by W. Blanchard Jerrold.
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.1 #3 (Jan 1867).
"Miss Florence Cope at table!" How many readers remember the happy chubby face, the cloth and pinafore of dazzling whiteness, the silver drinking-mug, and the dimpled hands ready to grasp the little spoon and fork? Autumn has laid his "fiery fingers" on the leaves many times since that sweet picture of bright childhood made a pleasant corner in a Royal Academy exhibition. I am sure it must have lingered in the memory of many a proud and fortunate mother. It came back to my mind with peculiar force one day in the autumn of 1865, in the West Derby Union at Liverpool. I was examining the various wards and departments of that admirably-managed house (I am not sure that it is not the best-managed in England), when a pauper nurse came in, carrying in her arms a plump blue-eyed boy about a year old, who shone after his first workhouse washing, and had just been fitted with workhouse clothes. He had that noble, that brave look you see in English baby-boys. It was hardly possible to believe that he was a little pauper, who was presently to sport a muffin-cap. He was so completely unlike the rest of the children in the house, and his calm earnest eyes were so eloquent, that I thought often of the little fellow afterwards, deeming him worthy of making a companion picture to "Florence Cope at table." I heard that his father and mother had died of cholera, and had left him, with brothers and sisters, to the parish. How is his table spread? There is no silver mug upon it, nor glistening damask; nor are there mother's eyes stealing over his shoulder, to teach him the proper handling of spoon and fork, and rejoice over his hearty appetite. Heavy and wearily the years must pass over his young head; and he must get through the fagging and the sad routine of childhood in a workhouse. He will know a master—let us pray that he may be a kind one—but no voice of close sympathy, no flesh of his flesh, against which little hearts are prone to warm themselves. The cholera has plucked all the flowers from the garden of his childhood, and has laid waste his prospect. He had no more to do with the tremendous misfortune that burst over him while he was crowing in his cradle than Miss Florence Cope's dimpled fingers had to do with the fashioning of her silver mug.
I do not know where a heart-ache may be got so easily as among workhouse children—children marshalled and drilled, and made so tame and patient, that they all look of one family—a dismal family, without nursery-songs or playthings. Take the workhouse boy or the Feltham boy, and try to get at his real nature. You will find him cunning, packed full of rules and regulations, knowing about the dietary scale; but it is impossible to say how utterly unlike a natural home-reared boy. A hard sad childhood indeed is that of the pauper, or of the inhabitant of a juvenile reformatory—perhaps the saddest, if not the hardest of any. Hard and sad as it is, however, it is protected against the temptations and pitiless accidents of the streets. The creature is saved the pang of hunger; the night under the dark archway, or upon the door-step; the bare-foot tramping; the drunken father; the bare board on a winter's night; and the low fellowship of "sneaks" and "wires." The lack of home influences is sad, and tells disadvantageously on the workhouse or the reformatory child; but the workhouse and the reformatory are the best substitutes society has yet been able to find for the natural home of children. It is true that we have orphan asylums by the score; that the forms of private charity by which the English heart expresses its sympathy for the sorrows of the children of the poor are various. Every trade, every profession has its charity, that covers the helpless heads of children. It is surely cheering to remember on these wintry days, under these gray skies, and in this sharp damp cold of ours, that thousands of innocent heads are roofed, that thousands of little mouths are filled, that thousands of tender limbs are clothed amply, by the sweet warm hand of Charity! We may and do differ among ourselves as to the forms which charity towards the young should take.
Some among us lament over the vast sums of money that go to the architect instead of the orphan; and they hold palatial orphan asylums to be a mistake. We think it a pity not to find a new, humble, and virtuous home for the helpless orphan, rather than a cheerless bed in a ward—even in the most exquisitely-ventilated of wards. We cannot help glancing a little jealously across the Channel, to watch the way in which the gentle Eugénie does her work of charity towards the orphan. She rears no monumental pile to cover the heads of her helpless ones. Her protégés have neither park nor palace. Simple as bon jour is her plan. She takes the orphan by the hand, and finds a new home for it suited to its degree. The child enters some well-regulated workman's family, to be a help rather than a burden there. It finds new parents; and becomes one of the family, under the protection of the Imperial Orphelinât. In this way the broken home, where vice and want were the presiding spirits, is exchanged for a home of comfort, where good manners reign. This is the way in which orphan and deserted children are cared for among our neighbours. The Assistance Publique authorities never crowd pauper children together: they have a wiser pity for the helpless babe—born to nothing. They send it forth to the labourer's cottage, to grow as his children grow, and to become an honest tiller of the soil. They put no mark of shame upon the little one; they leave it the spirit natural to its age. Pauper-born, they will not cast it among paupers, dull of brain and craven of spirit, to grow up as dull as their caretakers.
