is unknown.

One of the few figures who actively sympathized with the plight of the poor was also one of the most interestingly improbable. Friedrich Engels came to England at the age of just twenty-one in 1842 to help run his father’s textile factory in Manchester. The firm, Ermen & Engels, manufactured sewing thread. Although young Engels was a faithful son and a reasonably conscientious businessman—eventually he became a partner—he also spent a good deal of his time modestly but persistently embezzling funds to support his friend and collaborator Karl Marx in London.

It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club—in short, did everything one would expect of a successful member of the gentry. Marx, meanwhile, constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting at every opportunity of his wife’s aristocratic background.

Engels’s patient support for Marx was little short of wondrous. In that milestone year of 1851, Marx accepted a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, but with no intention of actually writing any articles. His English wasn’t good enough, for one thing. His idea was that Engels would write them for him and he would collect the fee, and that is precisely what happened. Even then, the income wasn’t enough to support his carelessly extravagant lifestyle, so he had Engels pilfer money for him from his father’s firm. Engels did so for years, at considerable risk to himself.

In between running a factory and supporting Marx, Engels took a genuine interest in the plight of the poor in Manchester. He wasn’t always terribly open-minded. As we saw in Chapter XVI, he didn’t think much of the Irish and was always prepared to believe that the poor were responsible for their own sad fate. Yet no one wrote with more feeling about life in Victorian slums. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, he described people living in “measureless filth and stench” amid “masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth.” He related the case of one woman whose two little boys, freezing and on the brink of starvation, had been caught stealing food. When a policeman took the boys home, he found the mother with six other of her children “literally huddled in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup and a small dish. On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s apron, which served the whole family as a bed.”

Engels’s descriptions were unquestionably touching and are often quoted now, but what is frequently forgotten is that his book was published only in German in 1845 and not translated into English for thirty-two years. As a reformer of British institutions, Engels had no influence at all until long after the reforms had begun.

Elsewhere, however, the conditions of the poor were beginning to attract attention. In the 1860s, a fashion arose among journalists to disguise themselves as tramps and enter casual workhouses—what we would now call shelters—to investigate and report on the conditions within, allowing readers the safely vicarious thrill of experiencing the horrifying conditions without leaving the comforts of home. Readers learned how inmates at Lambeth Workhouse were required to strip naked and step into a murky bath, “the colour of weak mutton broth,” which was filled with the sloughed and scummy leavings of earlier bathers. Beyond were grim dormitories where men and boys, “all perfectly naked,” were crowded together on beds that were little more than pallets. “Youths lay in the arms of men, men were enfolded in each other’s embrace; there was neither fire, nor light nor supervision, and the weak and feeble were at the complete mercy of the strong and ruffianly. The air was laden with a pestilential stench.”

Stirred by these reports, a new breed of benefactors began to found an extraordinary range of organizations—a Committee for Promoting the Establishment of Baths and Wash Houses for the Labouring Classes, a Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy, a Society for Promoting Window Gardening Amongst the Working Classes of Westminster, even a Society for the Rescue of Boys Not Yet Convicted of Any Criminal Offence—nearly always with the hope of helping the poor to remain or become sober, Christian, industrious, hygienic, law-abiding, parentally responsible, or otherwise virtuous. Still others strived to improve housing conditions for the poor. One of the most generous was George Peabody, an American businessman who settled in England in 1837 (he it was, you may remember, who provided the emergency funding that allowed the American displays to be installed at the Great Exhibition) and spent much of his vast fortune building apartment blocks for the poor all over London. Peabody estates housed almost fifteen thousand people in clean, comparatively roomy flats, though the heavy hand of paternalism was still painfully evident. Tenants were not allowed to apply paint or wallpaper, install drapes, or otherwise significantly personalize their homes. In consequence, they were not much cheerier than prison cells.

