Infant Mortality: then and now

Let's start with then:

Average life expectancy at birth for English people in the late 16th and early 17th centuries was just under 40 – 39.7 years. However, this low figure was mostly due to the high rate of infant and child mortality; over 12% of all children born would die in their first year. A man or woman who reached the age of 30 could expect to live to 59. Life expectancy in New England was much higher, where the average man lived to his mid-sixties and women lived on average to 62.

Demographers estimate that approximately 2% of all live births in England at this time would die in the first day of life. By the end of the first week, a cumulative total of 5% would die. Another 3 or 4% would die within the month. A total of 12 or 13% would die within their first year. With the hazards of infancy behind them, the death rate for children slowed but continued to occur. A cumulative total of 36% of children died before the age of six, and another 24% between the ages of seven and sixteen. In all, of 100 live births, 60 would die before the age of 16.

Family Size. An English woman who married at the average age of 23 ½ could expect a reproductive span of about 20 years. In New England, where women typically married at 20 or 21, the potential years for giving birth increased by those two or three years. The typical English woman would give birth six or seven times. [Plimoth Plantation Faculty, 'Raising Children in the Early 17th Century: Demographics' (pdf)]

The first thing to note about this is its very high 'oh my GOD!' quotient. That's astonishing. In the 16th and 17th centuries, 60 out of 100 children died before they reached adulthood. There's nowhere in the world today that has anything like that -- not Somalia, not Afghanistan (the current world-leader in infant mortality rates, with 121 deaths per 1000 live births) (compare the UK's 4.5), nowhere. It was a holocaust.

What about subsequently? Well rates stayed stubbornly high until the end of the nineteenth-century:

Toward the end of the 19th century, before the wide-spread recognition that bacteria was a major cause of illness, rates of infant mortality throughout the world were much higher than they are today. It was common for 20% or more of all infants in many populations to die before they reached their first birthday, and often mortality rates were even higher for children between the ages of one and five. In the last years of the 19th century, large areas of Russia had an infant mortality rate of nearly 28%. In 1901, the infant mortality rate in England, birthplace of the industrial revolution and capital of a global empire, was 16%. By 1930 the number of infant deaths had declined dramatically in many countries as the causes of infection came to be understood. Most progress up to this point was due to precautions such as hand washing and sterilization of milk rather than to actual medical advances, since antibiotics and sulfa drugs—the first medications that were really effective in fighting infection—were not developed until the late 1930s and 1940s. Although data on infant mortality in the developing nations is much less complete than the figures for the developed world, it is clear that the world's poorer countries have made dramatic progress in lowering infant mortality in the 20th century, due in large part to public health programs, especially those that have combated malaria through mosquito control. Availability of medication and immunization have also played a major role in improving infant health in developing nations.

In 1993 the infant mortality rate worldwide was 69 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to figures released by the United Nations Population Fund (the U.S. Census Bureau figures are slightly lower). The U.N. also reported an average infant mortality rate for the world's industrialized nations of 12 deaths per 1,000 live births. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's World Population Profile, the highest ratio of infant deaths (177 per 1,000 live births) was found in the Western Sahara and the lowest (four per 1,000) in Japan. The 1993 infant mortality rate in the United States was 8.4 per 1,000, ranking it twenty-second among the world's developed nations (a rank it maintained over the following two years, according to preliminary data for 1994 and 1995). The relatively high rate of infant deaths in the U.S. compared to Japan and Western Europe is largely accounted for by high infant mortality rates among low-income minority populations. [Thomson Gale, 'Infant Mortality' (1998)]

Speaking as a parent, I'd say this is good advice.

'[Victorian] children's literature becomes extremely moralistic, associating violent punishment with even minor misbehaviour: obey your parents, or you'll become an orphan, do not play with matches or you will burn the whole house down.' [Anne Lundin, '"Victorian Horizons: the Reception of Children's Books in England and America', The Library Quarterly 64:1, 34]

Elizabethan Peers

Well, this is interesting:

In the first fourteen years of her reign, Queen Elizabeth created seven English peers (Lord Hunsdon, Lord St John of Bletsoe, Viscount Bindon, the Earl of Leicester, Lord Buckhurst, Lord Burghley and Lord Norris of Rycote). She also restored the attainted Marquis of Northampton and the heirs of two other attainted peers (the Earls of Hertford and Warwick) and promoted two peers within the peerage (the Earls of Essex and Lincoln). Thereafter (it was after the aristocratic conspiracies of I569-72) her parsimony of peerages was heroic. Except for two members of the Howard family, both honoured in 1597 (Lord Thomas Howard, created Lord Howard de Walden, and Lord Howard of Effingham, promoted to the earldom of Nottingham), she neither created nor promoted, in a space of thirty-one years, a single peer. In these years abeyance, extinction and attainder absolutely diminished the peerage. [H. R. Trevor-Roper, 'The Elizabethan Aristocracy: An Anatomy Anatomized' The Economic History Review, n.s. 3:3 (1951), 295]

