Katja Jylkka’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
So you’re thinking about – or perhaps already planning on! – welcoming a new life into the world, but you’re not sure how a baby will fit into your novel. Well, dear reader, wonder no more.
1. Babies are an adorable and efficient way to make sure your relationship with your husband is running as smoothly as possible. Telling him you’re pregnant or taking your delicately conditioned self on a reckless horseback ride across the countryside will put an end to those late nights at the office and assure that he’ll stay by your side. At least for the next nine months, anyway.
2. If anything else, the baby will give you something to do – who knows! Maybe your pregnancy will mess with somebody’s inheritance schemes and you’ll get all sorts of chapters that, let’s be honest, you never would have gotten otherwise.
3. Remember, it may be a baby. It may also be brain fever.
4. Never use the word “pregnant” to refer to your present state. You shouldn’t even say you are “with child.” If anything at all, say that you “will soon be a mother” or that a baby will “soon arrive,” as if it’s a houseguest. Having others talk about your being “in an interesting condition” is also acceptable. Best yet, use unconventional metaphors to tell your spouse the happy news, like “there is a ship on the ocean bringing us a little baby.”
5. Presumably, your body will change during your pregnancy. This will be neither apparent to the reader nor discussed by your fellow characters.
6. You won’t be able to tell the sex of your baby until fairly late in your pregnancy. Typically, not until you’ve given birth and your husband has left you for someone who can actually produce a son.
7. Just as in announcing your “delicate condition,” the narrator will most likely discuss the duration of your pregnancy in equally abstract and weirdly poetic fashion. You can expect off-hand references to the earth moving around the sun, the seasons changing, tides turning, or “after an interval of time.”
8. In fact, it’s really best if your pregnancy isn’t depicted at all. Prepare for much of your pregnancy to occur in the gap between chapters and for the baby to suddenly appear at the beginning of the next section, only to be whisked off by a wet nurse a sentence or so later.
9. Babies are always your fault.
10. Problems during your pregnancy or with the delivery of the child won’t haunt you afterward (unless you die), as it will thereafter be summarized merely as a “somewhat alarming birth.”
11. It isn’t your fault if you miscarry. It’s just so strange, considering your husband’s family always produces such strong, healthy babies. Strange…
12. Having a baby will make you happy. Until it doesn’t.
Tags: babies, books, humor, katja jylkka, pregnancy, victorians
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For the longest time I was convinced that women before, oh the 60s, just did not have uncomfortable pregnancies. They just did not happen. Because women in literature never seemed to be bothered by them! They never felt unwieldy, ungainly, horribly swollen, had raging hormonal fluctuations, random pains, ongoing difficulty walking, feet swollen to twice their size, had to pee every ten minutes, or generally were discomfited by the entire process. It was totally a Revelation when I realized that just because nobody wrote about it didn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I mean, I understand the factors of better nutrition leading to better fetal development, and the many reasons why women today probably generally bear bigger and stronger babies, but I’m not totally convinced that A LOT of people tend to think that “people in the past were just better in general” at things like that. Because if it doesn’t come up in fiction = it totally didn’t happen. SCIENCE. (I think this is related to the weird fetishization some people have of women who give birth in undeveloped countries–“they work and pop out their babies and then they’re not incapacitated afterwards! Only you, middle-class white woman, of all the people in history and the world YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.”)
I can totally understand this. As a child I genuinely wondered whether or not people in the past ever went to the bathroom. Like, did Laura Ingalls Wilder ever poop? I simply wasn’t sure.
I sort of assumed nobody got their period because it was never mentioned, or if it was it was so oblique that the reference went right over my head. I remember one book where a woman commented that her oldest daughter would “soon need to start using rags” or something and it took me ages to figure out that she meant use them as pads – and that’s one of the more explicit references I can think of!
Honestly I love historical fiction but all I think about is “But what about her period/But where do they poop???”
