The Good, the Bad, and the Sooty

There is no way to sugar coat today's little historical factoid and it certainly does file itself under The Bad.

For every one hundred babies born in England in 1740 seventy five of them died at childbirth or before reaching the age of six. Since percentages get lost so easily in our minds let's try to put it a different way. Think of a family with four kids that you personally know. Give each one of them a name, a personality, and a future. Now imagine that three of them died before ever reaching kindergarten. The effect that this had on the size of families from that time can not be over stated. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that you find many families with more than four children who reach adult age.

What really shocks me is that this figure does not take into account the survival of the mother which would also lower the size of families. You can imagine how this depressed the population growth for many years and why with a rise in medicine there was an explosion of populations in the cities that the government could not cope with.

Even by 1800 the death rate was significant, 41% still died by the age of six.

Sorry if I depressed anyone to make up for it enjoy this...
See? So cute! Puppies always make bad news seem a little bit better!

The Good, the Bad, and the Sooty

Most of my writing takes place in England during the nineteenth century and as a historian I can't help but love it when I dive into the research and find something new that I didn't expect. I use a romantic view of the era for my books, you won't find many who want to discuss just how filthy and grimy everything was at that time. Yet there are also amazing things that happened during those hundred short years that changed peoples lives and the future of our world forever. Things were becoming globally distributed, even before Prince Albert's Great Exhibition of 1851 and there were great leaps in technology that almost overnight altered the modern households. When possible I'd like to start sharing what would have been the good, the bad, and the just plain sooty parts of life had I lived during that tumultuous time frame.

The Good:
Today is something I love because it combines history and a bit of romance. You might be so old fashioned as to think that a woman should never propose to a man and that it is only a modern practice followed by a few feminists. Luckily we have the example of Queen Victoria to look back on. Owing to the fact that she was already the Queen of England it was considered proper that she should choose her husband and be in the position of offering him a marriage instead of it being the other way around. It is clear that this somewhat annoyed her future husband as it put him in a weakened position. Prince Albert had to wait around in Germany for several years to see if she would propose even though he had decided that he wanted to marry her. While this custom did not take hold, another from their 1840 wedding did become common place. Queen Victoria is accredited as having started the tradition of wearing white wedding dresses.