‘Everything that the lovingest of husbands can express to the best of wives, & love to the little ones, not forgetting the kicker in the dark,’ Jack Verney wrote to his pregnant wife in 1683. I read this 326 years later with a pleasurable frisson. I don’t know why it is so charming to find that our ancestors felt as we do, but it is. In Louisa Lane Fox’s fascinating anthology, that thrill of recognition is found on nearly every page.
Lane Fox has used letters, diaries and memoirs; nothing fictional. Many writers are well-known — Kipling, Waugh, Mrs Gaskell — while others are random archival survivals. Most writers are upper or upper-middle class — not surprising, given the scarcity of pre-20th-century material on the experience of working-class parents — but I feel she could have trawled a little harder to redress the balance. However, I enjoyed reading Queen Victoria’s rejoicing at becoming a grandmother while still looking and feeling young — ‘I think of my next birthday [her 40th] being spent with my children and a grandchild. It will be a treat!’ Such a sentiment could have been expressed yesterday, as could the marvellously named Brilliana Harley’s 17th-century concern that her student son Ned is not eating properly — ‘I haue made a pye to send you; it is a Kide pye. I beleeue you haue not that meate ordinarily at Oxford.’
While similarities delight us, the differences intrigue and sometimes horrify. Thank heavens we no longer have to deal with wet-nurses. It is a miracle John Stedman (1744-97) survived to write of the succession of ‘bitches’ who stole his baby clothes, dropped him on stones, ‘slept upon me until I was smothered’ and allowed a ‘moulder’d old brick wall’ to collapse on top of him. Wealth and blue blood did not guarantee you the pick of the wet-nurses. ‘She was only rather dirty till last night, when she was quite drunk’, reports Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; ‘this morning I learnt that she had been so drunk as to fall down and vomit.’
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