Appendix

Sources and methodology

Individual archives

The extensive archives of three women – Frances Ingram, Elizabeth Shackleton and Rebekah Bateman – are central to this book.

Frances Ingram

Frances Ingram (1734–1807) was the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy speculator who married the ninth Viscount Irwin in 1758.1 The couple had five daughters and were particularly engaged in their upbringing. Frances’s letters show that she had a strong attachment to her daughters. She went to great lengths to remain with the children at her Temple Newsam estate near Leeds, rather than basing herself in London, even during the season. Despite this distance from fashionable society in London, her archive reveals her to have been an influential elite woman who was acquainted with many well-connected men and women, including several prime ministers and their wives.2 Her archive contains 220 letters, as well as various account books and household records. These letters are all written in an accomplished ‘familiar’ style, indicating that her correspondents had been well educated in the niceties of eighteenth-century letter writing.3 These letters contain many passing references to pregnancy and birth, often relating to high-profile women on the social circuit including Sophia Curzon, the wife of the second Baron Scarsdale and mistress of Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, and Anne Fitzroy, the scandalous duchess of Grafton.4 The most important collection of Frances’s correspondence for the purposes of this book is to be found in the archive of her friend Susan Stewart, later Susanna Leveson Gower, marchioness of Stafford.5 This collection contains eighty letters written over a period of twenty years between 1760 and 1781. The women had been friends since childhood and maintained a close relationship, with Susan asking Frances to be present at the birth of her first child. Frances was considered to be an accomplished letter writer by her friends, who regularly complimented her on her epistolary style. The tone of the letters between Susan and Frances is markedly different from those Frances wrote to her society friends, which suggests that the intimate and friendly tone of their letters was not solely a product of the conventions of polite letter writing.

Elizabeth Shackleton

A Lancashire gentry woman, Elizabeth Shackleton (1726–81) was the only daughter of a linen draper who had inherited a substantial estate through a half-brother.6 She married her second cousin Robert Parker in what appears to have been a successful love match, and had three sons before his premature death in 1758. Seven years later, she eloped to Gretna Green with her second husband, John Shackleton, a woollen merchant seventeen years her junior.7 This second marriage was not as successful as the first, and Elizabeth often recorded incidents of domestic disharmony and, occasionally, violence in her diary. She maintained extensive correspondence networks throughout her life with friends, family and business associates. Her correspondents’ social status varied, including a mantua maker, several members of the clergy and merchants with whom she came into regular contact. Her archive contains 422 letters written between 1752 and 1802, alongside three wallets of miscellaneous letters, notes and mementos. Three of her correspondents regularly wrote about issues of childbirth and infant care. The first was Elizabeth’s Aunt Pellet, from whom there are forty-six letters in the archive. These letters are didactic in tone, as her aunt looked to provide her with (unsolicited) advice about the best way to manage childbirth. The remaining two women who feature regularly in Elizabeth’s archives were her friend Jane Scrimshire and her cousin Betsy Ramsden. Jane was the wife of a Pontefract attorney who had known Elizabeth since they were young. Betsy was the wife of a schoolmaster and clergyman and both she and her husband regularly corresponded with Elizabeth.8 The life cycles of these women were closely linked as they were similar in age. They therefore married, gave birth and shared their concerns about breastfeeding, weaning and teething in many of their letters. As well as being an extensive letter writer, Elizabeth Shackleton also kept a diary during her later years. The diaries record not only Elizabeth’s visitors and social interactions but also her unhappiness in her second marriage. Her diaries appear to have functioned as what Marilyn Morris terms ‘a receptacle for disappointments and ill-feelings’.9 The birth of Elizabeth’s grandchildren are a high point in these diaries, and her detailed accounts of visiting their nursery and the memories these visits prompted provide rich material for research.

