Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (2 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page v
to Wayne Booth
 
Page vii
Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
Preface
xi
1 Real Deaths
1
2 Strategies of Consolation: The Dead Child in Poetry
40
3 The Life and Death of Paul Dombey, and Other Child
Deaths in Dickens
82
4 Heaven Claims Its Own: Child Deaths in Nineteenth
Century Fictionand After
126
5 Sentimentality: For and Against
174
Conclusion
213
Notes
223
Bibliography
239
Index
249
 
Page ix
List of Illustrations
(following page 113)
1. "The Child," by Otto Runge
2. "Rachel Weeping," by Charles Wilson Peale
3. "An Anxious Hour," by Alexander Farmer
4. "The Doctor," by Luke Fildes
5. "Angel faces smile," by Elizabeth Hawkins
6. "The Empty Cradle," by W. Archer
7. "Little Nell," by George Cattermole,
for first edition of
The Old Curiosity Shop
8. "Little Nell," another version by George Cattermole
9. "Kit's First Writing Lesson," by Robert Martineau
10. "Felix Grundy Eakin," by John Wood Dodge
11. "Paul and Mrs. Pipchin," by Hablot Browne, from the first edition of
Dombey and Son
12. "What Are the Wild Waves Saying," tinted lithograph by C. W. Nicholls
 
Page xi
Preface
Life has two gates: to stand before either is to stand on a threshold. The newborn child and the dying old man or woman mark the point at which awareness has just begun or is about to cease. How are these two points related? If we see life as a linear movement, then the point of beginning is the farthest from the point of ending, and the two are opposites. But if we see life as a space, demarcated by the fact that it abuts, at either end, on silence and unawareness, then the two extreme points are identical. In the first case, childhood is a beginning: the child has left nothingness behind and with every moment will become more alive; it embodies energy and vitality, and nothing is more remote from the idea of childhood than death. But in the second case, where the child exists on the margin, it embodies frailty and is always liable to be snatched back into the darkness from which it has barely emerged.
If then the child dies, we can react either with deep shock (this one least of all should be touched by mortality) or with sad understanding (not yet fully emerged into life, it was always in danger of slipping back into nonexistence). This ambivalence has always been with us, prior to and independent of the facts about child death. But nothing is quite free of history; in studying the death of children in the nineteenth century, this book will necessarily glance before and after, to ask how far even what seem unchanging qualities of childhood may change. It is an attempt to describe the deaths of actual children, to understand some of the issues that such deaths raised then and raise now, and to study the way in which they were represented in writing.
 
Page xii
Easily the fullest and most complex representation of experience is found in literature, and most of the book deals with poetry and fiction; but the study of literature is enriched by an awareness of historical context, and the first chapter therefore relates some actual deaths that are well documented and can teach us something about how nineteenth century society coped with premature death. History is not fiction, but writing fiction and writing of what actually happened have a great deal in common, and this material therefore confronts us with important questions about the way grief is represented in words: what is the difference between public and private feeling, and how far can we deduce past feelings from the words that have been left us? Beginning with actual deaths should prepare us for asking what is fictitious about fiction.
The second chapter looks at poems about the death of children, studying them primarily as strategies of consolation, and discusses the theology and psychology of dealing with grief. At the same time it relates the poems, where this is known, to the poets' own experience of bereavement and so is enabled to ask whether the truest poetry is the most feigning. A concluding discussion of Wordsworth's lines "There was a Boy" suggests that an interest in poetry as poetry, though it draws on such context, also moves away from it.
Chapter 3, on Dickens, tells the stories of Little Nell and Paul Dombey, adds some account of the many other child deaths in Dickens, and attempts to use this as a point of entry to understanding Dickens's literary art. Is it an accident that the great humorist was also a great sentimentalist? Why was Dickens so fascinated by girls on the threshold between childhood and womanhood?
Chapter 4 looks at other novelists, studies the variations that can be played on the theme of child death, and asks why it is so prominent in nineteenth century fiction, when it was so rare earlier. One answer looks at what is happening in terms of actual child mortality and draws on what is known about the demographic history. It is easy to make bold claims about this, and after making one I conclude the discussion rather skeptically. A quite different kind of explanation would be in terms of the steady expansion of the subject matter of fiction. The chapter concludes with an account of child death in twentieth century fiction and of the very different way it is represented.
Finally, I look at the reception history of Nell, Paul, and all those other children in nineteenth century novels whose life was in more danger,
 
Page xiii
according to Fitzjames Stephen, than the troops who stormed the Redan. The contempt with which twentieth century criticism has dismissed them as sentimentalized contrasts vividly with the enthusiasm and tears of con-temporaries. What does this tell us? Is it simply the verdict of one age upon another, to be replaced in its turn by the verdict of a future age on our own (arguably this has already begun), and to be explained in terms of the needs and values of the age that responds? Or is some kind of objective criterion possible in such judgments? I have come across no topic that raises this issue so acutely as child deaths, because it is the topic on which the difference between contemporary and modern judgments is most extreme: the once great popularity of
The Fairchild Family
and the overwhelming impact of the deaths of Nell, Paul, and Eva now leave us puzzled, indifferent, even vaguely resentful. The question of value judgments and the permanence of the canon, once so central and so unquestioned in literary criticism, now so profoundly interrogated and explained as the rationalization of power, takes us to the heart of literary controversy today. So whereas in the first four chapters I have tried to write directly about the original material, allowing these often moving stories and wonderful novels to affect the reader directly, mentioning modern scholars and critics only when they impinge directly on the discussion, and then only briefly, in the last chapter I confront recent critics explicitly and use the matter of child death to enter into current controversies. For some readers this may seem the most important chapter, for others it may the one to skip.
No one writes a book like this all by himself; and I am more than usually conscious of how much I owe to others. Impersonal thanks are due to those whose published work has helped me to cope with my ignorance, especially to the historians who have gathered together some of the material I have used. Although I have tried to go to the original sources where feasible, I owe much to the editorial and scholarly work of Robert Cecil, Philip Collins, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, David Grylls and Linda Pollock. Peter Wright and Warren Lenney did their best to correct my medical ignorance, and the late David Eversley my ignorance of demography; they must of course not be held responsible if it still shows. The deepest and most important thanks are due to those who read my first draft and offered much good advice: John Burrow, Philip Collins, Tony Thorlby, and above all Wayne Booth, who is as conscious of how much of his good advice I did not take as I am of how much I did.
 
Page 1
1
Real Deaths
Princess Charlotte
ON THURSDAY
6 November 1817 Princess Charlotte, only child of the Prince Regent, died a few hours after giving birth to a still-born son; and all England was plunged into grief (that is how, for the moment, we will put it). For several days the newspapers were filled with details of her illness and death, the sorrow of her husband and father, the arrangements for the funeral, and accounts from all over Britain of the widespread mourning. "We never recollect," wrote the
Times
, "so strong and general an expression and indication of sorrow";
1
and a correspondent from Brighton wrote that ''chilling regrets and unavailing laments seem the mournful inmates of every mansion house and cottage" (
Times
, 17 Nov.). The funeral took place on the 19th, the newspapers printing a very detailed account of the procession, the coffin and the order of service; and funeral services were held all over the country, in churches often draped in black, and in front of large congregations. National grief does not necessarily produce national harmony: in St. Paul's cathedral there was very nearly a riot, and the newspapers were full of complaintsabout the bad Latin of the inscription on the coffin ("in the fifty-eight words of which the inscription is composed there are forty-four genitive cases"), about the rapacity of the officers at the Royal Chapel, who made people pay for their seats "as at a Theatre," and, most important, about the medical attention received by the Princess.

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