10 Feb 2014
Only a Little Brook
To modern eyes, this print may seem morbid in the extreme. It is a poem voiced by a dying girl in her mother’s arms. Such pictures, known as "mourning pieces", were very popular in the Victorian era. The death of Prince Albert in 1861, and Queen Victoria’s deep preoccupation with it, was one reason. What we often do not realize is that the Victorians had much more frequent experiences with the death of loved ones than we do.
The current mortality rate in Canada is about 0.5%; only about 5 children in every 1,000 will die before the age of 5 years, and PEI has a rate even lower than the national average. In 1920, the rate was about 10%, twenty times higher. Estimates from 1830 in Quebec put the rate at 33% - one in every three children born then would die before the age of 5. One of the later lines of the poem is a vision of Heaven showing the girl all of her playmates who died before her waiting to welcome her. Thus, the print was intended as a comfort to a family who may have suffered the very common loss of a child.
Not just death itself, but the nature of it in those times is unknown to most of us today. A bout of Scarlet Fever is treated with an antibiotic today; one pill every 6 hours, 4 days off school with a bit of a rash, and it’s gone. In the 1800’s an outbreak in a town might kill as many as 30% percent of the children. Scarlet fever is now known to be spread by inhalation, so isolation is routine, but it would have been difficult to achieve this in those days even if it had been known about. In many families, children slept two or three to a bed. General standards of health, sanitation and nutrition were much poorer then, so a disease was much more likely to be fatal to a child with already weak defenses against illness. A family might have one child come home with a rash on Monday, and have all four children dead by the end of the week. This is almost unimaginable to us today but not uncommon back then.
So, dear child, next time you complain about having to wash your hands before meals, or eat nasty vegetables or take yucky medicine, remember that they make you about a hundred times safer than you would have been when this picture was made.
To modern eyes, this print may seem morbid in the extreme. It is a poem voiced by a dying girl in her mother’s arms. Such pictures, known as "mourning pieces", were very popular in the Victorian era. The death of Prince Albert in 1861, and Queen Victoria’s deep preoccupation with it, was one reason. What we often do not realize is that the Victorians had much more frequent experiences with the death of loved ones than we do.
The current mortality rate in Canada is about 0.5%; only about 5 children in every 1,000 will die before the age of 5 years, and PEI has a rate even lower than the national average. In 1920, the rate was about 10%, twenty times higher. Estimates from 1830 in Quebec put the rate at 33% - one in every three children born then would die before the age of 5. One of the later lines of the poem is a vision of Heaven showing the girl all of her playmates who died before her waiting to welcome her. Thus, the print was intended as a comfort to a family who may have suffered the very common loss of a child.
Not just death itself, but the nature of it in those times is unknown to most of us today. A bout of Scarlet Fever is treated with an antibiotic today; one pill every 6 hours, 4 days off school with a bit of a rash, and it’s gone. In the 1800’s an outbreak in a town might kill as many as 30% percent of the children. Scarlet fever is now known to be spread by inhalation, so isolation is routine, but it would have been difficult to achieve this in those days even if it had been known about. In many families, children slept two or three to a bed. General standards of health, sanitation and nutrition were much poorer then, so a disease was much more likely to be fatal to a child with already weak defenses against illness. A family might have one child come home with a rash on Monday, and have all four children dead by the end of the week. This is almost unimaginable to us today but not uncommon back then.
So, dear child, next time you complain about having to wash your hands before meals, or eat nasty vegetables or take yucky medicine, remember that they make you about a hundred times safer than you would have been when this picture was made.
