9

Opium and the Workers `Infant Doping' and `Luxurious Use'

It was not simply the public health dangers of adulteration and overdosing which brought a new way of looking at opium. For the question of who was using the drug - and how - was also important. Middle-class dependence has always been much more acceptable than the establishment of the habit within the working class and this class reaction to opium was characteristic throughout the nineteenth century. But it was particularly the case in the course of the public health movement at mid-century. The publication of De Quincey's Confessions was, it has already been noted, only a matter for interested comment; and one searches the journals of the time in vain for much by way of concern about the widespread use of the drug in `respectable society'. Yet popular opium use was another matter. The dangers of urban opiate use ran as a theme throughout the discussions of opium poisoning and restriction of sale. This was seen to be more threatening than the widespread reliance on opium in the rural Fens. Misunderstanding of the popular culture of opiate use had its roots in the class tensions of the period, and found expression in two ways - in the issue of infant dosing with opium, and in the belief in the workingclass `stimulant' use of the drug.

Opium and children

The dosing of working-class infants with soothing syrups based on opium has always attracted much attention as a public health issue.1 The practice was an undoubted reality, but implicit in the campaign against it was class interest and a desire to re-mould popular culture into a more acceptable form. Opium was the immediate concern, but the campaign against it criticized basic patterns of working-class child-rearing too. The rationale, however imperfect, behind practices like child doping was ignored. Opium, as elsewhere, was a useful scapegoat. Criticism of its use diverted attention from the social situation to the individual failings of working-class mothers.
Numerous soothing syrups were on the market. The best known names were Godfrey's Cordial, Dalby's Carminative, Daffy's Elixir, Atkinson's Infants' Preservative, Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup and Street's Infant Quietness. Other preparations in use for this purpose were, like syrup of white poppies, also made up commercially. Some, especially in rural areas, were still brewed at home.
Godfrey's was, though, the most famous of all the `infant's preservatives'. With origins dating back to the eighteenth century, it had originally been sold as a `general cordial' by Thomas Godfrey 0f Hunsdon in Hertfordshire and after his death remained on the market 'prepared according to a receipt written by his own
hand ...'.2 Like Dalby's, which also dated back to the eighteenth century, it was sold in distinctive steeple-shaped bottles. In an 1837 medical catalogue, F. Jacobson and Son were rather quaintly advertising 'Godfreyes round' and 'Godfreyes flat'.3 Small chemists and corner stores selling patent medicines were in the habit of making up their own 'Godfrey' and one 0f its dangerous features was therefore that it could vary widely in its composition. For instance, in Hull in the 1850s, Godfreyes bought from one chemist had half a grain of opium per fluid ounce; from another the proportion was four grains to an ounce .4 A pharmacist remembered the days when he used to make up Godfreyes by the gallon : `I ... can see with memory's eye the fluted green syrup bottle with its recessed label in red and gold in which it was kept. I can smell still the oil 0f sassafras which, with alcohol and laudanum, I stirred into the black treacle. One 0f the recognized perquisites of the apprentice was t0 lick clean the sticky film adhering to the wooden spoon at the end of the operation.'5
There were local preferences - Atkinson's Infants' Preservative, the product of an old-established Manchester firm, was more popular than Godfrey's in the 1840s in Midland towns like Dudley and Sedgley. Claiming a sale of 70,000 bottles a year, it declared itself free of `pernicious stupefactives, whose basis is laudanum or other opiates', but was in fact a mixture of chalk and laudanum.6 `Children's Draught', `Infants' Quietness', `Soothing Syrup', `Nurses' Drops', `Mothers' Quietness' - the names were legion, but opium the one invariable ingredient of these many different preparations. Slowe's Infants' Preservative was popular in the Manchester area. In Kentish Town a notice on Thomson's in Queen's Crescent still urges passers-by to `Try Thomsons Soothing Syrup for Baby'. The actual dosage of opium which was given to a child was highly variable and could be very large. The usual dose of Godfrey's was said to be from half a teaspoonful to two teaspoonfuls. Where weighing was erratic and the preparation evaporated to such an extent that it was much stronger than expected, two or three teaspoonfuls would be `stronger of poison than anybody knew'. Babies could soon develop tolerance of the drug, and mothers were then tempted to use stronger preparations, including laudanum itself.7
The same series of parliamentary inquiries which brought to light the issues of opium poisoning, the drug's use as a suicide agent and its adulteration brought the child `doping' issue forward also. Dr Baker of Derby, in evidence to the Factory Commission in 1834, early made the connection with a mother's absence at work which was to be a continuing theme in all discussions. He commented, `many mothers employed in mills are in the habit of giving opiates, such as Godfrey's cordial, Daffy's elixir, or laudanum, to their infants, that they may sleep during the mother's absence; and I have traced permanent squinting to this cause...'.,,8 Nottingham, too, was particularly noted for the practice. Women lace-makers were accustomed to use Godfrey's or laudanum to quiet their children while they worked at the frame. Lyon Playfair's survey of large towns in Lancashire collected further evidence from Rochdale, Manchester, Wigan, Bury and other centres. The Provincial Medical and Surgical Association (forerunner of the British Medical Association), the newly-established Pharmaceutical Society, the short-lived General Board of Health, all became involved in the question.
