Children’s and Infants’ Sleep and Bed-Culture in England and Scotland, c.1650-c.1830

This thesis explores how children and infant sleep was understood, managed, and experienced by children and the adults around them during the long eighteenth century. While scholarly interest in adult sleep has flourished, children’s sleep has been almost entirely overlooked. Examining child sleep and wakefulness offers ways to recover physical and emotional experiences of groups whose voices are often difficult to find.

The thesis begins by examining the furnishings provided for infant and child slumber in domestic and institutional contexts, to establish the physical setting of sleep. It then examines how medical authors advised parents to evaluate infant sleep, which offered insight into both infant health and the quality of nursing care. The importance of sleep as a measure of health becomes clearer in a close examination of records of smallpox inoculations in the 1780s. The thesis explores how interruptions to sleep caused by illness and medicine give glimpses of infants’ and children’s somatic experience, and how other causes of sleep disruption including misbehaviour and disturbances by bedfellows may offer a subtler insight into the subjective experience of childhood, something that is very difficult to access. Similarly, child sleep loss from illness also disrupted their carers’ slumber, revealing insights both into how elite households organised care, and nursemaids’ experience. It then examines deathbed narratives about four children who died between 1802 and 1826. After developing the question of what deathbed narratives reveal about the physical experience of occupying a bed, it explores end-of-life bed-culture and the ways that terminally ill children and their families spent their time. The thesis ends by examining the link between sleep and death in eighteenth-century culture, and the new eighteenth-century fashion for memorialising dead children as sleeping.