Plonk, the one that got away

Plonk

This is a reorganising and reposting of the blogs on 'plonk' that I first posted on the Languages and the First World War blog.

In all the excitement about words which became widespread in English during the First World War it is worth sparing a few moments for the words which infuriatingly did not get used. Given all the time that English-speaking soldiers spent in French estaminets drinking ‘vin blanc’ how on earth did they not get round to calling it ‘plonk’?

There is a wide range of military usages for ‘plonk’ during the war:

The noise of a bullet - ‘the plink-plonk of a bullet’, Nottingham Evening Post, 19 May 1915.

The arrival of a shell - ‘a shell plonks on top of the [dugout]’; and the noise of a shell - ‘whirra whirra came the travel of of the shell, then came the final plonk as it burst’, Liverpool Echo, 3 August 1915.

Grenades - ‘… by this time the German flares are falling all around, and along the trenches the ‘bang-bang,’ ‘zip-zip,’ ‘plonk-plonk’ and the more familiar sounds of rifle fire and grenade begin to tickle our ears’, Evening Despatch, 4 September 1915.

The impact of a bullet - ‘Just as I got to the second trench I felt a “plonk” in my leg. “Oh!” I said, “I’ve got it.” I looked down and saw a hole in my leg.’ West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 17 April 1917.

Jonathon Green points out that there are similar words for being drunk and being wounded, but that there’s no evidence to suggest that these were connected via the word ‘plonk’.

Unfortunately while the word ‘plonk’ was used variously to describe the sound or effects of different kinds of projectile, there has been found, so far, no published documentation of any English-speaking soldier, or civilian, using ‘plonk’ to mean wine, blanc or otherwise, until 1929. Jonathon Green cites the following:

1929 Register News-Pictorial (Adelaide) 31 Oct. 26/2: Coffin varnish and plonk were two of the names which Mr Collins […] referred to some of the cheaper wines.

There is the tantalisingly close 1919 citation in W.H. Downing’s Digger Dialects: ‘Vin blank, white wine.’ And ‘Von blink, a humorous corruption of vin blanc.’

Green’s 1919-33 citations are Australian, but we should bear in mind the history of wine-making in Australia: over 30 years before the First World War Australian wines had been competing successfully in international exhibitions in France. And according to http://www.rareaustralianwine.com/wineRegions/wineHistory.asp ‘After the First World War, vines were planted in various soldier settlements which temporarily increased production. Overproduction though, and consequently lower prices for some grape varieties, meant that some vineyards couldn’t compete economically and many vineyards collapsed.’ This wine, as it collapsed economically, might have called forth some wartime descriptions – see below for the documented wartime usage of ‘plonk’. Now begins the search for pre-war citations of ‘vin blanc’ in an Australian wine-making context.

So while we could say it ‘probably’ came from WW1 France, we cannot be certain.

The paper given at the LFWW conference (British Library, June 2014) by Véronique Duché and Diane de St Léger from the University of Melbourne described the progression of ‘bad French’ in Australian linguistic culture, from the evidence of trench journals. The Aussie in particular (which carried articles showing an interest in language) moved at the end of the war to being a veterans’ publication and then a national magazine, still retaining ‘bad French’ as an anti-authoritarian gesture.

By 1943 ‘plonk’ meant Australian wine: S J Baker’s A Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang, 1943 (3rd edn.) gives ‘plonk’ as ‘Cheap Australian wine, often laced with methylated spirits’; and ‘plink’ is ‘described as “a cheap form of plonk” ’ [which must have been pretty lethal]. Downing’s Digger Dialects, 1919 nearly gets there, but not quite. We may suggest, but no more, that it comes from ‘vin blanc’ as the most likely source, but not necessarily as a result of war-zone linguistic contact.

Are there any words which were used for both alcohol and projectiles and/or their effects? Green cites:

 ‘We’ll ’ave a drink to ’elp us,’ said Bill, and a cork went plonk!   1916 P. MacGill The Great Push 57:

Maybe there was an avoidance of linking something you liked, or at least could pretend to like, with something you wanted to avoid; perhaps wine ‘plonk’ did not come into ‘reality’ as spoken out loud until after the metal ‘plonk’ stopped killing.

