Confinement during the Georgian era, guest post by Jessica Cox

It is always delightful to welcome new guests to All Things Georgian, and today, I am joined by Dr Jessica Cox. Jessica is an academic in the Department of Arts and Humanities at Brunel University, London, where she teaches and researches nineteenth-century literature and culture. She has authored books on Charlotte Bronte and Victorian and contemporary popular fiction and her latest book ‘Confinement‘ has just been released, and is joining me here to share some information about her research and findings, so I will hand over to Jessica to tell you more.

Netflix’s new Bridgerton spin-off, Queen Charlotte, depicts the death of Princess Charlotte of Wales in childbirth and so highlights the very real dangers of childbirth to both mothers and babies at this time. This is something I explore in my new book along with the lack of control many women faced around their fertility – and infertility – in nineteenth-century Britain.

Netflix – ‘Queen Charlotte’. Image courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter

Queen Charlotte, is set against the backdrop of the vexed question of motherhood. Whilst focused primarily on the early relationship between the titular character and King George III, the series also depicts a secondary plotline beginning with the death of Princess Charlotte of Wales and her son in childbirth and following the Queen’s subsequent desperate attempts to secure an heir. Charlotte’s own fecundity is contrasted with that of her children – all fifteen of them – who have so far failed to produce the long sought-after legitimate heir to the throne, only ‘more bastards for me to ignore’, as the fictional Queen puts it. ‘You are old’, she tells her daughters – ‘Your wombs are likely dry and useless’. In the final episode (spoiler alert!), her fourth son, Edward Duke of Kent, and his wife Victoria announce the imminent arrival of a long-awaited heir, who will – as Royal history buffs will realise – eventually become the century’s longest ruling monarch: Queen Victoria. Meanwhile, whilst a young Queen Charlotte endures her first experience of childbirth, the (fictional) Lady Danbury, already a mother of four, is horrified by the prospect of more children, and resolves, following her husband’s death, not to marry again.

Royal Collection Trust

Whilst historians may baulk at the liberties taken by the series’ writers, the glimpses it offers into women’s maternal experiences in Georgian England reflect the difficult reality for many women at this time, when pressure to bear children was significant, fertility difficult to control, and birth a potentially dangerous event for both mother and baby. Queen Charlotte’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth – both she and her fifteen children survived – were generally positive, but nonetheless it seems likely she did suffer miscarriages, and she lost two of her sons in infancy.

The deaths of the Queen’s granddaughter, Princess Charlotte, and stillborn great-grandson (both heirs to the throne) in 1817 served as a reminder to the public of the dangers of childbirth – although such a reminder was hardly necessary. As one work on midwifery from the early nineteenth century noted:

There is scarcely an individual who has not to lament the loss of some dear relative or connexion in childbed. Many a husband is now weeping over the yet scarcely cold corpse of a dear wife […] and many a mother is lamenting the untimely fate of her daughter, who was consoling herself with the fond hopes of experiencing, when the pains were forgotten, the pleasures of being a mother[.][1]

Princess Charlotte had gone into labour – some two weeks later than expected – in early November. The baby was delivered stillborn around fifty hours later. It initially appeared that the Princess would recover, but, shortly afterwards, her condition deteriorated suddenly and she died (probably from internal haemorrhaging). She was one of many thousands of women to lose their lives in childbirth in Georgian England.

Another victim was feminist and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, some twenty years earlier, who died following the difficult birth of her second child. Her baby daughter (later Mary Shelley) survived, and would later undergo her own maternal trials, experiencing both miscarriage and infant loss. These experiences form the backdrop to her 1818 novel Frankenstein.

Oil portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York Public Library

Women could hardly but be aware of the risks of childbirth as a consequence of maternal mortality rates (around one in two hundred births ended in the death of the mother), but beyond this, the maternal body was largely obscured – referenced in oblique terms, if at all, in public discourses.

Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales by George Dawe. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

This is reflected in portraits of both Mary Wollstonecraft and Princess Charlotte painted during their pregnancies, in which there is no visible sign of their impending confinements. Medical textbooks – inaccessible to most women – provided some of the only detailed images of the pregnant body available at this time, though often in the form of disembodied torsos.

Obstetric instrument set, in leather roll, British, late 19th century.
Full view, leather unrolled, graduated matt black perspex background. Wellcome Collection

 

One exception to this is found in George Spratt’s Obstetric Tables (1833). Here are included several images of the developing pregnant body, which show a woman side-on, head covered with a bonnet and lowered demurely, a faint flush on her cheeks. She wears a cape, but her breasts and belly are clearly visible. There is something disturbingly voyeuristic about these images, particularly as the intended audience was medical men, but they are amongst very few images from this period to detail the pregnant woman.[2]

George Spratt (1784-1840) – Obstetric tables

The visual obscuring of pregnancy was mirrored in the reluctance to discuss pregnancy, miscarriage, and childbirth explicitly in nineteenth-century Britain. Hence, various euphemistic terms were used: references to women as ‘unwell’ sometimes allude implicitly to pregnancy; in letters women talk of approaching their ‘time’ or refer to their ‘interesting condition’. Infertility and miscarriage were little understood, and women frequently blamed, whilst such issues were rarely discussed in public writing on marriage and motherhood – and even in private letters and diaries there appears a reluctance to allude explicitly to these things.

The silences around miscarriage are reflected in Netflix’s Queen Charlotte: ‘Do you know how many babies I have lost before they were ready to be born?’, one of the Queen’s daughters asks her. ‘I do not’, she replies. The obscuring of these personal experiences parallels the broader silences around pregnancy, miscarriage, and childbirth at this time. If Queen Charlotte is guilty of fictionalising history, it nonetheless shines an important light on the issues of maternity in Georgian England.

Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain is published by The History Press and is available now

Sources

[1] Anon., The London Practice of Midwifery (London: James Wallis, 1803), iv.

[2] On these images, see Rebecca Whiteley, ‘Spratt’s Flaps: Midwifery, Creativity, and Sexuality in Early Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture’, British Art Studies, 19 (Feb 2021).