But the real change was the sudden growth of domestic missionary work, reflected most particularly in the endeavors of one man who did more to help impoverished children (often whether they wanted it or not) than anyone before him. His name was Thomas Barnardo. He was a young Irishman who came to London in the mid-1860s and was so horrified by conditions faced by helpless youths that he set up an organization formally called the National Incorporated Association for the Reclamation of Destitute Waif Children, though everyone came to know it as Dr. Barnardo’s.

Barnardo came from an exotic background. His family originated as Sephardic Jews in Spain, but moved first to Germany and then to Ireland. By the time Thomas came along in 1845, the family’s religious affiliation had switched to the more ferocious end of Protestantism. Barnardo himself came under the sway of the fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren, which is what brought him to London in the mid-1860s with the intention to qualify as a doctor and undertake missionary work in China. He never got to China. In fact, he never qualified as a doctor. Instead he began to take a missionary interest in homeless young boys (and eventually girls as well). With borrowed money, he opened his first home in Stepney, in East London.

Barnardo was a brilliant publicist and developed an immensely successful campaign based around striking before-and-after photographs of the children he rescued. The “before” photos showed grubby (and often scantily clad) waifs of sullen mien, while the “after” photographs showed them scrubbed, alert, and radiant with the joy of Christian salvation. The campaigns were so successful that soon Barnardo was expanding his interests in many directions, opening infirmaries, homes for deaf and dumb children, homes for homeless bootblacks, and much more. The slogan emblazoned along the facade of the Stepney home was “No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission.” It was an unusually noble sentiment, and many people hated Barnardo for it. The problem was that taking in boys unconditionally was an affront to the principles of the 1834 New Poor Law.

Barnardo’s boundless ambition brought him into conflict with a fellow missionary, Frederick Charrington. The scion of an immensely wealthy brewing family based in the East End, Charrington had come into missionary work abruptly when one day he saw a drunken man beating his wife outside a Charrington pub from which he had just emerged, as his wife begged him for money to feed their hungry children. From that moment Charrington embraced temperance, renounced his inheritance, and began working among the poor. He saw the Mile End Road as his personal fiefdom, so when Barnardo announced his intention to open a temperance café there, Charrington took umbrage and embarked on a relentless campaign of character assassination. Assisted by an itinerant preacher named George Reynolds (who had until lately been a railway porter), he spread rumors that Barnardo had lied about his background, misrun his homes, slept with his landlady, and deceived the public through false advertising. Barnardo’s homes, he additionally hinted, were outposts of sodomy, drunkenness, blackmail, and other vices of the most depraved sort.

Unfortunately for Barnardo, an uncomfortably large proportion of this was true. Barnardo was something of a liar and made matters worse by responding with clumsy falsehoods now. When it was alleged that he was misrepresenting himself as a doctor—a fairly serious offense under the Medical Act of 1858—Barnardo produced a diploma from a German university, but it was shown almost at once to be a poor forgery. It was also proven that he had faked many before-and-after photographs of children he had rescued, making them look much more destitute than in fact they were. Many of the staged photographs depicted the children in artfully torn clothing that exposed alluring quantities of flesh, which many now interpreted as basely appealing to prurient interests. Even Barnardo’s most faithful supporters found their loyalties strained. Apart from concerns about his character and probity, many worried about his levels of debt. One of the bedrock principles of the Plymouth Brethren was a devotion to thrift, yet Barnardo borrowed freely and repeatedly in order to keep opening more missions.

In the end, Barnardo was found guilty of faking photographs and of claiming wrongly to be a doctor, but exonerated on all the more serious charges. Ironically, life in a Barnardo home was scarcely more attractive than life in the dreaded workhouses. Inmates were roused from bed at 5:30 a.m. and required to work until 6:30 in the evening, with short breaks for meals, prayers, and a little schooling. Evenings were devoted to military drills, classes, and more prayers. Any boy caught trying to escape was placed in solitary confinement. Barnardo didn’t merely recruit children, but snatched them off the streets in a spirit of “philanthropic abduction.” Every year about fifteen hundred of these boys were summarily shipped off to Canada to make room in the homes for more boys.

By the time of his death in 1905, Barnardo had taken in 250,000 children. He left the organization indebted to the tune of £250,000—a colossal sum.

