A BABY SHOW.
There is no doubt that at the present moment the British baby is
assuming a position amongst us of unusual prominence and importance.
That he should be an institution is inevitable. That he grows upon us
Londoners at the rate of some steady five hundred a week, the
Registrar-General's statistics of the excess of births over deaths prove
beyond question. His domestic importance and powers of revolutionizing a
household are facts of which every Paterfamilias is made, from time to
time, unpleasantly aware. But the British baby is doing more than this
just at present. He is assuming a public position. Perhaps it is only
the faint index of the extension of women's rights to the infantile
condition of the sexes. Possibly our age is destined to hear of Baby
Suffrage, Baby's Property Protection, Baby's Rights and Wrongs in
general. It is beyond question that the British baby _is_ putting itself
forward, and demanding to be heard--as, in fact, it always had a habit
of doing. Its name has been unpleasantly mixed up with certain
revelations at Brixton, Camberwell, and Greenwich. Babies have come to
be farmed like taxes or turnpike gates. The arable infants seem to
gravitate towards the transpontine districts south of the Thames. It
will be an interesting task for our Legislature to ascertain whether
there is any actual law to account for the transfer, as it inevitably
will have to do when the delicate choice is forced upon it between
justifiable infanticide, wholesale Hospices des Enfants Trouvés, and
possibly some kind of Japanese "happy despatch" for high-minded infants
who are superior to the slow poison administered by injudicious
"farmers." At all events, one fact is certain, and we can scarcely
reiterate it too often--the British baby is becoming emphatic beyond
anything we can recollect as appertaining to the infantile days of the
present generation. It is as though a ray of juvenile "swellishness," a
scintillation of hobbledehoyhood, were refracted upon the long clothes
or three-quarter clothes of immaturity.
For, if it is true--as we may tax our infantile experiences to assure
us--that "farmed" infants were an article unknown to husbandry in our
golden age, it is equally certain that the idea of the modern Baby Show
was one which, in that remote era, would not have been tolerated. Our
mothers and grandmothers would as soon have thought of sacrificing an
innocent to Moloch as to Mammon. What meant it then--to what can it be
due--to precocity on the part of the British baby, or degeneracy on the
part of the British parent--that two Baby Shows were "on" nearly at the
same moment--one at Mr. Giovannelli's at Highbury Barn, the other at Mr.
Holland's Gardens, North Woolwich?
Anxious to keep au courant with the times, even when those times are
chronicled by the rapid career of the British baby--anxious also to blot
out the idea of the poor emaciated infants of Brixton, Camberwell, and
Greenwich, by bringing home to my experience the opposite pole of
infantile development--I paid a visit, and sixpence, at Highbury Barn
when the Baby Show opened. On entering Mr. Giovannelli's spacious hall,
consecrated on ordinary occasions to the Terpsichorean art, I found it a
veritable shrine of the "Diva triformis." Immediately on entering I was
solicited to invest extra coppers in a correct card, containing the
names, weights, and--not colours; they were all of one colour, that of
the ordinary human lobster--but weights, of the various forms of
Wackford Squeers under twelve months, who were then and there assembled,
like a lot of little fat porkers. It was, in truth, a sight to whet the
appetite of an "annexed" Fiji Islander, or any other carnivorous animal.
My correct card specified eighty "entries;" but, although the exhibition
only opened at two o'clock, and I was there within an hour after, I
found the numbers up to 100 quite full. The interesting juveniles were
arranged within rails, draped with pink calico, all arrayed in "gorgeous
attire," and most of them partaking of maternal sustenance. The
mammas--all respectable married women of the working class--seemed to
consider the exhibition of their offspring by no means infra dig., and
were rather pleased than otherwise to show you the legs and other points
of their adipose encumbrances. Several proposed that I should test the
weight, which I did tremulously, and felt relieved when the infant
Hercules was restored to its natural protector. The prizes, which
amounted in the gross to between two and three hundred pounds, were to
be awarded in sums of _10l._ and _5l._, and sometimes in the shape of
silver cups, on what principle I am not quite clear; but the decision
was to rest with a jury of three medical men and two "matrons." If
simple adiposity, or the approximation of the human form divine to that
of the hippopotamus, be the standard of excellence, there could be no
doubt that a young gentleman named Thomas Chaloner, numbered 48 in the
correct card, aged eight months, and weighing 33lbs., would be facile
princeps, a prognostication of mine subsequently justified by the event.
