4. The birth family

On 8 April 1787, when Rebekah Bateman was around three months pregnant with her first child, she compiled a list of her personal possessions. Underneath the list she wrote:

Should it please God to take away my life as all these things & are with him & we know not when our time is to his time I submit – but in case I am call’d away in giving birth to another then it is my desire that such things as are here before specified be given to my Mother & Sister – Sarah & Elizabeth Clegg for their use unless I should leave behind a female child, then I would wish them to keep them in their hands for her use & to dispose of them when & how they shall think proper.1

This expression of her wishes was found among many letters that Rebekah sent to her husband, Thomas Bateman. While it is not directly addressed to him, it is likely that it was either given to him for safekeeping or placed with his papers for him to find should she die while giving birth.

Rebekah’s will links three key figures in many women’s experiences of childbirth: her husband, her mother and her sister. Throughout this chapter I shall refer to them as the ‘birth family’. These three family members featured prominently in the practicalities of eighteenth-century birth and infant care. This chapter explores the importance of these close family relationships in providing practical advice and support, and in creating and sharing in the heightened emotional environment of birthing. It examines the practical and social benefits of the presence of the birth family during birthing, and contends that they formed key points in the networks of trust, information and knowledge that were crucial in the effective management of birth within the household. Husbands, mothers and sisters were given elevated status within these networks, based on the assumption of a deep emotional connection to the birthing woman and her infant. This connection was further deepened by the affective environment of the birthroom and the specific practices that were performed within the physical and emotional spaces of the household.

The second half of the eighteenth century was a period of social, cultural and political transition. Having been an important building block of early modern society, the eighteenth-century family, perhaps unsurprisingly, underwent a number of significant changes in this period. Central to these, it has been suggested, was the shift from the patriarchal family structures of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the paternalism of the nineteenth century.2 This shift was entangled in the cultures of sensibility that were so important to the middling sorts of this period. Changing ideas about ‘good parenting’, as Joanne Begiato has shown, were grounded in notions of benign family governance, particularly where fathers were concerned.3 The good father of the later eighteenth century practised good household economy, managing both the economic and moral resources of the family carefully.4 His natural affection for his wife and children led him to use kindness, distraction and persuasion to govern his household in the expectation that his tenderness would be repaid with the obedience and love of a dutiful child.5 The birth family presented here complicates this history of parenting and of the family more broadly. First, as we shall see, birthing highlighted family structures that were far messier and less stable than the nuclear unit of Victorian domesticity. The birth family drew together key relatives to create a temporary and transient family configuration that, for the duration of birthing, superseded the usual family structures. Extensive scholarship has highlighted the multiplicity of ways in which family was understood during the eighteenth century.6 Notions of family and household encompassed parents and children, servants and masters, grandparents, siblings and lodgers.7 Interactions between individual members of the household, the practicalities of shared living space, kinship networks and familial obligations contributed to a fluid, shifting sense of how family and the relationships between family members were defined. Nor were these relationships static. Relationships between family members shifted and occasionally fractured over fault-lines of age, adulthood, marriage or inheritance.8 Individuals belonged to multiple different family structures at any one time – some transient, some permanent – but all contributed to the way in which family was experienced and understood in the eighteenth century.

The household was an important arena for the expression of sensibility and, as Ruth Barton has shown, a container for the strong emotions of family life, but the demands of birthing required sensibility to be demonstrated through physical acts of care.9 The birth family was bound together by a shared set of emotions characterized primarily by love. This love was focused inwards on the new infant, and rippled outwards in concentric circles to encompass the birthing woman and her family. Similarly, the intensity with which love was experienced moved outwards from the birthing woman to the birth family, the birth attendants, friends and neighbours. The birth family was what Barbara Rosenwein has called an ‘emotional community’ defined by expressions of love.10 Unsurprisingly, however, emotional responses to the birth of an infant were significantly more complex than a simple expression of love. Various factors such as class, gender and social situation could alter the sequencing and intensity of emotional experiences. Moreover, the emotions of childbirth were often experienced in overlapping sequences and combinations that would have altered what Barbara Rosenwein calls the ‘feeling’ of each emotion.11 It was widely acknowledged in the eighteenth century that both the new mother and her child were extremely vulnerable to illness and injury in the weeks that followed the birth. Poverty, illegitimacy and the physical and psychological health of the mother and infant could blur and confuse expressions of love, altering not only the ‘feeling’ of those emotions but also the combinations in which they were experienced.12 Rosenwein does not contest the idea of a common emotional vocabulary to express feeling, but emphasizes the need for that vocabulary to reflect social expectations and needs. She envisages ‘constellations’ of emotion that shifted and changed incrementally to ensure that they remained relevant, representative and responsive to the individuals who participated in that particular emotional community.13 As is evident in this chapter, there were a number of socially acceptable ways in which members of a birth family could absent themselves from the birth process and therefore avoid the anticipated emotional engagement. Physical and psychological illness or frailty, for example, were widely understood to prevent husbands, mothers and sisters from attending a birth, as were the difficulties of travelling long distances. Those who were part of the birth family, and who described their participation in emotional terms, can therefore be seen as having done so voluntarily.

If love was a feeling, it was also an act. The act of ‘caring for’ is unsurprisingly prominent in narratives of birthing. Katie Barclay has highlighted the way in which ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’ were intertwined in eighteenth-century Scotland. This close association of ‘natural affection’ and the practical fulfilment of duty tied practices of caring into a wider affective regime of ‘love’.14 Sherrin Marshall has argued that the education of children constituted a care investment and therefore could be seen as an expression of love, while Emma Griffin has highlighted the associative link between good mothering and good housekeeping in Victorian working-class diaries.15 Birthing women and babies required a great deal of practical care. In providing that care, the birthing family was enacting and embodying a practical expression of love. I would go as far as to suggest that care practices formed one of the key functions of the birth family. Thus, the birth family offered an opportunity to consider Monique Scheer’s theories of emotions as practice. Scheer defines emotions as practice as ‘the bodily act of experience and expression’.16 By engaging in practical acts of care for a wife, a daughter or a sister, the birth family was therefore creating and strengthening, and demonstrating, its love. These hierarchies of love created through both emotional and physical acts, were heightened by the doubling of familial roles created by a new baby. Husbands became fathers, mothers became grandmothers, and sisters became aunts within this framework of family intimacy. The previous experiences of childbirth and child-rearing of female members of the birth family, and their emotional connection to mother and child, were thought to give them greater vigilance and care over their charges. The perceived value of this experience and emotional connection elevated their status within the networks of trust and information that were central to the management of birth in this period. The intimacy of all members of the birth family with the birthing woman was intended to support and calm her, while their common focus would enable them to navigate the emotional turmoil of the birth.

This chapter explores the responsibilities of the three key members of the birth family during childbirth. Each had an important practical and social role in the domestic management of birth, but I also suggest that their emotional connection to the birthing woman elevated their status above that of the friends and neighbours who also participated in birthing. These emotional ties were thought to increase the quality of the birth family’s advice, and to heighten their capacity to care for and comfort each other and the birthing woman during the perilous process of birth. Those managing birth within the household sought to provide the mother and infant with a comforting and familiar environment, and at the same time also recognized and created a space for the experience and management of intense emotions.

Husbands

Despite being absent from most published accounts of eighteenth-century childbirth, husbands were not necessarily absent from the birthing chamber. Many husbands shouldered important practical, social and emotional responsibilities, providing care for their wives and infants throughout birthing. As we shall see, men across the social spectrum experienced the emotions of childbirth intensely. Eighteenth-century husbands were well versed in the language of emotion, particularly as it applied to their families.17 Strong emotional connections between spouses in the eighteenth century have been widely identified, and many men openly expressed their emotional experiences and expectations of both marriage and parenthood.18 The perceived dangers of birthing threw these emotional attachments into sharp relief for eighteenth-century husbands.

A husband’s practical involvement in birthing commenced as his wife began to labour. His practical duties derived primarily from his role as a provider for his family, including ensuring that his wife had a bedstead on which to give birth, and sufficient food, bedding and warmth for the full period of birthing.19 A good husband was expected to fetch the midwife and assemble a group of local women to act as gossips. In wealthier households, this may have been arranged in advance, with elite households often encouraging their chosen midwife to take up residence in the household several weeks prior to the impending birth. Once George Heywood’s wife ‘was confident it would be labour, she then desired me to go for Mrs Newton the Midwife in Bloom Street’. Heywood’s Aunt Grace was already staying with them, having arrived the day before, and the Heywoods also had a female servant sleeping in the house. Having returned to the house with Mrs Newton, he also fetched Mrs Laord, ‘then I must to go to bed leaving those three with her which I thought sufficient so I could leave them with confidence’.20

Far from being an errand, fetching the women was an important element of a husband’s duty. Failure to do so formed part of the questioning when James Field was tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of his wife and child in 1766.21 The court proceedings suggest that Field’s wife had been labouring for some time before he went to fetch the local midwife and assemble some women to act as birth attendants. The midwife, Mary Duck, testified that she asked him, ‘Where have you been all day; he said, at home; I said, why did you not come sooner, and I would have fetched three or four, or half a dozen women.’ Her statement implied that Field’s delay in fetching assistance had led to the death of his wife as well as his infant. It was certainly instrumental in Field being charged with infanticide, an accusation usually levelled at single women.22 Field was acquitted of both murders on the basis of good character references, but his trial highlights the perceived importance of a husband’s practical role in the early phases of the birth process.