III

We have spoken so far only of poor children, but well-to-do children had torments of their own to endure. These were torments of the sort that many of the starving poor would have been glad to get, to be sure, but they were torments nonetheless. Mostly they involved emotional adjustments and learning to live in a world that was shorn of affection. Almost from the moment of emerging from the womb, middle- and upper-class children in Victorian Britain were expected to be obedient, dutiful, honest, hardworking, stiff-upper-lipped, and emotionally self-contained. An occasional handshake was about as much physical warmth as one could expect after infancy. The typical home of the prosperous classes in Victorian Britain was, in the words of one contemporary, an outpost of “cold, harsh and emphatically inhuman reserve which cuts off anything like that friendly, considerate, sympathetic intercourse which ought to mark every family relation.”

Well-off children often had to endure the hardships of character building. Isabella Beeton’s brother-in-law, Willy Smiles, had eleven children but set out breakfast for only ten, to discourage slowness in arriving at the table. Gwen Raverat, daughter of a Cambridge academic, recalled in later life how she was required to sprinkle her daily porridge with salt, instead of the glistening heaps of sugar her parents enjoyed, and forbidden jam with her bread on the grounds that anything so flavorsome would wreak havoc upon her moral fiber. A contemporary, of similar background, recorded wistfully of the food served to her and her sister through childhood: “We had oranges at Christmas. Marmalade we never saw.”

With the crushing of taste buds came also a curious respect for the character-building powers of fearfulness and dread. Extremely popular were books that prepared young readers for the possibility that death could take them at any moment, and if it didn’t get them it would almost certainly get their momma, papa, or favorite sibling. Such books always stressed how wonderful heaven was (though it seemed also to be a place without jam). The intention ostensibly was to help children not to be frightened of dying, though the effect was almost certainly the opposite.

Other literary works were designed to make sure children understood what a foolish and unforgivable offense it was to disobey an adult. A popular poem, “The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches,” recounted the tale of a little girl who failed to heed her mother’s gentle invocation not to play with matches. As the poem put it:

But Pauline would not take advice,

She lit a match, it was so nice!

It crackled so, it burned so clear,—

Exactly like the picture here

She jumped for joy and ran about,

And was too pleased to put it out.

Now see! Oh see! What a dreadful thing

The fire has caught her apron-string;

Her apron burns, her arms, her hair;

She burns all over, everywhere.

To make sure there was no possibility of misinterpretation, the poem carried a vivid illustration showing a young girl engulfed in a ball of flame, on her face a look of profoundest consternation. The poem concludes:

So she was burnt with all her clothes

And arms and hands, and eyes and nose;

Till she had nothing more to lose

Except her little scarlet shoes;

And nothing else but these was found

Among her ashes on the ground.

“The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches” was one of a series of poems by a German doctor named Heinrich Hoffmann, who wrote them originally as a way of encouraging his own children to follow lives of rigid circumspection. Hoffmann’s books were highly popular and went through many translations (including one by Mark Twain). All followed the same pattern, which was to present children with a temptation difficult to refuse, then show them how irreversibly painful were the consequences of succumbing. Almost no childhood activity escaped the possibility of corrective brutality in Hoffmann’s hands. In another of his poems, “The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb,” a boy named Conrad is warned not to suck his thumbs because it will attract the attention of a ghoulish figure known as the great tall tailor, who always comes “To little boys that suck their thumbs.” The poem continues:

And ere they dream what he’s about

He takes his great sharp scissors out.

And cuts their thumbs clean off—and then

You know, they never grow again.

Alas, Little Suck-a-Thumb ignores the advice and discovers that punishment in Hoffmann’s world is swift and irreversible:

The door flew open, in he ran,

The great red-legged scissor-man

Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come

And caught our little Suck-a-Thumb

Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;

And Conrad cries out—Oh! Oh! Oh!

Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast;

That both his thumbs are off at last.

Mamma comes home; there Conrad stands,

And looks quite sad, and shows his hands.