I must confess to looking with awe, and returning every now and then to
look again, on this colossal child. At my last visit some one asked on
what it had been fed. Shall I own that the demon of mischief prompted me
to supplement the inquiry by adding, "Oil cake, _or_ Thorley's Food for
Cattle?"
On the score, I suppose, of mere peculiarity, my own attention--I
frankly confess I am not a connoisseur--was considerably engrossed by
"two little Niggers." No doubt the number afterwards swelled to the
orthodox "ten little Niggers." One was a jovial young "cuss" of eleven
months--weighted at 29lbs., and numbered 62 on the card. He was a
clean-limbed young fellow, with a head of hair like a furze-bush, and
his mother was quite untinted. I presume Paterfamilias was a fine
coloured gentleman. The other representative of the sons of Ham--John
Charles Abdula, aged three months, weight 21lbs., and numbered 76--was
too immature to draw upon my sympathies; since I freely acknowledge such
specimens are utterly devoid of interest for me until their bones are of
sufficient consistency to enable them to sit upright and look about as a
British baby should. This particular infant had not an idea above
culinary considerations. He was a very Alderman in embryo, if there are
such things as coloured Aldermen. Then there were twins--that
inscrutable visitation of Providence--three brace of gemini. Triplets,
in mercy to our paternal feelings, Mr. Giovannelli spared us.
There was one noteworthy point about this particular exhibition. The
mothers, at all events, got a good four days' feed whilst their
infantile furniture was "on view." I heard, sotto voce, encomiums on the
dinner of the day confidingly exchanged between gushing young matrons,
and I myself witnessed the disappearance of a decidedly comfortable tea,
to say nothing of sundry pints of porter discussed sub rosâ and free of
expense to such as stood in need of sustenance; and indeed a good many
seemed to stand in need of it. Small wonder, when the mammas were so
forcibly reminded by the highly-developed British baby that, in Byron's
own words, "our life is twofold."
It is certainly passing, not from the sublime to the ridiculous, but
vice versâ, yet it is noting another testimony to the growing importance
of the British baby, if one mentions the growth of crèches, or
day-nurseries for working-men's children in the metropolis. Already an
institution in Paris, they have been recently introduced into England,
and must surely prove a boon to the wives of our working men. What in
the world does become of the infants of poor women who are forced to
work all day for their maintenance? Is it not a miracle if something
almost worse than "farming"--death from negligence, fire, or bad
nursing--does not occur to them? The good ladies who have founded, and
themselves work, these crèches are surely meeting a confessed necessity.
I paid a visit one day to 4, Bulstrode Street, where one of these useful
institutions was in full work. I found forty little toddlers, some
playing about a comfortable day-nursery, others sleeping in tiny cribs
ranged in a double line along a spacious, well-aired sleeping-room;
some, too young for this, rocked in cosy cradles; but all clean, safe,
and happy. What needs it to say whether the good ladies who tended them
wore the habit of St. Vincent de Paul, the poke-bonnet of the Puseyite
"sister," or the simple garb of unpretending Protestantism? The thing is
being done. The most helpless of all our population--the children of the
working poor--are being kept from the streets, kept from harm, and
trained up to habits of decency, at 4, Bulstrode Street, Marylebone
Lane. Any one can go and see it for himself; and if he does--if he sees,
as I did, the quiet, unostentatious work that is there being done for
the British baby, "all for love and nothing for reward"--I shall be very
much surprised if he does not confess that it is one of the best
antidotes imaginable to baby-farming, and a sight more decorous and
dignified than any Baby Show that could possibly be imagined.