Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (45 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 116
Scrooge was unkind. Whatever his ailment (we are not told, nor even whether it is connected with his lameness), it needed modern medical science rather than kindness, or even money, from Scrooge. His cure is as much of a miracle as Scrooge's reform.
A Christmas Carol
was one of the great successes of Dickens's public readings: clearly there is great theatrical potential in child pathos. It is not surprising, then, to find another child death among the reading successes, one in which theatricality is quite explicit.
Dr Marigold's Prescriptions
is the story of a cheap jack, or travelling seller of job lots, whose patter provides much of the vocabulary of his narrative. Near the beginning of the tale his daughter dies in his arms while he is holding one of his auctions.
"Now, you country boobies," says I, feeling as if my heart was a heavy weight at the end of a broken sash-line "now let's know what you want tonight, and you shall have it. But first of all, shall I tell you why I have got this little girl round my neck? You don't want to know? Then you shall. She belongs to the Fairies. She is a Fortune-teller. She can tell me about you in a whisper, and can put me up to whether you're a going to buy a lot or leave it. Now do you want a saw? No, she says you don't, because you're too clumsy to use one. So I went on in my Cheap-Jack style till I felt her lift herself a little on my shoulder, to look across the dark street. "What troubles you, darling?" "Nothing troubles me, father. I am not at all troubled. But don't I see a pretty churchyard over there?" "Yes, my dear." ''Kiss me twice, dear father, and lay me down to rest upon that churchyard grass so soft and green." I staggers back into the cart with her head dropped on my shoulder, and I says to her mother, "Quick, shut the door! Don't let these laughing people see!"
32
This is in every sense a theatrical death: it happens on a stage, and for maximum effect it should be enacted on a stage. The story was published in
All the Year Round
in 1865, and a few months later he included it in his new series of readings, simplifying the title to
Dr Marigold
(the "prescriptions" were the stories Marigold told to make his daughter "laugh in a pleasant wayor to make her cry in a pleasant way," and it therefore can be said to refer to Dickens's own story, which has the same double purpose). This double effect in performance is described in rather ponderous language by the
Staffordshire Sentinel
: the opening moments had the audience "primed for cacchinatory exercise," but soon Marigold's pathetic description of his child's death "rendered humid the majority of the eyes in the room."
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Page 117
Though some of the notices of the reading were critical, this compound effect was enormously successful with most of the audience, showing not only how compatible the humor and the pathos are but also how both are central to Dickens's success as a popular entertainer. Laughter is a public act, so it is not surprising that the comic scenes went down well at readings; but it is equally the case that tears are more readily stimulated in public than in private, so that the pathos of a death scene gains enormously from being read aloud. Gained then and gains now: for a modern public reader of Dickens has assured me that when he read the death of little Dombey to a teachers' conference (hard-headed late twentieth century teachers!) the chairman was reduced to tears so overwhelming that he couldn't give the vote of thanks.
34
Theatricality obviously presupposes an audienceor a readerwhose emotions are worked on by the mountebank-author. For a curious parody of that reader, I turn to
The Wreck of the Golden Mary
, a strangely inconclusive story of a shipwreck, narrated first by the captain, then when he collapses,, by the first mate, two heroic figures. The Golden Mary strikes an iceberg near Cape Horn, passengers and crew get off in two boats, and at the end they are left unrescued, so that we do not know if they survive, unless we take the fact that captain and mate are telling the story as evidence. Among the passengers is a young mother with a three-year-old child, who is nicknamed the Golden Lucy, to correspond to the boat, and "a sordid selfish old gentleman" called Mr. Rarx, who becomes obsessed with the child's safety, but only, we are later told, "because of the influence he superstitiously hoped she might have in preserving him." Lucy and Rarx are the only two characters who die, and the child's death is accompanied by a harsh counterpoint from the old man:
For days past the child had been declining, and that was the great cause of his wildness. He had been over and over again shrieking out to me to give her all the remaining meat, to give her all the remaining rum, to save her at any cost, or we should all be ruined. At this time, she lay in her mother's arms at my feet. One of her little hands was almost always creeping about her mother's neck or chin. I had watched the wasting of the little hand, and I knew it was nearly over.
The old man's cries were so discordant with the mother love and submission, that I called out to him in an angry voice, unless he held his peace on the instant, I would order him to be knocked on the head and thrown overboard. He was mute then, until the child died, very peacefully, an hour afterwards.
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Page 118
Lucy dies, no doubt, of exposure; but she also dies of the story's need for pathos. We can be left in suspense about the other passengers, but here is a clear-cut emotional effect that cannot be passed over. But why is Mr. Rarx there? I suggest he is a kind of parody of the reader, obsessively fixated on the child and convinced that his own well-being is somehow involved with her survival. When he dies shortly afterwards, we realize that he was right.
The Unmentioned
We have, surely, seen enough to accept Fitzjames Stephen's unkind remark, that an interesting child in Dickens's novels "runs as much risk as any of the troops who stormed the Redan,"
36
and to wonder whether there is some deep-seated association, in Dickens's fiction, perhaps in the Victorian mind, between children and death. We have seen how children who do not die are nonetheless associated with deatheven a child who survives to heal rifts and continue the race, like Florence. After the death of her mother, Florence asks, "What have they done with my mama?" and Polly Toodle, who is after all performing the life-enhancing task of nursing her baby brother, tells her a "story'' about a very good lady "who, when God thought it right that it should be so, was taken ill and died. Never to be seen again by any one on earth, and was buried in the ground where the trees grow." To this Florence, "shuddering," responds, "the cold ground": she knows what death is, after all, and Polly comforts her in a series of images that resolutely have it both ways:
"No! The warm ground," returned Polly, seizing her advantage, "where the ugly little seeds turn into beautiful flowers, and into grass, and corn, and I don't know what all besides. Where good people turn into bright angels, and fly away to Heaven!" (Chapter 3)
Where
good people turn into bright angels? This does not happen in the ground (unless we are to take the resurrection of the body very literally indeed), but Polly's comfort seeks to blend the advantage of pagan comfort ("le don de vivre est passé dans les fleurs") and Christian afterlife. Perhaps this is because Polly is uneducated and knows no better; more probably it is the novel itself that seeks to console in every way possible, never mind the inconsistencies.

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