“Ah!” said Mamma, “I knew he’d come

To naughty little Suck-a-Thumb.”

For older children such poems may have been amusing, but for smaller children they must often have been—as they were intended to be—terrifying, particularly as they were always accompanied by graphic illustrations showing dismayed youngsters irreversibly in flame or spouting blood where useful parts of their body used to be.

Wealthier children were also often left to the mercy of servants and their private, peculiar whims. The future Lord Curzon, growing up as the son of a rector in Derbyshire, was terrorized for years by a semipsychotic governess who tied him in a chair or locked him in a cupboard for hours at a time, ate the desserts from his dinner tray, compelled him to write letters confessing to crimes that he hadn’t committed, and paraded him through the local village wearing a ridiculous smock and a placard around his neck announcing him as a “LIAR,” “THIEF,” or some other shameful condition that he had usually done nothing to merit. The experiences left him so traumatized that he couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone about them until he had grown up. Rather milder, but nonetheless dismaying, was the experience of the future sixth Earl Beauchamp, who was left in the clutches of a governess who was a religious fanatic; she required him to attend seven church services every Sunday and to fill the time between by writing essays about the goodness of God.

For many the ordeals of early childhood were a modest warm-up for the stress of life in private schools. Rarely can hardship have been embraced with greater enthusiasm than in the English private school in the nineteenth century. From the moment of arrival pupils were treated to harsh regimens involving cold baths, frequent canings, and the withholding from the diet of anything that could be remotely described as appetizing. Boys at Radley College, near Oxford, were so systematically starved that they were reduced to digging up flowerbulbs from the school gardens and toasting them over candles in their rooms. At schools where bulbs were not available, the boys simply ate the candles. The novelist Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn, attended a prep school called Fernden that seemed to be singularly devoted to the ideals of sadism. On his first day there, his fingers were thrust into a pot of sulphuric acid to discourage him from biting his nails, and soon afterward he was required to eat the contents of a bowl of semolina pudding into which he had just vomited, an experience that understandably dimmed his enthusiasm for semolina for the rest of his life.

Living conditions at private schools were always grim. Illustrations of school dormitories from the nineteenth century show them as being all but indistinguishable from the equivalent spaces in prisons and workhouses. Dormitories were often so cold that water froze overnight in jugs and bowls. Beds were little more than wooden platforms, often with nothing more for warmth and padding than a couple of rough blankets. Every night at Westminster and Eton some fifty boys were locked in together in vast halls and left without supervision till morning so that the weakest were at the mercy of the strongest. Junior boys sometimes had to rise in the middle of the night to begin polishing boots, drawing water, and engaging in all the other chores required of them before breakfast. It is little wonder that Lewis Carroll said in later life of his schooldays that nothing on Earth would induce him to repeat that experience.

Many boys were flogged daily, some twice a day. Not being flogged at all was a cause for celebration. “This week I did much better at arithmetic and didn’t have the birch once,” one boy wrote home happily from Winchester in the early 1800s. Floggings generally consisted of three to six strokes delivered on the run with a whiplike birch, but occasionally greater violence was done. In 1682, a headmaster at Eton had to resign after killing a boy. A remarkable number of young men developed a taste for the whistle and sting of a spanking—so much so that whipping for pleasure became known as le vice anglais. At least two nineteenth-century prime ministers, Melbourne and Gladstone, were devoted flagellants, and a Mrs. Collet in Covent Garden ran a brothel that specialized in providing sex with a smack.

Above all, offspring were expected to do as they were told, and to continue doing so long after they had reached their majority. Parents reserved to themselves the right to select marriage partners, careers, modes of living, political affiliations, style of dress, and almost any other consideration that could be dictated, and frequently reacted with financial violence when their commands were disregarded. Henry Mayhew, the social reformer, was cut off when he declined to submit to his father’s instructions to become a lawyer. So, too, one after another, were six of his seven brothers. Only the seventh was keen to be a lawyer (or perhaps just keen to have the estate); he dutifully qualified and so inherited the lot. The poet Elizabeth Barrett was disinherited for marrying Robert Browning, who was not only a penniless poet but—the horror of it—the grandson of a publican. Similarly, the horrified parents of Alice Roberts disinherited her when she could not be dissuaded from marrying the indigent son of a Roman Catholic piano tuner. Fortunately for Miss Roberts, the man was the future composer Edward Elgar, and he made her rich anyway.

