Childhood Mortality in Nineteenth-Century England :: European Europe History

Childhood Mortality in Nineteenth-Century EnglandThe issue of puerility mortality is written into the works of Gaskell and Dickens with alarming regularity. In bloody shame Barton, Alice tells Mary and Margaret that forward Will was orphaned, his family had buried his six siblings. There is to a fault the expiry of the Wil password twins, as well as Tom Bartons early death --an event which inspires his father John to fight for labor rights because hes certain his news would have survived if hed had better food. In O abider Twist, Dicks early death is typical of workhouse children who neer recover from years of chronic malnutrition. And in Dombey and Son, Paul demonstrates that wealth does non guarantee longevity, as we watch him steadily weakened by approximately mysterious illness. Evidence is everywhere that Gaskell, Dickens, and many of their contemporaries, used fiction to narration a sad fact of l9th century life Many children didnt live to become adults. At the Newell Hi storical Burial ground in Attleboro, the infernal region marking the graves of the Stanley family indicates that three children were either stillborn or died before their first birthdays. If there were any other children who survived childhood, they were probably daughters who were buried in their husbands family plots. A typical grave from the mid-19th century is a husbands stone flanked by two or even three wives each but the give way having died in her 20s or 30s. Certainly many of these women died in childbirth, because their death dates agree the birth dates on the childrens stones. Several children might be named after the father. In one family plot with eight children, three were named John because only the third gear one survived the first year. ApE time when the death of a yearling was as normal as this practice was quite common in both America and England. While all of Dombeys money couldnt save his son from dying, little Pauls diet, lifestyle, and medical attention gave him every advantage available. The relationship between poverty and childhood mortality is unmistakable. In Bostons Irish Catholic slums, Lemuel Shattuck entrap that between 1841 and 1845, 61% of the population died before the age of five. (Woodham-Smith, p. 252) Poor slope children didnt fare any particularly in the manufacturing towns of London, Sheffield, Leocester, Manchester, and Liverpool. Statistics from the Sheffield General Infirmary between 1837 and 1842 publish that of 11,944 deaths, half were children under age five