One possibility (no more than that) is that the long history of wine-making in Australia would have made Australians so familiar with the term ‘vin blanc’ that it was unnecessary to create a slang version; as an already common term, pronounced phonetically for English-speakers, it would not have come within the remit of the need to create the deliberately ‘bad French’ that was a mark of Aussie ‘bloke’ attitudes (and which created so much wonderfully cynical slang during the period).

A search through Australian postwar newspapers reveals the term ‘vin blanc’ in use certainly up until 1939, in linguistic environments where slang terms were being used, and where ‘plonk’ might be expected.

For example:

(In a veteran’s narrative)

“Just one , Madame, only one vin blank!”

“Non, non, Monsieur, finish vin blanc, finish! Gendarme come tout de suite: finish!”

“Orright, then Madame, I can be a nurk too! I know where there’s a nice, clean waterhole full up to its grassy edge with fat, juicy frogs, and you won’t get one off ‘em!”

Sunday Times (Perth) 5 January 1919

Returned Soldiers’ League

Smoke Social

Diggers should join up and help their comrades

… Where two or three diggers are gathered together there is sure to be some fun and many reminiscences, and withal an atmosphere of camaraderie which impregnates the gathering with such a spirit of goodwill that the mere fact of being present is a privilege. … The President (Dr Steele) was in the chair, and there was a glint in that gentleman’s eye from the jump that prophesied that so far as he was concerned proceedings were not going to lag. However, not much urging was required, for, in the words of the invitation cards, the comrades rallied to their “Beera Quicekateer, boo-koo, vin blanc and mungey” and made the night the event of the year, and so as to avoid misunderstanding it might be said that when the fun was over they were each and every one as clearheaded as when the evening started.

Burra Record 22 Sept 1922

What did Omar Mean – Wine?

Corp William F Sherman

[this includes the term ‘parleying’]

A lot of licker is hard to take, but has a rebound like a French 75. But Vin Ordinaire, as they call it for short, is an insult to the taste without being a spur to the ambition. Vin Blanc, the pale variety, isn’t even good to look at, and it resembles vinegar in taste, appearance and smell. Vin Rouge has a beautiful vin rouge colour that is very deceptive. It tastes, however, even worse than its sister Blanche.

The Gungadai Times and Tumut, Adelong and Murrumbidgee District Advertiser 22 Aug 1922

Christmas at the War

“A Nineteen-Fourteener” has a few recollections of Christmas while abroad with the A.I.F.

In those days we were never short of “felloose” – the Gyppo term for cash. …

Vin blanc and French Biere spun out about 9 pm with the majority still sitting up on their blankets.

Sunday Times (Perth) 20 Dec 1925

The Great War – according to Hoyle

Do that puttee up.

Yes, sergeant.

Don’t answer me back.

No, Sergeant.

P-a-r-r-ade, S’hun!

Stand-at –Eas-s-se.

P-a-r-r-ade, S’hun!

Dis-miss.

Fall in.

Dis-miss.

Your leave is cancelled.

 ? ? ? ! ! ! x x x ! ! ! Sergeant.

What did you say?

Nothing, Sergeant.

Well, don’t say it again.

Fall in.

Dis-miss.

Your rifle is dirty.

D’you call these socks.

You’ve got blanco on your face.

Don’t answer me back.

So this is France.

Vin blanc.

Vin blanc.

Vin blanc.

It’s a long way to Tipperary.

Stop singing.

Put that _ light out.

Put that LIGHT OUT.

So this is the front line.

Look at that pretty cornflower.

Things seem pretty quiet here.

Things seem —-

Wallop. Whe-e-e-e-e!

Yes, nurse.

Is this Blighty?

Yes, doctor, I fell worse than ever.

When this ta-ra-ra war is over.

Good-night, sister.

Oh, yes, I saw a bit of fighting.

Western Mail (Perth) 1 May 1930

Report of The Diggers’ Ball

One of Narromine’s Biggest Social Functions

List of dances includes No 4 fox trot the Chat’s Parade (by De Louzer); No 5 waltz Tosti’s San Fairy Ann; No 6 one step, In a Vin Blanc Boozer.

Narromine News and Trangie Advocate 16 June 1933

From The Last Word’(short story)

Over the usual round of drinks Boon volunteered that he had been in France during the war, and had run across Smith in one of the English foot regiments.

