Children who had once had trouble with fits, or with their teething (and, given these symptoms, all babies did: has anyone ever had a baby who did not at some stage suffer from ‘disturbed sleep’ or ‘fretfulness’?), would shortly have problems caused by the purgatives and opium that had been administered to treat them, starting off a fresh round of medication. Mrs Pedley again tried to calm fears, pointing out that nurses often said children were subject to fits when what they meant was that they had a twitch, or they blinked frequently, or moved their arms and legs after feeding (which she attributed to flatulence).47
Although teething seems a bizarre worry from our perspective, nineteenth-century parents had many more real anxieties than their descendants: by the time they reached the age of five, 35 out of every 45 children had had either smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, typhus or enteric fever (or a combination), all of which could kill.48 Lesser illnesses, such as chickenpox and mumps, were also more dangerous than today, because of the drugs given to treat them. So much of what we take for granted was simply not available, or only barely. A great deal of progress had been made by mid-century: the stethoscope, the thermometer and the percussive technique for listening to the patient’s chest had all been developed; the smallpox vaccine was routinely urged on all parents. Yet what was available and what was commonly used were not necessarily the same thing. Louise Creighton, as late as the early 1880s, was misled when her son complained only mildly of feeling ill: she therefore did nothing for some time. When she finally sent for the doctor, the child was found to have fluid on his lungs; she said later that ‘had I then known the use of the clinical thermometer, which was not yet considered even a desirable instrument … for any mother to use’, she would have recognized the gravity of the illness earlier.49
Even something as basic as a hot-water bottle, to keep a sick child warm, was not easily obtainable. ‘Bottles’ were generally made of stone, and corked at the top. Wriggly fretful children had a nasty tendency to kick the corks out, sending scalding water gushing over themselves. ‘Gutta-percha’ bags were available by mid-century, but they were expensive, and so only for the rich.* The most common method was to heat sand in a pan over the kitchen range and fill cloth bags with it.50
The best solution to illness was to prevent it, all agreed. All also agreed on how this was to be done: a child should lead an orderly, well-regulated daily life, simple in every element. Meals were to be plain and ‘wholesome’ – a wonderful word embodying not only basic nutrition, but also a moral element. In this moral universe food was a danger as well as a benefit: books warned against children being given specific foods – usually strong-tasting ones (especially for girls: such foods were thought to arouse passion, and were troublesome during puberty in particular), though vegetables and fruits could be equally hazardous. It was notable that expensive foods, or ones that tasted good enough to be consumed from desire rather than hunger, were often considered the most unwholesome. Mrs Beeton was not alone in warning of the dangers of fresh bread. Day-old bread was infinitely to be preferred, while ‘Hot rolls, swimming in melted butter … ought to be carefully shunned’ – especially by children, who were to have the most restricted diets. She recommended that suet pastry be made with 5 oz of suet for every pound of flour – although a scant 4 oz would ‘answer very well for children’. Another of her puddings was made with eggs and brandy – unless it was intended for children, when ‘the addition of the latter ingredients will be found quite superfluous’.51 Meat was the basis of children’s diet, as it was of that of their elders, for, as Mrs Pedley noted, ‘The highest form of diet is animal food. It appears that children who, at a befitting age, are judiciously fed on meat, attain a higher standard of moral and intellectual ability than those who live on a different class of food.’52
Breakfast for children in prosperous middle-class houses was almost as Spartan as it was for their lower-middle-class coevals. Gwen Raverat, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and the daughter of a Cambridge don, throughout her childhood ate toast and butter, and porridge with salt. Twice a week the toast was ‘spread with a thin layer of that dangerous luxury, Jam. But, of course, not butter, too. Butter and Jam on the same bit of bread would have been unheard-of indulgence – a disgraceful orgy.’ She first tasted bacon when she was ten years old and away from home on a visit.53 Louise Creighton first tasted marmalade and jam only after her marriage, when she was in her twenties.54 Compton Mackenzie, the novelist, had a similar prospect in his childhood:
Nor did the diet my old nurse believed to be good for children encourage biliousness, bread and heavily watered milk alternating with porridge and heavily watered milk. Eggs were rigorously forbidden, and the top of one’s father’s or mother’s boiled egg in which we were indulged when we were with them exceeded in luxurious tastiness any caviar or pate de foie gras of the future. No jam was allowed except raspberry and currant, and that was spread so thinly that it seemed merely to add sweetish seeds to the bread.55
The bread and milk (or bread and milk and water) eaten by most lower-middle-class children was not substantially different from this upper-middle-class fare.
Mackenzie was a more rebellious child than Raverat or Creighton, and one day
I thought of a way to exasperate Nanny by telling her that I preferred my bread without butter. I was tired of the way she always transformed butter into scrape, of the way in which, if a dab of butter was happily caught in one of the holes of a slice of … bread … she would excavate it with the knife and turn it into another bit of scrape. I was tired of the way she would mutter that too much butter was not good for me and, as it seemed to me, obviously enjoyed depriving me of it. If I told her that I preferred my bread without butter she would be deprived the pleasure of depriving me.56
No doubt his going without butter was a worry – he was removing the possibility of a lesson in the moral values implicit in food.
Morality was at the heart of home education. When Marianne Gaskell came back from her school in London, her mother was well pleased with what she had learned there: ‘It is delightful to see what good it had done [Marianne], sending her to school … She is such a “law unto herself” now, such a sense of duty, and obeys her sense. For instance, she invariably gave the little ones 2 hours of patient steady teaching in the holidays. If there was to be any long excursion for the day she got up earlier, that was all; & they did too, influenced by her example.’57 The merit of her schooling was not the knowledge she had acquired, but that she had become dutiful.
Most children, boys and girls, were initially taught at home by their mothers. This might begin at a young age, although Mrs Gaskell was concerned not to start Marianne’s schooling too early – ‘We heard the opinion of a medical man latterly, who said that till the age of three years or thereabouts, the brain of an infant appeared constantly to be verging on inflammation, which any little excess of excitement might produce’ – so she waited until after the child’s second birthday. By her third birthday Marianne had begun to read and sew, ‘and makes pretty good progress … I am glad of something that will occupy her, for I have some difficulty in finding her occupation, and she does not set herself to any employment’.58 The expectation