Once the attendants had been assembled, a husband took charge of the emotional and spiritual well-being of the household by saying prayers for the safety of his wife and child. Domestic worship was a crucial element of Georgian spirituality, and there was what Andrew Braddock has called an ‘astonishing market for devotional literature’. This literature was written for recognizable situations in which prayer was thought necessary and thus they reflect everyday needs and experiences.23 Prayer at this point in the life cycle therefore functioned on a variety of levels. It offered the possibility of divine intercession for the birthing woman while also being an explicit demonstration of a family’s piety and of a husband’s credentials as a dutiful head of household. Households were, after all, the basic units of the church, and were ‘communities of prayer’.24 Family prayers were a central element of Anglican worship, and many devotional manuals were dedicated to guiding dutiful households through the intricacies of scriptural interpretation and application.25 Jeremy Schildt’s analysis of the Stockton family of Suffolk has shown how communal household worship during periods of emotional crisis provided emotional support and comfort.26 This support and comfort went beyond the immediate confines of the family to encompass wider faith communities such as parish, denomination and the Christian church.

The Anglican liturgy, as presented in the Book of Common Prayer, did not provide prayers for the safe delivery of a woman in childbirth. Such prayers were entreaties for divine intervention and assistance, and so had a sense of immediacy that resembled extemporaneous prayer more than prayers used in more formal collective worship. Prayers for women in childbirth can, however, be found in prayer books intended for domestic use. The prayer ‘for a Woman drawing near the Time of Difficulty, or in Travail’ published in The Protestant’s Prayer-Book of 1783 by the Gloucestershire clergyman John Marks Moffat typifies this type of communal domestic worship:

As all help cometh from the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth, we entreat thee to regard an handmaid in her present circumstances – O may the same goodness and mercy which have given her strength to conceive, bear her up to the appointed hour, and enable her to endure the pangs of nature with patience. Save her in childbearing and make her the joyful mother of a living and well-formed infant. At last may she experience the best deliverance, even a deliverance from all sin and misery, be raised to a perfection of holiness, and a fullness of joy in the heavenly world.27

The use of the word ‘we’ in this prayer has many layers. Its use in a book of domestic prayer implies that the group of people saying or listening to the prayer had an emotional investment in the well-being of the birthing woman and her infant. The final line of the prayer, however, refers to the household (and the birthing woman’s maternal role) as ‘a perfection of holiness’, aligning the spiritualized household with the wider Christian community. It refers to the physical presence of family, friends and neighbours while also invoking the support of the wider Christian community in asking for divine intercession. In directly appealing to God on behalf of the Christian community, this prayer strengthened the perceived power of entreaty on behalf of the birthing woman and provided emotional comfort to the birth family.28

The 1795 edition of The Whole Duty of Prayer, an Anglican devotional manual attributed to Richard Allestree, acknowledged the emotional needs of the birth family with ‘A Prayer to be said by those that are present with a Woman in Travail’.29 The prayer was published four times between 1692 and 1716, but was also circulated as part of the compilation of other writings attributed to Allestree, The Works of the Author of ‘The Whole Duty of Man’.30 The popularity of The Whole Duty of Man and the inclusion of this devotional text in a volume of Allestree’s combined works undoubtedly increased the circulation of this lesser-known treatise by the same author.31 Allestree recommended the following prayer be said during labour:

give us all (especially to this Woman thy Servant now in this Extremity) Patience: mitigate her Pains, prosper our Work, bless our understandings, that by our help she may be delivered, and forget her Pains; because a Child is born into the World … [give] the Mother gladness in beholding her Infant after all her Sorrows.32

Both this prayer and that suggested by Moffat specifically mention the way in which fear and ‘misery’ should give way to sensations of joyfulness and gladness, articulating some of the expected emotional sequences of childbirth.33 These prayers for a safe delivery were performed in an environment that had been carefully prepared to accommodate the impending birth. The emotional effect of the prayer, and the specificity of its purpose, therefore ensured that it was strongly bound to the environment in which it was spoken. Familiarity with the words and memories of the prayer’s use during other births could be powerful emotional stimulants. At the same time, the communal acknowledgement of these emotions, and the belief that the prayer had been effective in previous births, could help to moderate their intensity.

Once the infant had been delivered, it was the husband’s duty to give thanks for the safe deliverance of his wife. This immediate thanksgiving took place within the household and was entirely separate from the public thanksgiving ceremony of churching, which was performed in the parish church at the end of the lying-in month. These devotions focused almost exclusively on the successful delivery of the birthing woman, reflecting her importance in the ongoing social and economic survival of the family as well as the strong emotional connections between family members. The prayer of thanksgiving contained in the anonymously authored Devout Christian’s Best Companion in the Closet includes an additional paragraph to be said ‘if the Child is living’.34 The prayer for the mother contains many passages praying for her physical and emotional well-being following the birth:

thou hast vouchsafed to deliver thy Servant from the great Pain and Peril of Child-birth. Blessed be thy Name, O Lord, that thou hast turned her Sorrows into Joy, and her Pains into Ease and Refreshment: continue, we beseech thee, this Fatherly Goodness, to her; let thy good Providence still watch over her; and thy Strength support her under all the Weaknesses of her present Condition.35

This prayer names a number of emotions associated with childbirth, as well as the sequential passage from ‘sorrows’ to ‘joy’. The use of the word ‘beseech’ adds an element of pleading to this prayer. In contrast, the additional passage praying for the child is restricted in emotional content, simply commending the infant to God.

We commend likewise to thy Mercy and Goodness their Tender Infant; present it, that it may be regenerated, and born again by Baptism, that as it is thine by Creation, so it may thereby be made thine by Adoption and Grace.36

These prayers anticipate a strong emotional connection between the birthing woman and her birth family and acknowledge her economic and social role within the household. The cautious tone of the prayer giving thanks for the infant reflects the precarity of a newborn infant’s grasp on life, as well as its perceived contribution to the social and economic status of the household.

A similar focus on the delivery of the mother is visible in the prayers of the Presbyterian minister Oliver Heywood during his visits to recently delivered women across Yorkshire and Lancashire.37 His records specifically note his intention to visit the head of the household, providing support to the husband in his obligations to care for the spiritual and emotional well-being of his family:

On Thursday Dec 19 [1667] I went with my wife to Robert Ramsdens at park-nook, there we celebrated a day of thanksgiving for his wiues delivery of two liuely children, and for her recovery out of some other distempers, oh what a sweet day was it to my heart? Blessed blessed be god for it.38

On one occasion, Heywood was present in a household during a delivery, having been surprised by an early labour:

July 13 [1671] I went to Sam Ellisons to keep a day of humiliation for his wife, but god prevented that and she was delivered on lords day, we kept it a day of thanksgiving I baptized the child, preacht at night, and returned home on Friday.39

At each attendance, however, Heywood was explicit in his duty to help the husband give thanks for his wife’s safe delivery of a child rather than for the child itself. This reveals not only the significance of a husband’s spiritual role during a birth but also the perceived value of a wife and mother in this period. Her survival ensured that the household could continue to function as an economic and practical unit through her provision of domestic services and childcare and her contribution to the economic output of the household. The mother’s survival also ensured the emotional integrity of the household unit. In a period in which the institutions of marriage and parenthood were increasingly discussed in emotional terms, the survival of a wife and mother was crucial to the ongoing happiness and comfort of the household.

This focus on the physical and emotional well-being of the mother did not mean that parents did not experience a strong emotional attachment to their newborn infant. Men often charted their transition from husband to father by recording the precise time and date at which it occurred in their notebooks and diaries. These notes reflected the importance and emotion that eighteenth-century men attached to the birth of their children. Records of family births, and often deaths, were usually made on flyleaves, separate from the notes, reflections and recipes that filled the rest of the book. They captured the defining moments of a person’s lived experience and placed them in relation to others.40 These notebooks are often small and light, which implies that they were made to be carried around in pockets and close to the body. The notebook of the Barcroft family of Foulridge Hall, near Pendle in Lancashire, typifies these types of sources.41 The family were wealthy Lancashire merchant gentry and associates of Elizabeth Shackleton. The notebook is small and leather-bound, suggesting that its owner may have carried it with them in a pocket or close to the body.42 It is recorded in the archive as ‘diary latterly kept by bro of Ambrose and John Barcroft’. The entry for 16 August 1724 reads: ‘Son, James, born about 9 a Clock at Night. Heaven Bless Him!’ The addition of this exclamation after the details of the birth offers an insight into the writer’s emotional response to the news of his son’s birth and lends the note a sense of immediacy.43 The handwriting of the diarist changed in 1748, though there are no inscriptions to enable a precise identification of the new diarist. It is highly likely that it was the infant James whose birth had been recorded in 1724, now aged twenty-four. It was not unusual for notebooks of this nature to be shared with or inherited by other members of the family.44 The new diarist noted on 14 August 1756 that ‘My Dear & I were married Heavens Bless Her’. Less than a year later, ‘My Dear Martha was born about 7 a’clock at Night God Bless Her’.45 On 25 February 1759 he scribbled: ‘My Son Ambrose William was born about 20 minutes past 10 at Night. Heavens Bless preserve and Conduct him in everything that is Good and right.’ The precision of the time of birth suggests that the notes were made soon after the event. These notes and endearments in flyleaves form part of what Elaine Leong has called ‘the paperwork of kinship’.46 They create a ledger of family identity, which would have been particularly poignant where a family member had died.

