At Home - Bill Bryson [218]
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