I think the same about fantasy fiction. They’re always camping in some cave/ledge in perilous mountains or riding for 2 days without stopping, and no one has to poop off the ledge or demand everyone stop their heroic gallop so they can poop in a bush. The only people who ever seem to need to have bodily functions is sentries who wander off to go pee in the woods and then seem to wander half a mile out to do it, when my experiences in camps in the woods have shown that it’s surprisingly hard to get men to pee a decent way from camp/in the outhouse since as soon as you turn your back they start peeing out the door of their tent.
If you’re lucky they make it all the way out the tent door…
In one campsite anecdote told by my family, the man camping next to them actually left his spot by the communal campfire and wandered into his tent to pee. Much to the chagrin of his wife, who was trying to sleep in there.
This is why I am constantly telling anyone who will listen to read Tamora Pierce’s books. She writes fantasy, mostly with female protagonists, and she not only goes into detail about menarche and how her sword-wielding heroines handle Aunt Flo while adventuring, but she even invented MAGICAL CONTRACEPTION. Also, her characters regularly bathe and go to the bathroom.
It’s a weird thing, but I never noticed its absence in other books until I was like, aha! I SHOULD wonder how my favorite fantasy fictional women are not perpetually knocked up or bleeding on the floor!
When I used to play D&D, one of my friends suddenly stopped in the middle of our puzzle-solving to narrate how his character went off to the side of the cave to defecate.
The DM gave him a bonus 100XP for having functional bowels.
I always wonder how an earth Joan of Arc managed her period given that she started going on military campaigns when she was seventeen. Actually, now that I think about how did any historical military ladies handle their Periods? Like how did Nancy Wake or Violette Szabo carry out their spy duties whilst also trying to locate sanitary items? Especially Joan though, I mean, she would have been in armour most of the time so I do not envisage bathroom breaks being particularly easy.
IT’S ALWAYS RAGS. Getting your period in the olden days sounds so terrible!! Why did no one fashion a DivaCup out of wood or something???
I’m sure NorthSurvival would be happy to whittle you a Diva Cup, and then teach you how to bake a tiny cake in it when you’re not menstruating.
I’m now picturing a divacup made out of a hollow orange. Not sure how I feel about that tho.
Didn’t the Ancient Egyptians use lemon peels as cervical caps?
Or a potato. We’re at least somewhat close to eggs here.
SPLINTERS
Not to mention it’s always ‘waking up to find her thighs and sheets covered in blood’ – never ‘having a bit of a bellyache, going for a wee and finding a bit of red’. Do all literary adolescents have waterfall periods?
This is why studying history, especially of waterclosets, is so mind-blowing at times.
L.M. Montgomery has an lovely story in her journals about meeting Lord Grey, the Governor General. He takes her for a stroll, and suggests that they sit and chat on the steps of a picturesque outbuilding of the farm. the GG doesn’t realize that it’s the outhouse, and LMM details sitting there for an hour while other ladies of the party stroll out, see Lord Grey on the steps, and dart back into the house in anguish.
I still have never learned how pooping worked with the super long skirts in outhouses…
You reach back and haul your skirts over your shoulders like a blanket. Bonus: you get to be cozy!
GENIUS. As someone who managed to dip her maxi skirt in the toilet at work this morning, I am going to implement this strategy immediately!
What about corsets? Unless a corset is the bottommost garment that you have on, you pretty much have to take that sucker off to pull anything down (or at least unlace it QUITE a bit). What happened when ladies with corsets and multiple other layers had emergency poop situations? I worry about this!
Split knickers. You don’t have to take anything off because your underwear doesn’t have a crotch. Corset could stay where it was.
I had to catalog quite a few of these during an internship with a historical society, and the century-plus-old staining on them convinced me that this was not an ideal toilet costume.
Ewwwwwwwwww.
Fascinating! Also eew.
i always think this about the Hunger Games. Like, there has to be such a strategy to pooping when they’re in those damn bodysuits, trying not to get murdered, and under constant surveillance. Dude, i’d walk straight into that bloodbath. i can’t deal with people watching me poop and still dying anyway.
i adore this. i also would love to see it in a book right before http://the-toast.net/2014/10/16/literary-childs-g…
10. Problems during your pregnancy or with the delivery of the child won’t haunt you afterward (unless you die), as it will thereafter be summarized merely as a “somewhat alarming birth.”
