The Gentleman's Daughter (20 page)

After the birth, it was the female kin or the father (by his wife's directions) who communicated the good news to their kin and consequently it was to them that the first congratulations were often addressed. When they did eventually take up their pens, genteel mothers expressed their profound relief and thankfulness for God's great mercies. To have safely delivered ‘a fine living child’, endowed with all its ‘Senses Limbs & Faculties’, marked with no disfigurement, was a blessing indeed.
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Genteel women appear to have recognized the traditional lying-in period of about four weeks, as Bessy Ramsden's relief confirms: ‘thank God I had a very good Lying in, for had not an hour's illness the whole month and my Littel Boy as well as myself.’ However, the post-natal period was still seen as a period of risk to the mother as well as the baby, unsurprisingly given the significant dangers of puerperal fever, haemorrhage, thrombosis and, perhaps above all, milk-fever – given the traditional habit of keeping the baby from the breast until the flow of colostrum had ceased. So ardent prayers were offered for a safe recovery
and remedies exchanged to prevent hardness or soreness in the breasts and looseness in the bowels.
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Yet, if the mother was relatively well and the baby thriving, this was a period of pleasurable recuperation and polite celebration. There is no indication of post-partum disappointment if the babe was not a son and heir; indeed the only positive preference which surfaces in genteel correspondence is for girls, although this may be because most of the matrons studied here had plenty of boys.
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Presents were received for the new-born, godparents were sought to stand as sponsors at the christening and names were chosen; more often that not being family names, ‘shewing the respect that's due’.
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Bessy Ramsden gave small parties for her gossips to drink the spicy potion caudle. In fact, this was such a customary accompaniment of labour and lying-in, that ‘giving caudle’ served as a euphemism in the Ramsden letters for giving birth. For Bessy Ramsden, and doubtless for other successful mothers, lying-in was a well-earned excuse to leave off domestic duties and enjoy the fruits of their labour. William Ramsden's letters reveal his sunny spouse basking in bustling attention:

What remains unclear is the stages by which elite women emerged from the lying-in chamber, and whether they observed the traditional sequence of first lying prone in bed, sitting up in bed after one week, moving around the chamber after two, keeping to the house after three, and finally after four or five weeks emerging for the ritual purification and thanksgiving of churching.
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For genteel matrons, no absolute ban on mixed-sex sociability or leaving the house is detectable, although female kin recommended that ‘the good woman in the straw’ keep warm, take care, limit company and late nights, and avoid larking and jaunting about. In the 1750s Elizabeth Parker received many cautions from Aunt Pellet: ‘As this month is the most precarious, she begs Mrs Parker will be very careful of taking cold & desires her not to be too venturesome.’ By the 1760s and 1770s Elizabeth Parker was offering exactly the same advice to Bessy Ramsden, as William's acknowledgement reveals: ‘Thank you for all … your most
friendly Cautions against catching Cold &c tis the very Doctrine that has been preached to us by all the Matrons of [Charterhouse] & cannot therefore fail, I hope of being put into Practice.’
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Understandably, rates of recovery of strength and spirits varied from woman to woman. After the traumatic birth and death of her infant son in 1757, Barbara Parker lay near death herself and had mourning to add to the tedium of convalescence. In the same decade Jane Scrimshire endured ‘low spirits’ for at least four months after birth and commiserated with Elizabeth Parker who suffered for six. By contrast, the fortunate Bessy Ramsden enjoyed miraculous recoveries in both 1764 and 1768, boasting not half an hour's sickness in either case. The Mancunian Bertha Starkie got ‘pure well’ after the birth of her first baby in 1769, yet her sister still hoped ‘she won't breed till she [has] got a little more Strength’. The Liverpudlian Elizabeth Addison regained her health and figure very quickly after her confinement in 1816, but admitted ‘my nervous head will not allow me to take very great liberties with it’. Ellen Stock left Wigan in June 1815 to convalesce in Southport but ‘laboured under so great a depression of spirits that my recovery was slow’. In 1824 Ellen Parker's confinement almost killed her and she took six months to recuperate in Selby, during which time four of her brood were farmed out to their great-aunts in Colne.
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The possibility of post-natal melancholy was widely recognized and the experience of it acknowledged by the sufferers. It is estimated today that between 50 and 80 per cent of mothers will suffer a fleeting bout of ‘the blues’ shortly after birth, between 7 and 30 per cent will endure a more prolonged post-natal depression and a blighted 0.1–0.2 per cent will be assailed by puerperal psychosis.
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However, low spirits were by no means inevitable; biological experience could bear quite differently on different women despite their shared cultural assumptions and similar background.

Moreover, the rate of recovery both physical and emotional also varied for individual women from confinement to confinement. In 1749 Anne Stanhope's post-partum sufferings put her family to ‘a great deal of concern’. The doctor was called in and she was bled repeatedly, but fortunately her husband the Leeds merchant Walter Stanhope was able to report ‘in all our hurry abot its Mama, we have had no care, nor trouble’ with the baby. A later birth was much less physically damaging to the mother. In March 1753 Stanhope was thankful that ‘never any body coud have a more easy & speedy delivery, than she had’. Catastrophically, however, the infant began to fail within days of birth and to compound the family's distress, the elder boy Watty was seized with ‘convulsion fits’ heralding the onset of smallpox. A wretched Walter Stanhope feared his
wife was ‘not recovered enough to bear such a shock’. However, by April 1753 he was able to report ‘your sister has been low this day or two’, in the sombre aftermath of the baby's funeral, but ‘in other ways she is [purely] recovered’. Conversely, in 1783 Betty Parker of Alkincoats was less well after the birth of her second child than after the first because ‘her labour was rather more severe than before’. Her doctor gave strict instructions to keep her quiet and cool which he hoped would ‘abate the fever and danger that usually ensue’. Uncharacteristically, the widowed Anne Robbins retrieved her wits and strength very shortly after her fifth delivery in 1814 and, unusually for her, was able to name her daughter almost immediately. Still grieving for her barrister husband, however, her spirits took months to revive.
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Even for seasoned matrons the aftermath of birth remained hard to predict.

