Illness and Death

Poverty cast a deep shadow on the childhood of many a young Edwardian, just as it had for the Victorians. The harsh system of the workhouse was still the only provision for those who could not cope, and some families preferred to starve or turn to crime.

Too often a family of ten or more children ended up on or below the breadline when the father died or was too ill or injured to work. Dependence would then be on the mother to scrape a living by washing or charring when she was not incapacitated by continual pregnancies, or on the eldest children who would be forced to start work. The Employment of Children Act 1903 did guarantee a child a certain standard of education before it was allowed to leave school, but ironically this penalised the bright children. It allowed them to apply for a certificate to leave school earlier than their less clever contemporaries when they reached a certain standard in their work. The official school leaving age was 13 throughout the Edwardian period, but attendance by children of poorer families was often sporadic anyway.

Illness and death were always a threat, especially the seriously contagious diseases such as diphtheria. Inevitably these took their greatest toll in urban areas of poor housing. Many families in towns still lived in one or two rented rooms, with shared washing and toilet facilities.

There was no National Health Service, of course, so a visit to or by the doctor had to be paid for, as well as any treatment prescribed, and many homes contained a range of remedies in an effort to stave this off unless really needed. Among the typical contents of the medicine chest would be:

Castor oil (to help digestion, avoid constipation, and stave off colds)
Camphorated oil (to ease coughs and chest complaints, mainly for rubbing on the chest or even the child's vest)
Eucalyptus oil (taken internally, sometimes on sugar cubes, to ease muscle or joint pains, also as a decongestant and to help coughs and also used to kill bacteria in sickrooms)
An Inhaler, to ease chest coughs and blocked noses/breathing difficulties (or if you were a really up to date family towards the end of the period, a Wright's coal tar vaporiser)

Even in the better off families, the typically bland diet of the average child sometimes caused constipation, which would be promptly treated with a laxative. Popular naturally occurring laxatives for children and adults were castor oil, prunes, senna and rhubarb. Chemical potions in popular use included Gregory's Powder (rhubarb, ginger and magnesia); brimstone (sulphur) mixed with treacle; and calomel (which sounds misleadingly like caramel but was a potentially lethal compound of mercury and chloride).

Chloral (chlorine plus alcohol) was a well-known sleep-inducer, and various all-purpose remedies, the so-called 'patent medicines' could easily be bought without prescription at the chemist's - some included laxatives or diuretics to give some obvious medical after effects, and many contained opium, alcohol or cocaine derivatives. These undoubtedly made the patient feel better, even if they were addictive substances, and of course this counted as a cure.

Of course, for many there was no cure: A dark undercurrent of death ran all through Edwardian childhood. It would be a rare child at this date who had no first-hand experience of bereavement, and many lost friends, siblings and other contemporaries as well as older relatives and neighbours. Diphtheria and tuberculosis were still rife and were probably the two major causes of child death from illness; there was also a high rate of accidental death, and poor nutrition could be an underlying factor in death even for children of better-off families.

One much-discussed line from J M Barrie's Peter Pan (which first appeared as a play in 1904) is 'To die will be an awfully big adventure' as Peter faces possible death by drowning. It has been suggested that Barrie deliberately included this episode to give his child audience and readers a strategy to cope with the bereavements which they would inevitably experience, and possibly their own deaths. Barrie was speaking from experience: his own brother died at thirteen and their mother never recovered. Barrie was required to take his brother's place but could never do so to her satisfaction.

The King himself died on 6 May 1910, prompting another round of national mourning. Even in the 19th century there had been a move away from full black mourning for the younger children, but of course this had no effect on those families who had any connection with the royal court: their children were put into full mourning, with even black trimming on their underclothes, writing paper and handkerchiefs as well as the black garments and accessories.

Whatever their pleasures and discomforts, most Edwardian children felt secure in their childhood, and where they stood in relation to adults. This is perhaps just as well, as they would have to cope with changes on an unprecedented scale throughout their adult lives: World War One, the pandemic of Spanish flu, the social and cultural changes of the 1920s, the Depression, World War Two, and the social and cultural changes of the 1960s  - although even in the early years of the 20th century no doubt some grandparents grumbled 'You're not children these days - not like we were - with your cinemas and teddy bears and flimsy clothing'.