A rare and detailed account of a husband’s practical, social and emotional role during childbirth can be found in the diary of Edmund Harrold,47 which covers a period between 1712 and 1715 and encompasses a variety of topics, including family life, business interests and social life. Harrold used his diary to record the minutiae of his daily life, but he also reflected on what he perceived to be his personal failings (in particular his fondness for gambling and alcohol) and the ways in which they impacted on his own life and the lives of those around him. His decision to keep a diary coincided with the birth of his seventh child and the subsequent death of his second wife, Sarah. As a result, his writings offer an unusual and very valuable account of a husband and father’s experience of childbirth in the early years of the eighteenth century.

It is clear that Harrold remained in the household as Sarah prepared to give birth to their fourth daughter, also called Sarah, in 1712. His wife had arranged the household in preparation for her labour, as she felt that it was imminent. For Harrold, this would certainly have meant that he was excluded from the chamber in which they normally slept. The following entry noted: ‘At 3 in ye morn:[ing] she brought forth a daughter, Sarah. I went none to church. … I was ill out of tune for want to sleep.’48 By recording his lack of sleep and the time of his daughter’s birth, Harrold’s entry suggests that he had been close to the birthroom, listening to his wife’s labour and waiting for news of her safe delivery. The following day, he chose not to go to church. There are numerous other occasions throughout the diary when he did not attend church on a Sunday, but these were usually as a result of drunken excess the previous night and therefore caused him to suffer no little emotional and spiritual discomfort. On this occasion, however, it was both socially and morally acceptable for him to remain with his wife and new daughter. Rather than leaving them to attend church, Harrold offered a private prayer of thanks, noting in his next diary entry, ‘I bless God for my wifes deliverance, I hope she’l do well.’49

Despite the conventions of birthing, which required his wife to retain her lying-in space for up to four weeks following her delivery, Harrold appears to have returned to the bedchamber the day after the birth. This may have been due to their restricted living space, but it also facilitated his practical involvement throughout his wife’s lying-in. Sarah Harrold never recovered from this birth and her husband’s diary records not only his physical proximity to her illness and death, but also his efforts to take care of his wife and daughter. On 25 November (three days after the birth) he noted: ‘Wife very ill, busie in ye house. Can do little but waite on her and shops … Yn ye [26] about 6 in ye morn she began to sleep and she suckled ye child 1 time, but is full of pain and weakness.’ Two days later, he updated his diary: ‘Wife mends finely, thank God. Child had a bad night [with] gripe.’50 Despite appearing to recover, Sarah Harrold then declined rapidly. Her husband’s subsequent diary entries show his increasing awareness that she was dying. As Harrold continued to share sleeping spaces with her and their infant during her illness, it is likely that he was involved in caring for them both. Despite Sarah’s infirmity, the child remained in the house until 4 December, when he noted ‘Child went to [wet] nurse at Cockpit Hill ye [5] [after] her [Sarah’s] suck [milk] went away’.51

The following diary entries chart Sarah’s deterioration and her husband’s physical and emotional response to her death. Two days later he wrote that ‘[On] Sunday I stay’d at home with her and very ill she was, and waked with every night with one or two women.’52 Over the course of the following week, he noted that he ‘waited on her’, suggesting an active involvement in her care despite the presence of nurses. During this period of decline, Harrold and his wife discussed and made provision for her burial. He took care of the household’s spiritual affairs, arranging for prayers to be said on her behalf and ensuring that she had repented of her sins in preparation for death. The emotional impact of these postnatal arrangements is implicit in Harrold’s entries. On 16 December 1712 he recorded that ‘She continues very weak, but sencible. This night she slept none. I am ill [my] self. She weakens fast [and] drinks much.’53 Either he had remained in the lying-in room during his wife’s illness or they had discussed her physical discomfort in some detail. That Sarah’s sleep patterns and physical symptoms were recorded in Harrold’s diary indicates the extent of his concern for her, and the emotional and physical intimacy of their relationship. Harrold’s reference to his own illness articulated the depth of his grief, which was thought to have a physical manifestation.54 Sarah Harrold died the following day, and her husband’s strong emotional attachment to his ‘dear assistant’ is apparent in his subsequent diary entries. He wrote: ‘My wife lay adying from 11 this day, till 9 a clock on ye 18tin ye morn. Then she dy’d in my arms, on pillows. [Her] relations most[ly] by.’55 He sought comfort in notions of an afterlife; his grief manifested itself first as an illness and then through drink. Having entered the new year (1712/13) ‘with bad health, a troubled mind and scant of money’, Harrold explicitly linked his emotional state with Sarah’s death: ‘Still nothing but disapointments atends me … My dear [wife] was much in mind too.’56

Harrold’s caring duties did not end with the death of his wife and the infant being sent away to nurse. He recorded occasions of having entertained his daughter with her wet nurse, and regularly ‘Saw Little Sarah’ as he went about his daily business.57 On 31 March 1713 he remarked: ‘saw this day my pretty Sarah ye last time, and I was fetch’d out of bed to see her dead at six in morn. O Lord, I thank thee yt I had ye sattisfaction to see her this day.’58 Harrold had cared for his daughter during his wife’s incapacity until it was no longer possible to keep her at home, and had maintained affectionate emotional ties with her until her death. He appears to have been similarly involved in the lives of his other young children. While the birth of his third daughter, Esther, had taken place outside the scope of his diary, Harrold recorded her suffering from smallpox aged about four. His entry dated 13 October 1712 documented: ‘My daughter Esther has had a rawing night. I pray God to restore her to her health, but as he will not I.’59 In the days that followed that entry, Harrold regularly noted that he ‘caried Esther’ and stayed in the house with her as she recovered. His involvement in his household’s childcare arrangements and his emotional engagement with both his wife and his children made him take extra care of them during periods of illness, at the expense of his own physical, emotional and spiritual health. Harrold’s close attention to childcare and well-being may have been a result of the availability of living space to some extent. While it is not known precisely where he was living during the period of his diary, he was in cheap accommodation somewhere in the centre of Manchester, probably consisting of no more than two or three rooms.

The Manchester merchant Thomas Bateman, despite being significantly wealthier than Harrold, was similarly involved in birth and infant care, even though his living accommodation provided him with a greater degree of separation from his wife and newborn child. It appears that Bateman was present at the births of both his children. In each instance the letters that he exchanged regularly with his wife, Rebekah, during their time apart ceased a matter of weeks before the delivery and did not recommence until after the lying-in period had concluded. On the recommencement of their letters, it becomes clear that Bateman was familiar with infant care practices and was actively involved in the physical and emotional well-being of his family. Within three months of the birth of their first son, Rebekah made a journey to London to stay with her sister, leaving ‘dear Little Will’ with his father. The intimacy and ease with which their subsequent letters discussed Rebekah’s breastfeeding difficulties along with her emotional health reflects Bateman’s concern for his family and his familiarity with matters of infant care. On 12 October 1788 Rebekah wrote:

I have been & still am very much perplex’d with my milk it has not disordered me any further than being painfull for ye springing of it in, as fresh today as when I left you at first – I am oblig’d to draw it myself two or three times a day, which I assure you sometimes makes me very low tho’ upon the whole I am better than I ever thought I should have been all my friends here make it their study to entertain me.60

While the association between Thomas Bateman and the birth process is not as explicit as it was with Harrold, it is evident in the intimacy of the information that passed between him and his wife. It also appears that he maintained his active involvement in William’s care throughout his infancy. In a later letter, written while William was suffering from an illness, Rebekah wrote:

Your son & heir is got very well of his cough I am much oblig’d to you for so kindly & frequently reminding me of my duty respecting him, I have only say upon it that my feelings as his own mother tell me that nothing ought to be neglected with regard to his bodily health, & I often wish that we may both have grace given to enable us to bring him up in the nurture and admonition of ye Lord.61

The irritable tone of this letter is rare among the many written exchanges between Rebekah and her husband. It is worth noting that Rebekah’s frustration appears to have been triggered by Thomas ‘frequently reminding me of my duty’ rather than by his recommendations for William’s treatment and recovery. There is no suggestion that Thomas’s advice overstepped the boundaries of his paternal duty. Despite Rebekah’s exasperation, her letter contains a strong sense of shared duty and responsibility for infant care. As a good eighteenth-century husband and father, Thomas Bateman expressed concern for the emotional and spiritual health of his wife and children in his letters. The level of intimacy with which they discussed childbearing matters indicated a close emotional relationship and demonstrated Thomas’s familiarity with the birthing chamber and infant care.

