Imagine walking into an eighteenth-century English birthing chamber. George Morland's 1788 stipple etching, The First Pledge of Love, offers a glimpse into the kind of scene one might expect to see. In the center, a midwife offers the resting infant to the father, who stands opposite her with arms ready to receive his child. To the side and a little way past these three figures, the infant's mother, presumably recovering from her recent delivery, sits up in her bed from behind partially drawn bed-curtains. A circa 1800 modified version of this image befittingly adorns the front cover of Sarah Fox's Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England. The general composition in the later version closely mirrors that of its predecessor. But one difference is especially noticeable: in the 1788 illustration, the mother looks vaguely in the direction of the other figures. On Fox's cover, the mother squarely faces the reader....
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