Ann Yearsley

dates

1753-1806

Date of ‘To Mira, on the Care of her INfant’

1796 in collection ‘The Rural Lyre’

What is the significance of Yearsley’s class

Kerri ANdrews 2016 - Hannah More drawn to being Yearsley’s patron because of her working class background

Known as Lactilla, the Poeticall Milkwoman - divisions between these different aspects of her identity her class and her profession.

cf. Francis Jeffrey’s criticism of WW LB in 1802 for homeliness of language not befitting an author, would better suit ‘a ploughman or a milkwoman’

Kayla Probeyahn - how do male romantics present breastfeeding

breast synechdochic for mother

2024 - mothers ‘vulnerable, passive vessels of milk’

How does Blake represent breatsfeeding in the Book of Thel

idealising, passive - “life exhal;d in milky fondness”

How does WOrdsworth present breastfeeding in The Mad Mother

suggests nursing acts as respite from maternal insanity - maternal hallucinations disappear when she breastfeeds with her son. Yearsley instead emphasies the joys of maternal connection but also asserts the distance between mother and child - warns Mira about danger of overfeeding indant and overidentifying with it, clogging their thirst for knowledge and experience.

How does Yearsley open the poem

cataloguing male destruction - “Whilst man to man oppos’d wou’d shake the world,/ And see vast systems into chaos hurl’d”

Contrast Women and Male roles

“Whilst our heroes from their homes retire,/ We’ll nurse the infant, and lament the sire”

Mother as intellectual guide - against men - asserting mother retained presence

“To ancient fathers be thy boy consign’d/ But plant thyself true virtue in his mind”

importance of mother doing teh breastfeeding - meliorative power of breastmilk

“Nurse him thyself for thou canst make him mild”

Mother not a disembodied breast

her “Cadence … and human accents” inspire “joy, pleasure, sympathy, new-born desire”

What anti-mother text could Yearsley be referencing in her emphasis on the important of mothers for moral education

William Cadogan’s An Essay Upon Nursing and the Management of Children 1748 - “It is with great pleasure I see at last the preservation of children become the care of men of sense”

the ultimate responsibility of mothers - final line

“convince him [to rest at death] … on the sod/ the sole undoubted property of God”

WHat is the significance of the name Mira

character in Ovid’s Metamorphoses - mother to Adonis. Refs also made to Circe (as bad mother - in myth she mothers 3 sons, 1 of which kills his father) and Amyntor.

Suggests Eliza Haywood’s periodical ‘The Female Spectator’ in which Haywood wrote under pseudonyms, one of which named Mira - persona of happy housewife. reprinted for final time 1773 - Yearsley could have read it.

WHat were cultural attitudes to breastfeeding

upper class women encouraged not to - thought eccentric not to take a wet nurse and corset wearing resulted in physical alterations which inhibited breastfeeding. BUT increased cultural demand mothers breastfeed own infantas as in Rousseau and medical texts

Comment on Yearsley’s use of metre

heroic couplets - framing breastfeeding and women as worthy of epic narrative. suggests Pope and his experimentations with heroic couplets in the epistles. also mark rejection of forms associated with childcare - ballad and trope of bardic nurse