Similarly close emotional relationships are evident among even higher-status fathers. The Ramsden family were wealthy clergy and cousins of the Lancashire gentlewoman Elizabeth Shackleton. The family letters reflect a companionate marriage in which both partners were involved in childcare, even with the luxury of a well-staffed nursery. These arrangements are detailed in an affectionate letter Elizabeth received from William Ramsden, announcing the birth of a son in 1763:

My good woman at the same time with gleam in her Eye contemplating her little Boy who also in his turn seems as happy as this world can make him, only with his leather bottle. Pardon this gossip, good madam Parker, but the air of a Nursery is infecting. By her Ladyships order I took the Pen (which but for the absolute forbidding of Mrs Nurse would have been so much better employ’d in your services by Herself) first to thank you for all Civilities.62

His joy and satisfaction at the successful delivery of his son is evident from his account of the nursery where, the tone of his letter suggests, he was a familiar presence. Indeed, his letter proceeds to detail a dispute over the inoculation of an older child, which implies that his role as a carer was not one that he had simply assumed during the birth process:

Hitherto all has gone on very well i.e. as well as usual tho had I been Chief Nurse Little Pickle’s B[ottom] had stood a much better chance of not being made a Pincushion of, but Man is born to Sorrow you know, so there’s no helping it.

He wrote to Elizabeth Shackleton in a similar vein following a birth in 1770, in which he complained of completing his ‘Wife’s fiddle faddle Errands’ while she continued to lie in.63 The humorous tone of his correspondence prevents his complaints from being dismissive or contemptuous, imparting instead a warmth and intimacy between him and his wife. In his letters he evidently considered himself to be fulfilling his duties as a good husband and father, remaining close to his wife during her delivery and lying-in, and submitting himself to ‘her Ladyships order’ until she had recovered. He was thus fulfilling his social obligations during the birth. However, his ongoing involvement in his children’s health, and the familiar, informal tone of his letters, suggest a much deeper emotional connection to his family. Like Harrold and Bateman, Ramsden did not discuss his marital or paternal role in terms of duty or expectation. Each of these husbands and fathers appears to have had a genuine emotional connection with their wives and children, and continued to care for their family’s emotional, spiritual and physical needs well beyond their children’s births.

Similar expressions of close emotional relationships between spouses, mutual support and tender parenthood are also found in English pauper letters, from those at a very different point in the social scale to the Ramsdens and the Batemans. These letters, many of which had been triggered by a crisis, were produced when paupers wrote to their parish of settlement to request material or financial support. Illness or injury was commonly cited, but birth also featured regularly in the alleged causes of a family’s need for assistance. The addition of an extra individual to feed, the physical incapacity of the mother during the lying-in period and the potential costs of burying infant and mother all created points of crisis for the pauper family. Despite the extra pressures of poverty, these letters reveal similar expectations and emotions to those expressed by Harrold, Bateman and Ramsden. It is possible that the similarities were deliberate and that the authors of the letters were imitating the emotions and actions of the individuals to whom they were writing to invoke sympathy and increase their chances of securing relief. The consistency with which these devices were used, however, also suggests that pauper husbands and fathers experienced the same emotions as their wealthier counterparts during a birth and lying-in. Despite the hardships of poverty, there is little evidence to suggest that poor families were less emotional or affectionate than those of a higher social status.64

The Curchin family of Thrapston in Northamptonshire regularly invoked images of the loving but poor family in their requests to the parish authorities for assistance. In a letter dated 26 September 1824, Jacob Curchin wrote

I am sorry to say that my wife is quite large in the family-way and I declare I have not a bedsted to lie on. I should wish to stay with my wife and family and do the best I can but I cannot if I am not assisted.65

His reference to a bedstead relates to his role as a provider for his family and to the expectation that he should ensure that his wife was suitably prepared for the impending birth. It also demonstrates his abject poverty, as bedsteads were often the first piece of furniture gifted to or purchased by a couple when they married.66 Jacob’s poverty was reinforced by his later letters lamenting the family’s lack of money to employ a nurse, and his pursuit for payment by the doctor who delivered the child. His wish to remain close to his wife as she approached her labour fulfilled the social expectation that good husbands maintain close proximity to the birthroom. In 1829 and under the threat of gaol for non-payment of the debt owed to the doctor for delivering his child, he wrote: ‘I have done the best I could for my family and no man can do more.’67 This sentence directly compared Curchin’s emotional context with that of those who would be reading his letter. This clever rhetorical device demanded empathy from the parish officers, and also invited them to reflect on childbirth as a social leveller. Curchin attempted to present his case to parish officers using emotions and situations that they would recognize, but there were probably also commonalities in emotional and physical experience between these men. A letter written by Thomas Jump of Oldham, Lancashire, makes explicit this shared emotional experience between men of different ranks. Jump’s wife, the family’s main earner because of his physical incapacity, had survived childbirth four times in six years. In a letter detailing his struggle to feed his young family, Jump wrote: ‘Sir, you must be aware if you have a heart to feel, which I Know you … have that mine are really distressing circumstances.’68 He was looking not just for a practical and financial response to his letters but also for an emotional one based on the shared expectations and emotional experiences of being a husband and father. His statement implies some uniformity in the emotional experiences of the life cycle among men of all classes.

Husbands and fathers were far from absent in eighteenth-century childbirth. While they were excluded from the delivery room, they had an important practical and emotional role throughout birthing. Their prominence in this process was rooted in the assumption of a close, mutually beneficial and affective relationship between husband and wife. This relationship placed them at the centre of the networks of trust and information that surrounded the domestic management of childbirth. Their status within these networks was elevated by their emotional connection with both their wives and their children. They participated in the intense emotional environment of birth but also helped to create it through their own sensations of fear and anxiety, joy and relief. By fulfilling their obligations to their wife, their children and other members of the birth family, they contributed to the emotional and spiritual well-being of the household during a crisis point in the life cycle. This tested and strengthened their emotional bonds of spousal love and family intimacy, and demonstrated their suitability as good husbands, fathers and Christians.

Mothers

The mother of the birthing woman occupied an elevated position in the birth family. As an older woman with knowledge and experience of childbirth, she had invaluable personal experience that made her integral to the domestic management of childbirth in the eighteenth century. There was also a widespread social recognition of the strong emotional bond between mothers and daughters that was strengthened by idealized portrayals of the relationship between grandmothers and their grandchildren. The strength of maternal love, coupled with instinct, intuition and experience, was thought to give the mothers of birthing women a greater ability to care for their daughters and grandchildren. Yet their experiences and memories, their interaction with the domestic environment of birth and their emotional connection to both the birthing woman and their unborn child also had the potential to intensify sensations of fear, anxiety, joy and relief associated with this moment in the life cycle. It is not unusual to find examples of intense emotional relationships between mothers and daughters in the eighteenth century, partly as a result of developing cultural ideas about maternity and motherhood in what has been described as the ‘cult of motherhood’.69 This development was framed by earlier shifts in the notion of childhood through the writings of political and educational philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau which presented children as innocent and in need of protection.70 Childhood was increasingly sentimentalized as a period of naivety and sensitivity that made new demands on primary caregivers. Mothers became the guardians of these newly delicate infants, who were responsible for their spiritual and moral education and who had an intense emotional connection with them from the moment they were born.

Belief in this innate, feminine maternity required a mother to subordinate herself to the physical and emotional needs of her children, for ‘Would not the little innocent’s heavenly smiles amply repay every maternal affection?’71 It was anticipated that this fostering of an intense emotional and physical relationship between mother and child would create lifelong emotional bonds, heightened by an increasing tendency to keep female children within the familial household, even at elite levels.72 The Female Aegis; or, The Duties of Women …, a conduct manual published in 1798, described the idealized lifelong relationship between mother and daughter:

The peculiar obligations of parent and child are not wholly cancelled but by the stroke which separates the bands of mortality. When years have put a period to authority and submission; parental solicitude, filial reverence, and mutual affection survive. Let the mother exert herself during her life to draw closer and closer the links of benevolence and kindness. Let her counsel, never obtrusively offered or pressed, be at all times ready when it will be beneficial and acceptable. … Let her share in their joy, and sympathise with their afflictions; ‘Rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep.’ (Romans, xii.15) She may then justly hope that their love will never forget what she has done, and what she has suffered for them; and that the hand of filial gratitude will delight to smooth the path of her latter days.73

The anonymous author suggests that mothers exercise authority over their children and promote affectionate ties by acting as a friend and mentor. Throughout the life cycle mothers were expected to show empathy for their children as they navigated the complicated worlds of childhood, early adolescence and beyond. Authority should not simply be demanded as a parental right but should be earned through ‘affectionate benignity’ as the ‘confidence of a friend’.74 These emotional relationships were reciprocal, with daughters being seen as companions for their mothers as they aged. The correspondence between the wealthy heiress Frances Irwin and her friend Susan Stewart suggests that these close and affectionate relationships between mothers and daughters were commonplace in elite circles. In a letter dated 8 August 1774, written in anticipation of the marriage of Elizabeth Hamilton to the earl of Derby, Frances wrote:

I must pity the Duchess of Argyle [Elizabeth Hamilton’s mother] for loving so delightful an animal as a Daughter & daresay her wing will feel very cold and uncomfortable without her, the eldest Daughter too! What in the World can deserve ones eldest Daughter?75

