Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [60]
The country-house nursery was of prime importance as the birth and upbringing of a healthy male heir were central to the aristocratic mindset. Thus great efforts were made to ensure that babies were kept safe at a period when infant mortality was high among all classes; the mortality rate among upper-class children did not improve dramatically until the later eighteenth century.77
Hannah Glasse in The Servants Directory takes an unusual view of the nurserymaid’s duties: ‘A child when it comes into the world, is almost a round ball; it is the nurse’s part to assist nature, in bringing it to a proper shape.’78 Nurses often travelled with their charges. Among the Blount family letters is one in 1787 making preparations for a visit by the son and heir with his family. He writes saying that he will be travelling ‘with my wife’s maid, two nursery maids, & two men. The children may all be in the great Room . . . we will bring a little bed & bedding for the youngest . . . & the two maids may sleep in the large bed.’79
Infants would be cared for by a nurse and a nurserymaid, with additional help when required, and would often be breast-fed in their early months by a specially employed wet-nurse. The eighteenth-century beauty, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, famously defied convention and nursed her children herself, dispensing with a wet-nurse, although she did employ a ‘rocker’, literally a menial who rocked the cradle but was also expected to clean up the baby’s mess. The duchess had to dismiss her for drunkenness: ‘I perceived that she made the bed stink of wine and strong drink when she came near it . . . This morning I learnt she had been so drunk as to fall down and vomit.’80
Later on there would be tutors for the boys and governesses for the girls, who would attempt to provide a rounded education, always assuming that the boys were not sent away to school. It was a commonly held belief that private education by a tutor produced a more virtuous child.81 Daniel Defoe, in his book The Compleat English Gentleman (published around 1725), noted that aristocratic mothers were unwilling to let their boys go to school to be taught by a social inferior.82
The daily round of teaching a child was not necessarily unpleasant. In 1705, Lady Grisell Baillie wrote a note to her daughter’s governess on how she should spend her day: ‘To rise by seven o’clock and goe about her duty of reading, etc. etc., and to be drest to come to Breckfast at nine, to play on the spinnet till eleven, from eleven till twelve to write and read French. At two o’clock sow her seam till four, at four learn arithmetic, after that dance and play on the spinet again till six and play [by] herself til supper and to bed at nine.’83
Mary Wollstonecraft spent some time at the end of the eighteenth century as a governess to the children of Viscount and Viscountess Kingsborough at Mitchelstown Castle in Ireland, of which she wrote: ‘I am treated like a gentlewoman but I cannot easily forget my inferior station – and this something betwixt and between is rather awkward – it pushes me forward to notice.’ Much alone, she was thrown back on her own company and thoughts: ‘I commune with my own spirit – and am detached from the world – I have plenty of books.’84
Later in the century, Lady Kildare boldly asked the admired philosopher Rousseau (incidentally himself a former footman) to be her children’s tutor, and when he declined she appointed one William Ogilvie to teach her many children on Rousseau-esque principles, with plenty of freedom and time outdoors. Ogilvie was a mathematician, a classical scholar and a French speaker; perhaps because of his education Lady Kildare was prepared to treat him as a gentleman (although when he was appointed, there was much discussion about whether he was a gentleman or not and should be given wax or tallow candles). He taught Latin verse and grammar, French language and English