Georgian England was a dangerous place for children; even children of the wealthy. In 1800, one in three children died before they turned five. The risk was similar for infants of all social classes, except for the very poor, though class differences favouring the wealthy showed up at later ages.

But what of those born with a congenital impairment, or who survived illness or accident with a permanent disability? Some felt that such afflictions were the ‘will of God’, and ‘it was a religious virtue to accept patiently what God had willed’. [Turner & Withey] On the other hand, people were uneasy with deformity, and those who could afford to do so tried to avoid sights that offended their sense of aesthetic perfection. Improvements in prosthetics, surgery, and assistive technologies allowed parents to improve their children’s chances of future social success.

Suppliers appealed to their customers in terms of their ‘gentility’, promoting the idea that visible deformity or disability could be socially limiting as well as hindering economic productivity. [Turner & Withey]

A huge number of tortuous devices came onto the market to straighten backs and legs, and improve posture.

Devices to improve posture and keep an individual ‘straight’ were as varied as the manufacturers who made them. Large pieces of metal called backirons were hidden at the back of clothing and prevented slouching. Steel collars forced wearers to obey mothers’ and governesses’ injunctions to keep heads up, sometimes assisted by shoulder braces which pulled shoulders back. Neck swings stretched the spine by suspending the ‘patient’ in a block and tackle type device so that only their toes touched the ground. [Grace]

Not everything could be fixed, and even if a child’s impairment was minimised by one of the treatments on offer, the very idea that their body was defective and to be shuffled out of sight could not have made the children’s lives easier. The practice of casting blame can’t have helped.

Congenital deformities in infants were often blamed on something the mother did or experienced during pregnancy. A cleft palate might be the consequence of seeing a hare. A strawberry birthmark (infantile hemangioma) is so called because of the myth it results from eating strawberries in pregnancy.

Or perhaps the mother was deep dyed in sin. If God has afflicted this child, the reasoning went, it cannot be a punishment for the child’s sins, so it must be someone else’s fault, and who else but the mother? Or perhaps the devil had afflicted the child, and therefore the family. Where the belief in evil magic still prevailed, the family might conclude they had been cursed, and that was the cause of the deformity.

Shakespeare’s Richard III has quite a few passages exploring the reasons for the protagonist’s deformity, touching on all of these possible causes.

Such beliefs must have made for interesting family dynamics.

In the story I’m writing at the moment, I gave my hero an infantile hemangioma, which has shaped his life. Sent away to be hidden in the country as a small baby, he spent his early childhood years isolated by the growing tumour on his face. Then his family sent him for surgery in Naples two years before it was conquered by Napoleon, ironically at about the time the hemangioma was shrinking naturally. Now that the imprisonment of Napoleon has made travel easy, he has come back to England, his face scarred where the hemangioma was removed.

Black, J, Boulton, JP & Davenport, RJ., Infant mortality by social status in Georgian London

Grace, M., The Shape of Georgian Beauty

Roser, M. Child Mortality

Turner, D. & Withey, A., Technologies of the Body: Polite Consumption and the Correction of Deformity in Eighteenth-Century England, History, The Journal of the Historical Association