I have just heard of the following case: A poor woman, only
twenty-eight years of age, was confined last Wednesday with her seventh
child, all living. She has been allowed to live until this affair is
over in a deplorable cottage that is condemned. She has been living
quite near for about four months, but I and my neighbours have never
seen her nor the two youngest children, aged two and a half years
and fifteen months, and we are now told they have no clothes to come
out in. These two children were born in the workhouse infirmary. We
hear that the father, a hay-carter, only did six weeks’ work in a
twelvemonth. He must be a most brutal man. He was fighting the poor
wife only a fortnight ago, as if she were another man. The poor thing
lies there with only an old sheet and quilt for covering, and a poor
woman who is attending to the other children has taken the blanket
from her own baby to lend her. The very night the baby was born the
midwife had to send for a policeman, the husband was carrying on in
such a dreadful manner, and was worse afterwards, because they would
not let him have the Insurance paper that had just been filled in by
the midwife for the Insurance.