Image ID: 08544

St John of Jerusalem's Church, Winkburn - memorial to Harriet Gertrude Valentine-Pegge Burnell (died 14 April 1841 - aged 3)

Courtesy of Reg Baker

Near Winkburn Hall
Winkburn
England

A sad memorial to an infant member of the Burnell family who died in childhood. The infant mortality rate is a sensitive measure of the Victorian Age. Generalisations about poverty, housing, sanitation, medical care, and public health can all be made with specific knowledge of the infant mortality rate. In the upper-class areas Liverpool England, 1899, 136 newborns out of 1000 would die before they reached the age of one. Working class districts maintained a rate of 274 infant deaths per 1000 births, and impoverished slums had a horrifying 509 infant deaths per 1000. Even as these rates improve towards the end of the Victorian Age, infant mortality remained at over ten times the current rates in industrialized nations. One half of all children of farmers, laborers, artisans, and servants died before reaching their fifth birthday, compared to one in eleven children of the land owning gentry. Children suffered from multiple influenza outbreaks, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, polio, tetanus, and typhoid. Merely keeping sanitary was difficult until the later ages of piped water. This combined with the lack of vaccinations for diseases produced an extremely high infant mortality rate in all classes.

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Keywordschurchchancelmemorialstonemarbleinscriptionvictorianchildrengirlwallinfantmortality

Southwell Library