“We had a binge together,” he said. “You know that vin blanc stuff. We swapped stories and hats; he took my slouch hat and I had his cap. Got Hell roared out of me next morning on parade. Never saw him again …”

The World’s News (Sydney) 29 April 1936

An article in The World’s News (Sydney) 4 November 1936 is fairly regular in its lexis but contains a few slang phrases such as ‘well bushed’ (tired) and ‘stiff luck’. In a story about a dog being used for smuggling there is the sentence ‘How many bottles of vin blanc (Australianised into “plonk”) he carried into the lines would be impossible to calculate, but they were many.’ But this is long after the first documented usage of 'plonk' as wine.

To sum up, at this stage:

• In Australian and New Zealand war reportage during and after the First World War the word ‘plonk’ was used to describe a variety of projectiles, their sounds or their effects.
• ‘Vin blanc’ and a number of variations including ‘Von Blink’, ‘vin blank’, ‘vim blong’, ‘plinketty-ponk’, ‘point blank’ and ‘Jim Blonk’, were used, but apparently not ‘plonk’, to describe white wine, during the war and in reminiscences afterwards.
• Australians were familiar with the term ‘vin blanc’ and it was used widely. Not so much in New Zealand newspapers: from currently available OCR (high quality) in the NZ newspapers archive I can find only 3 citations of ‘vin blanc’ 1914-18.
• In several situations in postwar Australian newspapers, where one might expect to see a slang term, the straightforward ‘vin blanc’ is used. Some of these appear after the documentation of ‘plonk’ for cheap wine (1927).

Anglophone soldiers appeared to not enjoy French white wine, at least in their memory:

    “Sauntering over to a French canteen, we were initiated into the mysteries of “Jim Blonk” [vin blanc], and “Vin Rouge”, neither of which appealed to our English palates.”     Strange, J D. The Price of Victory, 1930, quoted in Hiddemann, H. Untersuchungen zum Slang des Englischen Heeres im Weltkrieg, 1938

Does the term ‘Von Blink’ indicate any semantic link between vin blanc and the enemy? Probably not, given the existence of ‘Jim Blonk’ and others, which seem to indicate that this was more a case of playing around with the sounds,  either to make a nonsensical term (‘plinketty-plonk’), or to create something more recognisable (‘point blank’) – it could be compared to the way place-names were changed (‘Ypres’ being morphed into ‘Wipers’).

These then are examples of the use of ‘plonk’ and the non-use of 'plonk':

1. Firstly, the earliest example of ‘plonk’ meaning cheap wine I have been able to find in the Australian press:

    Welter of Taxation

    A characteristic contribution to the debate was made by Mr Collins. He objected to the Government “plonking on” the taxation.

    “Give us a definition of ‘plonk’?” asked Mr McMillan.

    “Yes, I can do that.” Replied the obliging Mr Collins.

    “It is a cheap wine produced in Mr Crosby’s district.” Loud laughter greeted the sally.

    News (Adelaide) 8 December 1927

2. Alternative forms for ‘vin blanc’, the first three spotted and supplied by @hugovk via twitter, and my thanks to him:

    Wine

    Cable – “A wine ship with free samples will shortly leave France for America and Australia”.

    Sing hey for the good ship Claretcup,

    Sing ho for the cargo carried;

    Her anchor’s weighed and her peter’s up,

    Too long she’s tacked and tarried.

    Her bulkheads burst with bonza booze,

    Van blong, van rouge and sherry,…

    Sunday Times  (Perth) 26 March 1922

……

    Fish Oh!

    Van blong and van rouge at a French café came along as a top-off and two hours later Ted S- and his mate got aboard the rattler for Perth, Ted having a large parcel of fish under his arm.

    

    Sunday Times  (Perth) 20 July 1924

…………….

    Reminiscences of France

    The Australians, partly through irony and partly for practical reasons, deformed many French terms, and substituted either an English word or syllable at the end of a phrase. Thus instead of the French “Comment allez-vous!” (How are you?) the Australian said – “Comment allez plonk?”  The same thing was done by the French themselves, and the French word for German, “allemand”, was altered to “alleboche”, the final syllable of which became in time an independent and universally used word. Proper names were mutilated in the same fashion, and instead of “Marguerite” one heard “Margarine”, and “Simone” became “Cinnamon”. In Flanders people drank beer, and on the Somme white wine. This was first called “vim blong”, then “vim blank”, and afterwards “Point blank”. It would be interesting, the lecturer said, to revisit this district later and see how many of these words had remained in the dialect.

    Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton) 16 July 1923

.............

But ‘vin blanc’ was also used without difficulty:

    Behind the Lines

    You can get French beer at 1d a glass – very second-rate stuff – while “special” at 2d a glass and “Boche” at 1 franc  per bottle are better, but are all very light. Spirits are, of course, practically “taboo”, but vin rouge and vin blanc (red and white wine respectively) are popular drinks, but the quality is doubtful. Champagne may be had everywhere, and at varying prices.

    Press 28 July 1917 (NZ)

…………………………..

3. Uses of the word ‘plonk’, to do with hitting/projectiles, from Australian and NZ newspapers. Clearly the sound is being imitated in many cases:

    Hill time after time thwarted Edward’s good intentions by plonking a left to the face.

    Truth (Melbourne) 25 Dec 1915

….

    [A woman gives her husband] a resounding smack in the face . Plonk!

    Pukekohe & Waiuku Times 24 December 1915

………………..

     “Whizzy Plonk” – Metal from the Skies

    All we have heard was “whizzy plonk”  [talking about falling anti-aircraft shells]

    Auckland Star 12 May 1917

………….

    I was coming up the sap one day conveying mails, when a Taube aeroplane flew high, over our heads. Of course our guns must fire on her, so we, being directly underneath, got the full benefit of the stray bits. I was walking along with a chap and both of us were watching her as she passed when all of a sudden – bang! And almost immediately a faint pur-r-r of falling pieces. We landed together under the shelter of a bank, and ‘plonk’ came the pieces all around us.

    Poverty Bay Herald 28 March 1916

……………………………

[The sounds of projectiles]

    Zip-zip, hissing and cracking of bullets. …. plonk – only a Hun bullet which has buried itself

    Marlborough Express 21 Oct 1916

………………

    … the dull ‘plonk’ of a gun in the enemy’s lines …

    Poverty Bay Herald 19 Oct 1916

……………….

    [Naval guns] “plonk” two or three shells in a trench [and later] “plonk” some shrapnel above them

    Evening Post 8 July 1915

…..

    At about 11 a.m. plonk came two or three shells bursting on top of me, and burying me four or five [feet] deep. …

    Did I see the tanks? Of course I saw them, and they are absolutely out on their own, and very strange to watch, crawling along at four miles an hour.

    Press 12 Jan 1917 (NZ)

……………

    The regular “plonk, plonk”’ of the feet of a woman swimming …

    Auckland Star 15 April 1916

………………..

And the Taranaki Daily News  for 1 July 1915 reported on a concert with a rendering of the song ‘Plink, Plonk’ – this was written in 1911 by Murphy & Lipton for George Formby, its full listing being George Formby’s Famous Guitar Song ‘Plink-Plonk!’ (The Skin of a Spanish Onion).

Outside the usage of ‘vin blanc’, the word ‘blanc’ occasionally caused problems:

    It looks as if the restaurant-keeper’s education was sadly neglected or else that they entertain a profound contempt for French. One well-known Bourke-Street restaurateur writes it “Balmonge,” while another, not far away, puts it down as “Blank manjy.”

    Truth (Melbourne) 26 June 1915

Actually I reckon the etymology still holds good for the second case.

@Fieldmeasurer kindly contributes this excerpt from Agony’s Anguish self-published in 1931 by George Barker:

    An officer emerges from a pillbox, and with a whisper tells us to make for the distant ruins of a farm. Panting with nervous fear we each make for it, and our steps are shaky as we proceed. I try to run but my limbs are like lead. Plonk za! A near shave that time. Some of us manage it, others get hit and join their unfortunate companions in death.

‘Plonk za’ seems to belong in the linguistic experiments of Futurism. Noticeable also is the phrase ‘a near shave’, not the first time this has turned up in a First World War context.

Eric Partridge's take on 'plonk' is interesting (and he was there): 'Mud, esp. that of no-man's-land: military: 1916-18. (Hence, over the plonk, 'over the top'.) B. & P. [Brophy & Partridge] Ex the noise made when one draws one's feet from the clinging mire. ... 2. Pinky, cheap port, sold by the quart : Australian [Partridge was from New Zealand] : from ca. 1926. Prob. ex plink-plonk'.

In the 1930s the term spread - Partridge notes 'plonk' as cheap brandy sold in Italy (naval slang); and a 'plonk bar', an Australian wine bar, from circa 1935; a 'plonk-dot', 'A confirmed wine-bibber' from 1953; and 'plonko', a drunkard addicted to plonk, Australian since c. 1930.