The children and opium issue came to a head in the 1860s in line with the wider campaign to control the open sale of the drug. The medical input, as in the other `public health' issues, was striking, and Sir John Simon's reports were again particularly telling.
Nearly all the reports to the Privy Council made in this decade had some mention of the infant doping question. The statistical emphasis already noted in the public health campaign in general was used with telling effect here. Simon's anxiety about high rates of infant mortality - over twenty-four in every hundred thousand live births in towns like Wolverhampton, Ashton-under-Lyne, Preston and Whittlesey, twenty-six per 100.000 in Manchester and Wisbech - concentrated on the unrestricted sale of children's opiates.9 His anxiety was supported by the contemporaneous publication of Registrar-General's reports. These showed that the major proportion of opium poisoning deaths occurred among young children, in particular among infants less than one year old. Between 1863 and 1867, 235 such infants had died, and fifty-six children aged between one and four; 340 children and adults over five had died. An average 20.5 such poisoning deaths per million population occurred in that period among the under-fives; there was a comparative rate of 7.8 per million among the over-thirty-five age group.'10
The matter was brought up in Commons debate. The medical press was full of it; and infants poisoned by opiates provided a never-ending stream of patients for doctors anxious to try out the latest treatment methods." The full weight of the voluntary side of the public health movement was brought to bear. The Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association gave public lectures in the 1850s and 1860s on `The Injurious Influence of Certain Narcotics upon Human Life, both Infant and Adult'. On a national level, the Ladies Sanitary Association acted as a propagandist body. Penny tracts such as `The Massacre of Innocents' and `How to Manage a Baby' (along with `Why Do Not Women Swim?' and `The Evils of Perambulators') would, it was hoped, improve working-class child-rearing methods. 12 In the Englishwoman's Journal, the Association expressed its anxiety about doping: `Few but those who have been much among the poor, know how fearfully mismanaged their little ones are - how the infant shares his mother's dram and all her food, from red herring to cucumber - how he takes medicine sufficient homeopathically to treat the whole community - and how finally, an incautiously large dose of laudanum wraps him in the sleep that knows no waking.13 The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science and the statistical societies took up the question. Professor Taylor added his testimony on the question of children's narcotics. Both in his evidence to the Select Committee on the Sale of Poisons in 1857 and in his textbook on poisons, he used evidence of infant mortality from opium to support his general demand for restriction. 14
There were certain assumptions, however, which underlay this campaign. Although it is still common to find Victorian statements about child doping reproduced in discussions of disease and mortality without further analysis, the campaign against the practice was full of the class assumptions which did much to mould attitudes to the use of opium in general. 15 The campaigners assumed that the mother's absence at work was the root cause and that dosing was the habit of unqualified nurses, in whose care the infants were left. Dr Alfred Wiltshire, a medical inspector for the Privy Council in the late 1860s, was sure that maternal care was all that was needed to stop the use of cordials. `I think if the child were kept at home it would not get opiates, but the mother would attend to it.' Nurses, rather than mothers, were criticized. These repositories of `ignorance, tradition and prejudice' were at fault.16 The child-minder who took in large numbers of babies and kept them quiet with liberal doses of soothing syrup was a widely disseminated stereotype."
