What killed Victorian Preston’s infants?

See also:
‘Child murder’ in Victorian Preston
Eliza Cook’s response to John Clay’s ‘infanticide’ letter
Clay’s assertions rebutted by the town’s historian, Charles Hardwick.

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In 1850, a group of middle-class women from London published a book, Public Nurseries, setting out their plans for nurseries in the mill towns of northern England to provide day care for the children of working mothers. They were persuaded of the need for these nurseries by evidence presented to a government inquiry by the Preston prison chaplain, the Rev John Clay. [1]

The women were aware of their lack of knowledge of the lives of those working mothers:

‘Another point in which we strongly feel our deficiencies is this. It will be observed that it is only for factory towns that we think our scheme is suitable, or at least practicable. But in fact we are all Londoners, and have no personal acquaintance with any factory town whatever; so that we have been obliged to take our information as we could get it, without the means of verifying it ourselves.
‘This, we feel, may expose us to the proverbial rebuke addressed to those who meddle in affairs beyond their own province. We think, however, that the sources of our information are such as to ensure its being trustworthy.’

And they add:

‘But whatever faults we may be guilty of, literary or statistical, we have thought it better to send forth our feeble offspring into the world, who will take it for what it is worth. If it falls stillborn from the press, or is found to be worthless, it will at any rate have done little harm beyond the consumption of our time’

The authors of Public Nurseries must have felt they could trust Mr Clay’s evidence, for it was published in the report of an important government inquiry into public health in England’s industrial towns and cities. [2]

Unfortunately, the women were foolish to put their trust in Mr Clay’s evidence. His unreliability as a witness is the subject of a separate article in which his claim that hundreds of babies of working-class families in Preston were being murdered so that the parents could claim money from the town’s burial clubs is tested and debunked.

An example of his thoughts on burial clubs:

‘The humane public must be prevailed upon to look at this foul blot on our specious civilization, and to remember that in hundreds of thousands of instances, the prospect of burial money is creating direct and powerful inducements to parental neglect and cruelty.’

His bizarre claim was firmly quashed in print by the Victorian feminist, Eliza Cook, and her friend, the Preston historian Charles Hardwick. Mr Clay’s equally bizarre claim that an earthquake raised the Ribble at Ribchester by twenty feet, depriving a Roman port there of access to the sea, was similarly debunked by Hardwick.

The London women discuss various causes for the ills that spelled early death for the infants of working-class families in towns such as Preston and settle on one which they hoped to eradicate by their provision of public nurseries:

‘There is, however, one cause which seems in a peculiar manner to injure the infant poor in factory towns, affecting them exactly in proportion as they are young and helpless, and which appears to be not incapable of amendment. This is the employment of married women away from their own homes, and the consequent neglect and ill treatment of their children by the hired nurses who are employed as substitutes for the mothers.’

This view found favour with Eliza Cook, who in rebutting Mr Clay’s gross libel on Preston’s working-class parents in an article in the journal she published, observed:

‘But there is another evil which, in our opinion, has more to do with this question than all the burial clubs in existence, typhus and cholera included, and that is the gradually increasing practice of working the women in factories, instead of allowing them to remain at home to attend to their important duties there! The monster evil, both physically and morally, must be sought here, whatever “commercial difficulty” or “law of political economy” may frown upon the inquirer.

‘It is notorious that the bulk of the “turn-outs” and “lock-outs” at Preston are lads, lasses, and married women! What kind of a training for womanhood, and its duties and responsibilities, is the life of a girl labouring in a factory? She may perhaps be enabled thereby to purchase cotton cloth with judgment, but it is doubtful whether she will be competent to stitch it into a garment!

‘What sort of attention can a wife bestow upon her home and children, whose daily time and labour is devoted to a cotton-mill? Women labour sometimes till the very day previous to the birth of their offspring, and are often back to the loom by the end of the week.

‘The children are left to the care of hired nurses, and “Godfrey’s cordial,” soothing syrups, and other preparations, are ignorantly administered, with the view of relieving supposed trifling ailments, or for the purpose of temporarily reducing a screaming child to something like quietness!

‘Woman’s true place, in all really civilized society is HOME; and whatever labour she is called on to perform should be done there, so that her children may be under her own eye. Wherever the contrary becomes the rule, and not the exception, parental neglect and indifference must result, and only very trifling assistance be required from burial clubs to decimate the infant population!’ [3]

Despite the best efforts of the London women to promote public nurseries, none seems to have been established in Preston in the nineteenth century.

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[1] Public Nurseries (John W. Parker, West Strand, 1850), Google-Books-ID: JBteAAAAcAAJ.

[2] First Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring Into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, vol. 1 (W. Clowes & sons, 1844), https://archive.org/details/b21365179_0001/page/n7.

[3] E. Cook, Eliza Cook’s Journal, v. 10 (John Owen Clarke, 1853), https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7WAoAQAAMAAJ.