Reading the Regency

Family - Children and Childhood

"Five daughters successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs. Bennet, for many years after Lydia's birth, had been certain that he would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving."
[Chapter 50, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen]

Children were an important resource to both rich and poor families and giving birth to a child was a little like buying a lottery ticket.

For the poor, children meant more money may eventually come into the family in the form of wages. It also meant that one or more children would hopefully be around to support and/or care for their parents when they became too old or infirm to work. This outweighed the early disadvantage of more mouths to feed.

For the higher status families, each pregnancy meant another chance to produce the all-important male heir; vital for inheriting entailed property and titles that the family had built up over the years. Even in a wealthy family, a mother might need to rely on the care and compassion of her adult children later in life if her husband died before her, leaving her financial situation greatly reduced from the lifestyle she was used to. Jane Austen shows one example of this in Sense and Sensibility when Mrs Dashwood and her daughters left their family home to live in a cottage after her husband's death.

The marriage of a daughter into a wealthy or socially superior family could indirectly improve the social standing of the parents, and provide a springboard for other siblings to meet suitable husbands or wives. The disadvantage was the need to provide them with dowries to attract those husbands or the worry that they might not find a husband to care for them.

Family sizes

"Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on—lived to have six children more—to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself."
[Chapter 1, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen]

A lack of accessible or affordable contraception meant that regular pregnancies were an unavoidable side effect of being married. In an average family, couples might have children every 18-24 months, and the average woman who married at eighteen could look forward to fifteen pregnancies over a period of thirty years. Women suffering through extreme poverty may have given birth less frequently if they were subsisting on very little food, as malnutrition and low body weight could affect fertility. Pregnancies could also end in miscarriages or stillbirths for various health or environmental reasons.

The main cause for the delay between births was due to the mother breastfeeding her baby. Breastfeeding can be a form of contraception. However, even in the Regency period, not all mothers fed their own children. Some chose to use a Wet Nurse instead.

A wet nurse was a woman whose baby was currently breastfeeding or had been recently weaned onto solid food. The wet nurse would be paid to feed another woman's child if the mother could not or would not feed it herself. A mother who was not breastfeeding could therefore fall pregnant sooner than 18 months after the previous child had been born.

"A few days ago, at Beccles, in Suffolk, a woman was safely delivered of four children, making seven within one year, having three at a former birth: they are all dead, but the mother is now quite well."
[Lancaster Gazette, 18th October 1806]

Multiple births were uncommon enough that they usually warranted a report in the local newspaper:

"Births: The wife of R. Partington, in Park Street, Stockport, was lately delivered, on Friday sen'night, of three children, two boys and a girl. It is remarkable that she has had twins four times,and seven single births in fourteen years."
[Staffordshire Advertiser, 24th July 1802]