Elizabeth Shackleton’s aunt expressed similar opinions about the closeness of the emotional relationship between mothers and daughters in a letter dated 28 December 1755, written to a pregnant Elizabeth, who had already produced three boys during her four years of marriage:

tho we don’t doubt the tenderness of such Mothers as you are to either sex … if a little Miss should come, I hope it will prove a charming companion for you which you cannot expect from the Boys who will – or should – spend most of their youth in schools.76

With the cultivation of these close emotional relationships between mother and daughter, it is unsurprising that women looked to their mothers for comfort and support at the birth of their own children. Despite this, it is extremely rare to find written references to the presence of mothers in the birthroom. This was not because they were not in attendance but because it was assumed that they would be. It is only in brief references to absences or requests for information that we can see how common their presence was. When Elizabeth Shackleton’s daughter-in-law gave birth in 1781, for example, the only evidence of her mother’s presence in the birthroom was Elizabeth’s diary entry that she had ‘desired Mrs Parker would give me all the particulars of her daughter’s Labour and her Recovery’.77 Similarly, Rebekah Bateman only briefly mentioned the presence of her ‘Mamma’ when she gave birth in 1792.78 Occasionally, the sources refer to a mother who was unable to attend her daughter’s delivery. The tone of these letters is often defensive, suggesting that they might have been open to criticism for not fulfilling their role in the birth family. A letter to Ellen Parker, the wife of a Lancashire solicitor, from her friend Isabella Beaton asserted that ‘My health during the winter months is so delicate that I am completely confined to the house, therefore could not be with my daughter in her hour of peril’.79 That Beaton found it necessary to explain her lack of attendance in the birthing chamber by drawing attention to her own frailty suggests that she was defying convention by staying away.

Mothers’ emotional investment in birthing was not limited to concern for their daughters. Many expressed strong ties to the unborn infant and anticipated forming deep emotional bonds with their grandchildren. This affection was often given practical as well as emotional expression in the notion that grandparents would ‘spoil’ their grandchildren. The Female Aegis cautioned against such behaviour: ‘Many a child, whom parental discipline would have trained in the paths of knowledge and virtue, has been nursed up in ignorance and prepared for vice by the blind indulgence of the grandmother and the aunt.’80 The root of this ‘blind indulgence’ could be found in the relationship between grandparent and grandchild, or aunt and niece, relationships that often developed independently of the child’s parents and that were anticipated with a great deal of pleasure, particularly among middling and gentry families. Grandparents looked forward to the comfort and consolation of ‘cheerful hours, enlivened by the society of descendants, of relations, and perhaps of some coeval friend’ as they became increasingly infirm.81 The ill temper of old age could be deferred and ‘cheerfulness’ cultivated through regular association with young people, and grandchildren could often be relied on to fulfil this familial obligation.82 Removed from the potential battlegrounds of parental authority, education and discipline, the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren could be mutually beneficial and emotionally fulfilling for both sides.

While a close emotional relationship with grandchildren could enhance old age, there is also evidence of a conceptual association between grandchildren and a type of immortality. Luigi Cornaro’s Treatise of Temperance and Sobriety postulated:

Now lest there should be any Delight wanting to my old Age, I daily behold a kind of Immortality in the succession of my Posterity: For when I come home I find eleven GrandChildren of mine, all the sons of one Father and Mother, all in perfect Health.83

Cornaro’s work was originally published in the sixteenth century, and remained popular in Britain throughout the eighteenth century, with twenty-two editions published between 1702 and 1798. The work’s original title was How to Live for 100 Years, linking a large family to a long life. His notion of immortality through his children and grandchildren was echoed in the 1747 advice manual Age Made Happy as Well as Honourable:

from the Affection we bear to the body and soul of Posterity, in whom we hope to live many Ages. For methinks those Parents, who are honourably succeeded by their own Children, may rather be said to step out of the way, than ever to die.84

Frances Irwin, the wealthy mistress of Temple Newsam in Leeds, looked forward with pleasurable anticipation to becoming a grandparent in her letters to her friend Susan Stewart. Her letter of 3 February 1769 appears to have been written in response to her friend’s difficulties during an early pregnancy:

Be so good to think of seeing the little thing with pleasure, & never let me hear another gloomy word. I have not the least doubt but I shall see you, (if I am not blind by that time) a fourscore, followed by twelve sons, & twelve daughters & twelve times as many Grandchildren and Great Grandchildren.85

The suggestion was that her friend should live to an old age and enjoy the pleasure of having many grandchildren. A similar link between the enjoyment of grandchildren and a long life was made in a letter that Frances received from her brother-in-law George:

My Lady at Windsor will be highly pleas’d to see Mr Ingram and will communicate to him all she knows of the Borough. She was greatly pleas’d to see her Child of the third Generation: how good it wou’d be in you to add another year to her Life by giving her Hopes of seeing two or three more of her Dear children.86

These dynastic considerations were articulated in the use of terms such as ‘generation’ and were often not gender specific. Isabella Beaton, whose ill health had prevented her from attending her daughter’s delivery, saw herself in the physical appearance of her granddaughter:

Being an exceedingly proud doting Grandmamma I cannot refrain from telling you the particulars relating to my dear Grandchildren. You already know, Elizabeths firstborn (called after me, and Mrs [illegible]) is a little Girl in person. They say she resembles me because she is so fat and stately – having grey eyes, black eyelashes and eyebrows and a head of light hair curly as a lambs back, particularly fair with red cheeks, very red.87

In a very physical sense, Isabella’s granddaughter encapsulates a notion of dynastic immortality. Isabella’s letter emphasizes her emotional connection to her granddaughter: she was keen to identify herself as a ‘doting Grandmamma’ and this is reinforced in the details of her description of the child.

Close emotional relationships with one’s grandchildren might extend one’s life metaphorically but also literally, as grandparents were actively involved in their care throughout the lying-in period and beyond. On becoming a grandmother in 1781, Elizabeth Shackleton received a letter from her friend Mrs Cooper which started:

Tho’ you are a letter in my debt I should have wrote sooner to have congratulated you on the Birth of your little Grand Daughter but thought that your time would be so much taken up in nursing that you would scarcely have time to read my letter.88

The extent of a mother’s practical involvement in birthing as anticipated by Mrs Cooper supported a daughter as she recovered from the trauma of the delivery, and also extended a grandparent’s useful life. By attending the birth and helping with care and delivery, an older woman could ensure that she remained useful to both her family and her community.

This is, however, an elite perception of old age and usefulness. Scholarship on ageing in the eighteenth century has shown that old age in itself was not thought to render an individual useless.89 It was rather the infirmity, illness or injury accompanying old age that might obstruct active participation in a family or community. This was particularly true in poor families, where individuals looked to remain useful into old age out of financial necessity. For poor mothers, ageing could mean an increase in responsibilities, as adult children required assistance with their own children. In March 1756 the overseers of the poor paid Widow Whitecar at Holcombe Brook five shillings for her children and a further two shillings for her grandchildren, which suggested that she was providing care for both generations of her family.90 The Soundy family of Berkshire repeatedly placed themselves in poverty by caring for their children, their children’s spouses and their grandchildren, and birth seemed to trigger a financial crisis for them. This may be because the Soundys believed that their petitions to the poor law authorities had a higher chance of success when a delivery was anticipated. However, it may also have been that children created a series of financial crises as Frances Soundy took care of two younger generations of her family. That she took them in at all, despite barely being able to support herself and her invalid daughter, shows some strength of emotional attachment to her children as well as a strong sense of duty and obligation. Frances’s letter requesting assistance, dated 3 June 1827, read:

I told you that my younger son john Soundy and his wife was com to me for surport and a home and that his wife was in the family way … and gentellmen my elder son and wife and child for 20 weeks brot [brought] me so much disstrees that I can not see this ones wife throw [through] her trobell [birth] … But gentellmen thay have no bedstead and I can not aforde to by them one so gentellmen if you can not assist them thay must wan she is taken [with labour pains] she must go to the workhous for I can not bare to see her lay on the ground at sush a time gentellment I have no objecton to attend on her and do all that lay in my power for her but intirely to support her throu her trobell I can not for I have my eldest darter [daughter] at hom[e] who ad lost the youse [use] of her lims with the rumaxtick fever.91

Despite her request being financial, Frances’s letter concentrated on the emotional and practical support that she was expected to provide to her daughter-in-law. Her letter emphasizes her attempts to help all of her children but describes her duties during a birth as being too much in addition to her ongoing obligations. Frances was careful to portray her emotional attachment and practical support for her children, rather than her old age or infirmity, as the reason for her poverty. This is probably a device to appeal to the sensibilities of those who read her letter, but the letters in support of Frances’s claim from members of her community suggest that she was truthful in terms of both the extent of the assistance she was providing and her subsequent poverty. That her appeals for support were often written in anticipation of a birth demonstrates the importance of mothers to birthing experiences among those of low social status. Mothers not only offered advice, knowledge and practical assistance but also acted as a social safety net, providing accommodation and childcare throughout the birth and into early infancy.

