Childhood Sickness and Health in British Romantic Writing

This study considers the engagement of four British Romantic writers with popular medical debates on children’s sickness. The authors examined are Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Jane Cave, and Isabella Kelly. In Coleridge’s case, the efforts to understand the meaning and significance of children’s physical and emotional experiences of sickness resulted from his own early illnesses. Additionally, Wordsworth was closely involved with managing the health of his sick children. The writings of both Cave and Kelly, on the other hand, exhibit their interactions with medical ideas on child health as pregnant mothers. This thesis draws close links between its four literary authors and the popular medical writing of the Romantic period at several points. The communication was visible, for example, in the recurrent emphasis on similar ways of ensuring childhood health. I show that the Romantic period’s literary writing not only popularised specific medical ideas on children’s sickness but also attributed legitimacy to some of those ideas while rejecting and critiquing others. As this thesis will demonstrate, authors also constructed new ideas about childhood health that significantly differed from what was proposed by popular health manuals. By examining the interaction between the four authors and the popular medical treatises of the period, this thesis aims to understand what British Romantic literature says about childhood health and sickness.