(i) Treatment and Mortality of Children
ENGLAND:
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
(i) Treatment and Mortality of Children Nowhere is the hope of a people more unmistakably or more creatively expressed than in its protection, nurture and guidance of the Kingdom of Childhood: how then fared children in this age of '' expiring hopes"'?
'Their death rate tells its own tragic tale.
Only for London are authentic statistics available ; but they paint a portrait of unutterable woe.
The London Bills of Mortality show that in the period immediately preceding the advent of the Great Revival three out of four of all children, born of all classes, died before their fifth birthday: the exact percentage is 74.5.1
England therefore was then a land full of Rachels crying for their stricken babes.
Queen Anne bore seventeen children; but only one, the Duke of Gloucester, survived infancy, and he died when eleven years old.
The plagues of the age did not spare even the bairns of Royal households ; but among the children of the very poor, Death stalked unchecked.
Jonas Hanway (1712-86) aptly described as " the eighteenth century Shaftesbury," was the unwearying friend of pauper and parish children.
Among the scores of his published works preserved in the British Museum Library are several revealing his investigations into the treatment and death rate of the Parish
Infant Poor; and the facts they unearth present a mirror of child tragedy.
In Hanway's Earnest Appeal for Mercy to the Children of the Poor, he tabulates the results of his examination of all the Parish Registers in Greater London for the years 1750 to 1755 inclusive.
In the Parish of St. Luke, Middlesex, for instance, 53 children had been received; and all had died in the institution within twelve months of entry.
Several other parishes revealed 100 per cent. of deaths.
But in most districts a considerable proportion of the illegitimate infants were removed from the workhouse by their mothers, grandparents or other relatives ; and if these '" discharged"' children be substracted from the lists, nearly all the remainder died within a twelve1 See Lancet, 1835-36, I, p. 692.
(T. R. Edmonds, On Mortality of Infants in England).
Also A. K. Chalmers, M.D., Growth of Maternity and Child Welfare Movement in Great Britain, pp. 1-2.
DYING UNDER FIVE YEARS PER 100 BORN.
Period.
Rate.
Period.
Rate.
1730-49...
He oe
1790-1809 ..
750-09"...
Fo ..
63-0 TS10-20) 0 eis oe ee =. 3108
1770-89... oe oe
EXPIRING HOPES
month.!
St. Andrew above Bars and St. George the Martyr, during the years in question, received 284 infants; of these 222 died within twelve months; 57 were "discharged" or returned to their mothers ; and only five remained alive in the institution.
St. Martin-in-the-Fields received 312 children ; 158 had died ; 147 'were " discharged " ; while but seven survived the parish's tender care.
And so the tragedy continues.
Commenting on the conditions discovered, Hanway says :
'"' From this view of six years it may be presumed that for ages before the opening of the Foundling Hospital for such general reception,? the parish officers, within the Bills of Mortality, sported away the lives of many thousands of children:
2.4. Lhe office of Ghurch Warden, or Father of the Poor, was become a cruel exercise of authority, the officers acting as the wolf towards the lamb in the fable.
If the child brought money it was squandered or deemed no_ object ; if no money was brought, this was a secret reason why no expense should be made upon it, and in either case the child became a sacrifice."
Of St.
Clement Dane's parish, where in one year eighteen infants were received and all died before twelve months old, Hanway says the nurse seemed " to understand the art of lulling children to their everlasting rest."
But the real blame he traced higher up.
' The Officers," he charges, *' are defendant, judge, jury and executioner, and they think it to their inéerest that the prisoner should die.''* There is infinite pathos in Hanway's statement:
"I found that deaths and discharges nearly made up the whole history of the lives of the parish infant poor."
Little wonder then that poignantly he pointed the moral to his contemporaries : " The agan Chinese may legally drown female children; but an English Church Warden, or 'Father of the Poor,' within the Bills of Mortality, under sanction of his office, may suffer children to be starved to death, or poisoned with noxious air.
Custom authorises the practice, and he may go on in it from generation to generation; he may do all he can to undo his country and yet pass with impunity."¢ In another treatise Hanway writes:
' The parish infant poor's mortality may be 1 Jonas Hanway, op. cit. (1766), pp. 68-9.
2'The Foundling Hospital was started by Thomas Coram in 1739, the year after Wesley's " Conversion."
In 1756, with Government support, it opened its doors to all ; but soon its " gates were besieged," and in 1760 it had to restrict admittance.
Hanway was one of its Governors.
3 Hanway, op. cit., pp. 69, 140.
' Ibid., pp. 68, 72.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE
AND AFTER WESLEY
called 80 or go, or if you please, upon those received under twelve months old, 99 per cent."
Yet even as Hanway was making his discoveries and writing his reports, the Social Conscience was steadily awakening : and he himself was one of its noblest creations.
Repeatedly he compared the conditions he encountered with the teaching and example of Christ, and frequently he pointed out that it " was not the will of God that one of these little ones'should perish."
Years earlier, Thomas Coram, agitating for the establishment of the Foundling Hospital, had referred to the large numbers of '"' exposed" children, and declared that he had himself witnessed '' the shocking spectacle of innocent children who had been murdered, and thrown on dunghills.'?
Again, in the Memorial (1739), petitioning Parliament to grant a charter for the creation of the Foundling Hospital, trenchant reference is made to the prevailing "' murder of poor miserable infants "' ; to the "inhuman custom "' of exposing newly-born babes "' to perish in the streets"? ; to the placing of unhappy foundlings with '' wicked and barbarous nurses "' who for a "' trifling sum "' suffer them to '' starve for want of due sustenance or care "' ; and to the fact that the few who survive are generally turned
"into the streets to beg or steal "—some being " blinded, or maimed and distorted in their limbs, in order to move pity," thus becoming " fitter instruments of gain" to " vile, merciless wretches."
Both Defoe and Hanway make reference to the incredibly vicious custom of "' saddling the spit,' which meant the holding of hilarious and bacchanalian parish-feasts by child
'' guardians,"' on the lump sums paid in for the rearing of illegitimate children.
'"' Some vestries,'' wrote Defoe in 1727, "' are more barefaced and even make a trade of a parish.
I mean those churchwardens and vestries who lump it with harlots and whoremongers and take bastards off their hands at so much per head, for which they get a good treat, from two guineas to five according to the circumstances of their chap, which they call ' saddling the spit,' besides a good sum with the bantling
(child), which 'tis to be feared is entirely sunk, all being done by connivance."® Hanway says the practice of '' saddling the spit" did " not give a day of life to the infant" ; a '' speedy release from all expense" became the dominant motive ; while " the traffic of receiving money," he urged, seemed " but igen Letters on the Importance of the Rising Generation, II, p. 136
1768).
* See George, op. cit., pp. 43, 334 (note 61).
* Daniel Defoe, Parochial Tyranny, p. 19.