Any experienced woman might participate in the birth process, but a mother’s emotional attachment to the birthing woman and her infant gave her a heightened importance in the networks of trust and information that surrounded the birth. The author of Age Made Happy suggested that

A teeming Woman can have no better Incouragement nor Assistance than from such an experienced Friend at time of Need. And young Children can hardly be brought up without the Advice and Directions of those, who have before had the like Care. Their tender Fibres are soon disordered through Inadvertancy: Numerous small Ailments attend them, which an unwary Eye observes not till a worse Consequence follows, and a common Remedy might at first have rectified. Even celebrated Nurses will often overlook many Symptoms, which an affectionate By-stander may discover, and find a suitable Remedy for, from their own Experience.92

The relationships between mother and daughter, grandmother and grandchild, were thought to heighten a matriarch’s ability to care for them. Her experience and emotional connection to the new family was thought to increase her vigilance, enabling her to detect and rectify potential illness or injury in both mother and infant.

The autobiography of Alice Thornton, a seventeenth-century Yorkshire gentlewoman, recorded many occasions on which her mother’s vigilance and knowledge preserved Alice’s health and that of her children. Following her marriage to William Thornton in 1651, Alice and her husband lived with her mother, Alice Wandesford, for eight years, during which time Alice gave birth to four of her children. Meditating on the influence of her mother following her death, Alice wrote:

[She] had all manner of charges, expences, and household affaires, in sicknesses, births, christnings, and burials, of and concerning ourselves and children, with the diet, etc., of nurses, men-servants and maides, and our friends entertainments, all things don of her owne cost and charges all her daies while she lived.93

As head of the household, Alice Wandesford was clearly an influential figure in all areas of her daughter’s life. The strong emotional connection created by the proximity of their living arrangements can be seen throughout her autobiography. As might be expected, Alice’s mother featured prominently in her accounts of childbirth as a source of advice, wisdom and care. An entry dated 3 January 1654 records an instance in which Alice Wandesford’s vigilance and action saved her second grandchild from being overlaid by her nurse:

One night my mother was writing pretty late, and she heard my deare childe make a groneing troublsomly, and steping immediately to nurrse’s bed side she saw the nurse fallen asleepe, with her breast in the childe’s mouth, and lyeing over the childe, at which she, beeing affrighted, pulled the nurse sudainly of from her, and soe preserved my deare childe from being smothered.94

There were several other incidents in which Alice credited her own and her children’s survival to her mother’s experience, particularly during birthing. Alice’s lamentations following the death of her mother demonstrate the extent to which they depended on each other practically and the strength of the emotional attachment between them.

While maternal grandmothers were an expected and valued part of birthing, the role of paternal grandmothers was less assured. As we saw earlier in this chapter, the emotional connection between mothers and sons was thought to be less intimate than that of mothers and daughters, partly because the sending of sons to school from a young age imposed a physical distance between them. Paternal grandmothers might therefore find themselves excluded from the birth and removed from the inner circles of trust and knowledge inhabited by their maternal counterparts. While this was expected, it still caused tensions, the root of which was often to be found in the management of the emotions associated with childbirth. The anticipation of a delivery stimulated memories of a grandmother’s own experiences, heightening these strong emotions, but her exclusion from the birth family and the domestic environment of the birth removed any opportunity to experience and manage these emotions communally. Paternal grandparents often looked for other ways to be involved in the practical and emotional networks of birth, as a way to manage the independent nature of the relationship between grandparent and grandchild, the dynastic implications of a new infant and the management of strong emotion.

During her first pregnancy, Frances Irwin received a congratulatory letter from her brother-in-law, which appears to have been dictated to him by his mother:

Your Husband is in perfect Health my Dear Sister, I know I cannot begin my letter with a more Agreeable Paragraph, he tells us you are quite well which gave us great Pleasure Lady Irwin desires me to tell you that the Woman that makes the Child Bed Linnen knows so well what is proper for you to have for yourself, & what the Nurse you will have, will expect, that she has bespoke every thing that is Necessary for you & hopes you will do her the favour to accept of them with the other things, they will be all sent to gether, & are the prettiest Playthings I ever saw, I hope if you Approve of them, you will Continue the Woman for Coats [illegible] she made for the Princess of Wales, & now is Coat maker to the young ones she likewise makes for Lady Granby Alys Ford Hertford therefore you may depend upon Every thing [illegible], Lady Irwin has given her the greatest Charge that nothing should be wanting. My Grandmama desires leave to present her Grandsomething with a Cradle which I am to bespeak, & will likewise be sent with the rest therefore if you please not to trouble yourself about that.95

In commissioning ‘every thing that is Necessary for you’, Frances’s mother-in-law was exercising her authority as an older, more experienced woman. This gift was a way of discharging her duties and obligations to support Frances during her birth, as she may ‘depend upon Every thing’. The desire of ‘My Grandmama’ (the infant’s great-grandmother) to commission a cradle for the child was significant, as cradles were common heirlooms, particularly when linked to the lineage of elite families. The distance between Frances’s home at Temple Newsam in Leeds and that of her husband’s family who preferred to live in London, led them to try to create a connection to the birth of a new generation through objects. While Lady Irwin’s gifts were presented as a supportive gesture, they also had a regulatory purpose. Frances was highly educated and independently wealthy, and therefore did not always conform to the social and cultural expectations of the eighteenth century.96 By providing all the items that they considered necessary for a birth, her husband’s family tried to ensure that the birthing chamber was traditionally presented – a matter of some importance given the social element of birth and lying-in.97 Frances’s mother-in-law hoped to fulfil her role in the birth through the provision of objects that were intimately associated with the birthing chamber and the lying-in period. That she chose to provide textiles was highly significant, as they were often used to define and strengthen female lineages.98 These objects embodied her presence in the birthing chamber and also expressed her dynastic interest in the birth. They were physical manifestations not just of her experience and obligations as a mother and grandmother but also of her taste and wealth, and were what Leora Auslander has described as extensions of the body.99 Her gift essentially looked to create a presence for herself in the birthing chamber.

The extant letters between Frances and her mother-in-law give the impression of emotional detachment between the correspondents. This may have been due in part to their having been dictated rather than written directly but also to an emotionally distant relationship between the women. The letters and diary entries of Elizabeth Shackleton, in contrast, document her careful navigation of her emotional relationships with her son, her daughter-in-law and her husband so as to construct an intimate relationship with her grandchildren. Her diary entry of 13 February 1780 records the news that she had become a grandmother:

Ben came from Newton with the Great and Good news – that Tom’s wife was this morning about one a clock safely and happily delivered of a fine Son – Perfect and Health[y]. Ben said they were all doing well this morning when he came from Newton … God make me truly thankful that I have lived to see this good day of Being a Grandmother.100

Inclement weather and increasingly difficult marital relations prevented Elizabeth from visiting her grandson until 31 March, but she wrote an intimate letter to her daughter-in-law about her birth experience in the days following the delivery:

Most truly thankfull am I to our Good God that I have the Happiness to congratulate my own Dear Mrs Parker on the Mercies she has so lately (& much wished for) received and for the Loan that is given her from the Lord – a most fine child I am told is our Dear Little Robert Parker … My sister Parker tells me she never saw so large a child it is half brought up – you wo’d feel for that – I often think how you went on – thank God it is over. I hope this Child will be a comfort and make amends by Grace and every Virtue what you suffered for him … I hope we may come to jumble him about.101

In imagining her daughter-in-law’s difficult labour and painful lying-in (‘you wo’d feel for that’), Elizabeth made it clear that the birth had stimulated her own memories of childbirth and the associated emotions. Her fear and anxiety for the safe delivery of her daughter-in-law and grandson are evident in her declaration ‘I often think how you went on’. Relief and joy are also expressed in this letter when she states, ‘Thank God it is over.’ She experienced the intense emotions associated with childbirth but had to manage them from a distance, without the emotional support of the birth family and outside the familiar actions and environment of the reorganized household. Elizabeth attempted to manage these emotions by expressing them in her letters. That she did so by imagining the birthing chamber and the people within it suggests that this environment was a powerful tool in the creation and management of emotion.

When Elizabeth finally made the journey to meet her grandson, her diary entry was effusive:

About nine a’clock Mr S and I set out to pay our respects to the welcome little stranger my own Dear Grandson … Thank God we got safe to Alkincoats … Tom came to meet me – he welcomed me and I most truly congratulated him on the safe arrival of his own Dear little Son. He sent me upstairs into the old Nursery where I had the Happiness to find my Grandson asleep in his Cradle, I went upon my knees and most sincerely thank’d God for so great a Blessing.102

Becoming a grandmother was clearly a much anticipated moment of the life cycle for Elizabeth. Much of the visit was spent in the company of the infant Robert, and Elizabeth commented on his cheerful disposition and health. In both her diary and letters, Elizabeth was careful to avoid criticizing her daughter-in-law, referring to her as ‘my Daughter’, ‘his [her grandchild’s] dear mother’, and ‘my own dear Mrs Parker’. Here, she followed the recommendations of The Female Aegis and Age Made Happy by making herself an agreeable and amiable source of information, advice and support. By the time her second grandchild was born, however, Elizabeth was more assertive in providing advice, support and, on occasion, censure. She also took steps to add her presence to the birthroom through her letters. Her use of letters to embody her presence sought to create a direct relationship with the children not just in the lying-in room, but also in the nursery as they grew.

