The Wife's Handbook: Being a Practical Treatise on Pregnancy, with Remarks on the Rearing of Children and other Matters of Vital Importance to Married Women who Desire to limit their Familes

Unrecorded imprint published by an otherwise forgotten London surgical appliance maker which offers advice on pregnancy and childbirth, as well as what were at the time scandalous methods of contraception - and the mean to achieve this end. Both the title and structure of the book suggest that it derives from Dr Henry Allbutt’s bestseller The Wife’s Handbook but we can find no extant examples of this text in any institutional library.

The book is bound in printed wrappers, worn and dog eared; heavy spotting throughout the 32 pages; advertisements to verso of upper cover from ‘H Constantine Jackson’ out of 152 Fleet Street (later the headquarters of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Worker’s Dreadnought newspaper). 8 chapters; Chapter 7 ‘How to Prevent Conception’ including methods such as ‘a certain order in sexual intercourse’, withdrawal ‘largely practised in France’ and ‘an injection into the vagina immediately after connection.... These powders can be obtained of Messrs. H. Constantine Jackson and Co’, as well as condoms and pessaries. Further adverts on recto of lower wrapper and other imprints by Jackson overleaf.

Neither OCLC nor Copac locate any copies of this work. The only other printed works by H C Jackson that we can discover are advertisements for rubber surgical goods.

The work is a close imitation of Dr. Henry Allbutt’s 1886 work The Wife's Handbook: How a Woman should Order Herself During Pregnancy, in the Lying-in Room, and after Delivery which fell foul of the medical profession for advocating birth control and led to his prosecution by the General Medical Council leading to his being struck off in 1887. As a late 19th century publication dealing with contraception it is a discovery of some significance.