Victorian Baby ‘Murder’ Bottles

Elise Batchelor (OKS) Discusses a Hidden Infant-killer

Being a child in the Victorian era was a dangerous time as infant mortality rates in Victorian Britain were terrifyingly high, with as many as 15 percent of all babies dying in their first year of life. Lead paint, for instance, was extremely common in children’s toys as the best (and cheapest) preserver of wood. But there was an even bigger threat to the young, one which was invisible to the Victorian eye, and this was baby feeding bottles.

Baby science, the idea that babies could be studied and developed in the healthiest way, was the order of the day. In the 18th century it was believed God took the children he wanted. In the 19th century, science took over.

Women were seen as responsible for the deaths of their children. They were judged by how many of their children survived. A model of Victorian motherhood then was Queen Victoria, who had nine children who all not only survived but lived long lives.

The relationship between traditional ideas and the new scientific approach became increasingly fraught around the issue of how to feed babies. Breastfeeding had long been unpopular among the aristocracy. The queen didn’t breastfeed and aristocratic women had wet nurses.

This was reinforced by the ideal image of a Victorian woman, which was that of a delicate, refined and restrained woman, in contrast to the stereotypical fat and jolly wet nurse who breastfed aristocratic babies. This attitude filtered through to the newly swelling middle classes. This ideal, combined with the influence of the household name ‘Mrs

Image: A Victorian child drinking from one of the new baby bottles. Beeton’, help to explain why the baby bottle became so popular in the Victorian era.

Isabella Beeton's popular book, Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management (1861), was the go-to reference guide on how to run a Victorian household.

It doled out advice on cooking, hiring and firing household staff, and child rearing. Mrs Beeton dedicated two chapters of her hugely influential book to baby and childcare.

This included plenty of useful tips on breastfeeding such as drinking plenty of beer (though warning against gin), but after that it moved on to what to do if you were unable to breastfeed your child.

Image: A popular brand of baby bottle. This was a lengthy chapter as feeding babies by bottle was a new idea and would have needed detailed explanation. A problem arose in that this chapter was considerably longer than others and therefore gave the appearance that Mrs Beeton was endorsing bottle feeding.

Mrs Beeton’s support, as well as the marketing of baby’s bottles, put huge pressure on women to abandon breastfeeding. The bottles were made of glass or earthenware. Attached to the bottle was a length of rubber tubing and a nipple. With product names like ‘Mummies Darling’, ‘Little Cherub’ or even names such as ‘The Empire Bottle’ or ‘The Alexandria’, they were really suggesting that for a woman to choose the bottle made her a much better citizen of the empire and that she was essentially doing the right thing for her children.

It didn’t help that they were also very difficult to clean. The Victorian baby bottle has a slanted shape which made it very hard to clean away any residue that left at the bottom. The rubber stopper and tubing were porous and therefore accumulated a residue of milk and any bacteria in the residue permeated into the porous material. The porous material ‘sucked up’ bacteria which even if left for a few hours accumulated enough bacteria to cause an infection. To make matters worse the stopper itself, as recommended by Mrs Beeton, was left tied on for the two or three weeks it lasted, and never washed. This added to the problematic ‘banjo’ design. The lack of knowledge of transmission and of germs in water meant that bottle-fed children were more at risk.

Intestinal diseases lethal to children, such as dysentery and typhoid, thrived in these dirty drinking bottles resulting in serious diarrhoea infections.

For a small baby, the dehydration this caused would have led to death within 48 hours. Moreover, bacteria that is commonly found in the back of the throat or in the respiratory tract when inhaled into the lungs can cause pneumonia.

A child sucking on one of these baby bottles leaves the potential for any such bacteria to effectively be inhaled in small droplets. If inhaled into the lungs, this bacteria would cause an infection which could potentially be lethal, very quickly and with no cure. Infant pneumonia was in Victorian times the biggest cause of death in babies. These bottles not only provided a place for bacteria to get a niche, to grow and multiply into excessive quantities, but also then provided it an access route straight into a very vulnerable individual. So it is safe to assume that these bottles would have undoubtedly killed many children.

Although breast-pumps did exist at the time for mothers unable to produce milk a much more dangerous product was also available. The formula that was recommended to mothers, by influential figures such as Mrs Beeton, essentially consisted of flour, rather than the balance of nutrients and minerals contained in natural breast milk. It is very obvious to us today why these children would not have flourished under these conditions.

Doctors came to understand the dangers of bacteria and its growth. A step forward was made in 1894 with Allen & Hanbury’s double-ended feeder bottle (or banana bottle). The design had a teat at one end and a valve at the other, this enabled the flow of milk to be constant but more importantly, it was easy to clean and therefore safer. Despite this, the old, dangerous bottles sold well into the 20th century. These bottles rightly earned the nickname, ‘Murder Bottles’.