Rebekah Bateman

The letters in the archive of Rebekah Bateman, which covers the final two decades of the eighteenth century, display signs of genuine affection and intimacy between correspondents, though her style is very different from that of Frances Irwin. While the archives of Frances Irwin and Elizabeth Shackleton show a tendency to focus on news and the maintenance of networks and personal relationships, Rebekah Bateman’s letters were spaces for personal reflection – a way to cope with the sometimes competing tensions of piety, commerce and family life.10 Rebekah was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister in Manchester and married Thomas Bateman, a cotton dealer in the city. Congregationalist communities were generally self-contained even within a bustling city such as Manchester, and were inclined to be more self-conscious about their faith than their Anglican counterparts.11 Rebekah’s letter collection therefore reproduces the Protestant tradition of letter writing that had become popular in the seventeenth century – her letters contain a great deal of evangelizing and self-examination as she, and the recipients of her letters, struggled to make sense of their relationships with God and with those around them. The letters are also, however, undoubtedly influenced by the ‘familiar’ tendencies of eighteenth-century letter writing and Rebekah’s correspondents often sent news of pregnancies and births within other Congregationalist communities. The archive contains 223 letters written between 1781 and 1797, during which period Rebekah contemplated marriage and experienced motherhood. Forty-seven letters have survived between Rebekah and her husband Thomas. The couple had a relationship that was tense at times, but the way in which they wrote to each other during the early infancy of their children suggests a shared intimacy through the process of giving birth and caring for young infants.12 The archive also contains twenty letters written to Rebekah’s childhood friend Mary Durdon between 1781 and 1791, many of which were written in anticipation of her marriage and in expectation of bearing children. Finally, there is a collection of fifty-one letters between Rebekah and her sister Elizabeth Wilson, dated between 1781 and 1797. Elizabeth had married a London silk dealer and moved to the capital soon after her marriage. She relied on Rebekah for a great deal of advice and support throughout her childbearing years which, apart from occasional visits, was provided by letter.

Midwifery treatises

Published midwifery manuals are an important source throughout this book. While I argue against the dominance of accoucheurs in eighteenth-century birthing chambers, their writings remain important for contextualizing the way in which childbirth was understood and managed in this period. The style of midwifery writings over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries underwent a gradual yet distinct shift. The conversational vernacular collections written by authors such as Jane Sharp or Nicholas Culpeper gave way to the scientific, discourse-driven texts of celebrated accoucheurs such as William Smellie and Alexander Hamilton.13 This is often seen as indicating a wider social and epistemological change as a result of developments in medical practice that promoted the skills of the accoucheur and eventually led to the professionalization of childbirth over the course of the century.14 These metanarratives draw us away from the focus of this book, but the texts themselves are useful as examples of medical theory and practice. They often provide glimpses of traditional childbirth practices, as the authors sought to define their rational and scientific methods in opposition to each other and to the actions of midwives and birth attendants. In accessing this information, we need to be aware of the audience to whom these texts were directed. During the first half of the eighteenth century, there was a rapid increase in demand for midwifery writings, driven in part by the establishment in 1739 of Richard Manningham’s Lying-In Hospital in Jermyn Street, London, which provided lying-in beds for poor women and also instruction (for a fee) to young men keen to learn obstetric medicine.15 Manningham’s contemporary William Smellie also established a reputation in the field by teaching and lecturing paying students in obstetrics. The subsequent sharp rise in the number of qualified accoucheurs created new readers for midwifery treatises and also new authors, as the number of such texts rose dramatically during the second half of the eighteenth century. These authors wrote for their own students and also for each other, as debates about generation, reproduction and birth became popular in educated and elite circles. Four accoucheurs and authors are repeatedly referenced in this book. All were influential practitioners of obstetric medicine and teachers as well as authors.

William Smellie

William Smellie (1697–1763) has been called the ‘father of modern midwifery’.16 Based in London, he trained over 900 men and an unknown number of women in the theory and practice of midwifery. He kept meticulous notes, and his 1764 work A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery had run to twelve editions by the end of the century and was translated into French, German and Dutch.17 Despite his never holding a formal position at a London medical institution, Smellie’s methods were widely disseminated and exceedingly influential in the development of midwifery practice as the eighteenth century progressed.

Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton (1739–1802) spent his professional life in Edinburgh, practising as a surgeon and eventually becoming professor of midwifery at the university in 1780.18 He published several treatises on the theory and practice of midwifery during his career. The most comprehensive of these – and therefore the one referred to most frequently in this book – was The Family Female Physician: or, A Treatise on the Management of Female Complaints, and of Children in Early Infancy, which was issued in seven editions between 1781 and 1813. As he was a prominent teacher of midwifery, Hamilton’s methods were hugely influential. He broadly represents the prevailing obstetric opinion at the close of the eighteenth century.