A bit of attitude, and possibly altitude, in defining 'strafe' (1919)

In the volume of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (later to become the OED) covering Si to St, published in 1919, there are very few quotations illustrative of usage which date from after 1910. 

One entry which had to have recent quotations was the very recent adoption of the word 'strafe'. The entry is headed: 

  ‘Strafe, v. slang. [From the Ger. phrase Gott strafe England, ‘God punish England’, a common salutation in Germany in 1914 and the following years.] trans. Used (originally by British soldiers in the war against Germany) in various senses suggested by its origin : To punish; to do damage to ; to attack fiercely ; to heap imprecations on …’ 

The citations are worth quoting as they indicate a number of concepts. Firstly amusement at, and a bit of superiority over the German language – ‘1916 Times Lit. Suppl. 10 Feb.62/1 The Germans are called the Gott-strafers, and strafe is becoming a comic English word’. How to beat your enemy - take a hate-word and turn it into a comic word; it's not far from the way the gay community seized the word 'queer' and by using it removed its barbs.

This is followed by the awesomely dismissive: '1916 Blackw. Mag. Feb. 284/1 Intermittent strafes we are used to.'

Then a languid sense of superiority, emphasised by the taking over of an enemy word – ‘1916 MS.Let. fr. Front (Feb or Mar.) There is not much Hun artillery fire, but as our guns strafe them well every day, I expect they will wake up and return the compliment.’ 

And the same sense of amusement in ‘1916 Daily Mail 1 Nov. 4/4 the word strafe is now almost universally used. Not only is an effective bombardment of the enemy’s lines or a successful trench raid described by Tommy as ‘strafing the Fritzes,’ but there are occasions when certain ‘brass hats’ … are strafed by imprecation. And quite recently the present writer heard a working-class woman … shout to one of her offspring ‘Wait till I git ‘old of yer, I’ll strarfe yer, I will!’

All of these defuse the power of the German word, and give a sense of not being impressed or disturbed by it at all – it becomes little more than a word to frighten children with. How do we read this? How does the selection of illustrations indicate how this group of lexicographers looked back at the war? It is hard not to interpret their attitude as one of amused superiority.  

Two versions of Archie, and some others

A handful of notable entries from post-First World War dictionaries. First, from Cassell's New English Dictionary 1919:

Frigo - (Soldiers' slang) Frozen or chilled meat

Huff (Airman's slang) - to kill

and

To Lusitania - (slang) to torpedo (esp. a large passenger-ship) 

All of these usages have disappeared I assume, though 'huffing' is still a term used in draughts (does anyone play draughts still?). The days are thankfully past when anyone would have occasion to 'Lusitania', and even gallows humour scarcely excuses it. But I did laugh out loud when I saw 'frigo' - definitely one for the slang counter at Iceland.

Cassell's also has an interesting definition for 'Archie' - actually 'Archies':

[nickname from the popular song, 'Archibald, certainly not',' with allusion to the fewness of the hits made], n.pl. (Soldiers' slang) Anti-aircraft guns or shells; the anti-aircraft force.

And in Collins' Etymological Dictionary (1922) there is:

Archies n.pl. the anti-aircraft force; also, the guns and shells. The name is said to have been given, owing to the fewness of the hits, from the song, "Archibald, certainly not." 

Rather different from the version given by Ernest Weekley in his An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921): 

Archibald, Archie: “It was at once noticed at Brooklands [where much aviation development and testing was carried out prior to 1914, and portrayed in the film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines] that in the vicinity of, or over, water or damp ground, there were disturbances in the air causing bumps or drops to these early pioneers. Some of these ‘remous’ were found to be permanent, one over the Wey river, and another at the corner of the aerodrome next to the sewage-farm. Youth being fond of giving proper names to inanimate objects, the bump near the sewage-farm was called by them Archibald. As subsequently, when war broke out, the effect of having shell bursting near an aeroplane was to produce a ‘remous’ reminding the Brookland trained pilots of their old friend Archibald, they called being shelled ‘being Archied’ for short. Any flying-man who trained at Brooklands before the war will confirm the above statement” (Col. C H Joubert de la Ferté, I M S ret.).

