To find a single principle of cleavage through the smallpox of the 18th century, dividing it into good and bad, is impossible. The determining things were manifold, and they are to us obscure. Things proper to the individual constitution or temperament, hidden in what has been called “the abysmal deeps of personality,” cover a good deal in our reactions towards smallpox as in more important relationships. Generalizing such facts to the utmost, we do not get beyond the notion that the greater or lesser degree of proclivity runs in families. Morton could recall no case of smallpox fatal in his own family, nor, curiously enough, among his wife’s relations. On the other hand he introduces a case, his 53rd, as if to illustrate the contrary—a fair and elegant young lady, sprung of a distinguished stock, but one to which this disease was wont to prove calamitous as if by hereditary right[1050]. The royal family of Stuart had a peculiar fatality in smallpox; and so, it appears, had the family of the earl of Huntingdon, who wrote to Thomas Coke on 18 June, 1701: “I am informed Lord Kilmorey [married to his sister] is ill of a fever, and that some think it may prove the smallpox. For the love of God, send for my sister to your house. She never has had them and they have proved fatal in our family[1051].” A similar fatality in the family of John Evelyn can be traced in the pages of his diary.
Next to the individual constitution, we may take the epidemic constitution, in the Hippocratic sense. No one keeping before him the strange diversities of type in whole epidemics of scarlatina and measles will say that the Hippocratic doctrine of varying constitutions is not requisite to cover a certain element of mystery. But we should rationalize it wherever we can; and there are some obvious considerations that may be used to explain why smallpox, throughout a whole epidemic, had so high an average fatality in some years or in some localities. Rutty, who noted the fevers and other prevalent maladies in Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland from year to year, and the associations of the same with famine or the like, says that some had dysentery in 1757, “promoted perhaps by the badness of their bread, as it was a time of great scarcity,” that a low, putrid, petechial fever followed in the winter, fatal to not a few of the young and strong both in Dublin and in the country, and that as the cases of petechial fever increased much beyond the usual number in January, 1758, “it was observable that the smallpox kept pace in malignity with the fevers[1052].” That was the same year, 1758, for which Whytt records, along with the fatal smallpox of Fifeshire and Teviotdale, a dysentery and pestilential fever a month or two before, disastrous in Argyllshire, less mortal in Haddington and Newcastle, as well as an influenza all over Scotland[1053]. Again, in the country town and parish of Painswick, Gloucestershire, there was an epidemic of smallpox in the summer of 1785 so fatal that nearly one in three of the infected died. “This fatality,” says J. C. Jenner, “may in some measure perhaps be attributed to a contagious fever and epidemic ague which prevailed at the same time, and to the heat of the atmosphere”—many being dropsical from the agues that had afflicted them for months, and many reduced by the typhus fever[1054]. A striking instance of the fatality of smallpox among children in a poor state of health owing to previous disease is given by Sir William Watson:
At the Foundling Hospital of London, containing upwards of 300 children, there were 60 cases of smallpox during the last six months of the year 1762, of which only 4 died, or 1 in 15. In April and May of next year (1763) measles of a bad type broke out among the 312 inmates, attacking 180, of whom 19 died (over 1 in 10), while many who recovered were greatly weakened, having ulcerations of the lips and mouth for some time after. In May and June, when the children were recovering from measles, the smallpox attacked many in the hospital, including 18 who had lately gone through the measles. No fewer than 11 of those 18 died of smallpox. A corresponding fatality of smallpox was observed shortly before among children at the Foundling who were recovering from or had lately passed through the dysentery or “dysenteric fever[1055].”