So, Schrodinger’s baby: you either live on, alarmed, or die, with no intermediate option. How cozy!
Is this where we can talk about the part in “Anne’s House of Dreams” where preggo Anne is “counting her days like silver beads on a rosary”? Because teen me read that and went <_<. (Although the next chapter dealing with Joy’s birth and death is beautiful and wrenching and so honest- particularly for literature targeted at young women.)
I like how her pregnancy is “announced” to the reader by means of Gilbert saying that when a man has a nice house and a nice ginger wife in it, he couldn’t ask for anything else, and Anne goes, “He could ask for one more thing! Oh Gilbert, I can’t wait til spring!” The first few times I read it, I was young enough that it went over my head completely and I thought, oh, they must be planning to get a puppy when the weather warms up. I’d be excited too! Puppies are awesome.
ON THE OTHER HAND, I was legitimately shocked in Emily’s Quest when she’s having that heart-to-heart talk with Teddy’s mother, who makes a reference to having been pregnant, and Emily says something like “I have known for a long time that the doctor doesn’t bring babies in his bag.” An unmarried young woman implying that she knows about sex and pregnancy! Whaaaaat?
I mean, obviously I figured that Ilse and Emily spent a lot of their offscreen time poring over Ilse’s dad’s medical textbooks and taking turns giving Perry handies in the woods, but I wasn’t expecting the text to acknowledge any familiarity with such tawdry biological processes.
In AHOD I was on board with the first pregnancy, all “OK, she’s pregnant…hmm…hmm….the baby dies?????…hrm…hrm….” and then like ten chapters later there’s this random bit about the stork and shit when Jem is born and I was going “Wait a minute, LMM, you lost me.”
Although when I did the math and figured out how close Anne’s kids are in age and how much of the time she was pregnant when they were young, I was like “well no shit they have a maid.” I’d want a maid too if I had four or five kids under the age of ten and was pregnant all the fucking time, too.
Yeah, the timeline is a bit eyebrow-raising. They got married in September, so she must have gotten pregnant right away if she was due “in the spring” – Joy was born in May or June and then Jem was born the next March? And there are only 6 years between Jem and Rilla. So basically Anne was continuously pregnant between September 1892 (or 1891?) and July 1899.
It’s also interesting to me how the Blythes are the only large family in the books, apart from the odd poor family that’s criticized for having too many children (like in AHOD where Miss Cornelia is introduced and she’s sewing a dress for a baby because she wants it “to have one real pretty dress, just as if it WAS wanted”). Fred and Diana only have what, 3? And Diana was married at 21, not 25.
It’s true! None of Anne’s other friends have large families–Diana has two, Priscilla has a couple, Jo has two or three (I think), Leslie has only two, there are four Meredith kids, and so on. I wonder if LMM just wanted to write about a houseful of kids with hijinks and that was the easiest way to do it.
Anne spent an awful lot of time pregnant, is all.
After thinking about it a bit longer, I’m even more confused about the timeline.
1. Rilla turns 15 in July 1914, which means she was born in July 1899.
2. Just days after turning 18, Shirley declares his intention to enlist. We know that this is very soon after the United States entered the war. So this is early April 1917. Which means… he was born in April 1899?
Is my math off somehow (entirely possible) or did LMM commit a major goof?
I think what’s more likely is that because the books were written out-of-sequence, LMM either screwed up by a year, or just never put that much thought into the timing in the first place.
No wonder Anne was still slim when picnicking with Diana in AOI, Rilla was born at like 4 months’ gestation.
No wonder Shirley’s birth was so difficult! It must be hard to give birth to a kid while gestating another one in your spare uterus.
I greatly prefer the spare uterus hypothesis to the “Gilbert the DOCTOR knocked up his wife shortly after a very difficult birth that left her ill for several months” hypothesis…
Maybe Anne was just faking sick for a few months because she was damn tired of getting pregnant immediately after popping out the previous kid.
