8 - Grieving for dead children

Summary

Despite a gradual decline in the death rate at the end of the nineteenth century, infant mortality remained disproportionately high until the First World War. Concentrated in poor and overcrowded urban districts, infant mortality (the deaths of children under twelve months old) occurred with such frequency (220 deaths per 1,000 live births in the worst cities between 1891 and 1900) that working-class parents were thought to have acquired a degree of immunity towards these deaths, especially as high birth rates replaced lost lives with startling rapidity. The statistics were used to sensational effect in campaigns for the greater protection of infant life. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that alongside fears about white slavery, infanticide was one of the most recurrent moral panics of the nineteenth century. The common theme permeating anxieties about infant life was the supposed brutality of poorer parents; despite increasing awareness of social and environmental influences on life expectancy, reports on high infant mortality rates were consistently suffused with allegations of baby-farming, infanticide and wilful neglect. Much of this cynicism was rooted in perceptions of financial interest: the diminution of family size alleviated household expenditure whilst child life insurance policies heralded a minor windfall. At best, working-class parents were fatalistic and ignorant; at worst, they were mercenaries who perceived the lives of their offspring exclusively in material terms.