It happens that we can compare a mild or average smallpox with an unusually fatal one, and the conditions on which they respectively depended, in the two neighbouring towns of Warrington and Chester in the two successive years 1773 and 1774. Chester in 1774 had the average kind of epidemic—1385 cases with 202 deaths (1 in 6·85), all in children. The Chester populace, as described by Haygarth, lived for the most part in poor houses of the newer suburbs; they were filthy in their persons and their houses were often visited by typhus fever (supra, p. 41). But the occupations of the men were not unhealthy, and the women would seem to have been left to their domestic duties in the usual way. At Warrington the circumstances were different. A seat of the sailcloth weaving from the Elizabethan period (as early as 1586 the “poledavies” of Warrington are mentioned), it had retained its repute and extended its industry as sailcloth came more into demand[1056]. The American War, and the earlier war with the French in Canada, caused an immense number of ships to be commissioned for the royal navy, and the Warrington looms are said to have furnished half of all the sailcloth that the fleets needed[1057]. Its manufacturers made their fortunes, new looms were added, population was drawn to the town from the country, marriages multiplied and were unusually prolific, and the swarms of children were hardly into their teens before they were set to earn wages along with their fathers and their mothers. We have vital statistics from the parish register by Aikin[1058], and an account of the industries by Arthur Young, as he saw them in 1769[1059]. During the twenty years from 1702 to 1722, each marriage, according to the register, produced only 2·9 children; from 1752 to 1772, the marriages averaged 73 in a year, and the baptisms 237, being 3·25 children to each marriage[1060]. But in the last three years of that period, 1770-72, the marriages had risen rapidly to an annual average of 95, and the baptisms to 331, being about 3·5 children to each marriage. From 1773 to 1781 the marriages averaged 85 and the fecundity reached 4·5 children to each. Arthur Young found the whole of this community, men, women, and children, engaged in sailcloth or sacking manufacture, boot-making, and pin-making.
“At Warrington the manufactures of sailcloth and sacking are very considerable. The first is spun by women and girls, who earn about 2d. a day. It is then bleached, which is done by men, who earn 10s. a week; after bleaching, it is wound by women, whose earnings are 2s. 6d. a week; next it is warped by men, who earn 7s. a week; and then starched, the earnings 10s. 6d. a week. The last operation is the weaving in which the men earn 9s., the women 5s., the boys 3s. 6d. a week. The spinners (women) in the sacking branch earn 6s. a week. Then it is wound on bobbins by women and children, whose earnings are 4d. a day.... The sailcloth employs about 300 weavers, and the sacking 150; and they reckon 20 spinners and 2 or 3 other hands to every weaver.”
On that basis of reckoning, Young estimated that the Warrington manufactures employed about eleven thousand hands; but as Aikin, in 1781, counted the whole inhabitants of the borough and three adjoining hamlets at 9501, it is clear that a good many spinners of the flax and hemp who lived in the country near Warrington must be allowed for in the eleven thousand. At all events Warrington was an early and an extreme instance of that hurry and scramble of wage-earning, by fathers, mothers and children, which the growth of manufactures in the latter part of the 18th century gave rise to, and of which many particulars came to light long after during the discussions that preceded the passing of the Factory Act. The mothers were workers, and all the while breeders at a somewhat high rate. It is difficult to imagine how the household duties were got through, and the infants reared, in such an industrial hive. Nor was there much attention given, during those great days of the sailcloth industry, to the scavenging and lighting of the town, and probably little to the overcrowded state of its old-fashioned streets and lanes. It was in January and February, 1775, fully a year after the great smallpox epidemic had ceased, that Mr Blackburne, who had become lord of the manor in 1764, “promoted the design of establishing a court of requests at Warrington, cleansing and lighting the town, and removing the butchers’ stalls.” These proposals, we are told, gave rise to a paper war[1061].
Ferriar has described what was apt to happen when country people migrated to manufacturing towns, got married, and had children born to them:
“A young couple live very happily, till the woman is confined by her first lying-in. The cessation of her employment then produces a deficiency in their income, at a time when expenses unavoidably increase. She therefore wants many comforts, and even the indulgences necessary to her situation: she becomes sickly, droops, and at last is laid up by a fever or a pneumonic complaint; the child dwindles, and frequently dies; the husband, unable to hire a nurse, gives up most of his time to attendance on his wife and child; his wages are reduced to a trifle; vexation and want render him diseased, and the whole family sometimes perishes, from the want of a small timely supply which their future industry would have amply repaid to the public[1062].”
What Ferriar saw so often some years after at Manchester must have been a not uncommon case at Warrington during the bustling time that Arthur Young describes. Its infantile mortality was certainly excessive, according to the following comparison with that of Chester, from the figures supplied to Price by Aikin from the Warrington burial registers of nine years, 1773-81, and by Haygarth from the Chester bills for ten years, 1772-81[1063]. The deaths are reduced to annual averages, and those of Warrington are raised, in the third column, to the ratio of the population of Chester by making them half as much again.
Annual average of deaths from all causes under five years.