Yet professional child-minders in fact cared for a minute proportion of children in the factory areas. Most women with young babies did not go out to work, or did not work in the way presented in the parliamentary inquiries. Most women operatives were in the sixteen to twenty-one age group and tended to leave work after marriage. Domestic employment was more common and might have meant that a mother took her child along with her. Over one third of all working women in Preston in the 1850s for instance were in non-factory occupations, while others worked irregularly or part-time.18 Child-minders were on occasion undoubtedly neglectful. But the reformers were working within a range of evidence and options which supported their own predilections. For a mother to stay at home and not work often led to lower, not higher, standards of child care; the absence of an extra wage led to a lower standard of nutrition. There was no correlation between the mother's presence and healthy infants. In Sheffield, for instance, only one per cent of mothers worked, but 21 per cent of babies were unhygienically bottle-fed.19
Both the culture of poverty and the economic realities of working-class life were ignored. For opium was at least a palliative for the gastro-intestinal complaints which, in conditions of poor housing and sanitation, in fact caused most infant deaths. Its ability to quieten infants made fretful by these and other digestive complaints aggravated by feeding habits based on `scraps' should not be underestimated. Despite the undoubted dangers involved in overdosing, opium did have some role to play in a very imperfect system of infant management.
What was ignored, too, was the positive belief in the beneficial properties of opium for a baby shared by those who used it. There is no doubt that some factory hands were resolutely opposed to the dosing of their children. But there was a continuing popular belief in its powers as a restorative, reflected in the use of terms like `cordial' and `preservative'. This was related to a reliance on the beneficial properties of sleep and the sort of passivity which made a child easier for a harassed mother to handle. Godfrey's and laudanum were given to children on the day they were born, and were even prepared in readiness for the event. Such preparations were believed to be `strengthening', and there was every incentive for the mother of a sickly baby to use them. Mary Colton, a twenty-year-old lace-runner in Nottingham, spoke of how women in her community had advised her to care for her illegitimate child:

She could not afford to pay for the nursing of the child, and so gave it Godfrey's to keep it quiet, that she might not be interrupted at the lace place; she gradually increased the quantity by a drop or two at a time until it reached a teaspoonful; when the infant was four months old it was so 'wankle' and thin that folks persuaded her to give it laudanum to bring it on, as it did other children.

Other examples of a popular belief in the `stimulant' powers of opium are not hard to find. Mr Herford, the Manchester coroner, reported in the 1 840s that he had seen many cases where the parents had given large doses of narcotics, `but neither I nor the jury believed that the person who gave the drugs thought that they would kill or do harm'.20 It is indeed difficult to see how else many working-class families lacking day care facilities, properbaby foods and access to medical facilities could otherwise_ have coped.
The campaign against child doping was, then, culturally and economically insensitive to this extent. It was also silent about the extent of the practice outside the working class. Working-class self-medication was wrong; yet opium was used for children both by the medical profession and in the nurseries of the well-to-do. In official medical circles, the use, and in particular the self-administration, of opiates was frowned upon. Marshall Hall had produced a paper on `The effects of the habit of giving opiates on the infantine constitution' in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal of 1816.21 John Clarke gave similar warnings in his Commentaries on Some of the Most Important Diseases of Children (1815) in which he stated that children's cordials had been `ignorantly and indiscriminately given.... Nothing is more uncertain than the effects of opium on young subjects; and it ought never to be employed even by medical men, except with the greatest caution.... '22 Most medical writers, however, did not advocate a complete ban on the use of the drug for children (and there remained some prepared resolutely to advance its claims). Dr Charles West in his Report on the Progress of Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children (1844-5) stated that preparations like laudanum, camphorated tincture or Dover's Powder should be used in the treatment of children's diseases in preference to preparations like syrup of poppies, which were variable in strength .23
This medical tolerance of the professional use of opium for young children extended into general practice. Prescription books show that opium-based remedies for children and infants were dispensed. A chemist in Islington dispensed in 1864 a mixture containing Battley's Sedative Solution (an opium preparation) for Mrs Ballard's infant. The baby was suffering from a rash and was probably fretful; two teaspoonfuls were to be given twice a day. The mention of such preparations for infants, or for young `master' this and that, sprinkled throughout the records indicates that the profession was not averse to prescribing opiates for young children.24 It was primarily self-medication, or 'non-medical' use, which was objected to.
