Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (32 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 81
in the Imagination "for immortality"? This is a puzzling phrase: is it a Proustian idea, that the imagination exists in a realm outside time, or a Christian idea, that the life of the imagination is a preparation for (an anticipation of) immortal life, or is it simply a rhetorical assertion of how important sense experience is for imagination?
The death also enables the poem to conclude with its account of the poet at the boy's grave, where he presents himself as incapable of saying anything. Since this is Wordsworth, that may mean that his thoughts lie too deep for tears, but it may also mean that there is, simply, nothing to say, that the death is a conventional ending, that regrets, lamentation, or praise would all be out of place. As if to underline the fact that silence is the only response, the sentence ends with an exclamation markas did Jeffrey's! The contrast between the two exclamation marks is striking. Wordsworth's is that of awe, Jeffrey's like a snort. Imagine standing for half an hour at the grave of a boy who had no claim on your feelings except this "one accomplishment"! The accomplishment of the boy corresponds to the accomplishment of the poemshifting attention from the familiar subject of child death to a concern with the nature of sense experience and our relation to the physical world. This child is not an angel but simply an absence, and Wordsworth has written a poem about a pervading absence whose trace suffuses our perceptions. Suffuses and, possibly, sharpens, so enabling him to introduce something new into English poetry, and enabling us to speculate that the truest poetry is built on absence.
 
Page 82
3
The Life and Death of Paul Dombey,
and Other Child Deaths in Dickens
The argument of this chapter is complicated. There is more child death in Dickens than in any other novelist, and exploring it will take us in several directions. The Dickensian child leads a lively existence before dying, though that life is always touched (even enlivened) by the thought of death; so it will be necessary to relate such a child (Paul Dombey is the main example) to traditions of the representation of childhood. When the child diesand here we move from Paul to Nellit is represented above all as an angel, and the discussion of the nature and function of belief in angels uses a comparison with Goethe, who turns out to be more skeptical than Dickens. A brief excursus into the biographical origins of Little Nell leads to a discussion of the uncertainty of the boundary between child and adult, and how that relates to both sexuality and death. Finally, the chapter turns to the nature of pathos and how it is achieved, relating it first to Dickens's well-known theatricality and then to political anger.
Since Paul Dombey enters the world as he enters the novel, we can begin with his birth:
Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his
 
Page 83
constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.
Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well- made man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet.
1
Why is it funny that the baby is so close to the fire? Because it is being used not as an invitation to ask if the little dear is too hot or too cold but as an opportunity to turn him into a muffin. We know about muffins: they're not important, but they are familiar, and so they can tell us something about that totally baffling object, a baby. Those who treat babies as human, as potential people, are dismissed with condescending patience ("and though of course an undeniably fine infant"); those with eyes to see (it is like a parody of Tennyson's claim that he could look at his own child with the eyes of an artist, "a man who has eyes and can judge from seeing")
2
do not understand babies in the conventional way, and on them the baby makes an almost meaningless impression: "somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect as yet." This is a world in which human beings are best understood (should we rather say "understood''?) by being compared to inanimate objectsa world in which the inanimate objects have a tendency to be more alive than the people. It is the world of Dickens.
At what point does this strange object fade into the light of common day and turn out to be that dull thing, a human being? If he dies young enough, the answer could be, Never:
To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of minewho gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggleI am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.
The stone lozenges are not only the most alive presence in the opening paragraphs of
Great Expectations,
they also bestow some of their vitality on the dead brothers, who, like the forty-eight-minute Paul, are animated not by breath but by their participation in the inimitable Dickensian style.

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