Without pausing to decide which is the cheaper method of the two, we may confidently receive the French system as the more humane and rational. With the large sums of money which we expend in splendid temples of charity, our neighbours, with their simple idea of finding a new home for the helpless orphan, would have given comfort, in the best, the most humanising shape, to double the number of little ones we have been able to provide for. Wiser than us in one direction, they are more culpable in another. Paris mothers let their children die by thousands. Wet-nursing has become in the departments round about the French capital an important trade. It has come to this, that only the absolutely poor nurse their own offspring. Every mother who can afford it goes to the bureau to hire a wet-nurse, as she goes to hire any other servant; and she sends away her babe in the care of a stranger, and thereby doubles the chances of its death. The trade is so brisk in nurslings, that the competing offices bribe the doctors by giving them ten or twenty francs for every baby customer they send. The wet-nurses troop from the country to Paris, and carry off the infant or infants for which they have contracted, as a needlewoman carries work home.
Terrible are the stories of the fate many of the poor little creatures suffer. Much foul play is practised upon them. Their baby-lips tell no tales. The changelings are many. When a mother can send her new-born child 20, 30, or 100 leagues away, in the care of a dull, ignorant, immoral country wench, to save herself that trouble which women have been taught to hold the sweetest pleasure and most honourable office of their lives, she cannot be very nice about its treatment. It has come to this pass in Paris, that a certain number of good-hearted gentlemen have deemed it necessary to establish a society for the protection of—not animals, but babies. They based the necessity for such a society on the frightful mortality among the infants sent by Parisian mothers to be nursed in the metropolitan departments. A newly-born child is swaddled, thrust into the arms of a country wench, and sent sixty or a hundred miles off into some poor village. Two or three months afterwards, the mother receives a letter to say that the little stranger—a little stranger indeed!—is dead; and here is an end of the matter. The nurse has room for another little customer; and so, in certain departments, we are told, wet-nurses put by a dot for their wedding-day! M. Sauvestre, who has written on the many dangers which beset the Paris babies put out to nurse, gives an illustrative anecdote.
A diligence had drawn up at a village inn, and the guard was hastily carrying the luggage of the passengers who stopped there from the vehicle to the inn parlour, in a drenching shower of rain. A mound of heavy packages was being piled upon the table in the room. In the midst of the passengers who had alighted was a woman in a rough cloak. Passing through the inn parlour, she had cast a parcel upon the table by the other luggage. A slight movement of the upper part of this package attracted M. Sauvestre's attention. On approaching, he saw that a little living creature was packed in a pillow. While he was looking at this strange parcel, the guard returned into the room loaded with an enormous box. He was on the point of casting it from his shoulders upon the pillow, when M. Sauvestre roared out to him, and was just in time to prevent a baby from being crushed to death. The parcel was undone, and the baby was in the arms of the landlady when the wet-nurse returned. "She was not much concerned to hear," adds M. Sauvestre, "that her little charge had just escaped a horrible death; but she packed it up again, and went away grumbling at its inconvenient weight."
No wonder, then, that Paris should have a Society for the Protection of Babies, and that M. Armand Husson, the humane and intelligent director of the Assistance Publique, should have decided on the formation of four model wet-nursing establishments in the neighbourhood of the capital. So general and serious is the neglect of the first of maternal duties in Paris, that it is set forth as one of the great causes which keep down the population of France. It seems that Paris wives have yet to learn that the mother is the model wet-nurse. If we have not systematised child-murder like this established among us, we have at any rate destroying agents enough. In our great cities, where the poor are massed in dismal fetid townships, there are hapless mothers, to be counted by the thousands, who, nursing their babes, destroy them. The infant mortality among the poor working populations of London and Liverpool, of Glasgow and Dublin, and other centres of dense population, is appalling. The underfed mothers cannot give that which they have not. Living on a crust and a cup of weak tea, they cannot yield generous nutriment to their children. The accounts which were published at the time when the crèches of Paris were first imported into London, descriptive of the condition of the young among the poor working population of the metropolis, were heart-rending. I remember that, being engaged in the advocacy of day nurseries in every centre of industry, I lighted upon facts concerning the treatment of infants in factory towns, as well as in London, that led me to wonder how it was that one child in ten survived its infancy and reached even an enfeebled and early-doomed manhood.
