Mothers in the Archives
This is the first in a series of guest blog posts written by visitors to Gladstone's Library. Researchers from all over the world come to the library to work with our special collections and archives. The blog posts will highlight the fantastic resource our collections can be for researchers from a variety of disciplines, and we hope they inspire you to explore our collections in new ways. If you are considering a research project, please get in touch by emailing [email protected]
By Jessica Cox, Reader in English, Brunel University London
After studying the Victorian period for many years, my own experience of motherhood took my research in new directions. The early years of motherhood felt overwhelming: pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and the inevitable sleep deprivation frequently left me physically and emotionally exhausted, with little time to focus on anything else. Recovering after an emergency caesarean section following the birth of my third child, I was struck by the thought that in all likelihood neither I nor my daughter would have survived had we lived in the nineteenth instead of the twenty-first century. I began to reflect on women’s experiences of maternity two hundred years ago: a time when maternal and infant mortality were far higher than today, when women had limited control over how many children they bore, and when difficult births were typically endured with little or no pain relief.
The nineteenth century was also a time when Britain’s population increased dramatically: a fourfold increase from approximately 10.5 million in 1801 to almost 40 million a century later. Behind these statistics lies the experiences of millions of individual women, whose encounters with motherhood likely felt no less significant than those of women today. I began to look for their stories, which were frequently missing from later historical accounts of the period. The result is my forthcoming book, Confinement: Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
Alongside examining medical developments, transformations in maternity care, and wider social and cultural attitudes towards pregnancy, birth, and infant care, I was anxious to centre women’s own perspectives. In the early stages of my research, it was unclear how much of a challenge this might represent, but it soon became clear that while public discourses are often circumspect on the physical aspects of motherhood, women’s private writing – letters and diaries – repeatedly references these issues, reflecting on their own maternal experiences, and those of friends, family, and acquaintances.
It was this research which led me to visit Gladstone’s Library in February 2022. I had visited many years before and was keen to return to this beautiful setting – and to discover more about the maternal experiences of the women of the Gladstone family. Inevitably, the published work that has emerged from the archives at Hawarden has typically focused on the men of the family, and in particular on political matters. Those works which do discuss the women of the family tend not to focus on the physical aspects and minutiae of motherhood. Yet the letters and journals of the Gladstones and the Glynnes reveal much about their everyday experiences of maternity, and the joy and the grief of nineteenth-century motherhood. Both Catherine Gladstone and her sister, Mary (Lady Lyttelton), were mothers to large families: producing eight and twelve children respectively – so between them they spent some fifteen years pregnant. They were close and shared the highs and lows of pregnancy and motherhood, until Lady Lyttelton’s death following the birth of her twelfth child in 1857.
Married on the same day, they gave birth to the first of their many children within a few days of one another in June 1840. In an undated letter written during their pregnancies, Mary wrote to Catherine expressing her delight at the news of her sister’s imminent arrival: ‘I am longing to tell every one that a sapphire eyed babby is on its way with a white soft skin & dark hair, how I shall love it, […] may God bless you & make you well through it’ (pictured above). Mary was not entirely well herself during her pregnancy, telling her sister in the early stages that she was ‘very bad after eating, no breath whatever, & tight & rather fainty feeling’.
Women did not always know what to expect (some records show some women went into labour with no knowledge of childbirth whatsoever). Mary and Catherine may have had some understanding, but nonetheless, Mary wrote to her sister shortly after the birth of her first child, declaring: ‘It was much worse than I expected & I did not feel the last pains at all natural’ (pictured above).
If birth was difficult, motherhood was evidently often a joyful experience for the former Glynne sisters, as their letters frequently reveal: ‘Last night baby was wide awake & laughing at nine o’clock [...] so I cd. not help taking her own to shew her to George she looked so dear in her little night cap’, Mary wrote to Catherine shortly after the birth of her first daughter (pictured above).
Elsewhere, their letters reference the confinements of others – friends, family, and public figures (including Queen Victoria) – as well as the various developments of their own infants, including the appearance of their first teeth. In this latter respect, the letters echo the short diary of the sisters’ mother, Lady Mary Glynne, written in the years following the death of her husband, Sir Stephen, in 1815. In it she records details of her four children’s physical characteristics, personality, abilities, and education. ‘Pussy’ (Catherine), she writes, at the age of three, ‘is one of the most thriving magnificent children that can be seen’, whilst Mary, aged one year and ten months, is ‘Pretty & more delicate than any of the others’, though ‘remarkably forward in intellect’.
These reflections, written some two hundred years ago, seem to me to speak to the continuities between nineteenth-century and modern motherhood. My short time at the archive was not enough, and there remains much to be discovered about the maternal experiences of the Glynne and Gladstone women.
(Cover image "Hand coloured carte de visite image of mother and baby by R Allen & Son, Nottingham" by whatsthatpicture is marked with CC PDM 1.0.)
[1] Lady Lyttelton to Catherine Gladstone (1839/1840), Glynne-Gladstone Archive, ref GG/792.
[2] Lady Lyttelton to Catherine Gladstone (9 Dec 1839), Glynne-Gladstone Archive, ref GG/792.
[3] Lady Lyttelton to Catherine Gladstone (June 1840), Glynne-Gladstone Archive, ref GG/792.
[4] Lady Lyttelton to Catherine Gladstone (1840), Glynne-Gladstone Archive, ref GG/792.
[5] Notes by Lady Glynne On the health, education, etc. of her children, 1815-1822 1 volume, Glynne-Gladstone Archive, ref GG1068