Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [293]
CAPTAIN JACK: Sir! Sir! You amaze me!
ABSOLUTE: Why, what the devil’s the matter with you, fool? Just now you were all gratitude and duty. CAPTAIN JACK: I was, sir—you talked of independence and a fortune, but not a word of a wife!
ABSOLUTE: Why—what difference does that make? Odds life, sir! If you had an estate, you must take it with the live stock on it, as it stands!
CAPTAIN JACK: If my happiness is to be the price, I must beg leave to decline the purchase. Pray, sir, who is the lady? ABSOLUTE: What’s that to you, sir? Come, give me your promise to love, and to marry her directly.
CAPTAIN JACK: Sure, sir, this is not very reasonable…. You must excuse me, sir, if I tell you, once for all, that in this point I cannot obey you….
ABSOLUTE: Sir, I won’t hear a word—not one word! …
CAPTAIN JACK: What, sir, promise to link myself to some mass of ugliness!
ABSOLUTE: Zounds! Sirrah! The lady shall be as ugly as I choose: she shall have a hump on each shoulder; she shall be as crooked as the crescent; her one eye shall roll like the bull’s in Cox’s Museum; she shall have a skin like a mummy, and the beard of a Jew—she shall be all this, sirrah! Yet I will make you ogle her all day, and sit up all night to write sonnets on her beauty.
What does Sheridan suggest about marriage among the upper classes in the eighteenth century? What social, political, and economic considerations were significant in eighteenth-century marriages? Could he be overstating the issue? Why or why not?
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CHILD CARE At the beginning of the eighteenth century, traditional attitudes also prevailed in the care of children. Generally, lower-class women breast-fed their own children because it provided the best nourishment. Moreover, since there were strong taboos in various parts of Europe against sexual intercourse while one was breast-feeding, mothers might also avoid another immediate pregnancy; if the infant died, they could then have another child. Lower-class women, however, also served as wet nurses for children of the aristocratic and upper middle classes. Mothers from these higher social strata considered breast-feeding undignified and hired wet nurses instead. Even urban mothers, the wives of artisans, for economic reasons sent their babies to wet nurses in the countryside if they could, making the practice widespread in the eighteenth century.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, traditional attitudes began to alter, especially in western Europe. The impact of Enlightenment thought, such as Rousseau’s Émile, and the increasing survival of more infants led to new attitudes toward children. Childhood was more and more viewed as a phase in human development. One result was a shift to dressing children in more comfortable clothes appropriate to their age rather than dressing them in clothes modeled after adult styles. Shops for children’s clothes appeared for the first time. Primogeniture, the practice of treating the first son as the favorite, also came under attack. All children, it was argued, deserve their parents’ attention. Appeals for women to breast-feed their own children rather than use wet nurses soon followed. In England, games and toys specifically for children now appeared. The jigsaw puzzle was invented in the 1760s, and books, such as Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), aimed to please as well as teach children. These changes, however, were limited mostly to the upper classes of western European society and did not extend to the peasants. For most Europeans, children were still a source of considerable anxiety. They represented a health risk to the mothers who bore them and more mouths to feed if they survived. In times of economic crisis, children proved such a burden to some families that they resorted to infanticide or abandoned their children at foundling homes.
Despite being punishable by death, infanticide remained a solution