functional derangement
it's Mrs Beeton's world and we're all living in it
she wakes languid and unrefreshed from her sleep, with febrile symptoms and hectic flushes, caused by her baby vampire, who, while dragging from her her health and strength, has excited in itself a set of symptoms directly opposite, but fraught with the same injurious consequences—"functional derangement.”
For a number of years now I’ve been preoccupied with Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Isabella Beeton published this guide to Victorian domesticity in 1861, when she was just 25 years old, and within seven years it had sold two million copies. It would be hard to overstate its impact on British women at that time; it was primarily aimed at the aspiring middle class “mistress of the house”, the type of woman who would employ staff, but ballooned to contain over 2000 recipes for families of all budgets, and spoke of everything from child rearing, to the treatment of ailments, to soupmaking and how to prepare the brains of a cow. The fact that she was much too young to have naturally acquired all this knowledge only adds to the book’s peculiarity; many recipes were donated by acquaintances, or plagiarised from people who sent them to the magazine she wrote for, and the sections on the care of children present a mix of both the science and superstition of the time. The language is always ostentatious, sometimes funny and often alarmingly direct, like found poetry. It is a goldmine for the obsessive writer.
It is one of two recipe books I can remember always being in our house while I grew up; the other was a blue-fronted cookbook produced by the Newcastle-based Be-Ro flour company, which was falling apart due to overuse (the cookbook, not the company). But I can’t remember ever opening The Book of Household Management, or seeing my mother consult its unsettling advice. Having bought my own copy and poured over its 1,100 pages, I have been taken over by the project of trying to push together its world and the world that I find myself living in now, to compare and contrast its reality to my own. To sieve through its sentences and find which parts shine a light on something enduring, which can be reappropriated, and which are simply unhinged.
At the back of the book is a section called The Rearing, Management and Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, and in it a chapter entitled Physiology of Life, as illustrated by Respiration, Circulation, and Digestion. It’s worth noting at this point that Isabella Beeton had a moderate education, more than many women of her time, but that it had centred around French, German, the piano and pastry making rather than, say, medicine. By 1861 she had, however, endured a number of pregnancies, several of which ended in miscarriage, and two of which produced sons. Her first son, Samuel, died at three months old. Her second, also called Samuel, was two years old when The Book of Household Management was first published; he would die on New Year’s Eve 1862. Exactly a year later, a third son, Orchart, was born. In January 1865, she had her fourth child, a son named Mayson Moss, and a week later she died of postpartum infection, at the age of 28.
When Isabella Beeton writes about pregnancy and parenthood it is under an umbrella of probable death; the infant mortality rate then was between 15 and 20%. Children were both gift and burden, and motherhood often ended in catastrophic loss. Even as she declares parenting to be inherently natural and good, she writes of mothers as if they are livestock, and children as if they are parasites; she wishes to both reassure the scared young women who’ve had newborns thrust into their arms, and remind them that they could cause that child’s demise.
Mothers, in the fullness of their affection, believe there is no harbour, sleeping or awake, where their infants can be so secure from all possible or probable danger as in their own arms; yet we should astound our readers if we told them the statistical number of infants who, in despite of their motherly solicitude and love, are annually killed, unwittingly, by such parents themselves...
The implied threat here is intoxicating, to the literary minded individual. What you think is infallible is not, says Isabella. What feels to you, dear young friend, to be perfectly instinctive, singularly caring, might instead be murderous. It is an uncanny life, the one in the pages of the Book of Household Management, where death stands at every door, and your own body is a potential traitor. You must love a child that has one foot in its grave, and you must love it as if it will live, without giving over every part of yourself to it. You must hold your heart out, vulnerable and unprotected, ready in every moment to snatch it back and lock it away.
I have been unable dislodge the phrase functional derangement from my mind. This, according to Isabella Beeton, is the fate of the baby vampire left to suckle at its mother while the mother sleeps; a most injurious practice. The word derangement implies mental illness, though this is clearly not what she means in this context. The Cambridge Dictionary gives a definition that includes “the state of being completely unable to think clearly or behave in a controlled way”, which feels more correct. The mother wakes in a condition of clammy exhaustion, with giddiness, dimness of sight, nausea, loss of appetite, and a dull aching pain through the back and between the shoulders, but the baby, Isabella says, has excited in itself a set of symptoms directly opposite. The baby is enlivened, and terrifyingly so. The baby is a vampire, the baby will drain you, the baby is deranged. The baby is overfed, and has become wild with it.
It is here that I find a point of relation. The phrase functional derangement speaks to me: I feel overfed, and wild with it. I feel, just as a person going about my day in the year 2023, as if my face has been affixed to the teat of bad news and discourse and responsibility for overwhelming, unmanageable problems that I did not cause and have no power to solve. I am being drowned in astringent milk.
You could write a book on the contemporary human condition and functional derangement would be a fitting title. Expected to produce, to grind, to cope, but in a context that no sane mind can even attempt to make sense of. Besieged on one side by both predictions and evidence of encroaching environmental collapse, and on the other by the enforcement of an increasingly strained status quo; by the frenzied social regression of a system hanging on for dear life. In developed nations we have all benefitted in some way from a system that is now destabilising every bit of life on the planet. We are bidden daily to change this; we are politically prevented from changing this. It’s impossible not to feel like a character in a J.G. Ballard novel, or, indeed, a Victorian middle class baby, growing fat on a privilege that may well roll over and kill you.
Some children are stronger in the enduring power of the stomach than others, and get rid of the excess by vomiting, concluding every process of suckling by an emission of milk and curd. Such children are called by nurses "thriving children;" and generally they are so, simply because their digestion is good, and they have the power of expelling with impunity that superabundance of aliment which in others is a source of distension, flatulence, and pain.
The fact that she started out as a racing journalist is one of my favourite facts - the ‘Mrs Beeton’ image was almost entirely constructed by her and her husband.