Margaret Stephen

Very little is known about the life of Margaret Stephen (1765–1795) other than that she practised midwifery in London. There are indications in her writing that she was well educated, for she spoke several languages and argued that midwifery was a respectable occupation for women who had fallen on hard times.19 According to the preface to her book Domestic Midwife; or The Best Means of Preventing Danger in Child-Birth, she had herself given birth nine times. She trained at one of William Smellie’s schools and styled herself as a ‘teacher of midwifery to females’. Her book was printed in 1795, presumably to supplement her teaching practice and income. She represents an unusual female voice in the obstetric discourse of the period.

Henry Bracken

The work of Henry Bracken is also prominent in this book. Bracken learned midwifery by attending the Hôtel Dieu in Paris and the University of Leiden before returning to Lancaster to practise. He published The Midwife’s Companion: or, A Treatise of Midwifery in 1737, and it was reissued in 1751. While he became better known as a writer on farriery and as a founder of veterinary medicine, Bracken’s midwifery text provides an overview of the whole process of giving birth and is broadly representative of provincial accoucheurs who had trained in urban centres.20

Official records

Other crucial collections of sources used in this book provide information about the management of pregnancy and birth among the lower sections of eighteenth-century society. These experiences of birth are the most difficult to access, as they were more likely to have been shared orally than in writing.

Court records

The records produced by the Northern Circuit assize courts are an important repository of incidental information on the experiences of those of low social status. The assizes travelled around their allocated circuit, hearing cases that were thought too serious to be dealt with summarily by the quarter sessions. The Northern Circuit was one of the largest, encompassing Yorkshire, Lancashire, Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland (Cumbria). The size of the circuit meant that each county was visited annually. A vast number of cases were heard by the assizes each year, so I have focused on a sample of cases from across the eighteenth century in eighteen different years, equally distributed between 1740 and 1800, which totalled approximately 1,260 individual cases. Of those cases, 3 per cent involved accusations of infanticide or the murder of the infant within the first weeks of its life. The type of record produced by each case varies, and includes witness depositions taken by the parish constable, coroner’s reports and official indictments. There are, of course, challenges in the use and interpretation of these sources.21 As shown in Chapter 5, the authority of the courts and the fatal implications of a conviction for infanticide had the potential to alter the testimonies of the witnesses both positively and negatively. These sources are rich in detail about birthing and the households in which it took place. Community features heavily in the court records, both as a support mechanism and as a malignant method of control. Court records thus provide a richly detailed account of the experience of birth among those of lower social status in eighteenth-century England.22

Poor law records

The other group of texts that describe birthing from the perspective of the poor are pauper letters written to the poor law authorities requesting financial relief when a birth was expected. These letters vary hugely in authorship and content. It used to be thought that very few remained in northern archives. Where possible, I have referred to the parish records of Holcombe – an ancient chapelry in the parish of Bury that served the township of Tottington Lower End.23 These documents are supplemented by further pauper letters taken from a series of published volumes entitled Narratives of the Poor, in particular the first volume, Voices of the Poor: Poor Law Depositions and Letters.24 This volume of the collection contains 210 letters from various petitioners across Berkshire, Lancashire and Northamptonshire, 11 per cent of whom cite pregnancy as a causative factor in their poverty. A collaborative project between the National Archives and the University of Leicester, ‘In their own write: the Lives and Letters of the Poor 1834–c.1900’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is currently underway which will make these incredibly rich sources much more accessible to future researchers.

The letters in this published collection are methodologically problematic in several ways. As a published collection of letters they have been carefully curated by the editors to fulfil the requirements of the volume. In being transcribed, the letters lose their material elements and the reader is required to accept the editor’s omissions and interpretations. However, even before their transcription, these documents present many methodological challenges. The imbalance of authority between the writer and the reader has the potential to influence the information contained in the letters as writers sought to manipulate the poor law system to their advantage.25 I have therefore taken care to read these letters as representative of what writers believed the poor law authorities wanted to hear rather than as evidence of actual practice.