If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  But the complainers who preached so loudly on the topic were usually rather officious godly gentlemen of the Puritan persuasion. Even mothers whose milk had run dry did not escape their censure: ‘sure if their breasts be dry, as they say, they should fast and pray together that this curse may be removed from them’. These views naturally held great sway in the Puritan communities of New England. In contrast to Britain, breastfeeding became the norm there at all levels in society.

  A seventeenth-century breast pump

  While some women were incapable of providing milk, there were certainly many others who just wanted to avoid pain and inconvenience. A significant group were forbidden by their husbands to breastfeed because it inhibited the conception of the next child. Certainly a woman of property who’d given birth to a girl would be expected to return to the marital bed as soon as possible in the hope of providing a male heir to the family’s estates.

  Bernardino Ramazzini (c.1700) gave a list of medical risks to the breastfeeding mother: she might face problems ‘when milk is too abundant, when it curdles in the breasts, when these become inflamed’, or she might ‘suffer from an abscess or cracks in the nipples’. Such conditions were very painful and genuinely dangerous before antibiotics came along. There were also nutritional considerations: ‘atrophy or wasting may result from long-continued suckling … the bodies of nurses are robbed of nutritive juice … they gradually become thin and reedy’.

  However, gentlewomen were in fact much more likely to have enjoyed good, rich and varied diets than the wet nurses they employed, and farming out the task to others came with its own risks. Half-hearted or sleepy nurses had been known to crush or ‘overlie’ their charges during late-night feeds. John Evelyn lost a son this way in 1664: ‘It pleased God to take away my son Richard, now a month old, yet without any sickness … we suspected much the nurse had overlain him.’

  The arguments which raged over wet-nursing are interesting for the light they throw on people’s attitudes to parenthood. You might think that parents like John Evelyn who sent their children away to be brought up by strangers could not have really loved their children (this, of course, is also the reason why the question of breast-or bottle-feeding rouses such strong passions today). Historians have argued that parents in centuries past loved their babies less: high rates of infant mortality and the need to send well-born children away to arranged marriages at a young age made affection risky because of the high probability of loss and sorrow. In France, Michel de Montaigne shocks us when he fails to remember how many of his own children had died: ‘two or three at nurse, not without regret, but without grief’.

  So we may well ask: did people really have childhoods in the past? Or were children treated as mini-adults, fit for the world of marriage, labour and loss? A baby boy would be hard to distinguish from a girl until he was ‘breeched’ (put into trousers) at the age of seven, but from that point onwards he was almost a grownup.

  Certainly aristocrats had to harden their hearts in order to send their children away to early, dynastically important marriages, or to serve in the households of grander relations or the king. Daniele Barbaro, an ambassador to 1540s England from Venice, thought it shocking that the English parted from their children at such a young age, and that it showed ‘want of affection’. But the noblemen he questioned countered that it was done for the child’s own good. Their offspring received education and contacts in a more important household, and thus connections were forged between families that would serve everybody well.

  But we also know that even when aristocratic girls were sent away to marry young, they remained attached to their birth families. Letters, visits and news carried by servants or visitors kept the links alive. Heiresses frequently chose to be buried with their fathers rather than their husbands: they were daughters before they were mothers. It’s also clearly nonsensical to say that pre-modern families did not share strong affective bonds. Elizabeth Appleton, of Ipswich, New England, had a family particularly scarred by infant mortality. In 1736, she summed up her dreadful losses with heartache:

  Here is an account of all my posterity. 6 sons and 3 daughters, 20 grand son and 20 grand daughters, 58 in all. 33 are gone before me. I hope I shall meet them all at Christ’s right hand among his sheep and lambs. I often look over this list with sorrow.

  Sarah Goodhue, also of Ipswich, movingly reminded her children in 1681 of her husband’s customary behaviour on coming home from work. He was a fond and involved father, and had delighted

  to take the young ones up into his wearied arms … you may behold as in a glass, his tender care and love to you every one as you grow up: I can safely say, that his love was so to you all, that I cannot say which is the child he doth love best.