Scholarship on embodied objects has focused on the communicative, performative and expressive capacities of a material item.103 James Daybell’s work on the materiality of letters reflects on non-textual signs and symbols, and the role of letters in wider social and textual transactions of the period.104 If embodied objects are memory cues with the ability to recreate physical connections, as suggested by Auslander, letters deserve a more in-depth reading as material objects. They can be extremely intimate objects: despite the conventions and templates of polite letter writing in the eighteenth century, they can convey the voice and accent of the writer through their spelling and expressions. Style was consciously adopted, with different methods of expression being employed to distinguish the recipients of the letter, the contents and the public or private nature of the letter’s consumption. Handwriting continues to be a highly personal form of identity that also expresses emotion, age and education.

Elizabeth’s letters display signs that she intended them to be used as embodied objects. In a lengthy postscript to her daughter-in-law following the birth of her first grandchild, Robert, she wrote: ‘Wednesday noon: I send you all my Congratulatory letters it will be a something to do while you are upstairs [lying-in] to read them to Robert [the infant] tell me what he says upon the occasion.’105 The tone of this postscript is intimate and conversational. Elizabeth explicitly envisaged the letter being read aloud in the lying-in space, where she would have been had she been able to visit in person. She was therefore looking to recreate her presence. This continues in the remainder of the postscript:

Jack said he [the infant] first open’d one eye then the other he smiled and was a most monstrous weight a deal of dark hair upon his head thinks he is like his Father … Pray what do’s Robert pretend to laugh at perhaps at me his old Granny – tell him hye brought a fine sunny day with him – poor Boy after coming out of so warm a spot on a frosty cold morning he wo’d find the difference.

Elizabeth was not just transmitting her presence into the birthing chamber but also using the letter as a vehicle for her own memories and imagination – remembering her experiences of the birthing chamber as well as creating a reciprocal connection with a grandchild whom she was unable to meet. That this was anticipated as an ongoing relationship is evident in the other surviving letter she wrote to her grandson:

Two very little Ducks brings love and respects to my own Dear Bonny Love and sweet Child my own King and dear Angel nice little Robert sweet soul. His Granny wants to know how he do’s thinks every moment she is absent from her own Dear Dear nice pretty Lad an age how Dos sleep Pobs106 and good had him go on he must eat away and talk to his Nurse and Mamma [illegible] Parky knows them both. What a bad day my Love almost starves my Bonny Pretty Robert must have his Blanket petticoat thrown over Linen – must not get cold for one pound of Penny’s – Poor nice Prince … Granny thanks her own dear Child his Father and Mother for her very good dinner. And above all for the sight and conversation of her Beauty and nice sweet Precious Child – Robert fair and fatty must look through the window shut close and kept warm at his Farm at his Farm all his nice little Baa Lambs and the good Woman his Turkey Hen in the straw growing nice little Chucky’s for her own Master little Pe Pe Pe’s – Bless my child send him good night, God almighty be with him.107

As this letter contains no reference to Elizabeth’s second grandchild, we assume that it was written and sent before Robert was ten months old. The use of a type of baby speak in the letter again suggests that Elizabeth intended her letter to effectively transport her to his nursery, and this is reinforced by the way in which she tried to imagine his view from the nursery window. Her letter looked to compensate for her physical absence and to create an attachment between them despite the distance.

The expectation of a strong emotional connection between mothers and daughters were the basis of their importance in the process of birthing. While mothers were repositories of knowledge and experience, these qualities were also provided by the midwife and other birth attendants. It was their emotional relationship with the birthing woman that differentiated birthing women’s mothers from the other women in the birthing chamber, and that enabled them to comfort and support their daughters during their travail. This deepened emotional connection led them to exercise greater vigilance in the care of their daughters and also created the expectation of a similar connection with the new infant. The household was central in the formation and expression of these emotions. By being present in the household during birthing, mothers were able to manage their emotional response to their daughters’ travail through their interactions with their environment and the familiar routines of attending a birth. Where mothers were unable to be present in the household during a birth, they found comfort in their sensory memories of childbirth and in an imagined presence within the birthing chamber.

Sisters

As close female kin, sisters were important individuals both in birthing and in infant care. Unlike mothers and husbands, however, the level of their involvement depended not just on their personal relationship with the birthing woman, but also on their own point in the life cycle. References to the presence of sisters in the birthing chamber are rare. As with mothers, this is not necessarily evidence of their absence. We saw in Chapter 3 for example, that Betsy Ramsden’s sister was present during her lying-in despite having had to travel a significant distance. Betsy’s letter noted that it was ‘the only time I have seen her since she was married’, implying that her sister had gone to some effort to be present during Betsy’s third birth. The conventions that prevented unmarried women from being present during a delivery were too strict to allow unmarried siblings to partake in all aspects of birthing, though as Chapter 1 revealed, they were not completely absent. Alice Thornton, a Yorkshire gentlewoman, wrote in some detail of her attendance in her sister’s birthing chamber almost six years before she herself married. Alice was not present at the delivery but was an important figure during her sister’s lying-in, providing care and emotional and spiritual support until her sister died only four weeks after a difficult delivery.108

Proximity in age and shared experiences of childhood and adolescence meant that sisters with experience of birthing often provided emotional support for their parturient siblings, acting as repositories for fears and problems, and as sources of knowledge and advice.109 Where the relationships between parents, their children and (to a lesser extent) their grandchildren were rooted in duty and obligation, the social expectations of sibling relationships were less rigid.110 They were more likely to be based on personal affection than social convention, and their position within the process of birthing was therefore less assured. Where they were present at the delivery, sisters fulfilled many of the same functions as their mother: as a stabilizing influence in a spatially and emotionally disrupted household, and as an arbiter of heightened care and concern for the mother and infant. Sibling relationships in the context of birthing reveal the way in which understandings of family in the eighteenth century were layered, and subject to competing definitions and priorities. The births and marriages of siblings created numerous offshoots to the family line and therefore formed complicated kin networks, which came with attendant responsibilities.111 Sibling relationships therefore created flexible and contradictory duties, as individuals looked to fulfil their obligations as a wife, a daughter, a granddaughter, a cousin or an aunt. Each of those roles situated the individual within a different family group and added layers to the way in which they understood and fulfilled their familial obligations. Belonging to each of these different configurations of family required the constant balancing of priorities in response to external factors such as shared living space, illness or incapacity, and life-cycle event.112 Examination of the birth family suggests that the demands of important life-cycle events such as birth could lead to the needs of the immediate family (husbands and children) being subordinated to the wider demands of family duty.

The Bateman archive reveals the level of emotional support that could be provided by a close sibling during the birth process and also the way in which the life cycle affected this relationship. Elizabeth Wilson (née Clegg) was not married when Rebekah Bateman gave birth to her first son, William, and was therefore not present at the delivery. Her support for her sister took the form of expressions of love and anticipation at meeting her nephew:

I fully expected to have seen my little Nephew before this & am glad to hear how finely he comes on … I assure you he has often had a share along with my other friends in my thoughts & I don’t know but I have longed to see him as much as any of them.113

She then placed herself within what Joanne Begiato has called ‘the hierarchy of childcare’,114 arguing ‘but you must consider that in one month I could not have got that endeared affection for him as his Mother Grandmother &c &c &c have been gaining in 4 months love’.115 This expression of hierarchical love for the infant is indicative of the perceived emotional barrier between mothers and unmarried women. As the eighteenth century progressed, perceptions of motherhood and parenting changed to encompass notions of natural love and nurture. Becoming a parent was thought to unlock greater capacities of love and affection than could be possessed by those who did not have children.116 Elizabeth placed herself behind her sister and mother in her affection for her nephew because it was widely accepted that she did not have the same capacity for love as they had.

Having not experienced the emotional ties between a mother and child, Elizabeth was excused her honesty. It was only after she became a mother herself that she could be expected to display greater empathy and deeper emotion at her sister’s descriptions of motherhood. By the time Rebekah’s second son, Thomas, was born, Elizabeth had married a textile merchant and moved to London. As a married woman, with the potential of conceiving in the near future, she displayed a greater emotional interest in the impending birth. What is more, her congratulatory correspondence displays a more detailed knowledge of birthing than had been evident following the previous birth. She wrote:

I was very much rejoiced to receive a letter from you so soon after your confinement. I had been expecting a letter from my Mamma for some days to inform me how you went on but was very well satisfied to hear from yourself.117

She demonstrated knowledge of the conventions of rest and confinement that both preceded and followed the birth, and also acknowledged the link between these conventions and the health and strength of the mother.

The nature of the sisters’ letters changed significantly when Elizabeth became pregnant in 1792. From this point in their correspondence, they began to operate as part of a reciprocal network of practical as well as emotional support, particularly on matters of birth and raising children. The letters contain many more details about emotional health and physical experience than those written before the pregnancy, and make explicit reference to their shared upbringing and intimate relationship:

I have great reason to be thankful for the share of health I enjoy now I have got over my morning sickness I grow quite fat so that I think sometimes I shall almost [obscured by the page binding] a sight by & by – I thought you would have felt being in other respects like my Mamma but I begin to think I shall be most like her in size – I wish I may be like her in the best sense of the word. It is surely a great mercy to have good examples before our eyes & I trust you & I will have reason to bless God for ever – for what he has done through the instrumental Pity of our Dear Parents.118

The emotional intimacy between the sisters and their mother is evident here. Elizabeth’s reflections on her mother’s and sister’s experiences of pregnancy were echoes of conversations about reproductive processes that had taken place between the women.

