Was William a sensitive new-age guy?

In my last post, William came through the door with a cup and saucer in one hand, and a plate in the other. Since then, Tara has questioned whether a Victorian man would even think of doing something so domestic as making tea and toast for his wife, let alone know how to do it. Would William have known how much tea to put in the pot and how to hold a toasting fork, or by having him do this, am I turning him into a sensitive new-age man of the 21st century?

Trust me, you’re not going to see William changing nappies or washing dishes. He’s the head of the household, and he wears the pants. In this particular situation though, there are a number of things which have gone before which make this response to Sarah’s morning sickness possible.

First of all, William was from a working class family, and his mother was a single parent from the time he was 11. Children like him were expected to help out around the house, and although the burden fell more heavily on daughters, in William’s case he was an only child until he was 15. So he would have helped his mother with chores around the house – as he became older, taking on the heavier chores of chopping and stacking firewood, carrying water perhaps, but chances are he would have made his fair share of tea and toast, even if he didn’t do dishes or cook.

William and Sarah got married on a Sunday and he would have gone back to work the next day. The honeymoon period would have been the first months together in their little house, getting to know each other as husband and wife. It would have been a very different lifestyle than what either had known previously – just the two of them, playing house together. You can imagine Sarah’s delight in setting up her new home the way she wanted, and looking forward to William coming home from work every night. She would have missed her parents, brothers and sisters, although probably not all the work that would have fallen to her as the eldest daughter. She and William were young and in love, and you know what that’s like – they would have been falling all over themselves to please each other, and showing their affection in taking care of each other.

By my reckoning, Sarah fell pregnant with Ovid on her wedding night, or within a few days of it, so they would barely have got used to being a couple when they discovered they were going to become a family. I would imagine that the first time Sarah started the day with a bout of morning sickness, William would have been running around doing whatever he could to help her feel better; if she said dry toast might help, I think he would have gone off and made it for her. After that, though, Sarah’s sense of duty would probably have seen her get out of bed, no matter how wretched she felt, and get on with taking care of her husband. If she was really ill and unable to manage, then I would think one of her younger sisters would have been drafted to do the cooking and nursing. But that first morning, I can just see him anxiously offering everything he could to help Sarah feel better.

Then there’s the five month sea voyage to New Zealand to consider. On board ship, everyone was out of their normal environment; there were new ways of doing the simplest things, like cooking and washing clothes. The men didn’t have their usual work to go off to – for working class men, five months with nothing to do would have seemed very strange. Many of the men worked alongside the sailors on the sails, just for something to do. Likewise, they helped out with the domestic chores in the steerage. Passengers were divided into messes of six for rations and cooking. This was six full adults, so a mess group could actually have consisted of four adults and four children aged between two and fifteen (counted as half portions). Mess-mates took turns at drawing the weekly rations and taking the prepared food to the galley for cooking. While the women may have been the main preparers of the food, the men were involved as well – a blurring of gender roles born of necessity. It gave the men something to do, and in some cases, they might not have had much choice, if for example, a wife was sea-sick, or had her hands full dealing with small children. It’s not hard to imagine a chap volunteering to peel the spuds and make the tea, if only to avoid having to change nappies and mop up after sea-sick children.

I think the five months at sea would have had an effect on the family dynamics that you wouldn’t see in families that didn’t emigrate. For William and Sarah, it would have affected their relationship with Ovid – both because he was the only one of all their children to share the adventure of the journey, but also because it put William in 24/7 contact with his son and his wife in a way that would never have happened in England. Even if William wasn’t fully hands-on with the nappy-changing and bathing like modern dads, he would have seen it and been around it in a way that wouldn’t have happened if he had been working 10-12 hours a day, six days a week. William would have seen aspects of Ovid’s growth that he might otherwise have missed – perhaps even the boy’s first steps. Even if he spent as much time as possible on deck, playing sailors, or sketching or chatting with the other men, he would still have spent more time with Sarah than their previous way of life allowed. So I see it as likely that he would have had a degree of sensitivity towards her needs and feelings that he might not otherwise have had.

Sarah herself tells us that when they landed at Kaiwharawhara, it was William who built the fire and boiled the water for the first cup of tea, saying to the men around him that they all needed to take care of their children and wives. That was his first priority – he didn’t go haring off into the bush to explore, or sit around waiting for Sarah to wait on him.

So those are my reasons for thinking that the morning sickness scene could have played out as I wrote it. All of William’s loving and tender feelings towards Sarah in those moments would have been expressed in action – he would have needed to do something. Right then, right there, he knew that tea and toast was the answer for her, so he did it, and I can see him dancing around the fire in his nightshirt, delighted at the prospect of a new baby. On the days that followed, however, I would imagine duty reasserting itself in Sarah, and her going back to getting up and getting on, no matter how she felt. William’s need for action would have seen him turn to things like making furniture - a bedside table, a cradle, perhaps. Not a sensitive new age guy, but perhaps a little more sensitive than other men of his time.