A few more details and thoughts, first posted on the Languages and the First World War website last year:

 

Col. Charles Henry Joubert de la Ferté, of the Indian Medical Service was 68 when the war broke out, and lived in Weybridge, where Brooklands is located. Brooklands had been in use for at least 7 years by this time - A V Roe and Tommy Sopwith both tested planes there. Whether the term was picked up from the song or whether the song reinforced the chosen word is difficult to determine without more evidence, but it is not impossible that aviators, on being shot at, would express words to the effect that whatever was coming towards them was certainly not as harmless as the warm air rising from a sewage farm.

So, 'Archie' for the shellfire, and 'Archies' for those who sent it up all seems reasonable. But which way were aviators trying to comfort themselves, either by claiming the enemy were not good shots, or by claiming that they were as harmless as hot air?  Or, to put it another way, were they just crap shots, or were they just crap?

A couple of surprising Jack Johnsons

In the first months of the First World War there were references to slang terms for weapons in usages which seem at best thoughtless, and more likely shocking now, however innocent in intent may have been their use at the time; this is with hindsight, and they appeared before the horrors of trench warfare, the use of gas and the scale of the casualties were widely known. As the war progressed usages like these for recreational objects or activities became less common; the use by civilians (especially politicians) of any slang terms that had a basis in the experience of military combat, such as 'under fire' and 'over the top', were strongly condemned by G K Chesterton in the Illustrated London News 14 December 1918 . 

The Rochdale Observer on 31 October 1914 carried an advertisement for fireworks that read: 

Fireworks! Fireworks!

Ask for “Black Maria” or “Jack Johnson” shells 

Wholesale House :- Edwards & Bryning Ltd, ...

and the Western Gazette 11 December 1914 carried an advertisement for a box of 100 toys marketed by the Allies Toy Co in Brighton, which included a scenario described thus:

 Boom! – Oom! – Om! – M! – Bang!!! 

The “Jack Johnson” great German Gun is at work. First 25 harmless shells explode with a bang, then the Red Cross Nurses and their white Tents appear on the scene to deal with the wounded. 

The term is used here for the gun rather than the shell, a late occurrence for this usage, but not an isolated incident.

Addition to the post on the non-gendering of infants

Now, this is an interesting addition to the question of the non-gendering of infants in the nineteenth century. Lindley Murray's 'English Grammar' was on its forty-seventh edition in 1834, and easily the most popular textbook on the subject. First published in 1795, during the 1830s it was available in embossed print for the blind, and was translated into Marathi for Indian students.

This is from p151, in the section in Syntax on pronoun agreement :

We hardly consider little children as persons, because that term gives us the idea of reason and reflection: and therefore the application of the personal relative who, in this case, seems to be harsh: "A child who." It is still more improperly applied to animals: "A lake frequented by that fowl whom nature has taught to dip the wing in water." 

This is purely from the point of view of grammar, but it suggests that it is based on the idea that gender is something that is grown into, or acquired with the ability to reason and reflect. Or that adults would take no notice of gender until the powers of reason and reflection were also noticeable. Is it proposing that gender-acquisition is dependent upon the ability to reason and reflect? This is curious given that it was within a world where the statuses of male and female were profoundly different. All rather perplexing, especially given Murray's philanthropic mindset.

Shell shock and trench coat

Corrections to this post, as the dates were wrong

An advertisement for Phosferine in The Sphere 23 October 1915 (not 1914, as previously proposed): Phospherine is stated as being good for ‘nervous exhaustion and stunning of senses caused by shell shock’.

What is interesting about 'shell shock' is that the term here is not used for the physiological condition but the cause of the physiological condition - the shock of the shell causes the nervous exhaustion and stunning of the senses, the neurological condition that later would be called 'shell-shock'. 

The (now) earliest recorded use of 'trench coat' was in Punch on 23 December 1914, in an advertisement for Thresher and Glenny: 'Shell made of hard khaki drill, lined sheepskin, and a special interlining, rendering it absolutely waterproof. 
Wind, wet and mud resisting.'

