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The Death of Charlotte Bloomfield in 1828: Family Roles in an Evangelical Household

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Anthony Fletcher
Anthony Fletcher*
Affiliation:
University of London
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Extract

A small collection of family papers provides intimate and illuminating material on the illness and death of a much-loved teenager. Charlotte Bloomfield was the daughter of Lord Benjamin Bloomfield, confidant of the Prince Regent and from 1823 British ambassador at Stockholm. In 1825 Bloomfield had Charlotte painted with pretty golden curls by the fashionable miniaturist Anne Mee (Fig. 1). She holds her pet rabbit. Her story has rich resonances for the study of the evangelical household. This essay explores how a lingering death of this kind could produce a family crisis, which was in effect a test of faith. The case is also interesting in terms of the history of the medical treatment of children at home. Moreover, it shows how memorialization of such a death sustained the evangelical piety of the family in the decades that followed. This account gives particular attention to the particular roles and responsibilities of family and household members.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 50: Religion and the Household , 2014 , pp. 354 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014

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References

1 ODNB, s.n. ‘Benjamin Bloomfield, first Baron Bloomfield (1768-1846)’. The archive and Charlotte’s portrait came into my possession following the death of my cousin Ethel Gore-Booth, whose grandmother, Georgiana Bloomfield, was Charlotte’s sister.

2 Stone, L., The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1977), 651–2 Google Scholar; Pollock, L. A., Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1800 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Jalland, P., Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford, 1996), 121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Houlbrooke, R., Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480-1750 (Oxford, 1998), 186–7.Google Scholar

4 Newton, H., The Sick Child in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012), 208–20.Google ScholarPubMed

5 Houlbrooke, R., ‘Death in Childhood: The Practice of the “good death” in James Janeway’s A Token for Children ’, in Fletcher, A.J. and Hussey, S., eds, Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State (Manchester, 1999), 37–56.Google Scholar

6 Newton, Sick Child, 204, 208-20.

7 Bloomfield archive [hereafter: BA], Charlotte Bloomfield’s book of prayers; A. J. Fletcher, Crowing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood (London 2008), 89.

8 For the role of Miss Ridout in teaching Charlotte the polite accomplishments of the age, see Fletcher, Crowing Up, 236-8.

9 BA, Charlotte Bloomfield to Miss Ridout, 15, 20 December 1825.

10 BA, Charlotte Bloomfield to Miss Ridout, 2 February 1826.

11 BA, Charlotte Bloomfield to Miss Ridout, 3 May 1827.

12 BA, Charlotte Bloomfield to Miss Ridout, n.d. [1827].

13 Fletcher, Growing Up, 238.

14 Davidoff, L., Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations 1780-1920 (Oxford, 2012), 109.Google Scholar

15 Newton, Sick Child, 67-9.

16 Ibid. 71-3.

17 BA, Susan Ridout, account of the last days in the life of Charlotte Bloomfield.

18 BA, small notebook with manuscript prayers.

19 I gave a brief account of this story, soon after the archive passed to me, in my presidential lecture to the EHS: ‘Beyond the Church: Women’s Spiritual Experience at Home and in the Community, 1600-1900’, in R. N. Swanson, ed., Gender and Christian History, SCH 34 (Oxford, 1998), 187-203, at 199-200.

20 BA, verse dated 10 March 1828.

21 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 183-91.

22 BA, ‘A Prayer for a Sick Child’.

23 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, 57-70.

24 BA, prayers used by Charlotte Bloomfield and lock of hair, 29 February 1828.

25 Georgiana, Lady Bloomfield, ed., Memoir of Benjamin Lord Bloomfield, 2 vols (London, 1884), 1: 7.

26 BA, Lord Bloomfield to Georgiana Bloomfield, 1 January, 14, 23 April, 16 July 1830; Lord Bloomfield to the Hon. Mrs Henry Trench, 14 April 1842.

27 BA, Lord Bloomfield to Georgiana Bloomfield, ‘Good Friday’.

28 BA, James Conolly, ‘Memoir of Benjamin first Lord Bloomfield’, n.d.

29 Bailey, J., ‘A Very Sensible Man: Imagining Fatherhood in England, c.1750-1830’, History 95 (2010), 267–92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, L., ‘The Relative Duties of a Man: Domestic Medicine in England and France c.1685-1740’, JFH 31 (2006), 237–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newton, Sick Child, 93.

30 Newton, Sick Child, stresses this continuity. I am very grateful to Hannah Newton for her comments on this essay.

31 Mortimer, I., The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2009), 2, 40–1 Google Scholar; idem, ‘“The Triumph of the Doctors”: Medical Assistance to the Dying, c. 1570-1720’, TRHS 6th ser. 15 (2005), 97-116, at 114.