Baby’s Toilet

I have elsewhere discussed the racial politics associated with baby-bathing films (see my review of A Hard Wash 1896) when the bather and bathed were dark-skinned but there was also a similar “class” element that changed interestingly as the genre evolved.There was a highly popular Gaumont film with the same title as this (La Toilette de bébé) which showed a happy, gurgling baby splashing about in what the catalogue described as a “vulgar” wooden tub, emphasising that this was working-class baby. This film may be the one that appeared in the Gaumont catalogue as early as 1897 and certainly featured in the 1900 catalogue and was still for sale in the 1905 catalogue. It certainly had a long shelf-life.This Hepworth film might be seen as in sense a response to the Gaumont film. This is no longer a peep through a keyhole at a mother and baby of another race or another class. Here the grizzly little bourgeois baby is actually film-maker Hepworth’s own brat – Elizabeth (Babrbara) is of course the name of the baby not the bather who is just a nanny – and she is enduring a full “modern” bathing at the hands of a gruesomely thorough nurse – weighing, powdering and all the rest.The film of white middle-class babies as it developes is very noticeably different in its approach and is clearly developing into something more like a public-service film about babycare. We are no longer being asked to laugh at the baby’s antics but to admire the quality of the care provided. Pathé, in the same year, produced a one-minute film Le Bain de bébé known as Baby’s Bath in the US but as The Prize Baby in Britain where it as considered “specially interesting for mothers”.Of course the baby, who was kidnapped by gypsies and famously ‘rescued by Rover”, that same year, was probably direly in need of a bath…..