The primary evil—the first attack upon the child's life among the labouring poor—comes in the shape of bad food, that is, of improper, deficiently-nutritive food. .Dr. Joseph Brown, in his letter to Mr. Henry Fenwick, M.P., on the "Food of the People," deliberately asserts, after having given the closest attention to the subject, that "the plague-spot, the skeleton in the closet of England, is that her people are under-fed." By the people he means the "strictly labouring class and their families." He speaks after long experience in Sunderland and South Shields, and tells us that the power of Englishwomen to nurse their offspring is diminishing. Hyper-lactation is on the increase. When Dr. Smith reported to the Privy Council on the minimum quantity of food on which human life could possibly be expected to subsist, he found in the cotton towns that only in one of the examined classes of in-door operatives did the estimated standard of nitrogenous food exceed bare sufficiency. Dr. Brown insists that the mass of the people are under-fed. Deficient nourishment absolutely kills more than 50,000 babes every year. Take the following startling contrast, as quoted by the Doctor: " The obituary records of the Society of Friends supply us with most valuable data to determine how greatly the average death-rate of children might be reduced, could they generally but have careful and judicious nursing. It is to this advantage, and no other, that we find out of 936 deaths at all ages, which occurred in the Society of Friends in the three years ending in 1862, only 101 of that number died under five years of age. Were the deaths of children, then, in society generally at the same rate as amongst Friends, 54,000 lives annually would be saved. Whence, then, this enormous excess of deaths at the younger ages?"
Quaker babies are sufficiently nourished, and are well cared for in every respect. Among the Quakers the mortality is 9¼ per cent; while in Sunderland and South Shields it is more than 40 per cent. This difference measures the exact difference between the Quaker's table and the table of the labouring poor. There is enough, and always enough, at the Quaker board; and there is not always a crust, while there is seldom much more than a crust, for the poor labourer's children. Faint with hunger, or at best sustained on bad food, the child that will cling to life poises itself weakly upon soft, ill-formed unsteady bones. Tubercles form in the lungs, the glands of the neck swell. Dr. Brown sums the result up rapidly, and tells us that "a poor creature" is produced. The poor creature is poor in brain as in bone; his inheritance is a rickety case for a rickety mind. Poverty weakens the moral as well as the physical man. Deficient nutriment plants moral disease in the poor under-fed child. Dr. Brown wants to see the butcher and baker abroad arm-in-arm with the schoolmaster.
Whether the physical condition of England at the present time tends to confirm the propositions of Malthus, that population when unchecked increases in a geometrical ratio, while subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio—is an argument that cannot be discussed within the limits of this paper. England may be suffering from unchecked population and checked production or checked trade. For thirty-one years our legislators, while they left the increase of population unchecked (having no power to check it), checked the food-supplies of the people. Dr. Brown presents the feeble adult working population which is now under-fed, and is rearing sickly under-fed children, as the inheritance which the Protectionists have left to their country. He states that the progenies vitiosior of to-day is the product of protection. But cheap bread—the big loaf—is now laid upon the labourer's board, the baffled Protectionists answer; and see, the children are as sickly as their sires; the infant mortality is fearful still; the babes and sucklings whine for food, and cannot make bone and muscle; and hyper-lactation is on the increase among the women of the labouring classes! Our worthy Doctor admits all this, and answers that "man liveth not by bread alone." He says, "If we look around us, we discern the high price of all agricultural produce—corn and potatoes alone excepted; milk, the beef of infancy, is dear; cheese is dear; whilst beef, mutton, and pork are at a price which makes it a matter of certainty that only in homœopathic doses can any of these luxuries reach the stomach of the father or mother of a family of the labouring class." Here is the vice in our economy which is at the root of all the physical evil which the working classes suffer, from their sickly cradle to their premature grave. The food which supplies the carbon, which fills up the heat-waste of the body, has been made plentiful by the beneficent operation of free-trade. We have got coal in plenty now for the human engine; but this is not enough. The engine falls out of repair; the engine wears away. The detritus must be replaced with new fibre. It is this fibre—this nitrogenous. part of food—which is almost at famine prices. The poor rickety child may be stuffed to the throat with cheap bread daily, and he will not thrive. It will fatten him and work his lungs, but it, will give him little muscular tissue; it will give him no sound bone. A little bone and tissue it does contain, but not enough for his purpose. Milk and bread would give all his animal economy requires—caseine and bone-earth as well as heat.
