Many years ago, researching family history in the old newspapers collection of the Launceston library, I happened to spot an anonymous poem from 1870. It wasn’t exactly Tennyson or Wordsworth, but its simple pathos made me copy it down on the spot.
The poem is a mother’s lament for an infant taken, as infants so often were in those days, by disease or other misfortune.
There’s a little drawer in my chamber
Guarded with tenderest care,
Where the dainty clothes are lying,
That my darling shall never wear.
And there, while the hours are waning,
Till the house is all at rest,
I sit and fancy a baby
Close to my aching breast.
The poem, along with the extraordinary number of death notices for infants and young women, is a stark reminder of how only too-recent it is that a death in childbirth or infancy has become a tragic rarity rather than the grim norm. Until just a little over a century ago, fully half the children could be expected to die before the age of 15. A dramatic decline began in the early 20th century, until today the infant mortality rate is under five per 1,000 children.
For our grandparents and great-grandparents, though, childhood death was an ever-present spectre. How did they cope? It’s tempting to think that acceptance bred indifference. The practice, familiar to any family historian, of giving a new child the name of a deceased one, might suggest an attitude of, ‘Well, we can always have another.’
But, as the anonymous poem shows, the grief of every lost infant remained with bereaved parents for years. A new book by British historian Robert Woods examines how parents of the past reacted to the ever-present reality of high infant mortality.
Woods seeks to answer questions such as: “Was the bond of emotional attachment between parents and offspring as close in the past as it is said to be today?” Or did sky-high rates of child mortality lead to diminished attachment and limited mourning of children who died? There has been considerable debate on this matter among historians. While some such as Philippe Ariès have theorized that parents were once largely indifferent to the loss of their offspring, others have critiqued this assessment. It is true that, numbed by frequent child deaths, parents often did not make as much of a show of their grief. Children died with such frequency that their graves often went unmarked. “Prior to the 15th century, children’s tombs either did not exist or were very rare,” Woods writes.
But although losing a child to death in infancy or early childhood was a common, indeed near-universal experience among parents, there is no reason to think that the loss was any less emotionally painful for all its ordinariness. The words of parents and other witnesses to early child death often suggest acute pain.
And not just the words of an unknown Tasmanian mother penning a grief-stricken remembrance. The great English poets put their loss into heartrending words as well.
The poet Ben Jonson (1572–1637) wrote touching poems about his deceased children, including these words for a son who died at age seven: “Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lye / Ben. Ionson his best piece of poetrie.” Robert Herrick’s (1591–1674) poem “To the Lady Crew, upon the Death of Her Child” advises a mother not to weep, because her dead child is at least no longer in pain: “And (pretty Child) feeles now no more / Those paines it lately felt before” […]
Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers typically loved their children then as much as now, and their grief was correspondingly intense. Consider these lines from “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth” by a poet who lost several of her children prematurely, Mehetabel Wesley Wright (1697–1750), urging her day-old infant to look at her one last time before dying:
Ah! regard a mother’s moan,
Anguish deeper than thy own!
Fairest eyes, whose dawning light
Late with rapture blest my sight,
Ere your orbs extinguish’d be,
Bend their trembling beams on me!
In simple rhyming couplets, Thomas Gray (1716–1771) composed the poignant “Epitaph on a Child”:
Here, freed from pain, secure from misery, lies,
A child, the darling of his parents’ eyes
Members of the nobility were not spared from the horrifically high rates of infant mortality in the preindustrial age. Elizabeth Egerton (1626–1663), an English countess, wrote a poem for her son Henry, who died at just 29 days old:
[He] lived dayes as many as my years
Heartrendingly, the American colonial poet Jane Colman Turell (1708–1735) wrote of losing three children in a row, each pregnancy ending in a stillbirth.
Thrice in my womb I’ve found the pleasing strife,
In the first struggles of my infant’s life:
But O how soon by heaven I’m call’d to mourn,
While from my womb a lifeless babe is torn?
Born to the grave ’ere it had seen the light,
Or with one smile had cheered my longing sight.
It might be said that mothers, having borne the growing child in their own bodies for those long, anxious months, and endured the agony of childbirth, would feel the loss of a baby more intensely. But plenty of fathers laid their grief out in searing lines.
The famous poet John Milton’s (1608–1674) lengthy poem “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough” contains several passages that vividly portray the pain of losing a child […]
So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. (The words “tomb” and “womb” were frequently rhymed, as Woods observes.)
Burns, Shelley, Coleridge, even Shakespeare, all wrote poignantly about losing children. My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! weeps Constance, in King John.
Woods offers a detailed analysis of the poems and epitaphs in his book, noting that “deeper feelings of grief” are evident in poems where the subject is the writer’s own child or a close relative (as one would expect), and that the degree of grief does not seem to vary greatly with the child’s age or gender (perhaps surprising, as in the more sexist world of the past one might expect the loss of male children to inspire more intense grief).
All in all, we should be forever thankful we live in the modern world.
Looking at statistics and figures of infant mortality can give an idea of how horrifyingly frequent childhood death was in the preindustrial age. But reading firsthand accounts of grief conveys a vivid sense of what it was like to actually live in a world of such frequent early deaths.
Let us be thankful that we’ll very rarely have to experience it for ourselves.