Another William Howard note

From Robert W. Kenny, 'Parliamentary Influence of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, 1536-1624' [The Journal of Modern History 39:3 (1967), 215-232]:

What finally emerges from biographical data is something less than a "Howard party" in the commons, but still a group of some significance as loyal followers of crown policy. In 1586, the first parliament after Howard became one of the great officers of state, the only member with close ties to the lord admiral was his brother, sitting for Reigate. Other connections were peripheral: Thomas Knyvet and George Lewis were cousins but perhaps! not dependents; William More was as much a colleague as a follower. And the identification of John Young remains a little uncertain. Just after the Armada, the lord admiral's prestige was higher and his parliamentary position somewhat stronger- William Howard, More, Knyvet, Young, and another Lewis, but, in addition, Julius Caesar and the two Levesons. The size of the "following" declined somewhat in 1593. Howard had full control over Bletchingley and Reigate, sending William Howard, John Trevor, Julius Caesar, and Stephen Riddlesden; but there was scarcely anybody else that might be included except for William More, once again knight for Surrey.

In 1597 Howard's strength had improved. There were still members of possible or peripheral connection, Young at Shoreham and Nicholas Hawkins at Cardiff, and a rather larger number of dependable votes. There was one Howard representing Surrey and another Reigate, two Trevors representing Bletchingley, Julius Caesar at Windsor, and Sir Robert Southwell at Guildford. It was in 1601 that Nottingham's influence in commons seems to have reached its peak. Two Howard sons were county members for Surrey and Sussex, and a nephew sat for Reigate. There were two Trevors, at Reigate and Tregony, Caesars at Windsor and Appleby, Robert Mansell at King's Lynn and Wil liam Monson at Malmesbury. Then William, the Lewis with the closest ties to the Gamages, was returned for Cardiff and Thomas Knyvet had his customary seat at Westminster. So in 1601 the lord admiral would have had at least nine, and perhaps eleven, members in his interest, even if the electors at Bletchingley had rebelled. The 1601 parliament was the time of Nottingham's greatest political power, when Essex had been destroyed and he and Cecil were without rivals as holders of the: queen's confidence; it is not surprising, then, that the electoral appeal of his followers might be greater. [229-30]

1601 and immediately afterwards, then, would have been a good time to start sucking up to the Howards; perhaps by dedicating collections of honeyed sonnets to the eldest son. (Kenny's argument in this paper is that Nottingham, though 'a man whose name is familiar to the schoolboy but whose personality and consequence have remained-perhaps deservedly-obscure'; on account of the 'shortage' of documents relating to him. [215])

George Orwell's last review

Orwell never lived to complete his last review, which was of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. It peters out into notes ('Analyse "Brideshead Revisited." (Note faults due to being written in first person.) Studiously detached attitude. Not puritanical. Priests not superhuman ... But. Last scene, where the unconscious man makes the sign of the Cross. Note that after all the veneer is bound to crack sooner or later. One cannot really be Catholic and grown-up. Conclude. Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions'). But the opening paragraph is just marvellous:

Within the last few decades, in countries like Britain or the United States, the literary intelligentsia has grown large enough to constitute a world in itself. One important result of this is that the opinions which a writer feels frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole. To a great extent, what is still loosely thought of as heterodoxy has become orthodoxy. It is nonsense to pretend, for instance, that at this date there is something daring and original in proclaiming yourself an anarchist, an atheist, a pacifist, etc. The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing, is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system. In 1895, when Oscar Wilde was jailed, it must have needed very considerable moral courage to defend homosexuality. Today it would need no courage at all: today the equivalent action would be, perhaps, to defend antisemitism. But this example that I have chosen immediately reminds one of something else—namely, that one cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it.

School

Kids resent going to school because they feel they’re missing out on something. On what? On the magic life of adults? I’m old enough to remember being taken into town by adults who would park me and my sister outside a bookies, or a pub, whilst they popped-in to perform whatever incomprehensible things it was that adults did in such ‘no kids allowed’ venues. Standing on tip-toes to try and see over that portion of the windows opaqued with frosted glass; or snatching glances through the swinging entrance door as people went in, or came out—it was exciting. Of course the glamour of it was wholly a function of its mystery, and now that I am an adult (wa-ay past twenty-one) I understand that there is nothing but seediness beyond the magic door. What adults do when the kids are at school is dull, not glamorous. They go to work. But kids go to school to work too. It’s not much a secret to say that kids go to school not to work at their ‘learning’ so much as to learn work, more specifically to learn the rhythms and habits of work, sitting at a desk, fulfilling tasks handed down by their superiors, keeping regular hours. What happens when you feign sickness and skive off school? You end up watching daytime television, which activity starts out fun, and very quickly becomes boring. But perhaps this is a glimpse into a deeper mystery. What is it adults do all day? They are bored, which situation they fight more-or-less desperate rear-guard actions against, by (amongst other things) visiting betting shops and pubs.