  From the late seventeenth century onwards, growing numbers of such diaries and letters record a more openly affectionate attitude towards children, and a new generation of medical practitioners began to argue that a mother should indeed breastfeed her child. The doctor William Cadogan, in his 1748 Essay upon Nursing, confessed that he’d simply failed to find any arguments in favour of wet-nursing. Because his book was adopted by the influential Foundling Hospital in London, it became very widely read. ‘I am quite at a loss to account for the general practice of sending infants out of doors’, he wrote, ‘to be suckled, or drynursed by another woman, who has not so much understanding, nor can have so much affection for it, as the parents.’ He recommended ‘every father to have his child nursed under his own eye, to make use of his own reason and sense in superintending and directing the management of it’. The emphasis on ‘reason and sense’ is very typical of an Enlightenment physician.

  A few years later, the beautiful and trendsetting Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, followed Cadogan’s advice. Startlingly for an aristocrat, she began to breastfeed her own daughter, after having discovered that the nurse she’d employed was often drunk and ‘made the bed stink of wine’.

  And this was in line with the eighteenth-century ideas about childhood being promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote that parents should be loving and kind to their children, letting them dress and live simply and naturally, rather than restricting them in tight clothes or closely monitoring their behaviour. There was a resultant craze for breastfeeding, so much so that James Gillray in 1796 produced a satirical drawing showing a time-pressed fashionable mother enthusiastically squeezing out a spot of milk just before going out to dinner.

  A fashionable mother apes the Duchess of Devonshire by eschewing a wet nurse and breastfeeding her own child

  The medical establishment’s continued campaign in favour of breastfeeding took a different and more serious turn in the nineteenth century. The practice of wet-nursing had by no means died out, and a new nightmare was presented in the shape of the phenomenon of baby-farming.

  A woman in financial difficulty might deliberately conceive with the intention of gaining lucrative work as a wet nurse. The unwanted children of these would-be wet nurses would be sent off to ‘baby farms’, where they received only cursory attention, sometimes even dying from neglect. ‘Why should a mother be allowed to sacrifice her child – to subject it to a slow process of disease and death – in order to make a handsome profit out of her nursing power?’ asked the British Medical Journal.

  Much campaigning eventually resulted in the Infant Life Protection Bill of 1872, whose effects are still evident today in the need the state feels to screen, register and monitor those working as childminders. Women who cared for other women’s children for longer than twenty-four hours had to register their establishments, and the babies of wet nurses were less likely to ‘disappear’. Also bottle-feeding had become a more practical alternative by the 1860s, with baby bottles more widely and cheaply available. Mrs Beeton thought bottle feeds ‘more nutritious’ and likely to prevent the child getting rickets.

  Despite this new concern for the well-being of babies, the extreme separation of functions in the Victorian house saw middle-class childr
en still kept remote from their parents. They were relegated upstairs to their own nursery or schoolroom, where they were looked after by substitute mothers in the form of nursery maids and governesses. Edward Burne-Jones, the painter, referred to his first child as ‘the small stranger within our gates’, summing up this lack of intimacy. In conservative families, ideal Victorian children were not seen or heard until they reached maturity and took their places in society as grownups. There was a great contrast between sixteen and seventeen: a sixteen-year-old might still wear the clothes and eat the food of a child, sleeping in a nursery and living a life peripheral to that of his or her parents. But a seventeen-year-old suddenly became an adult, allowed to socialise with his or her parents and their friends and given a separate bedroom.

  Only in the 1950s did an interim life stage – the teenage years – begin to be recognised. This coincided with a post-war housing explosion which saw parents able to provide older children their own individual bedrooms for the first time, rather than putting them in with their younger siblings and reserving the spare room for a nursemaid. Possession of a private room encouraged teenagers to amass their own age-specific clothes, records, posters and pastimes.

  But younger children were still treated as powerless, slightly inferior members of a household, with lower-priority needs and desires. Today it’s quite astonishing to remember that only in the last thirty years have children been placed right at the heart of family life. Terence Conran, writing on children’s bedrooms in 1974, considered that ‘it’s pointless spending a lot of money on decorations for young children. They won’t appreciate the financial sacrifice, and will feel highly indignant when you nag about scribbles and dirty marks.’ It’s not an attitude shared by the Habitat shops he founded today, or by the huge industry that makes and sells furniture and gadgets for children’s bedrooms. Nowadays children are treated as equally, if not more, deserving of a family’s resources than parents. Despite the evidence that loving parents have existed throughout the ages, households are now more child-centred than ever before.

  People often think that the practice of wet-nursing died out in Britain by the turn of the twentieth century, yet in fact it was still relatively common until the 1940s – as it remains in other cultures. And despite the danger posed by HIV, swapping babies for a feed is not unusual among laidback middle-class mothers today. Perhaps milk-less mothers who want their children to enjoy breastfeeding’s benefits will once again bring back the wet nurse.

  4 – Knickers

  Comfortable garments … which all of us wear but none of us talk about.

  Lady Chesterfield on knickers, 1850

  What do you do first thing in the morning? The Tudor physician Andrew Boorde recommends that you should ‘stretch forth your arms and legs, and your body, cough, and spit, and then go to your stool to make your egestion’. Today, likely as not, you still stretch and visit the bathroom. Then, every single morning of your life, you choose an outfit, moulding your identity for the day ahead.

  Bedchambers have always been places for storing clothes, unless you were grand enough to have a wardrobe. This was originally a separate room, not a piece of furniture, staffed by specialist servants. The ‘wardrobe’ department (‘warders’ of the ‘robes’) was a subsection of the royal household. Its members looked after the king’s and queen’s clothes, as well as their soft furnishings. From the time of Edward III, the wardrobe staff even had their own central depot in the City of London, handy for the cloth merchants. (Its existence is echoed in the name of the church ‘St Andrew’s by the Wardrobe’ near St Paul’s Cathedral.) By the seventeenth century, the king still had a ‘Great Wardrobe’, a central repository, but he also had a ‘Standing Wardrobe’ in each royal palace and a ‘Removing Wardrobe’ which travelled with him.

  The wardrobe would eventually evolve into the wooden cupboard to be found in bedrooms today, but this would not happen until the nineteenth century. Textiles and hangings in medieval times were stored on a hanging-rail called a ‘perch’ (from the Latin ‘pertica’, a rail or pole; also used as a unit of length in land surveying) or in a chest. A cupboard would not be found in a medieval bedroom. It was literally a board, or shelf, upon which cups could be placed, and it belonged in the great hall or kitchen. A chest was the more likely receptacle for linen or folded clothes, and Georgian ladies write of ‘laying up’ rather than ‘hanging up’ their dresses.

  The birth of the modern, upright wardrobe followed the birth of the coat hanger. Victorian fashions for ladies involved skirts wider than ever before, and all this fabric had to be stored somewhere. Ottomans and hollow stools made their appearance in ladies’ dressing rooms and bedrooms. Finally, the ‘shoulder’, as it was originally known, was invented. This was a narrow, wooden but still recognisable coat hanger, and it allowed clothes to be stored vertically in a cupboard. In 1904, a German visitor noted that in English women’s wardrobes ‘only skirts are hung on hangers and go into the hanging part of the cupboard, all the rest are laid flat, like men’s clothes’. But the wire coat hanger had just been invented, and would sweep all before it: today shirts, coats, trousers and dresses alike are usually hung.

  For many centuries a king or nobleman would put on his undershirt in the room where he slept. After that, a ceremony called the levee would be performed. The king would step out of his bedchamber into a more public room, where his outer clothes would be handed to him by his servants. He had to get used, then, to his courtiers seeing him in his underwear.