Nor did the narcotizing of middle-class infants arouse as much anxiety. For many middle-class children, confined more severely in this period to a life based on the nursery and separate from that of their parents, were likely to be cared for by a nursemaid accustomed to using opium as a quietener. This was recognized at the time. The standard text on children, Thomas Bull's
Maternal Management of Children in Health and Disease, warned
that 'Godfrey's Cordial and other preparations of opium are too often kept in the nursery, and secretly given by unprincipled nurses to quiet a restless and sick child'. Bull advised that teething or restlessness at night should be dealt with, not by a drug, but by taking the child frequently out of its cot and carrying it about in an airy room .25 Nurses who already worked long hours, whether `indiscreet and lazy' or not, must surely have preferred sedation to getting out of bed once more to quieten a crying baby in a chilly nursery.26 Even in the 1 880s, infants' preservatives were still on sale at tenpence a bottle in the respectable Army and Navy and Civil Service Stores.
The passing of the 1868 Pharmacy Act, as Chapter 1 o will show, had a notable effect on overall infant mortality. But the campaign against child `doping' by working-class mothers continued with a shift of focus after this date. It became part of the campaign to control unqualified baby-minding. As such, it was part of the more to 'professionalize' all forms of child cam-midwifery-most obviously. The use of opium by unqualified women again served to detract attention from the wider context of living conditions, and environment. A report was published by the Harveian Society on infanticide in 1867, and one by the Obstetrical Society in 1869 dealt with infant mortality. Both raised the question of unqualified child `doping'. In an address to the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science in 1867, J. Brendon Curgenven, honorary secretary of the Harveian Society, stressed this point. Unqualified nurses were at fault and also the `pernicious use of opium', which was `carried on to a great extent in the Midland manufacturing counties, and the poor, wizened, dull, illnourished infants are really pitiable to behold', comments which were illustrative more of the role of malnutrition and poverty than of opium.27 Nevertheless, as secretary of the Infant Life Protection Society, founded in 1870, Curgenven agitated for the registration of childminders, compulsory registration of births and deaths, and an end to infant dosing.28
There were undoubtedly scandals involving opium and children in these years. The Waters and Ellis baby-farming case in 1870, where illegitimate children were being taken off their mothers' hands for a fee and later disposed 0f, was shown t0 have involved the use of laudanum t0 keep the babies quiet.29 The Infant Life Protection Act of 1872, put on the statute book in part as a reaction to this case, limited its provisions to those who looked after two or more children under one year old; it thus effectively excluded the working-class child-minder, who could go on using opium as she pleased. The compulsory registration of births and deaths did, however, make it more likely that an opium death would be detected.

Working-class `stimulant' use of opium

The campaign against child drugging had misjudged the issue. It showed a distinct bias in ignoring the use 0f opiates to dose children outside the working class. Adult working-class use of opium was treated in much the same way. For the widespread popular use of opiates already described and in particular the use of opium as an adjunct to alcohol, as an informal means of sobering up, was presented, partly through the public health inquiries of the 1830s to 1850s, as a distinct threat and a justification for control.