Once safely delivered, the neonate had to be sustained. Well before the birth elite women had decided whether they themselves would breast-feed the baby, and depending upon that decision had hired a nursery maid or found a wet-nurse. Such decisions have assumed a totemic role in many accounts of eighteenth-century motherhood. Somewhat perversely, Stone and Trumbach have both used the incidence of maternal breast-feeding as an index of blooming mother love in the period, by implication indicting all those apparently unloving mothers who bottle-feed today.
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Growing expectations that the ideal mother would breast-feed her own babies have been routinely remarked throughout the period 1600–1850, but whether a precise chronology can be constructed on the basis of propaganda is questionable. However, rigorous study by Valerie Fildes of all the available options verifies that the national trend over the period was one of increasing dissatisfaction with the alternatives to mother's own breast-milk.
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What this meant for practice at the local level at any particular point in time is another matter. While acknowledging the direction of change, Judith Lewis finds a striking diversity in infant feeding among the fifty noblewomen at the heart of her study. Despite an increase in maternal breast-feeding from 1760 to 1850, no single custom prevailed.
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What a national increase in maternal breast-feeding says about the complexities of maternal emotion for individuals also remains obscure. In fact, when eighteenth-century ideologues urged the ‘natural duty’ of breast-feeding, their principal lure was that the practice was beneficial to the mother's health.
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The exact meaning of breast-feeding to a nursing mother or concerned father awaits further research.

In the genteel families studied here, discussion of feeding decisions is confined to the letters women exchanged with women. Paternal preferences seem all but irrelevant. Yet the issue was undoubtedly charged with
emotion. Jane Scrimshire betrayed an anxious need to be confirmed in her own decisions when she told Elizabeth Parker ‘I sho'd be glad to know whether you intend the Little one to suck or not I Hope you do’, and repeatedly asked ‘you have never said whether he suck'd or not Pray let me know your next’.
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The female decisions recorded here roughly correspond with a decline in wet-nursing, but the revealed trend is by no means decisive. In the 1730s in York Anne Gossip breast-fed her babies. In the 1740s in Leeds Anne Stanhope employed a ‘thorough, healthy good natured girl’ to serve as a live-in wet-nurse, as did Elizabeth Parker in Colne in the 1750s. Jane Scrimshire also opted for a wet-nurse in this decade, but sent her babies out of Pontefract to be suckled.
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In the 1760s the Londoner Bessy Ramsden breast-fed all her babies herself. In the 1780s Betty Parker's first-born was ‘obliged to be brought up by the spoon as his mother has not Milk for him’, provoking the grandmother's disapproval: ‘God bless him he has already experienced his Disappointments what a pitty he co'd not have the breast.’ However, she had the grace to concede ‘his uncle name sake was brought up by hand & he is no Skeleton’.
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In the 1810s Ellen Weeton had to abandon breast-feeding through illness and employ a live-in nurse. Elizabeth Addison suckled her babies, while the widowed Anne Robbins found relief and consolation in being a successful nurse. This is not to imply that between the 1730s and the 1820s women made a simple, once and for all choice between wet-nursing, artificial feeding and the breast, swayed only by contemporary medical opinion. As three of the preceding examples suggest, by no means all women were able to breast-feed, whatever their convictions.

The earliest account of the suckling and weaning of babies is that of Jane Scrimshire, who left a nursing record for the two youngest of her three children, Jenny, Tommy and Deborah. Born 19 June 1753, Tom Scrimshire was nursed away from home. He came back for at least two visits; his mother received regular reports and recorded her satisfaction. Tom was put into short coats in December 1753, he cut his first tooth in February 1754, and at nine months his mother began ‘to think of Weaning in about a Months time as the Learned say they shod never suck Less than half a year, not beyond a Whole year’. In September 1754, at fifteen months, he returned to the family for good. Deborah Scrimshire, however, was nursed away for a mere five months. Born in May 1756, when she came home for a visit in November her mother was loath to part with her, whatever the opinion of the learned. ‘Debby has been at Home these two months’ wrote Jane in January 1757, ‘her Pappa says nothing about her Going, so I shall not. She has got two teeth …’ It appears that the babe was promptly weaned, but the wet-nurse was subsequently hired as
nursery maid.
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It should go without saying that the mere fact of wet-nursing is no proof in itself of maternal indifference or callous neglect.

Bessy Ramsden nursed her four children, Billy, Betsy, Tommy and Dick herself. ‘As I am a nurse,’ she reported in 1768, ‘I take great care of myself and drink porter like any fishwoman.’ But breast-feeding was not without its difficulties and side effects. Dame Bessy suffered headaches, loss of concentration and diminishing sight all of which she attributed to nursing, yet she was determined to persevere: ‘I have been almost Blind & am still dim sighted. It tis Thought that suckeling is the occasion of it, but I don't care to give a hearing to that subject, as my littel Tommy shall not Loose his comfort, Tho' his Mama's peepers suffer for it.’ Nevertheless, Bessy Ramsden was evidently conversant with the positive benefits of her practice: