The Strangest Family

by Janice Hadlow

  William Hamley, whose descendants went on to run the great toyshop in London’s Regent Street that still bears his name, opened his ‘Noah’s Ark’ in High Holborn in 1760, stocking a vast variety of playthings for children of all ages, from tin soldiers to wax dolls and illustrated books for young readers. His first customers were better-off families from the newly built squares and terraces of the West End, prepared to pay handsomely to entertain their offspring. For the truly committed amongst these new consumers, their purchases were about something more than just the delight of the moment. Adding to their children’s pleasure was also an investment in the future, since happy boys and girls were far more likely to develop into well-balanced adults, properly fitted to take their place in society. Adding to the enjoyments of your children thus delivered benefits that went far beyond the cheerful indulgence of a doting parent; it was also a forward-looking social duty. Making children happy was a good thing in itself since it was likely to nurture a new generation of fulfilled, content and well-balanced adults, happier in themselves and of far greater use to society.

  This was a very seductive blueprint for eighteenth-century parents of a thoughtful cast of mind. It was made all the more appealing by the conviction of many of its advocates that it was easily and practicably achievable. In books and pamphlets, articles and treatises, advice abounded on how to turn the ideal into reality. All agreed that the conscientious parent must be prepared to interrogate and if necessary reject all institutions and thinking that interfered with natural behaviour and affection: established practices in childcare, in education, in discipline, in nutrition, even in the style of children’s clothes – nothing was to be regarded as sacred. In pursuit of an uncorrupted upbringing for their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers were told they must be prepared to make great changes in their own lives, as well as those of their offspring.

  Nowhere were these ideas more attractively synthesised than in the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, ou de l’éducation published in 1762. In dense and didactic detail, the book tells the story of Emile, a child of aristocratic parents, who is sent to the country to be raised as far away as possible from the malign, distorting effects of polite, urban life. He lives there in a state of almost complete isolation – significantly, the only book he is allowed is Robinson Crusoe – quarantined from customary practices of every kind. His food is plain, his clothing simple, and he spends most of his time outdoors. The cultivation of a strong and hardy body is given as much attention as the nurturing of his mind. As a small child his education is conducted entirely through practical experience, learning from what he sees around him. His spiritual instruction is designed to preserve his instinctual morality rather than expose him to revealed religion.

  Emile was an immediate bestseller across Europe, unquestionably one of the most influential books of the century. It was bought even by those who disagreed with the radical political philosophy of Rousseau’s earlier works. In Britain it became a publishing phenomenon, reviewed everywhere, serialised in magazines, and provoking intense and lively debate in correspondence columns about its virtues and deficiencies. The small part played by religion in Emile’s upbringing displeased some commentators – it was publicly burnt in France as a result of what he had to say about the role of the Catholic Church – but this had no discernible effect on its popularity amongst British readers.

  Rousseau always insisted he had not written the book as a practical guide, although that did not prevent some of his more committed admirers attempting to replicate Emile’s experiences. Lady Kildare, a deep devotee, actually offered him a job as tutor to her children. When he declined, she embarked on the experiment without him, leaving her home at the heart of ascendancy Dublin, abandoning her role as a political hostess and decamping to the rural coast of Black Rock, where she attempted to raise her huge family in circumstances as close to Emile’s as possible. Some readers were more sceptical: Lady Kildare’s sister, Caroline Fox, declared there were ‘more paradoxes, more absurdities’ in it than almost any other book she had read – but perhaps the great majority of Rousseau’s many readers sat somewhere between these two responses.26 What they took away from Emile was a potent, if romanticised summation of Enlightenment ideas about family life, from which they cherry-picked those for which they felt the most sympathy, and adapted them as best they could into the requirements of real life. For, despite Rousseau’s protests that he had not written a handbook, there is no doubt some of his audience did regard it as a prescriptive text and acted on what they believed to be his recommendations. Contemporary commentators attributed the rapid decline of the swaddling of babies in England, which had virtually disappeared by the end of the century, almost entirely to his criticism of the practice.

  Equally influential was his forcefully expressed conviction that the welfare of children was the direct, personal responsibility of all conscientious parents. Rousseau had very harsh things to say about those who handed children over to the governance of servants and tutors. The nurturing and care of children was not a chore to be outsourced; it was the central obligation, and indeed one of the principal pleasures, of parenthood. In theory, bringing up the young was a duty incumbent on both parents; but Rousseau had little doubt that, in practice, it was the mother who had the most important role to play. ‘In the union of the sexes,’ he wrote, ‘each contributes equally to the common aim, but not in the same way.’ Both in physiology and temperament, nature had marked women out for a special role as nurturers and carers.

  Rousseau maintained that among the rich and well-to-do, this first duty had been too often subordinated to the requirements of polite society, but was convinced any thoughtful woman would much prefer to undertake the care of her children herself, if allowed to do so. In the 1760s, and beyond, his message was ardently embraced by an ever-increasing number of aristocratic women. The Countess of Shelburne, secure in the happy intimacy of her model marriage, was as fulfilled as a mother as she was as a wife. She devoted her days to her toddler son in a way that would have surely won Rousseau’s approval. She spent her mornings with the little boy, walking in the gardens with him ‘without his nurse’. She watched him dine, and after he had slept returned to the nursery to ‘teach him to spell words till it is time to dress for my own dinner’.27

  George and Charlotte embarked on their own experiment with parenthood on the crest of the first wave of enthusiasm for the new thinking. Emile was published in the year of the Prince of Wales’s birth. Like so many other young mothers of her age, Charlotte had a copy, which she added to a growing collection of other books on the subject that formed a substantial part of her private library. These were not ornamental acquisitions, but works Charlotte clearly knew well. In 1776, she sent her brother Charles ‘a book which contains everything about how to care for children from the moment of their birth … Have it translated, and return the original when you please. Follow a little of our method, and you will find that your children will soon grow stronger.’28

  Charlotte was exactly the kind of intellectually minded, conscientious young woman for whom modern ideas about child-rearing exerted the strongest possible appeal. But, from the earliest days of her own motherhood, it was clear that her ability to implement Rousseau’s principles would be limited by the customary practices the author deplored. Judged by his standards, Charlotte fell at the very first hurdle when she did not breastfeed her children. For Rousseau, breastfeeding was the touchstone of a woman’s commitment to the whole ideal of better parenting, the source from which all resulting social benefits flowed. ‘But let mothers deign to nurse their children,’ he wrote in Emile, ‘morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every breast, the state will be re-peopled.’ Until the mid-eighteenth century, most women who could afford to do so hired wet nurses to feed their babies; in the years that followed, the climate steadily shifted in favour of mothers suckling their own children. By the end of the century, maternal breastfeeding had beco
me the prevailing ideological orthodoxy.

  ‘The first of the parental duties which nature points out to the mother is to be herself the nurse of her own offspring,’ sternly opined the cleric Thomas Gisborne in 1797, in a widely read series of reflections on the duties of women. To hire a wet nurse except in cases of absolute physical incapacity ‘is to evince a most shameful degree of selfishness and unnatural insensibility’.29 The assumption that breast was best extended even to children themselves. Lady Kildare, that enthusiastic devotee of Rousseau’s principles, had been forbidden to suckle her children as doctors feared it would affect her already poor sight; later, she found herself having to justify her lapse to her young son, as keen as Rousseau himself to draw conclusions about human behaviour from observation of the natural world. ‘“Mama, don’t the mothers of calves give them suck?” “Yes,” says I. “And why then did you not give me suck, for you are my mother, like the mothers of the little calves?”’ Lady Kildare was hurt and ashamed. ‘Now, was this not quite cutting? I was ready to cry, but I told him the naughty doctors would not let me.’30

  Charlotte had no medical dispensation to excuse her from ‘the first duty’. It is clear from Hunter’s journal that she had plenty of milk with her first three babies, but there seems never to have been any question she would feed them herself. It may well have been regarded as incompatible with her public role, as it would have obliged her to neglect many of her official duties. It would also have absented her from the marital bed. Contemporary medical opinion considered sex during lactation extremely undesirable; it was thought adversely to affect the quality of the milk, as well as exhausting a woman already physically reduced by the demands of nursing. If a woman employed a wet nurse, she was generally regarded as ready to get back into sexual harness a month or so after giving birth. The feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, writing at the end of the century, noted scornfully that some husbands, ‘devoid of sense and parental affection’, refused to allow their wives to breastfeed because they were not prepared to endure the period of celibacy it required. Looking at the pattern of her pregnancies, there seems little doubt that this was Charlotte’s experience; had she breastfed her own babies, she might well have produced fewer of them. Although the contraceptive effects of lactation itself remain a subject of debate, only the most demanding of eighteenth-century husbands would have expected his wife to resume sexual relations whilst she was still feeding a child. One way or another, Charlotte’s practice of handing over her babies to wet nurses contributed to her extraordinary fertility.

  It is of course possible that the decision not to breastfeed was not Charlotte’s. Her mother-in-law, the Princess Dowager Augusta, was a powerful presence during Charlotte’s first confinements, and, in common with most women of her generation, had made unquestioning use of a wet nurse, and may have been instrumental in ensuring her daughter-in-law followed her example. Certainly it was she who selected and vetted the woman who was to take on that role for Charlotte: Mrs Margaret Scott, the wife of a Kentish squire who had fallen on hard times. It was an important and well-rewarded post: the Duchess of Northumberland heard that Mrs Scott was ‘to have £500 for the first year, and one or two for life. Her husband is to have £1,000 a year.’ In return, Mrs Scott was to devote herself entirely to the prince to the exclusion of all other activity. ‘She is neither to see, write to, nor receive any letters from any of her friends.’31 Although the duchess thought she looked sickly (she had just given birth to her tenth child), under her care, the prince flourished. Perhaps because she seems to have played so little part in her appointment, Charlotte did not like her. Recalling Mrs Scott’s regime in later years, the queen declared that she had been difficult from the start, meddling, argumentative and prone to stand on her dignity. Future wet nurses were chosen with regard more to calmness of disposition than claims of gentility.