Consider the predicament of the poor man's child. The first food he draws in starts him on a journey of feebleness and disease; for it is deficient in the elements his frame demands for its growth and for the repair of its waste. Milk—of which in many parts of England the agricultural labourer can hardly get a drop for his children—is so thoroughly adapted to the human economy as food, that strong men will work and keep up admirable health on oatmeal porridge and skimmed milk. A Northumberland farmer told Dr. Brown that his Irish reapers took oatmeal porridge and skimmed milk for breakfast and supper, and table-beer and bread for dinner; and that on this meatless diet they flourished exceedingly, and were content. The oatmeal and bread were at once heat-imparting and nutritive; the beer was valuable for the gluten of the barley and the slight alcoholic stimulant; while the skimmed milk furnished them with the precious repairer—caseine. Milk is beneficial to a greater degree perhaps than any other kind of food to the human being at every stage of life. But it is inaccessible to the labourer's family whether in town or country, except in the smallest quantities. The poor family's comfort is tea; which supplies a gentle stimulus, and contains a little nitrogen. Sugar is cheap; but then sugar is carbon. You see how hard the case of the poor is. Dr. Brown estimates that a single pound of beef daily in the family of a labouring man would absorb one-fourth of the entire income of that family. Moreover, the labouring man being the hard worker—the creature in the group making the most daily waste of bone and tissue—must needs have a much larger share of the bone and tissue-giving food than any other member of the family. Hence the wife and the children are necessarily less well-fed than the head of the family; and the weakness of the insufficiently-fed mother enfeebles and lays the root of disease in the baby. If the labouring poor of London had not fish to fall back upon, I cannot tell what would become of them. The coarse skate, in which they delight, is delicious to them, because it contains, in a higher degree than any other fish in the market, the nutritious principle—the fibrine which their system craves. Take the three fishes which form so great a part of the occasional luxury of the poor labourer's board, namely, skate, herring, and haddock—the three cheapest fishes—the "offal" of Billingsgate; they are the three which are most highly charged with the nutritive principle. Fried or baked with fat, any of these fish will take the place satisfactorily of butcher's meat. Here, again, is a poor housewife's difficulty: the fat is dear. Dr. Brown suggests the cooking of this cheap fish with bacon—the cheapest form of fat. The suggestion calls to his mind—as every suggestion of a change in the cookery of the poor must call to the mind of the suggestor who has had anything to do with the poor—the wasteful cookery of the labourer's wife, and her obstinate refusal to amend it.
Biding patiently as we may the good time when a knowledge of the economic use of every description of food and clothing shall have spread comparative comfort over the tens of thousands of our countrymen and country-women who now hunger at the bare board and shiver before the empty grate, may we not each of us in his degree, and to the extent of his means, be of some comfort at this time of the year, at least to the little ones who are out in the cold and faint with hunger from no fault of theirs? The children of the rich are coming home for the holidays with firm and rosy cheeks, and with the happy promises of the time sparkling in their eyes. The bazaars are filling with toys. Will it do any harm—will it mar the brightness of Christmas to remember that while there are our children, who delight over and play with toys, with cheeks as red as the holly-berries,—there are children heavy-eyed and lean-fingered—weary children, doomed almost to earn the crust with which they cut their baby teeth—who are makers of these toys, in miserable places,—that there are Jenny Wrens, and more unfortunate doll-dressers, and saddlers of wooden horses? Live where you may, in London, or in country town, or in rural district, you cannot have far to seek little ones to whom ENOUGH AT TABLE on Christmas-day shall be a splendid and an extraordinary feast. Little feet will patter, baby throats will crow over the wondrous bounty of plain roast or boiled ; the pudding will appear a mighty gift sent direct from Heaven. For one day the children of the poor will be comforted with the food that is needful to their growth and health, if only each comfortable creature will, as an offering of thanks for his enjoyments, see that some poor little ones round about him have at least what he deems the common necessaries, but which are to them the luxuries of life.
Biding the good time, I repeat, when every hard workman shall be able to command enough wholesome food for wife and children, bear we in mind this Christmas season, that the happy time has not yet come, and that there are little ones who, while our children yearn for toys, cry for food. Let none of us forget these innocent sufferers, nor approach them empty-handed. It goes hard with the poor mothers and the over-worked bread-winners—
"But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly;
They are weeping in the play-time of the others,
In the country of the free."