Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (37 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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"Hallowed bethy"
The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! (Chapter 47)
What is crucial here for Stewart is Jo's inability to manage the repetition, and he points out both the importance of the typography ("Jo's feeble, lower-case response") and the fact that Dickens originally intended the sentence to be completed, then (in proof) deleted the last word. The correspondences between the subject matter (death) and the process of writing leads to the kind of symbiosis, even identity, between the two that structuralist and post-structuralist criticism so often asserts: "Death is again defined by the interface between private radiance and narrative peroration."
10
The death of Jo is much more explicitly Christian than anything in
Dombey and Son
; and Victorian deathbeds, as a whole, seldom find it possible to exclude all religious elements."
11
In order, now, to discuss the relation of Dickens's death scenes to Christianity, it will be necessary to look at the one other child death that is as famous as Paul's.
Little Nell
Six years before
Dombey and Son,
Dickens had scored an equally resounding success with the death of Little Nell in
The Old Curiosity Shop.
Again, let us begin with a short biography, which in this case lends itself to very simple summary. Her only relative is her grandfather, to whom she is totally, even pathologically devoted. He loves her, but his weakness for gambling (which he tells himself is for her benefit) makes him utterly unreliable
 
Page 95
as a protector, and she has to take on the role of looking after him, even to the extent of having to prevent him from stealing her money. Because of his gambling debts, the old curiosity shop, which he owns, falls into the hands of Quilp, Dickens's most brilliant grotesque villain, whose hideous vitality forms an ongoing counterpart to Nell's frail purity: Steven Marcus even suggests that the reason Nell has to die is because in order to distinguish her from Quilp she cannot be associated with life and energy.
12
Nell and her grandfather run away and spend much of the novel wandering aimlessly through a mainly pastoral England, until Nell finally dies in a wintry but idyllic village setting.
Her actual death does not form a set piece but is mentioned in passing as part of the description of the already dead body and its setting; in this earlier, more static novel, the emotional effect derives from iconographic, pictorial elements and from the accumulating, pervasive atmosphere that leads us to think about death almost all through the book. As early as chapter 9, before she and her grandfather have started on their travels, she sits at her window watching the people passing along the street: "She would perhaps see a man passing with a coffin on his back, and two or three others silently following him to a house where somebody lay dead." During their wanderings they stop for a while with a village schoolmaster whose favorite pupil dies (this is a kind of rehearsal for the ending); when the schoolmaster later shows Nell the house he has obtained for her and her grandfather, describing it as "a peaceful place to live in, don't you think so?" she replies, clasping her hands earnestly, "Oh yes, a quiet happy placea place to live and learn to die in!" (chapter 52). And when she has been sitting in the church reading her Bible, the spot "awakens thoughts of death''but what of it: "Die who would, it would still remain the same; these sights and sounds would still go on, as happily as ever. It would be no pain to sleep amidst them." She then climbs the tower and looks out. "Oh the glory of the sudden burst of light . [t was like passing from death to life; it was drawing nearer Heaven" (chapter 53). But the image of drawing nearer heaven might more easily suggest passing from life to death. Life- the life of rustic England that she sees from the top of the tower-is impregnated with death.
If life is suffused with the idea of death, will not the reverse be true: that death is perceived as not very different from life? So the long-standing Christian assertion (not dead but sleeping) can be used to soften and sentimentalize the harshness. In the novel, this is used to show us that Nell's
 
Page 96
grandfather, insisting that "she is still asleep," has begun to lose his wits; but the same refusal to accept the reality of death is insisted on by the novel itself:
She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who has lived and suffered death. (Chapter 71)
Is this a description of a dead body or a refusal to describe it? Contemporary readers might have been uncomfortable with putting the question this way, but they would have had one great advantage over us if they had tried to answer it: that they had seen dead bodies, and quite possibly dead children. Today the cosmetic skill of the mortician, and all the other apparatus of avoidance, keeps us away from the dead; so for comparison I will turn to a contemporary description of a dead child:
From the gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure; there the angel face; and, as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that no features had suffered any change. Had they not? The forehead, indeedthe serene and noble forehead
that
might be the same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating the supplications of closing anguishcould these be mistaken for life?
13
Thomas De Quincey lost his nine-year-old sister when he was six, that is in 1791, but he wrote this account at about the same time Dickens wrote
The Old Curiosity Shop:
this is an adult writing, though attempting to recall a child's perception. It could almost be a commentary on the description of the dead Nell, beginning (except for the use of the term "corpse," which Dickens avoids) with two clauses in the same mode as the novel, then asking in a more matter-of-fact way whether what "people usually fancy" (and, we could add, what novelists usually write) corresponds to what we actually see.
The emblems associated with the dead Nell are those we might expect: snow and, more generally, winter; churchyards and the interior of churches; and birds. Kit brings the dying Nell her bird in a cage; the birds that she used to feed, obedient to the pathetic fallacy, die when she does, "that they may not wake her"; her caged bird outlives her, but only just: it is "a poor

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