Sometimes disinheritance was provoked by rather more trivial considerations. The second Lord Townshend, after years of being annoyed by his son’s effeminacy, abruptly struck the hapless fellow from the will when he wandered into the room one day wearing pink ribbons on his shoes. Also much spoken of was the case of the sixth Duke of Somerset, known as “the Proud Duke,” who required his daughters always to stand in his presence and reportedly disinherited one of them when he awoke from a nap and caught the ungrateful wretch sitting.

What is often striking—and indeed depressing—is how freely parents withheld not funds but affections. Elizabeth Barrett and her father were intensely close, but when she declared her intention to marry Robert Browning, Mr. Barrett immediately terminated all contact. He never spoke or wrote to his daughter again, even though her marriage was to a man who was gifted and respectable, and based on the deepest bonds of love. In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War.

So on the face of it, it would seem that Victorians didn’t so much invent childhood as disinvent it. In fact, however, it was more complicated than that. By withholding affection to children when they were young, but also then endeavoring to control their behavior well into adulthood, Victorians were in the very odd position of simultaneously trying to suppress childhood and make it last forever. It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.

Defying a parent was so profoundly unacceptable that most children, even in adulthood, would simply not engage in it. A perfect illustration of this is Charles Darwin. When as a young man Darwin was offered the chance to join the voyage of HMS Beagle he wrote a touching letter to his father explaining precisely why and how desperately he wished to go, but took pains to assure his father that he would withdraw his name from consideration if the idea made his father even briefly “uncomfortable.” Mr. Darwin considered the matter and declared that the idea did make him uncomfortable, so Charles, without a peep of protest, withdrew his name. The idea of Charles Darwin not going on the Beagle voyage is to us unimaginable now. To Darwin, what was unimaginable was disobeying his father.

Of course Darwin did get to go in the end, and a big part of the reason his father relented was an odd but crucial factor in the lives of many upper-class people: marriage within the family. Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin’s sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma’s brother and the Darwin siblings’ joint first cousin. Another of Emma’s brothers, Henry, married not a Darwin but a first cousin from another branch of his own Wedgwood family, adding another strand to the family’s wondrously convoluted genetics. Finally, Charles Langton, who was not related to either family, first married Charlotte Wedgwood, another daughter of Josiah and cousin of Charles, and then upon Charlotte’s death married Darwin’s sister Emily, thus becoming, it seems, his sister-in-law’s sister-in-law’s husband and raising the possibility that any children of the union would be their own first cousins. What all this meant in terms of relationships between nephews, nieces, and the next generation of cousins is very nearly beyond computing.

What it produced, rather unexpectedly, is one of the happiest family groupings of the nineteenth century. Nearly all the Darwins and Wedgwoods seem to have been genuinely fond of one another, which is a very good thing for us, because when Darwin’s father expressed misgivings about the Beagle voyage, Darwin’s uncle Josiah was happy to intercede on his behalf and to have a word with Charles’s father, his cousin Robert. What’s more, Robert was persuaded to change his mind because of his respect and affection for Josiah.

So, thanks to his uncle and a tradition of keeping genes within the family, Charles Darwin did go to sea for the next five years and gathered the facts that allowed him to change the world. And that takes us conveniently, if a little unexpectedly, to the top of the house and the last space we will pass through.

* We can’t be sure that this room in the Old Rectory ever actually was a nursery. It is another of the afterthought rooms not included on Edward Tull’s original plans, so there are no blueprint labels to guide us. But its modest dimensions and position next door to the main bedroom strongly suggest that it was intended as a nursery rather than just an additional bedroom, which raises yet another intriguing and unanswerable question about the bachelor Mr. Marsham’s hopes and intentions.