It was De Quincey himself, whose own `stimulant' consumption of opium had met an interested, yet unperturbed, reception who was among the first to present working-class opium use as a problem. In the Confessions, he wrote:

... some years ago, on passing through Manchester, I was informed by several cotton-manufacturers, that their workpeople were rapidly getting into the practice of opium eating; so much so, that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening. The immediate occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages, which, at that time would not allow them to indulge in ale or
spirits ...30

A letter written by Coleridge in 1808 (not in fact published until 1837) confirmed this: `. . . the practice of taking opium is dreadfully spread - throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire it is the common dram of the lower order of people - in the small town of Thorpe the druggist informed that he commonly sold on market days two or three pounds of opium, and a gallon of Laudanum - all among the labouring classes.'31
The belief was that working people were turning to opium for 'non-medical' or `stimulant' purposes, that their use was not for medical reasons at all, but that they used the drug as a cheaper alternative to drink. This view of popular opium use was commonly to be found at the time.. In Mrs Gaskell's novel of Manchester factory life, Mary Barton (1848), the character of John Barton falls victim to the seductive properties of the drug. 32 Jonathan Pereira added a new section in 1853 to the third edition of his classic textbook of materia medica specifically to warn of the dangers of the drug's lower-class use .33 The Westminster Medical Society was told in 1840 that `the consumption of opium was increasing among the working-classes to a frightful extent'. Nor was its action among them a sedative one, for it `affected all that was good and virtuous in woman, it acted as an aphrodisiac, and subverted all morality'.34 Some observers of working-class life thought the extent of the practice `somewhat exaggerated'. Nevertheless evidence was forthcoming from Glasgow, Salford and other parts of the factory districts. A druggist with a business in a Salford mill area related how, on market days, his customers `come in from Lymm and Warrington, and buy the pure drug for themselves, and "Godfrey" or "quietness" for the children. Habitual drunkards often give up spirits and take to laudanum, as being cheaper and more intensely stimulating'. 35
The mid-century `public health' inquiries added to the definition of the problem. The consideration of child doping among the working class naturally led to concern about adult use too. The Factory Commissioners specifically made inquiries in the 1830s about the `stimulant' use of opium and were met with unanimous testimony from doctors working in the factory areas that such practices did not exist.36 Yet the dangers of lower-class use remained a continuing theme, discussed in particular during the inquiries into the open sale of poisons. Messrs Abraham and Edwards of the Liverpool Chemists' Association told the Select Committee inquiring into the sale of poisons in 1857 that laudanum was often `very much abused' in their area. It was sold to be administered as a stimulant to adults and taken as `a dram'. Professor Alfred Taylor concurred in condemning the `bad use' made of opium in the manufacturing towns. 37
Some outside observers were tolerant of the possibility; in Blackwood's Magazine in 1830, for instance, the habit was seen to have advantages: `... who can say, when eighteen hours toil out of the four and twenty have bowed down both body and soul to the dust, a few drops of laudanum may not be, in the best term, a blessing?'38 Yet, in general, the possibility of working-class `stimulant' use was a problem, part of the different framework within which opiate use was coming to be perceived at this time. As with children and opium, the emphasis was all on lower-class use; similar practices in the rest of society went unremarked or were viewed more tolerantly. The contrast in response to the use of opium by public speakers and the use of opium by factory operatives was, for instance, instructive. 'Medicus', writing in the Lancet in 1815 (which consistently publicized the dangers of lowerclass use), put it thus : `For those unfortunate creatures who daily resort of this baneful drug as a cheap species of intoxication, I have but little sympathy or commiseration. Their weakness entails a severe punishment even in this world.' However there were others, `especially among the middle-classes of society, who resort to the use of opium, under the pressure of severe mental
distress . . .'.39
The connection of popular opium use and drink was also a convenient argument in the much wider debate over temperance in Victorian society. The temperance movement had its origin at the time that concern over lower-class opium use began to manifest itself. The British and Foreign Temperance Society was launched in 1831 as the spearhead of the anti-spirits movements, and the more extreme teetotal movement was gaining artisan and radical support, at least in the North of England, from the early 1830s.40 There was a belief that prohibitory or interventionist moves over the consumption of drink would inevitably lead to a corresponding increase in opium consumption. Some of the earliest investigations of opiate use did make this connection with drinking habits. Christison, for instance, in his analysis in 1831 of ten opium eaters, thought that the lower classes often combined opium eating with `the practice of excessive drinking'. He himself found it difficult to distinguish between the two : `I fully anticipate that this habit will be found not less destructive than the vice of drinking spirits. 141 The idea of opium as an alternative rather than an accompaniment to drink was a later refinement. It was not until the end of the decade that the specific point mentioned by De Quincey was again raised. Jellinger Symons, one of the assistant commissioners inquiring into the state of the handloom weavers, reported that `When the drunkards in Glasgow become too poor to satiate their appetite for spirits, they now resort in great measure to laudanum, which, in an adulterated state, is consumed in considerable quantities.'42 This point was generally accepted, even sometimes among temperance supporters. It was a quite common argument in medical discussions of the issue, too, to point out that an opium-eating working class was indeed preferable to a spiritdrinking one, since opium eaters were not violent and spirit drinkers were. Sir Benjamin Brodie, the Queen's Physician, made this point before the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1840, and it was much discussed in the course of the more extensive anti-opium debate at the end of the century.43
In general this idea of opium as an alternative to drink and consequently one of the possible repercussions of temperance was accepted. Only Julius Jeffreys, who was later a surgeon in India, investigated further. Unable to find any opium eater who was also teetotal, he traced the idea back to a journal run by the drink interest, whose editor asserted that the connection was indeed possible since a decrease in the consumption of spirits had been accompanied by a rise in that of opium.44 The argument was a fallacy, for in fact both per capita spirit and beer consumption were rising until the 1870s and declining thereafter, a pattern of consumption similar to that of opium. The pattern of concern about popular opium use however remained a subsidiary theme in the fortunes of the temperance movement. The Licensing Acts of 1872 and 1874, and the debate on Sir Wilfred Lawson's Permissive Bill in the same decade, brought the matter forward again. Opium and drink remained thus far connected in the temperance cause.
