Private Pleasures

GODDEN
MACKAY
Cumberland Street lost six of her twelve infants. Margaret Doyle lost two
daughters before her daughter Margaret was born. Florence Lathrope, who
probably ran the old Bird in Hand hotel as a boarding-house between 1903 and
1904, had lost three of her five children and her husband before she came to live
on the site.
These losses, and the grief they entailed, the sickbeds, small coffins and the
funerals, were thus very common occurrences, typical rather than atypical
household experiences. That the same households should also display artefacts of
consolation and sentiment, buffering the direct and constant interface of life and
death, is not surprising. Mourning jewellery made of costly jet and its imitation,
vulcanite, were also worn by the site's women. They were large, striking pieces,
designed to be seen against heavy, voluminous, black mourning clothes. These
pieces are also signs that the site's women were participants in the intricate and
formalised mourning rituals developed to deal with both public mourning and
private grief over the Nineteenth Century. Like the rise of the sentimental itself,
such practices were newly adopted rather than traditional, since there is no
indication that the lower orders of the convict period had such formalised mourning
periods or material accoutrements. Again, it would seen that such modern rituals
of propriety crossed the boundaries of social status. 55
We might then think of the culture of domesticity and comfort as a whole in a
similar way. The firm control and shaping of household interiors by women, the
adoption of what was held to be 'proper, should be considered against the
precariousness of both physical health and economic stability. The latter were of
fundamental importance, and both were often beyond ·the control of working
people. Although they now turned more often to doctors {though not, apparently, to
dentists) medical science had not yet developed to the stage where many diseases
or injuries were treatable or at least mitigated. The archaeological evidence
indicates that people also continued the earlier traditions of self-help, dosing
themselves with emetics like salts and cod liver oil, and the patent medicines which
became popular from the 1860s. The site also yielded various glass syringes and
even a cupping glass for bleeding patients. 56
So the determined domesticity - lace curtains, colourful sets of china, the pretty
vases and figurines of poodles or ladies or lambs-, and the good and fashionable
clothing, were a kind of defiance, and a defence, against bouts of unemployment,
the sickbeds, and the deathbeds. Let us consider the experiences of labourers
like Joseph Duncan {who had lived in 122 Cumberland Street, where the 'Babes'
figurine was found, in 1867 -1870) and Searight Newton, a wharf labourer who
occupied 4 Cribbs Lane in 1896. Both these men went bankrupt as a result of illhealth
and under, or unemployment. Duncan, who filed for bankruptcy in 1878
over debts totalling forty-five pounds, had already lost all of his household furniture
(worth only six pounds) and attributed his situation to 'being laid up with a poisoned
Karskens, Report 149