During the period between 1830 and 1880 a large number of British children either went to India with their parents or were born there. The exact number of British children in India at any given time during that period is unclear, as sources of information about British children in the Indian subcontinent are scanty. The accounts of children's lives are in parents' letters and diaries, and in contemporary domestic manuals. If all of these writings are read as a corpus, a picture emerges about British childhood in India. The available documents relate the experiences of children from British families ranging from lower-middle class to upper-middle-class.A major anxiety for British families in colonized India was the high rate of INFANT MORTALITY. In the Bengal presidency between 1860 and 1869, the average death rate was about 148 per thousand British children under the age of five, while in England during the same period the mortality rate was about 67 per thousand. The grief of losing children was expressed time and again by British mothers. Maria Amelia Vansittart, wife of a Civil Session judge in northern India, noted in her diary on March 26, 1846, that between eight and nine in the evening a very little girl was born, and in the entry of April 13 she described her daughter's burial. Theon Wilkinson, who studied tombstones in India, documented the repeated misfortunes of some families. The rate of infant mortality decreased as the century progressed, but it was still high enough to create anxiety and perceived helplessness among British mothers.