This continuing belief in the stimulant consumption of opium was an indication of how `official' representation of popular habits could remould them into something quite different. As Chapter 3 has already shown, opium was indeed widely on sale in the factory districts, but it was consumed in rural areas, too, and at all levels of society. Working people were generally using the drug in self-medication. The connection with drink was present, but it was the sobering and not the `stimulant' effect of the drug which most consumers expected. The distinction between `medical' and 'non-medical' use was impossible to draw, and it was easy enough for observers to substitute moral judgement (the `bad use' of opium) for cultural sensibility.. The use of the drug in the working class, whether for children or by adults, was nevertheless considered at this time as a part of the `opium problem'.

References

1. As for example in M. Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (London, Rockliff, 1958), pp. 141-52; E. Lomax, `The uses and abuses of opiates in nineteenth century England', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 47 (1973), pp. 167-76; and A. E. Roberts, `Feeding and mortality in the early months of life; changes in medical opinion and popular feeding practice, 1850-1900' (University of Hull Ph.D. thesis, 1973), Chapter 8.
2. A. C. Wootton, Chronicles of Pharmacy (London, Macmillan, 1910), vol. 2, pp. 177-8.
3. J. K. Crellin and J. R. Scott, `Pharmaceutical history and its sources in the Wellcome collections. III. Fluid medicines, prescription reform and posology, 1700-1900', Medical History, 14 (1970), p. 151.
4. 'Godfrey's Cordial', Pharmaceutical Journal, 11 (1851-2), p. 237.
5. `Onward from Galen; a current causerie', Chemist and Druggist, 167 (1957), PP. 164-5; `Poisoning by Godfrey's Cordial', Pharmaceutical Journal, 3rd ser. 10 (1879-80), pp. 746-7.
6. P.P. 1843, XI II: Children's Employment Commission: Second Report of the Commissioners on Trade and Manufactures, q. 30, qs. 73-4, q.
81.
7. See the evidence on all this presented, for instance, to P.P. 1844, XVII: First Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, op. cit., Rev. J. Clay, `Report on the sanatory (sic) condition of the Borough of Preston', p. 46, and J. R. Coulthart, `Report on the sanatory condition of Ashton under Lyne', pp. 77-80. Also P.P 1845, V: Second Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, Appendix 2, `Lyon Playfair's report on the sanatory condition of large towns in Lancashire', pp. 365-71.
8. P.P. 1834, X I X, op. cit., PP. 538-9.
9. P.P. 1864, XX VIII : Sixth Report, op. cit., p. 34. Most of Simon's reports have something on child drugging and the use of Godfrey's.
10. Annual Reports (London, H.M.S.O., 1867), op. cit.; also V. Berridge and N. Rawson, op. cit.
11. Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), 3rd ser. 77 (1845), cols. 449-50.
12. Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association, Annual Reports, 1856 7,1861, 1864; Ladies Sanitary Association, Annual Reports, 1881, 1882.
13. `The details of woman's work in sanitary reform', Englishwoman's Journal, 3 (1859), p. 223.
14. P.P. 1857, X I I, op. cit., Sale of Poisons, qs. 860-62; A. S: Taylor, On Poisons, op. cit., pp. 586-7; see also, for example, J. Elder Cummings, `The neglect of infants', Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, x894 (London, Longmans, Green, 1875), P. 723.
