# Wow. Kids Dying in the Old Days

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wow-kids-dying-in-the-old-days/948463>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [August 11, 2021, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wow-kids-dying-in-the-old-days/948463 "2021-08-11T17:28:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 5

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**Author:** ![gkster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gkster/32/14107_2.png) [@gkster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gkster)\
**Post date:** [August 24, 2021, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wow-kids-dying-in-the-old-days/948463/81 "2021-08-24T01:12:37Z")

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> [@smokey78](#):
>
> I’m surprised I only found out about Charlotte Bronte’s demise recently. (wrote Jane Eyre)  
> She was the last surviving sibling in a family of six. At age 36 she accepted a proposal from the family pastor. Her father was shocked because they had known the pastor for years and now he wanted to marry Charlotte? . . . . After her death the pastor was so sorrowful/regretful that he agreed to become the caretaker for Charlotte’s father to his last days (he passed at age 84)

Just to clarify, Arthur Bell Nichols (Charlotte’s husband) was the curate, or assistant pastor. The pastor was Patrick Brontë, Charlotte’s father.

And Patrick Brontë outlived not only his wife (by 40 years) but all six of his children. The first of the children to die were the eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, aged 12 and 11.

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**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\
**Post date:** [August 24, 2021, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wow-kids-dying-in-the-old-days/948463/82 "2021-08-24T23:02:23Z")

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> [@gkster](#):
>
> Just to clarify, Arthur Bell Nichols (Charlotte’s husband) was the curate, or assistant pastor. The pastor was Patrick Brontë, Charlotte’s father.
> 
> And Patrick Brontë outlived not only his wife (by 40 years) but all six of his children. The first of the children to die were the eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, aged 12 and 11.

And they died of TB, as did his other children, inc Emily and Ann (and their feckless brother Branwell - he was an alcoholic, but it was TB that killed him). There’s speculation that TB weakened Charlotte and contributed to her death too.

TB was rife then. The older girls caught it at a boarding school whose living conditions sound like it was barely better than living in poverty - it was a thing at the time, to toughen up the kids; Dickens’ Dotheby’s Hall, although set a lot later of course, was not an exaggeration.

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**Author:** ![phs3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8491ac/32.png) [@phs3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/phs3)\
**Post date:** [August 25, 2021, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wow-kids-dying-in-the-old-days/948463/83 "2021-08-25T22:11:32Z")

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There’s a book I read as a teen called _Mrs. Mike_ about a woman who moves to the Yukon in the 1880s (?) and marries a Mountie. The women in the book all talk about their “first family” and their “second family” and so on, because they’d have a bunch of kids, and then diphtheria would come along and they’d all die. And then they’d have some more, and the flu would come along and they’d all die. And so forth. Made a big impact on me.

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