"The Sick Child" by Robert Barnes (1840-96) in "Pictures from English Life" (1865)

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The Sick Child

Artist: Robert Barnes (1840-96)

Engraver: Cooper

1865

wood-engraving

26.8 cm high by 22.1 cm wide — 10 ⅜ by 8 ⅝ inches

Illustration for Pictures from English Life.

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Scanned image, formatting, and text by Philip V. Allingham and Simon Cooke.

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Commentary: A Domestic Drama that is More than mere Victorian Sentimentality

Barnes's “pictures from English life” often verge on the excessively sentimental, although the intimate and private scene with the sick child has more genuine drama and pathos as the sibling tries to comprehend the parents’ emotional response to the infant’s condition, and senses their concern. The realia of background kitchen utensils and the parents’ dress reinforce the working class nature of the scene, and reflect Barnes’s sympathies with the class so often marginalized in Victorian art and literature. These young parents are hardly stereotypical cottagers or "Hodges"; rather, without benefit of relatives or a country doctor the physically attractive and respectably dressed young parents attempt to support one another through this family crisis.

The illustration reminds us that child deaths remained stubbornly high throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in rural counties of England such as Dorset. We are over eight decades here away from the post-war Labour government's instituting of the National Health Service (NHS, 1948). In 1800, fewer than one in three children managed to reach the age of five throughout the United Kingdom — and the average woman in the UK that year would have had between five and seven children over the course of her child-bearing years. The situation had not improved dramatically by the end of the century in rural counties. Can this working-class couple even afford to send for the local physician, should one be available? In 1865 deaths per one thousand live births were 266, such deaths having fallen from 329 in 1800.

Bibliography

Barnes, Robert, and E. M. Wimperis, illustrators. Pictures of English Life. London: Sampson Low, 1865.

5 March 2025