Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (53 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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Again I questioned, but this time only in thought. "Where is that region? Does it exist?" (Chapter 9)
There is an urgency here that is never present in Mrs. Sherwood's deaths. None of her children ever asks "What is God?," or holds on to silent reservations in the way Jane does at the end. None of them conveys the sense of being physically shut out by skepticism as Jane does when she asks whether our souls "can get to it" when we die. The emotional function of the whole deathbed topos has now been brought to the surface: its purpose is consolation, and consolation is not easy, indeed may not succeed. If Helen Burns has an effect on Jane, this will depend not on her virtue but on the possibility of intimacy, even bodily intimacy. This is not a lesson in theology but a search for human comfort, for the warmth of being in bed together. Helen's last question is, "Are you warm, darling?" By the time morning comes, she is dead and offers Jane no warmth.
Conviction of one's own depravity, the doctrine that looms so large in the world of Mrs. Sherwood and Mr. Brocklehurst, means that earthly life is nothing but a series of temptations; and in that case, the sooner one escapes from it the better. It is only a short step from this to wishing the child dead. As Elisabeth Jay has pointed out,
6
children, to the Evangelicals, were no more innocent than the rest of us, so there is no actual advantage in dying earlyfrom the moment one is born, one is plunged into sin. But the idea of childhood innocence dies hard. Perhaps the most famous assertion of it is Traherne's claim, "Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child," which comes very close to denying the doctrine of original sin:
 
Page 139
So that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.
7
Certainly a Calvinist, almost certainly any other Evangelical, and arguably any orthodox Christian will take issue with this, but the belief seems indestructibleand widespread in the nineteenth century. Thackeray, soo deeply of his time even when claiming to resist it, spoke for a central Victorian sentiment when, after the death of his eight-month daughter Jane, he wrote to his mother with highly sentimental religiosity:
O God watch over us too, and as we may think that Your Great heart yearns towards the innocent charms of these little infants, let us try and think that it will have tenderness for us likewise who have been innocent once, and have, in the midst of corruption, some remembrances of good still.
8
David Grylls draws a useful contrast when he divides nineteenth century attitudes to childhood into the "Puritan" and the "Romantic," the former believing strongly in original sin and the need to break the child's will, the latter believing in the natural goodness of children; he then points out that both schools favored deathbed scenes.
9
And despite the logic of their stern theology, it is the Puritan or Evangelical deaths that tend to assert most strongly that dying early is a blessing, because it enables us to escape the temptations of this world. Little Charles, dying an edifying death in
The Fairchild Family
, comes very close to saying this.
I know myself to be a grievous sinner, and one that cannot live a day without doing that which is evil; therefore, why should I grieve because God is pleased to take me so soon from this state of sin and sorrow? (161)
"So soon": this could of course simply express his impatience to get to heaven, but it is very easy to hear relief as well: the earlier he dies, the surer he is to get there.
And in
Amy Herbert
this is quite explicit. In this improving story by E. M. Sewell, little Rose, the youngest Harrington child, whom everyone adores, is watched on her deathbed by the governness, Emily Morton, for whom Rose's death would be "the severing of her dearest earthly tie," but she cannot bring herself to wish that Rose should live, since death "would
 
Page 140
be an escape from all the dangers of the world to the enjoyment of rest and peace for ever''; so that to ask for her survival "would be merely a selfish regard to her own feelings, without any reference to considerations of far higher importance." That seems plain enough; but in the next paragraph comes an even more explicit statement:
To lose her now, would be to feel that she was gone to happiness; to lose her then [i.e., later], might be to dread lest she should have forgotten the promise of her baptism, and departed from the path of holiness in which she had so earnestly endeavoured to lead her.
10
There is no antinomianism here. The governess can produce a good effect, but there is no knowing how long it will last. A yet uncorrupted child is better dead.
Little Eva
The most famous child death in nineteenth century fiction, outside Dickens, is that of little Eva. Eva St. Clare and Uncle Tom are the two Christian spirits in Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1851): the young girl and the old man, the slave-owner's daughter and the slave. Extremes meet to show us that earthly status is of no importance in the judgment of heaven. This is the egalitarianism of other-worldliness, that, by separating out spiritual equality and regarding it as untouched by earthly hierarchy, also protects the status quo, leaving worldly hierarchy safely untouched by spiritual equality. In the other world all are really equalbut not till then.
Eva's death owes a good deal to Nell's. Both are etherealized, never disfigured by suffering, and both end up lying beautiful in their deathbeds, surrounded by emblems of innocence and regeneration. Around Nell there are winter berries and green leaves ("something that has loved the light and had the sky above it always") and her little bird ("a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed"like Nell herself, continually escaping from the finger of Quilp); Eva is "robed in one of the simple white dresses she had been wont to wear when living: the rose-colored light through the curtains cast over the icy coldness of death a warm glow."
11
Both are angels before their time and have a premonition of their end. Nell's premature change into an angel, to the distress of her little friend, was quoted in the last chapter; Eva is more explicit, telling Tom, "I'm

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