Timeline is super confusing in Rilla and Anne of Ingleside.
Let’s not even get into the fact that, based on the details of fashion and technology, it seems like Jem was born after 1900, instead of a decade before.
Do you have any examples? I don’t really know much about the fashion and technology of the period, so I wouldn’t have picked up on those!
I am so late in responding!
But, essentially in LMM’s timeline:
– Puffed sleeves — when Anne was 11 (year 1877)
– Telephones and Eaton’s catalogue — when Anne was 25 (year 1891)
When, in reality, puffed sleeves were very much an 1890s thing. The first telephone call on the Island was in 1911. Eaton’s catalogue would’ve been more of a household staple in the late ’90s, early 1900s.
Let’s not even try to perform the mind game that is figuring out when “The Blue Castle” is set. My theory — the 1920s in a universe without WWI.
I’ve always gotten the impression that the Blythes were LMM’s wish-fulfillment family, since her own kind of sucked. So she wrote about a huge family that was constantly getting into fun shenanigans instead of struggling to cover up the patriarch’s mental illness and dealing with the kids’ legal troubles.
Ha! I love that moment, where LMM has Aileen Kent take a Victorian pause from her melodramatic monologue of disfigurement and jealousy and heartbreak, and then go right back into it.
Ugh, Teddy, you idiot, you should have known better than to give your mother that letter. You couldn’t even trust her with a dog!
I ADORE that bit.
The Emily books and The Blue Castle are much less concerned with propriety in my opinion. They are just more frank about life and the hard and weird people living it.
Like the creepy older distant cousin perving over a 12 year old girl. Eugh.
And then in Anne of Ingleside when she’s out picnicking with Diana and Diana’s all “I’m so fat, you’re so skinny” but this part of the story clearly takes place when Anne is in the last months of her seventh pregnancy??? And the description is all “Anne was still slender in her loose blouse,” which, you know, everyone carries differently, but SERIOUSLY COME ON.
Maybe she was wearing one of these magical maternity skirts!
Perhaps increasingly large hats are also recommended, so as to distract from the waistline.
Okay, this isn’t Victorian, but it’s stuck with me for years: in the real Maria Von Trapp’s biography, there’s this bit about how it was impolite for her to be seen performing in public while pregnant. So, to disguise her pregnancy, she wore a succession of bigger and bigger false boobs, so it would look like she was just large all over without the obvious pregnant shape.
This is what inspired my hat comment! “The handsome and portly (!!) Mrs. Von Trapp”
I love that we’ve all read the same books.
Hive vagina and such as.
Maybe she’s gestating the baby inside the hat!
Holy crap, is it really that close? I’m going to have to reread to see, but if so….holy crap. COME ON, LMM, come on.
Right there with ya. Like you totally had to read between the lines when Leslie got mad at her for saying what she and Gilbert were ‘hoping for in the spring’ or whatever. If you’re reading too fast or on the young side you might just think Anne and Gilbert were getting a yacht or something (until Leslie gives her the baby dress). For as frank as LM was about some things, other times she could be perversely purple in her prose.
Also I still cry when I read the chapter about Joy. As always we get to see how the anguish about Joy takes Anne and Leslie’s friendship to the next level, but I am curious as to how Anne and Gilbert’s relationship was affected, and we basically don’t see it. It has a lot to do with maybe sort of Anne being a lesbian or LM not writing meaningful relationships between husband and wife because she didn’t actually have one.
This comment was much longer than I intended it to be.
That would require Gilbert to have feelings and emotions about things.
For being such a supposedly central character to Anne’s life, Gilbert is a cipher most of the time.
a cipher implies there is something there but he is just an empty coat filled with white teeth and nice hair
I would 100% prefer to have Victorian brain fever than a Victorian pregnancy. With brain fever you get to lie in bed all day, right? Or go scream in the attic whenever the mood strikes? Sweet deal.
