Talking to a customer about classic children’s lit and how many of them firmly believe that fresh air and sunshine will cure any number of unspecified Victorian illnesses. I mentioned The Secret Garden and how much I like that the protagonists are basically just feral gremlin children who are very unpleasant to be around until they somehow manage to socialize each other.
Then I said, out loud, “on a scale of Sarah Crewe to Mary Lennox, how well did you handle being raised by a nanny in Edwardian India,” and realized that tumblr really has ruined my speech patterns for all time.
THE THING ABOUT THE SECRET GARDEN THO. Is that Colin very likely has rickets. For which sunshine is a specific remedy!
There actually was a late-Victorian through Edwardian uptick in rickets among the upper classes: after the discovery of pasteurization, but before we understood about vitamins–and, consequently, before we figured out the temperature range that kills tuberculosis in milk without destroying vitamin D.
Colin is born prematurely to a mother who dies in childbirth. His father was already paranoid that Colin was going to inherit his disability, and Colin being sickly and weak as a result of his premature birth kicked his paranoia into overdrive. Colin would have been raised on what the dietary science of the time considered the safest, healthiest food: the bland Victorian nursery diet, crossed with the bland Victorian invalid diet. Pasteurized milk, bland starches, and vegetables rarely and boiled within an inch of their lives.
And the longer Colin stays small and weak for his age, the more his dad worries and keeps him inside away from chills (and out of the sun), and the more the lack of vitamin D causes his legs and spine to bow.
And for a child who was still growing, all of this could be largely reversed by massive amounts of vitamin D, via sunlight and virtually any fresh foods. And the other thing Mary and Dickon do, besides getting him out into the sun, is smuggle him raw milk from the farm, which he is not supposed to have.
(Don’t drink raw milk. You have other vitamin D sources, including milk pasteurized by less-destructive modern methods; you are not immune to tuberculosis, brucellosis, E. coli, Salmonella, or fucking plague.)
amhrancas 