ABSTRACT
Because the rearing of infants and children was considered to be pre-eminently task of the mother, much of the evidence on which this analysis is based comes from advice literature designed for middle-class mothers. Middle-class Victorian mothers could obtain such advice from book-length manuals and periodicals designed expressly to aid them in their tasks. The early-Victorian works concerned with moral welfare of children were sometimes written by clergymen, but often by women who presented themselves to their readers as pious mothers, whose experience of motherhood and whose piety qualified them to give advice to others. Mothers could rely on the advice manuals to give them specific advice about the treatment of such common problems as infant diarrhoea or croup, but much Victorian advice about physical care in health or disease was more general in character. As well as advising mothers about the treatment of their children in health, books and articles also provided advice about treatment of children in disease.