The effects of infant mortality in the nineteenth century as seen in the non-gendering of babies in literature

 

The incidence of infant mortality in the 19^th century beggars belief. Arthur Leared, physician at the Great Northern Hospital near King’s Cross in London, begins his article ‘Infant Mortality and its Causes’ (1862) with the statistic: ‘About one-fourth of all the children born in this civilized country perish miserably in the first year of their existence’. He compares the lot of animals to that of humans, noting that ‘the free agency of man caused an indifference to the strongest of all natural obligations, and that the results of apathy and ignorance are mistaken for those of a natural law’. The drift from the countryside to the cities and towns created conditions where disease was bound to carry off the weakest, and in 1915 Hugh Ashby noted that ‘the conditions generally found in towns are far more inimical to infant life than those in the country’ [Infant Mortality, Cambridge, 1915]. However, many factors caused the high incidence of infant mortality, Ashby citing poverty, the lack of skill in childcare, improper feeding, alcohol and opium abuse, as well as the myriad of diseases that carried children off suddenly and to which 19^th-century medicine had no answer.

The statistics did not change much through the course of the century. In 1827 more than one in four children born in the east London area of Bethnal Green died before reaching the age of two (Alan Palmer The East End (2000) p 60).  While Ashby cited rates of between 13% and 16.3% (mortality specifically before 12 months) from 1880 to 1900, C F Masterman in The Condition of England (1909/11) reported 20% infant mortality in the Pottery towns [p137].

Some writers moved in areas where the figures, spiralling out of control, seemed to invoke the spectres of diseases that science was banishing to the past. The Countess of Ebersburg, in Six out of Ten: an Awful Bill (1877), reported that eighty per cent of infants deaths were caused not just by scarlatina, diphtheria, hooping cough, and measles, but also by ‘miasma’, ‘convulsions’ and ‘cholera infantum’ (caused by ‘bad air and bad food’) [p2]. Elsewhere she mentions ‘marasmus, the slow fading and wasting away of scrofulous little children’, and ‘miasmatic germs, or crowd poison’ [pp3, 5]. The countess calculated that ‘of all the little babes born in one year SIX OUT OF TEN die ere they reach the fifth year’ [p10]. Leared notes that ‘it is no uncommon thing’ for only one child in a family of eight or ten to survive [p8,9].

These startling statistics were not limited to the parts of a major cities that had poor sanitation or whose residents had low incomes or limited education. Mary Shelley lost three of her four children, at the ages of two weeks, one year, and three years; Byron’s daughter Allegra died at the age of five; Charles Lamb was one of seven siblings, of whom four died as infants; Elizabeth Gaskell and her brother John were the two out of the eight children born to their parents who survived infancy. Childbirth itself was likely to produce casualties, with both mother and child at risk, even in hospital. James Young Simpson in his work showing the value of anaesthetic quoted statistics showing that in the last two decades of the eighteenth century in London mortality rates for mothers in parturition were 1 in 110; the rate countrywide for 1841 was still 1 in 170 (Anæsthesia, or the Employment of chloroform and ether in surgery, midwifery, etc., Philadelphia, 1949, pp 48-9).

Destitution and starvation were killers too. William Blake, whose sensibilities embraced the world of the young child (how many ‘babes’ are there in Songs of Innocence and of Experience?), was portraying the real world in ‘Holy Thursday’ (Experience), both in the words ‘Babes reduced to misery’ and in the image of the woman staring at the dead infant abandoned on the ground.

It is not surprising that this high risk of loss of a child should affect the parent-baby relationship. At the heart of the parent-baby relationship lay the long-standing idea that newborn children were ‘on loan’. Shakespeare’s Capulet in Romeo and Juliet states of his daughter that ‘God had lent us but this only child’, all the Capulet’s other children having died young. This sense of children being on loan rather than permanent survived into the Victorian era, creating a culture in which there was a close association between babies and death – witness the vogue for carte de visite photographs of dead babies. Babies  were seen as ‘visiting angels’ (Jonathan Miller, BBC, 4 Jan 1998), and the dead were wrapped in shrouds which resembled baby clothes (Julian Litten, The English Way of Death, 1991, p 84). Though heartbreak was real for the bereaved parents, there could also be a kind of commitment avoidance in the delaying of naming children till they had survived the first few months of life.

Given that babies ran a one in four risk of death, and that surviving infancy was such an achievement, it is surprising how seldom this is treated in 19^th-century literature. There seems to be a general absence of interest in babies, or, when they do appear, they are referred to with impersonal and non-gendered terms. While young children in literature of this period may have strong identities babies seldom do; they are adjuncts, almost symbols or props. Where they do function in the plot, they are referred to as ‘it’, ‘baby’, ‘infant’, ‘child’, seldom gendered or named. We have to be careful here to distinguish between two linguistic situations: on one hand where the sex of the child is not known (‘Is it a boy or girl?’), and on the other where it is ignored, examples of which I here present. The avoidance of stating the gender of babies, evidenced by the use of the word ‘it’, is part of the non-engagement with babies as individuals, seen in repeated incidences in nineteenth-century literature. 