Okay, so remember The First Four Years, when Laura gets dizzy at all that wheat sliding down a chute and can’t read because the words start spinning? And then, when she figures out she’s pregnant, says “those that dance must pay the piper?” That was a rare honest moment that I assume Rose Wilder Lane or someone would have edited out of the book if it hadn’t been published posthumously in manuscript form.
Also, there’s a Garth Williams illustration of Laura slapping a Native American that always frustrated Child!Nicole because this part of the story clearly took place during Laura’s pregnancy, so why wasn’t she drawn as pregnant?
I was SO surprised at how forthright that was when I read it for the first time! Like, Laura really was very sick and had a terrible birth and everything and the book was fairly straightforward about it. Which was a shock after the rest of the Little House books were very circumspect.
I was actually really confused when I read TFFY as a kid because the way it was written, I got the impression that Laura got knocked out, the doctor pulled out baby Rose, and then she woke up when it was all over. Which is . . . not how childbirth works, I think?
It was if you had ether and forceps!
See my comment downthread! It was in many cases.
Yeah, the bit about “paying the piper” always struck me there, because it makes it sound like what she really enjoyed was sexing up that hottie Almanzo on the regular and was a little disappointed that it had the physical consequences it did. Didn’t Queen Victoria have the same problem, too? Very much into Albert’s fine manflesh, not so much into the pregnancy and birth thing.
Solidarity, ladies. I’m going to go hug my birth control now.
Well, she did start calling Almanzo “Manly” after the wedding night… 😀
I’ve always assumed that there is some special secret language that Victorian authors used that let Victorian readers know someone was pregnant but which I miss completely, and this is why I’m always surprised when a baby shows up out of nowhere. I think when I was younger I probably didn’t understand what “confinement” meant and that would have led to some surprise. But at this point I’m pretty sure I know what the words all mean, yet am still always surprised when a baby shows up.
These babies are often also not given names and just called “Baby” and that also bugs me. I like knowing names, even of unseen imaginary Victorian babies.
Related, I just reread Rilla of Ingleside and was struck by the fact that nothing in the text identifies Rilla’s war baby as a boy or a girl – it’s just “the baby” for several pages until they finally give up and give it a name and you find out it’s a boy. It didn’t bother me so much as strike me as very different from our current way of constructing identities for babies.
I worked with a guy who referred to his daughter as “Baby” or “the baby” for years. I eventually had to ask what her name was, because it was weird not knowing.
Depending on the child, they could just keep being “Baby” or some variation thereof forever. My mother’s great Aunt Babe, for example, was known as such her whole life, despite being named Sara, because she was the youngest. She was born around 1900ish. (My great grandfather, her nephew, was named Denis and called “Sonny” forever for similar reasons.)
Wow, so I finally just realized why my Auntie Babe is called that, even though that’s not her name. In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious.
I didn’t know for years that my aunt wasn’t actually called Junie – short for Junior, because she was named after her mother and it would have been confusing to have two Marians. I think she’d actually died before I found out.
The First Four Years was a series of endless bummers.
Also I always kinda assumed that Laura’s attitude about pregnancy came from Ma, who was super into religious guilt and self-denial and what have you.
I just listened to it again for the first time in years, and man. Shit. Almanzo doesn’t come across as the world’s most responsible human being with regards to money, but…..hailstorm! Fires! Terrible birth! Debt! Death of a child! HOUSE BURNS DOWN. Fin.
I mean, poor Laura.
Almanzo was a total idiot with money. “I’m going to buy and/or lease all this expensive farm equipment even though this farm is barely functional and I am also partially paralyzed! Let’s also buy some expensive tchotchkes!” Come on.
Especially after Laura is like “You know, farms are really, really hard and we have barely any money” and he’s like “No! We can afford this! Also, let’s buy a ton of stock, and toys, and I neeeeeed this expensive plow. No no, Laura, this is men’s business, don’t fret.” Well, Manly, you suck at men’s business, then.
Plus ça change…..