  The nature of people’s undergarments is a subject to which we can gain a surprising amount of access. Even the chivalrous, ancient and Noble Order of the Garter actually takes its name from an attempt to cover up a lady’s very public wardrobe malfunction: Edward III created the order’s motto when he chided some courtiers with the words ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘Evil be to he who evil thinks’) when they rudely laughed at the Countess of Salisbury’s garter accidentally falling to the floor.

  Indeed, underwear has often been put deliberately on display. This can be a sexually predatory action, common to the lacy-shirted male Cavalier courtiers in the 1630s through to the young urban males of today showing their Calvin Klein underpants above low-slung jeans. And Monica Lewinsky discovered that even the most powerful man in America could be reduced to a jelly by the sight of an intern’s thong.

  Generally speaking, though, to have visible underwear is regrettable. A young French housewife was addressed in the closing years of the fourteenth century in the advice book Le Ménagier de Paris. She was commanded to cover up carefully:

  be mindful that the collar of your shift, or your camisole, or of your robe or surcoat does not slip out one over the other, as happens with drunken, foolish, or ignorant women.

  Yet to receive someone while imperfectly dressed can even mean that you respect them greatly, and the supremely self-confident Winston Churchill would famously chat to his staff while naked in his bath. On the morning of 17 June 1520, during the conference near Calais being held to celebrate their friendship, Francis I of France appeared unexpectedly in Henry VIII’s bedchamber. He personally handed the English king his shirt as a sign of the close intimacy between the nations of England and France. (This tactful gesture was necessary because Francis had defeated Henry in a bout of wrestling a few days previously, and his brother king was in a royal sulk.)

  In Henry VIII’s case, it was usually an Esquire of the Body who would help the king into his shirt in the privacy of his bedchamber. Henry would emerge ‘loosely dressed’ and enter his privy chamber, a more public room, next door. Here, his Yeomen of the Wardrobe would have his outer clothes ready, and his Grooms would hand them to the more senior Gentlemen of the bedchamber. It was this latter group who would actually dress the king. The Grooms were warned to handle the king’s garments with great reverence, and not to ‘lay hands upon the royal person, or intermeddle with dressing’, except to warm clothes before the fire.

  In innumerable royal bedrooms,
it was a trusted and often noble servant who had the responsibility of warming the king’s shirt ‘before the fire, & hold the same till we are ready to put it on’, words which come from the bedchamber rules of William III. When Horace Walpole visited the French court of Louis XV in 1765, he found the king’s public dressing had become so well-established and ritualised that it was almost a tourist attraction: ‘You are let into the King’s bedchamber just as he has put on his shirt; he dresses and talks good-humouredly to a few.’ Yet even this unusually tolerant king had his limits: he would ‘glare at strangers’.

  The same dressing ceremonies were also found in the bedchambers of important ladies. John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century diarist, recorded how he was once invited into a bedchamber to see Charles II’s mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, ‘in her morning loose garment, her maids combing her, newly out of her bed, his majesty and the gallants standing about her’. Many other gallants and cronies of the king had also gathered to see the pleasant and titillating sight.

  A little later at the British court, Queen Anne was also semi-publicly dressed by her extensive bedchamber staff. They descended in rank from the Mistress of the Robes, to the Ladies of the Bedchamber (aristocrats one and all), to the Women of the Bedchamber, to the dressers, hairdressers, and finally, the Page of the Backstairs.

  The items of the queen’s clothing were also ranked from high to low, and the participants were only allowed to touch garments appropriate to their status. So, the Lady of the Bedchamber put on the queen’s shift, which went right next to her skin and was considered to be highly important. The Lady also handed the queen her fan at the end of the whole process, and that was the limit of her involvement. More menial work – lacing the queen into her stays, putting on her hoops and fastening her dress – was done by the Women of the Bedchamber and the dressers, and the Page’s lowly role was limited to putting on her shoes. The Mistress of the Robes had the least physically demanding but most high-status job of all: she handed the queen her jewels. One pities the queen, standing cold and vulnerable in the centre of this dance of ceremony.