Wordsworth’s uncomfortable poem The Thorn (1789) deals with the anguish brought on by rejection and pregnancy outside marriage; the existence of the infant, and the death of the infant, exerts a strong force within the poem, but the baby never breaks through to actual identity. Marian in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 poem Aurora Leigh is found to have a child, but it is several pages before we find that the child is male; he is addressed as ‘the child’, ‘my lamb’, ‘my flower, my pet’, but even seven years later along the plot-line we do not know the child’s name.

The youngest member of the Pocket family in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) is continually referred to or addressed as ‘baby’, the child’s name or gender never being revealed, despite being a clearly defined character. In Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), when Gabriel Oak erases the words ‘and child’ from Fanny Robin’s coffin, he is removing the identification of her shame, and protecting her memory, but in so doing effecting the removal of the ungendered child’s existence. Though Bathsheba castigates Troy for kissing ‘them’, the dead mother and ungendered child in the coffin, it is in fact only Fanny’s corpse that he kisses.

In The Prime Minister (1876) by Anthony Trollope we know that Emily’s baby is male – there are five references to ‘him’ and ‘he’ – but while the words ‘baby’, ‘child’ and ‘infant’ are used, ‘son’ and ‘boy’ are not. The baby dies within a few days, and is not named. Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song (1893), a book of nursery rhyme poems, has 13 references to ‘baby’, but only two of them give the gender of the baby. The book notably also contains five rhymes discussing the death of ‘baby’. In E M Forster Howards End (1910) ‘Baby’ is a kind of role-title, bestowed first on Charles and then Margaret; by the end of the book Dolly’s child is ‘Baby’ and ‘the Diddums’.

Even a bereaved mother might omit to bestow a gender in speaking about her child. In March 1816 Mary Shelley’s premature baby died, after her journal entries had referred to her child in non-gendered terms – ‘The child is not quite seven months’, ‘the child not expected to live.’ She wrote to Thomas Jefferson Hogg: ‘My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions.’

These examples render more noticeable the cases where babies are treated as individuals.

It is in The Prelude (1799) second part, from line 267 – ‘Blessed the infant babe’ – that we see Wordsworth working from the observation of an individual baby going through the process of learning from his mother; and the baby’s gender is specified within 4 lines. Wordsworth’s view of himself, so strongly based on his childhood, and particularly his view of himself as a poet, was closely connected to the ‘infant sensibility’ noted soon after. It is rare to find a writer of this period viewing him/herself as an infant.

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) we can trace a development of the importance of the role of the infant through the changing terms: Celia, who is genuinely devoted to her son, calls him ‘baby’ as much as ‘Arthur’. The term ‘the baby’ is used frequently throughout the book, but he is addressed as ‘baby’ seven times before his name, Arthur, is introduced. Arthur’s role is to highlight the childlessness and barrenness of Dorothy’s marriage – it is after the introduction of Arthur’s name that we are told ‘It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.’ When Rosamund loses her baby this is referred to as a ‘misfortune’, but clearly means a lot more to Rosamund, who later states ‘I wish I had died with the baby’. The third important birth in the novel fittingly occurs in the ‘Finale’, where Celia announces ‘Dorothea has a little boy’.

On rare occasions we find writers for whom babies were individuals who are addressed directly. Hogg’s Life of Shelley tells the story of the poet addressing a baby on the subject of life before birth: ‘it was a fine placid boy; so far from being disturbed by the interruption, he looked up and smiled.’ It is the kind of direct and ingenuous enquiry one might expect only of Shelley, or Blake. [2408.a..5. Vol 1 p240]. Robert Burns’s A Poet’s Welcome to his Love-begotten Daughter (1785) shows a totally genuine interest in ‘my bonie, sweet, wee dochter’; the poem though was never published. Blake too in his unshackled mind saw babies as not just individuals, but as equals: in ‘Infant Joy’ the two-days old babe names him/herself – there is no need for a gender as the child is addressed directly – and shares the voice of the poem equally with Blake himself.