  Thomas Gisborne argued that failure to breastfeed often arose from want of affection on the mother’s part. Such an accusation could not be levelled at Charlotte, who, within the restrictive bounds of royal behaviour, was an attentive parent to her first son. She asked to have him given to her as soon as he was born, and in later weeks was often to be seen carrying him in her arms. In 1763, every inch the proud mother, she presented the king with a wax head of his eldest son mounted on a column which gently rotated, so that the model could be seen from every side.

  As childhood was increasingly seen as a uniquely precious and beautiful state, capturing its essence became the ambition of both patrons and artists alike – and, as domestically minded parents, the king and queen were at the very heart of this unfolding project. Charlotte and George celebrated their affection for their growing family in the pictures they commissioned. They had their family painted constantly, in a huge variety of media, and in every possible grouping, from intimate single portraits to large, ambitious conversation pieces. They embraced modern ideas about how best to portray the young, favouring painterly styles which encapsulated all the newest thinking about what it was to be a child. The decades during which their sons and daughters were born saw the depiction of children in art aspire towards an ever-greater informality, with a sense of joy and exuberance replacing the more stately images of previous years. By the 1780s, the subjects of youthful portraiture had, for the most part, moved out of the drawing room and into the open air, just as Rousseau recommended for their real-life counterparts. Children were shown romping with pets, digging the garden, playing cricket, picking fruit and generally having a high time of it. At the beginning of the period, painters such as Allan Ramsey (one of George’s favourites) sought to convey a calmer, more restrained vision of domestic happiness. In 1764, he produced a delicate and tender picture of Charlotte and her two young sons. The queen and her boys are posed against a neutral grey background, anonymous yet undeniably grand; tall pillars loom out of the shadows. The centre of the picture glows with light, and framed within it sits the small family group, united and gently entwined with one another. The Prince of Wales, a sturdy toddler, leans against his mother’s leg, a toy bow in his hand, whilst his younger brother Frederick perches on her lap. The queen’s arm rests on her spinet; among the many papers piled upon it can be glimpsed a copy of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. The tone is wistful, almost dream-like, and the very isolation of the trio emphasises the strength of the bond between them. At the same time, it quietly suggests the things that unite the family as a whole: a shared passion for music, an interest in learning and, above all, a depth of affection between parent and children that was the bedrock of their life together.

  Twelve years later, in 1776, Benjamin West painted the six middle children in a very different style. West, best known for his epic historical canvases, sought to convey liveliness and energy rather than the hushed stillness of Ramsey’s picture. The royal children are shown outside in a garden, transfixed by the antics of a small dog that attempts to catch a ball thrown by one of the boys. Prince Ernest holds the dog’s lead; a drum and other toys lie discarded on the ground; no adult is present to demand they be picked up. The boys wear their hair long and unpowdered, and sport white open-collared shirts, a style that had become the virtual uniform of the modern, informally reared child. One of the princes is shown with his stockings falling down. The boys are clearly having a rather better time than their sisters, who look on with a slightly anxious, preoccupied air.

  By 1785, in a picture by John Singleton Copley, even girls are allowed to have fun. The three youngest princesses are shown enjoying themselves in a wooded grove, where cheerful chaos rules. Three dogs bark and gambol, Princess Mary brandishes a tambourine, Sophia holds up her skirts, whilst the infant Amelia, in an elaborate baby carriage and even more elaborate hat, raises her hands in excited pleasure. The contrast with Ramsey’s painting of twenty years earlier could not be greater. It is a noisy and energetic picture – the final effect is one of hectic gaiety rather than genuine unforced liveliness – which seeks to capture childish exci
tement in all its unruly excess. In its heightened emotionalism, Copley’s work looks forward to the Romantics, whilst Ramsey’s serene image has its heart in a more ordered, classical world.

  Perhaps the most beautiful of the pictures which the king and queen had made of themselves and their children was one of the very simplest. Soon after the birth of the Princess Royal, Charlotte was drawn in pastels by Francis Cotes. She is shown holding her baby daughter, who lies sleeping in her arms. She wears simple clothes, her brown hair undressed, and she looks directly at the viewer, one finger delicately raised in a silent request not to wake the child. It is a beguiling and delicate vision of maternal affection, and was much praised when it was publicly exhibited in 1767. Lady Mary Coke thought it caught the queen’s character and likeness better than any other picture: ‘It was so like it could not be mistaken for any other person.’32 Even Walpole, usually immune to the appeal of royal imagery, thought it ‘incomparable’.33 But the most appreciative of the picture’s many admirers was the king himself. He had it placed in his bedchamber at the Queen’s House, so he could enjoy it every day. When the family moved to Windsor, it went with him, and was still in his room in 1813, when he was too blind to see it clearly and not always lucid enough to remember what it depicted.