Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (84 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

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BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 229
scene is well shown in Margarete Holubetz, "Death-bed Scenes in Victorian Fiction,"
English Studies
1 (1986): 1434.
12. Steven Marcus,
Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1965).
Of the many discussions of little Nell and her death in recent Dickens criticism, the one that is most necessary for me to notice is that of Andrew Sanders, in
Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist
(London: Macmillan, 1982), a book overlapping considerably with the concerns of this chapter and using some similar extra-literary material to set Dickens" death-scenes in context. (Sanders does not confine himself to child deaths). For all its learning and persuasiveness, this book advances a thesis quite incompatible with mine, since Sanders insists on Dickens's Christian orthodoxy, finding in the novels unambiguous confirmation of the claim he made in his last letter (and often before) that he had always striven in his writings "to express veneration for the life and lessons of our Saviour." Pious (even Pecksniffian) remarks like this are not difficult to find in Dickens, and to use them as a criterion for interpreting his fiction is to subordinate art to uplift, ignoring the nuances with which belief is advanced, retracted, hinted at, turned into metaphor, or kept just beneath the surface, which I have tried to explore. The very suggestion that Dickens's novels are vehicles for "veneration" has a ring of the absurd. It is shrewd of Sanders to observe that the pseudo-medievalism of Nell's death is an attempt to exploit a set of properties to which Dickens normally felt considerable aversion; but then to claim that this is the
only
reason for the distaste felt by so many criticseven denying the presence of any sentimentalityis to use an incidental point as a distraction from the main effect. Sanders stresses the importance of angels but sees their function and existence as much less problematic than I do. A much fuller development of these criticisms can be found in the excellent review of Sanders's book by Garrett Stewart in the
Dickens Quarterly
1 (1984): 97105. I return to this question when discussing the reception of Nell and Paul in chapter 5.
13. Mrs. Tait's narrrative, 213 (see chapter 1, note 7).
14. Michel Serres's book is
Angels: A Modern Myth
(Paris: Flammarion, 1995). See the article by Justine Picardie, "A Host of Angels" in the
Independent on Sunday,
24 Dec. 1995.
15. Nina Auerbach,
Woman and the Demon
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 82.
16. Mrs. Stone,
God's Acre: Historical Notices Relating to Churchyards
(London: 1858), 394.
17.
Recognition of Friends in Heaven
(see chapter 2, note 8).
18. Philippe Aries,
The Hour of Our Death
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1983), 471, 543 (see also chapter 2, note 7).
19. Dickens to Thomas Latimer, 13 March 1841,
Letters
, Pilgrim edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-), 1:257.
 
Page 230
20. John Forster,
The Life of Charles Dickens
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1872), book 2, ch. 7.
21. Ibid., book 5, ch. 5.
22. Edmund Wilson, "Dickens: The Two Scrooges," in
The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941).
23. Dickens to George Thomson, 8 May 1837,
Letters,
1:257.
24. Dickens to Richard Johns, 31 May 1837,
Letters
1:263; and to W. Harrison Ainsworth, 17 May 1837,
Letters,
1:260.
25. Dickens to John Forster, 8 Jan. 1841,
Letters,
2:181.
26. Garrett Stewart,
Dickens and the Trials of Imagination
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), chapter 4 (esp. p. 214).
27. Alexander Welsh,
From Copyright to Copperfield
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 14.
28. Henry James, Review of
Our Mutual Friend, Nation,
21 Dec. 1865. Text from
Charles Dickens:
A Critical Anthology, ed. Stephen Wall (Harmondsworth, England:: Penguin, 1970), 166.
29. James R. Kincaid,
Child Loving: the Erotic Child and Victorian Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1992). Since Kinkaid's position is radically deconstructive, interested not directly in the nature of child-loving or in the meaning of Victorian texts but only in our way of reading them and in our reasons for denying the sexual element, it is very difficult to discover what his view of pedophilia or his reading of the novels actually is. Certainly there is nothing in his book that would enable one to maintain, as I do, that the representation of Jenny contains sexual elements absent from that of Nell.
30. Robert M. Polhemus, "Comic and Erotic Faith Meet Faith in the Child: Charles Dickens'
The Old Curiosity Shop,"
in
Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life,
ed. Robert M. Polhemus and Roger B. Henkle (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994).
31. Charles Dickens,
The Public Readings,
ed. Philip Collins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 33.

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