And that’s why you don’t let your husband control all the money. Shoulda run off with those Native Americans when you had the chance, Laura. I bet THEY were financially stable.
If you have lived long enough to discover your pregnancy, congratulations! The fertilized egg has successfully implanted in your uterus rather than in your fallopian tube! If you die suddenly and mysteriously before the baby is born, your survivors will now know that it was for some other reason.
I have no Victorian examples, but as a key to Christie-time literature: when a Man swears his new baby will be an only child, he is promising to never ejaculate inside his wife again. Lord Whimsy, staring into middle distance after Harriet’s actually quite easy birth: swearing to pull out every time forever. In Dorothy Parker’s “Horseface”, the young man who doesn’t really like his baby OR the nurse: the solution is pulling out from now on. The Oneida silverware-making sex-cult? ALL about interrupting that coitus, with young men being encouraged to practice frequently with post-menopausal women in order to get good skills.
I LOVE that this high-minded declaration has roots in a messy form of birth control that… for me, it’s one of the aspects of sex that’s a little goofy, the clean-up bit.
The Oneida silverware sex what? Do tell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community
Plus side: all sex pretty consensual, community child care, free love within community, goal of community was to make paradise on Earth for all genders, more equality of genders than was found elsewhere (women could help set community policy, wear pants, reject sex with dudes who did not provide orgasms).
(How do we know sex was consensual? Because there was a dude, Charles Guiteau, who was a member for five years and no one would have sex with him. Not even a little. Dude could not get laid in a sex cult. Later he killed the president.)
Minus side: enforced separation of parents and children if children seem to prefer parents to other adults, community criticism sessions where everyone criticizes one person, attempt to turn sex-cult into an inherited monarchy, eugenics means that planned pregnancies must be community approved, closed relationships heavily discouraged.
They called him CHARLES GITOUT because no one wanted to sleep with him. On the bright side, he got a really fun song in Assassins.
HIS DAD WROTE A LETTER OF APOLOGY TO THE SEX CULT BECAUSE HIS SON SUCKED SO MUCH.
“Dude could not get laid in a sex cult” is my new go-to burn.
See my comment above for increased burn severity.
SOMEONE ELSE LOVES THE ONEIDA CULT AS MUCH AS I DO. I’m dying to have a reason to go to upstate New York so I can visit the house.
The chapters on it in Assassination Vacation are some of my favorite non-fiction pieces ever, EVER.
I believe you can actually rent an apartment in the Mansion House or stay over in the bed and breakfast. Some of the residents are actually descendants of the community members. Dream vacation!
Well then! (thank you!)
Every time I wish I could have lived in a less tech-obsessed more horse-centric age, birth control is the sticking point. None of the available methods were really any good at all, except maybe just being physically unable to conceive. (And that one is no good either because one needs to produce an heir.)
I do wonder about all those people in Jane Austen and Bronte novels with two kids. How did they do that? Did the past have some great alternatives?
I tend to assume high child mortality was at least partially responsible for that.
I always just assumed that the Lady of the House just started locking her door at night, i.e. the pasts’ “great alternative” was a scullery maid.
And don’t worry, entering “confinement” is a totally natural and peaceful stage of the pregnancy, it has nothing to do with hitting your limit with all the condescending patriarchal bullshit everyone is serving you and expressing your outrage in whatever form that inevitably ends with you physically barred inside your rooms until you finish giving birth.
Considering how utterly shit maternity leave is here in North America, sometimes I wish they’d bring confinement back. Like, I’d be OK with it.
I have a 1930s book (so not Victorian, obviously, but still reasonably removed from the present day), The Complete Medical Encyclopaedia and Household Doctor, which has a section on having a baby. The thing that struck me the most was the section on giving birth, and how to endure the pain: “And then, at last, just as you are wondering how long it is going on and whether you can really bear it, the doctor is there, and there is a whiff of chloroform for you, and when you wake up, Baby has come and is waiting for you to take him in your arms”. Hmm.
