Cost and standard of living -- England -- London; London (England) -- Economic conditions; Working class -- England -- London
With these two exceptions, the babies all lived to be over a year. They
usually did fairly well, unless some infection from the elder children
gave them a bad cold, or measles, or whooping-cough, when some of them
had a hard struggle to live, and their convalescence was much retarded
by the close air and overcrowding of their unhygienic surroundings.
Compared with babies who were fighting such surroundings without special
nourishment, they did well, but compared with the children of well-to-do
people they did badly indeed!
The ex-baby, where such a person existed, was nearly always undersized,
delicate, and peevish. Apart from such causes as insufficient and
improper food, crowded sleeping quarters, and wretched clothing, this
member of the family specially suffered from want of fresh air. Too
young to go out alone, with no one to carry it now the baby had come,
it lived in the kitchen, dragging at its mother’s skirts, much on its
legs, but never in the open air. One of the conveniences most needed by
poor mothers is a perambulator which will hold, if possible, her two
youngest children. With such a vehicle, there would be some sort of
chance of open air and change of scene so desperately necessary for the
three house-bound members of the family. As it is, the ex-baby is often
imprisoned in a high chair, where it cannot fall into the fire, or pull
over the water-can, or shut its finger in the crack of the door, or get
at the food. But here it is deprived of exercise and freedom of limb, and
develops a fretful, thwarted character, which renders it even more open
to disease than the rest of the family, though they share with it all the
other bad conditions.
There is no doubt that the healthy infant at birth is less healthy at
three months, less healthy still at a year, and often by the time it
is old enough to go to school it has developed rickets or lung trouble
through entirely preventible causes.
To take several families individually, and go through their history, may
serve as illustration of the way in which children who begin well are
worn down by the conditions round them:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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