When Elizabeth suffered from low mood as her birth approached, she turned to her sister for support and reassurance:

I am much obliged to you for the intelligence you gave me & am glad to find your intention is still to come in August if nothing very particular happens to prevent, I hope I shall not be too much deceived in the time [of delivery] I cannot but think it will be about the middle of that month I hope you can be here by the time if not a little sooner – I shall be much disappointed if I cannot see you but I must leave these things to him who orders all for the best. I thank you for excusing for me, your excuses were very just – I find it is necessary for me to prepare for the little stranger but sometimes when I am busy with my hands my thoughts are as busy & I now & then feel myself rather low, I wish I could leave myself in his hands who can do [obscured by page binding] things & be enabled to submit cheerfully to whatever he appoints.119

Elizabeth’s sensations of fear and anxiety over her impending confinement became unmanageable when she was doing tasks associated with the birth and infant care. Despite attempting to rationalize her emotions by referring to her strong religious beliefs, Elizabeth’s interactions with objects associated with childbirth stimulated feelings that overrode what she saw as her duty to submit her fate to God’s will.

As we saw at the opening of this chapter, Rebekah’s worries about being ‘call’d away in giving birth to another’ had articulated a similar conflict between the bodily experience of childbirth emotions and her understanding of her religious obligations. As it was socially accepted that experienced siblings would be part of birthing, Rebekah was able to leave her own young family in the care of her husband and servant to support her sister in her confinement. Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, with whom she appeared to have a close relationship, was also present at the delivery, which took place within the marital home. Elizabeth and Rebekah’s own mother appears to have been emotionally fragile and therefore did not attend the birth. The infant – also called Rebekah – was very sickly and Elizabeth’s low mood worsened following the delivery, causing her sister to write to her husband to explain that she was required to remain in London for longer than anticipated:

She [Elizabeth] is still very bad & is so much altered that you would not know her; I was call’d up this morning between four & five & found the mother crying, which she had done all the night instead of sleeping, she seems very glad now that I am here, & seems very unwilling for me to come home so soon, therefore as this has happened I could wish to stay till I see how it will turn; they all seem very anxious about her.120

Rebekah’s concerns for her sister appear to have centred around her emotional state, rather than her physical health. In a society in which emotion was seen to have a real physical impact on the humoral balance of bodies, emotional disruption was believed to engender physical complications.121 In such circumstances, Rebekah’s role in the birth family took precedence over her obligations to her immediate family, and it was accepted that she should stay in London. She did not return for over six weeks so that she could help her sister regain her strength both emotionally and physically. Following her return, Rebekah continued to provide practical and emotional support to Elizabeth in her letters. Two weeks after she had returned home, she received a letter from Elizabeth with an update on her progress:

Through mercy my Rebekah [the child] comes on very well though she has for the two or three last days been sadly troubled with the Gripes which I suppose is owing to my having a cold – I remember you told me that my colds would affect her too – I find it she is so fond of the Breast & grows so much stronger that I think that is one reason of my Breast having the skin off however I hope that will soon be better – & would be thankful it is no worse than it is.122

This network of support and advice continued throughout the remaining letters. The sisters shared recipes, discussed concerns about their children and even exchanged locks of hair from their infants’ heads. The significance of such an exchange should not be underestimated: human hair has long been understood to embody the person from which it is taken. The most common manifestation of this embodiment is in the creation of mourning jewellery, because of its ability to survive for many centuries after the person from whom it has been taken.123 In the eighteenth century, however, hair also functioned as an expression of love – it was low in cost, easy to obtain and rich with symbolic meaning.124 This symbolism arose from the concept that, in owning a lock of hair, one owned a portion of that individual. This was widely understood at all social levels and was acknowledged by Elizabeth in her correspondence:125

I must not forget to thank you for the little bit of hair off Thomas’ head. I think he must have a great deal for his age but I fancy it is too sandy for mine to be like it. I cannot only excuse your folly as you call it but be very much pleased to receive a Little bit of the Lad. I should vastly enjoy to see the whole of him as well as his Brother William.126

The exchange of hair created intimacy and indicated trust. Widespread understandings of sympathetic magic acknowledged the potential danger that locks of hair and fingernail clippings could be used to bewitch or curse the individual from whom they had been taken.127 To exchange locks of hair was, therefore, to symbolically place the giver in the power of the receiver.128

Where sisters were unable to be present in the birthing chamber, they generally retained a privileged position in family networks of information. They expected and demanded to know about the health of their parturient sisters and the arrival of a new niece or nephew. When Caroline Lascelles ‘was called this morning with the delightful news of dearest Harriet’s safe confinement’ in 1827, she ‘went up to town immediately after breakfast, and found her and the little girl (who was not quite welcome this time) going on as well as possible’.129 As the child had been born only at 10.30 the previous evening, it is probable that she was one of her sister’s first visitors after the delivery. Judith Millbanke wrote to her own aunt in Christmas 1778, demanding that she ‘tell him [her brother] we think we have also lost much by his changing his mind; tell sister Burges [her sister-in-law] I am ashamed of myself for behaving so shabbily to her; tell Sophia I long to hear of my being an Aunt’.130 Finally, on the 16 January she

received the long wished for intelligence that our dear Sofia was safe in Bed & that both She & my little Niece were as well as could be expected – thank God she is so now, but doubt from your account of her being so long ill She suffer’d more than what is usual.131

She then ‘called on Aunt Rowney as soon as I got your Letter, to inform her of the Birth of her great, great Niece’. The family was not unusual in their emphasis on the relationship between aunts (and great-aunts) and their nieces. There is plenty of evidence that prospective aunts anticipated long-term and fulfilling relationships with their nieces and nephews. As we saw with Elizabeth Shackleton’s slightly irritable correspondences with Aunt Pellet (see Chapter 1), these familial ties were often long-lasting. Becoming an aunt carried with it numerous obligations and duties, as well as the anticipation of a potentially lifelong and fulfilling relationship.

Conclusion

Close family relationships were important in managing the process of birthing in eighteenth-century England. The birthing woman’s husband, mother and sister provided her with practical advice and support throughout the birth and formed key points in the networks of trust, knowledge and information that were so important in the household management of childbirth. The women in this chapter generally found the involvement of these networks of trust and information to be positive elements of the birth process, though the scholarship of Karen Harvey, Laura Gowing and Linda Pollock shows that this was not always the case, particularly for women of lower social status.132 By being present in the household with their wife, daughter or sister during her birth, husbands, mothers and sisters demonstrated their love and natural affection for the birthing woman and created a temporary birth family. For a finite period, involvement in the birth family superseded obligations and duties to other understandings and configurations of family. Amy Harris’s monograph on Georgian siblinghood has highlighted the importance of moving away from consideration of families based on a married couple, emphasizing horizontal dynamics in the way families interacted and defined themselves.133

This chapter adds life-cycle events to this potential configuration of overlapping relationships and obligations that constituted eighteenth-century understandings of family.134 The birth family was held together by social, practical and emotional obligations to each other, to the birthing woman and to her unborn child. The layering of these personal relationships intensified the birth family’s experiences of childbirth, as husbands became fathers, mothers became grandmothers and sisters became aunts. These relationships were fluid and changing, textured by the life cycle as sisters experienced childbirth themselves, and as husbands and mothers become more proficient in their roles within the framework of birthing.

The dominant emotional framework of birthing was defined by love and natural affection. Husbands, mothers and sisters were prominent figures in birthing because of their assumed heightened emotional connection to the birthing woman and her child. The complex emotional bonds between spouses, parents and siblings were amplified within this emotional framework. Their love and affection were seen to heighten the capacity of the birth family to care for the new mother and her infant, and to increase their awareness of the potential risks during and after birth. The birth family therefore occupied elevated positions in the networks of trust and information that were so crucial to the domestic management of birth, as their emotional relationship was thought to produce greater vigilance and care over the birthing woman and her child.

As an affective environment, the household was an important space in understanding family and emotion in the eighteenth century, as well as in the management of childbirth.135 As the space in which the birth family were gathered, the household was at the centre of networks of trust, information and experience that operated in the birthing chamber and also in everyday life. These networks were strongly associated with emotional attachment and therefore mirrored the ripples of emotional intensity in the birthing, moving outwards from the household in concentric circles. The advice and information offered within these networks could be contradictory and hostile, or helpful and supportive, but was hugely influential in the way in which the birth was managed. As well as being at the centre of these networks, the household contained and shaped eighteenth-century experiences of childbirth. The physical capacity of household space, the way in which it had been rearranged to accommodate the birth, the prayers that were said within its walls and the objects that were contained within it stirred embodied memories and shaped behaviour. The household therefore shaped the emotional and embodied experiences of childbirth for both the birthing woman and her birth family.