9. Many infants died after being suffocated while sleeping in the same bed as their parents – but were these really tragic accidents?
One of the biggest killers of young children was a problem that became known as ‘overlaying’. Quite simply, many homes were so small and cramped that children would sleep in the same bed as their exhausted, over-worked parents. Sometimes, an adult or older child would roll over in their sleep and suffocate an infant. According to one report from the time, in the year 1887, 5 in 6 of all infant deaths that occurred in homes where families shared a single bed were the result of ‘overlaying’. But were such deaths tragic accidents or something more sinister?
To some contemporary observers, many ‘overlaying’ deaths were murders. The parents – and it was almost always the mother blamed – could not afford to feed the infant, and so suffocated it. To judgmental critics of the Victorian poor, this was yet another sign of the sinfulness of the slums. More recently, however, academics have argued that many ‘overlaying’ cases were in fact, tragic instances of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). That meant countless mothers in the 19th century either wrongly blamed themselves for the deaths of their children or were unfairly accused of murder.