A visit to a day nursery, by Agnes Rowell
An original magazine essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this essay, published in a magazine in 1867, a woman visits a nursery where mill workers leave their babies during the working day.
Every morning at half past five, in the street behind the great mill at Hallam Bridge, a little procession forms that I believe has no equal in England. Women in shawls and clogs, some of them hardly more than girls themselves, come hurrying down from the terraces with bundles in their arms, and the bundles are babies. They are bound for a plain brick house with a green door, which bears over its lintel the words ‘Day Nursery for the Infants of Working Mothers’. There, for threepence a day, a child may be left from dawn until the mill bell rings at six in the evening.
I confess that I went to see it with some prejudice. It has long seemed to me that a mother’s place is beside her infant, and that any institution which makes it easier for her to leave it must do some harm, however kindly meant. I came away with my opinion shaken, if not overturned.
The house is scrupulously clean. Each child, on arrival, is washed and dressed in a nursery smock, its own clothes being folded and kept until evening, and this alone, the matron told me, has done more to keep the fever from the babies than all the doctors in the town. There is a long, light room upstairs where eighteen cradles stand in two rows, and a room below for the older children, those who can walk, with a rocking horse, a box of wooden bricks and a rail along the wall for them to pull themselves up by. Dinner is broth and bread, milk for the youngest, and at two o’clock every child is put to sleep, whether it will or no.
I asked the matron what became of these infants before the nursery opened. She told me that they were left with neighbours, often old women who minded a dozen at once for a penny a head, and quieted them, as often as not, with a spoonful of laudanum. ‘They slept,’ she said, ‘and some of them did not wake.’ I had not known this, and I do not think most of my readers know it either.
At six I watched the mothers return. I had expected, I suppose, some indifference in them, after a day spent so far from their children. There was none. One young woman, still white with cotton dust to the eyebrows, snatched up her boy before the nurse had finished unfastening his smock and stood rocking him in the doorway with her eyes shut. I turned away, feeling that I had no business to watch.
I do not say that this is how children ought to be raised. I still believe it would be better for every one of those babies to be at home, at its mother’s knee, and for the mill to manage without her. But the mill will not manage without her, and her husband’s wage will not manage without the mill; and while that remains so, the green door at Hallam Bridge is the kindest thing I have seen in a manufacturing town.
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.