So, I’m now reading Ruth Hall, by Fanny Fern, and it’s all happily married and childless in Chapter 6 and all “the advent of the little stranger” and velvety cheeks in the first line of Chapter 7. That’s a lot of stretch marks and placenta to happen in about an inch of white space in between.
That reminds me of a discussion I had with my D&D group over whether Remove Disease could be used as an early-term abortifacient. We concluded that by rules as written it totally can. (It specifically mentions that it can deal with parasitic conditions, and an unwanted pregnancy counts as a parasitic organism, to my mind.)
It also reminds me of the time I mentioned it was my character’s birthday soon and started planning a party – the DM ended up giving me some really, really sweet items as a birthday present from the character’s parents, because I was the only one of the party who’d remembered that adventurers have birthdays and families too.
I love both aspects of this comment, and now it’s just making me miss my D&D group that much more.
That reminds me of a discussion I had with my D&D group over whether Remove Disease could be used as an early-term abortifacient. We concluded that by rules as written it totally can. (It specifically mentions that it can deal with parasitic conditions, and an unwanted pregnancy counts as a parasitic organism, to my mind.)
It also reminds me of the time I mentioned it was my character's birthday soon and started planning a party – the DM ended up giving me some really, really sweet items as a birthday present from the character's parents, because I was the only one of the party who'd remembered that adventurers have birthdays and families too.
And when you choose your unconventional metaphor with which to announce your interesting condition, on no account omit the ellipses. You can’t just blurt these things out.
The proper form is “a ship upon the ocean . . . bringing . . . to you and me . . . a little baby.”
The ship on the ocean is a modern misreading of an actually literal historical tradition, wherein wealthy Victorian families would routinely import newborn infants from Ireland or the Indies; these children did not receive names or detailed personal attention for much the same reason the Thanksgiving turkey does not.
Why would the off-screen thing the idle gentry are always elaborately avoiding discussing directly just be sex
I dearly hope I am misunderstanding you, but wealthy Victorians imported infants for the purposes of eating?
well really everyone but only the wealthy could afford a fresh one
Yes! Jonathan Swift was the first to propose it as a method of population control for poorer nations in the 1700s (you can read his original proposal here: http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html).
#8 so hard
WHERE DID THIS BABY COME FROM
I love both aspects of this comment, and now it's just making me miss my D&D group that much more.
This is reminding me of whichever of the Anne of Green Gables novels it was (just looked it up — Anne’s House of Dreams) in which the narrator announces Anne’s second pregnancy with the sentence “For Anne was once again a dreamer of dreams.” I think dream-babies fall into the same category as ship-on-the-ocean babies.
I am so late in responding!
But, essentially in LMM's timeline:
– Puffed sleeves — when Anne was 11 (year 1877)
– Telephones and Eaton's catalogue — when Anne was 25 (year 1891)
When, in reality, puffed sleeves were very much an 1890s thing. The first telephone call on the Island was in 1911. Eaton's catalogue would've been more of a household staple in the late '90s, early 1900s.
Let's not even try to perform the mind game that is figuring out when "The Blue Castle" is set. My theory — the 1920s in a universe without WWI.
Wimsey has to have known about the French letter and the cervical cap — heck, he probably has an original of whatever Casanova wrote about them.
Or “in a delicate condition” or “in the family way” for pregnancy.
Or "in a delicate condition" or "in the family way" for pregnancy.
I think most women, including Joan of Arc had less-frequent periods long ago.
Frequent, strenuous physical exertion has a tendency to lighten and stop remove periods, something that I didn’t believe until I got set to a wilderness program for bad children when I was a teenager. My usually insanely heavy, clockwork-regular period was barely a dribble the first month and it vanished entirely for the last two months, and I wasn’t the only girl who experienced this. Even the staff members said that their cycles had changed drastically in the time they’d been working there, to the point where most of them reported only getting a very light period every three months or so. We were all eating properly and everything, but we were also hiking 5+ miles almost every day while carrying at least 50 lbs on our backs.
Armor-wearing and battle is really hard work, so I’d imagine Joan of Arc experienced something similar.