Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (14 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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along with much family detail: her father was a clergyman who had refused a living because of his doubts about the Thirty-nine Articles and who supported himself and his family by taking pupils. The last half-year of her life was spent in Madiera: the reasons she gives are her father's health and the cheapness of living there, but her own health must have been a consideration, perhaps the main one.
There is so much enthusiasm for living, learning, and observing in her journal, and she was so obviously a fluent and relaxed writer, that the occasional gloomy entries come with a real shock. The first of these occurs less than a year before the end:
Journalizing has lost its interest with me. I am dreary, dispirited, and ill. The only occupation I pursue with any interest is that of increasing my knowledge of chronology. I have in the last few days learned perfectly a hundred dates.
The gloom did not last: on the very next day she is reading Nichol's book on the solar system with obvious interest, and by the following week she records that in reading Nichol, "astonishment, delight, admiration, almost overpowered my imagination and thoughts." On 29 January 1839 she writes:
While they went to church in the morning, I was as usual left alone, and sank into a long melancholy reverie on subjects which will intrude themselves whenever I am alone. I ought to esteem myself happy; but all the enjoyment of happiness is gone, and cannot return . There is nothing in Madiera which is dear to me; the land, the people, are new and unknown and strange. Nay, it makes no little difference to me that in every room of the house I look round on strange furniture, which belongs to another, instead of our own, which I remember from earliest childhood. Oh there are moments when visions start up before me of sweet well-known spotswoods where the anemone and bluebell grow; streams shaded with ash-trees and hawthorn, where I have wandered alone in early spring mornings, on violets and primroses and grass drenched with dew, myself the happiest of the happy, listening to the songs of the birds, and shaking over me a shower of bright drops, as I gathered the branches of the willow or bullace. Oh, how many happy hours, which seem to me but as yesterday, start up in contrast with the present! I live it all over again, and I cannot avoid weeping. There is no language to describe the sharp pain of past and regretted happiness. I was much happier as a child than I am now, or ever shall be.
 
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That is the most moving passage in her journal, yet perhaps nothing in it has the bleakness of that account of her learning a hundred dates because a purely mechanical, even pointless, task, is all she can bring herself to perform. This passage was written six months before her death on July 7, andd though she went on writing until a fortnight before the end, there is nothing as extended or powerful as this. It surely owes much of its impact to the fact that it is less about impending death than about actual illness: future experience can (obviously) never be as real as present experience. At times, indeed, it hardly seems to be about illness but simply about growing up, about the nostalgic vision of lost childhood, the "meadow grove and stream apparelled in celestial lightthe glory and the freshness of a dream." We could even claim that Wordsworth's celestial light is less immediate than the shower of bright drops that falls from a very earthly tree on the young Emily.
As befits a clergyman's dutiful daughter, there are elements of piety, but there is very little about a future life. She asks God to be merciful to her a sinner, she praises God for "giving me such excellent parents," but she does not seem to anticipate union with God, and no light is shining on her as she goes. Her final entry, after a few brief, telling details, looks forward not to her own future, but to being remembered:
I suppose I am beginning to sink; still I can at times take up my pen. I have had my long back hair cut off. Dear Papa wears a chain of it. Mamma will have one too.
In one sense at least, this is the most actual of all the child deaths. Emily was no longer a child, but at nineteen she remembered her childhood with such intensity that we can feel that the Emily who is dying is not the young adult who is writing the journal; that child is present in the dying writer, not through sympathy but in a more literal sense, through memory. This is the nearest thing we have yet had to a child's account of her own death.
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A Postscript: Diagnosis and Non-diagnosis
What did these children die of? Almost all of them died of infectious diseases, and we know in statistical terms what these diseases were. Smallpox was the biggest killer until the introduction of vaccination early in the nineteenth century. Even then, smallpox remained the most common cause among poor children until well into the century, because the practice
 
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of vaccination only spread slowly down the social scale. After that came pulmonary tuberculosis ("consumption"), which was also endemic. Then came diseases that swept England in epidemics (especially cholera), and those that came in waves of greater and less severity (measles, scarlet fever). Typhus, diphtheria, and whooping cough were also important. Frequency of all these diseases dropped dramatically with improvements in public health after the mid-century: it is of course prevention not cure that has lowered the child death rate so dramatically in our time. Even antibiotics do not cure all of them.
All that is well-known, but what did particular children die of? Often we know, but often we do not. I have looked at some dozens of child deaths in memoirs and letters and am struck by how often we are told that a patient died of "spotted fever of the most malignant character," of "fever and brain disorder," of "inflammation of the bowels," of ''convulsions," or simply of a serious illness.
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It is common practice today, especially in America, when mentioning a death (even in the case of the very old, and certainly in other cases) to state the cause of death; clearly this was not the case in Victorian times.
There are three, perhaps four, reasons for this. The first is medical ignorance: the further back in time we go, the less capable medical science is of classifying and diagnosingindeed, the more alarming medical science is in every respect! Some of the doctors we meet in the pages of these memoirs do not inspire much confidence: Elizabeth Prentiss told Dr. Watson that she thought her little son had "water on the brain": her description is fairly detailed, and suggests either a brain tumor or tubercular meningitis. To expect the doctor to diagnose this would be asking too much, but it is alarming to read that, even in 1852, "he said it was not so, and ordered nothing but a warm bath"; twelve days later the child was dead. We have already seen how little Sir Richard Croft could do for Princess Charlotte and how dearly he paid for his presumed incompetence. The official bulletin, presumably provided by Croft himself, attributed her death to "exhaustion of vital energy, occasioned by excessive and insupportable pain."
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This appears to suggest a blockage in the course of delivery, but the fact that the child was born normally and was "one of the finest infants ever brought into this world" makes that very unlikely. The Princess must surely have died of sepsis or a hemorrhage: it looks as if Croft did not realize thisor was he being vague in order to preserve what he saw as the proprieties? Of course, the occasional bland or incompetent physician is not of

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