15. For example, G. Rosen, `Disease, debility and death', in H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff, eds., The Victorian City (London, Routledge, 1973), vol. 2, p. 65o.
16. P.P. 1871, V I I: Select Committee on the Protection of Infant Life, q. 374
17. As for example fictionally in B. Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations (London, 1845; Longmans, Green, 1881), p. 113.
18. Evidence of this is in I. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (first edition 193o, reprinted London, Frank Cass, 1969), p. 197; R. B. Litchfield, `The family and the mill; cotton mill work, family work patterns, and fertility in mid-Victorian Stockport', pp. 18o-96 in A. S. Wohl, ed., The Victorian Family. Structure and Stresses (London, Croom Helm, 1978); M. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge University Press, 1971), PP- 71-2.
19. A. Wohl, `Working wives or healthy homes?', Bulletin of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, 21 (1977), pp. 20-24.
20. P.P. 1843, X I V : Children's Employment Commission; Appendix to the Second Report of the Commissioners (Trades. and Manufactures), part I,
`Report by R. D. Grainger on the employment of children and young persons in the manufactures and trades of Nottingham, Derby, Leicester, Birmingham and London ...' f. 61-2. See also F. Engels, The Condition of the Working-class in England (London, 1892, Panther edn 1969), p. 135.
21. M. Hall, `The effects of the habit of giving opiates on the infantine constitution', Edinburgh Medical and Surgical journal, 12 (1816) pp. 423-4.
22. Quoted in Lyon Playfair's report to the commission on Large Towns and Populous Districts, 1845, OP. cit., p. 366.
23. Review of Dr West's book in British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, 20 (1845), P. 551.
24. Prescription book of an Islington chemist, op. cit.
25. T. Bull, The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease (London, Longman, 1840), pp. 110-12.
26. For examples of such cases, see The Times, 12 November 1857; Macclesfield Infant Mortality Committee, Infant Mortality in Macclesfield. Report of a Special Committee of the Town Council (Macclesfield, Swinnerton and Brown, 1877), p. I I.
27. J. B. Curgenven, The Waste of Infant Life (London, Faithfull and Head, 1867), P. 4; Home Office papers, H.O. 45, 8040, 1867, Recommendations of Harveian Society on infanticide; and `Report of the Infant Mortality Committee', Transactions of the Obstetrical Society of London, it (1869), pp. 132-49, and 12 (1870), PP. 388-403.
28. P.P. 1871, VII : Select Committee on the Protection of Infant Life.
29. See I. Pinchbeck and M. Hewitt, Children in English Society (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 596, 613.
30. T. De Quincey, op. cit., p. 31.
31. M. Lefebure, op. cit., P. 59.
32. Mrs E. Gaskell, Mary Barton. A Tale of Manchester Life (London, Chapman and Hall, 1848, Penguin edn 1970), p. 219.
33. J. Pereira, op. cit. (London, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans,1854-7), vol. 3, p. 623. For other examples, see P.P. 1844, op. cit., q. 943, and `The factory system', Quarterly Review, 57 (1836), PP. 396 443
34. Westminster Medical Society, `The opium trade', Medical Times and Gazette, r (1840), pp. 162-3.
35. Morning Chronicle, 15 November 1849.
36. P.P. 1834, XIX: Factories Inquiry Commission, op. cit., pp. 538-9.
37. P.P. 1857, op. cit., qs. 218-31 and qs. 852-8.
38. 'Noctes Ambrosianae', Blackwood's Magazine, 28 (1830), p. 391.
39. 'Medicus', `Teetotalism and opium taking', Lancet, r (,851), p. 694.
40. B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians (London, Faber and Faber,1971), pp. 107-26
41. R. Christison, Lancet, op. cit., pp. 614-17.
42. P.P. 1839, XLII: Hand Loom Weavers, `Report with Appendices of the Assistant Commissioners on Southern and Eastern Scotland and Several Countries in Continental Europe', p. 52. See also P.P.1840, XI: Report from the Select Committee on the Health of Towns,q. 1086.
43. J. Jeffreys, `Observations on the improper use of opium in England', Lancet, r (1840-41), PP. 382-3.
44. J. Jeffreys, The Traffic in Opium in the East (London, Longman, 1858), pp. 18-19.