Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (41 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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emblem of goodwill. Except that it is the center of a wondering group, we could take the figure to be Florence rather than Jesus.
To describe this as religiosity is to see it as the "spilt religion" that Irving Babbitt attributed to Romanticism, as that which lays claim to the emotional effect of religion with none of the doctrinal contentand not even to all the emotional content, but only to that which is reassuring: not judgment, not even self-sacrificing love, but benevolence (benevolence costs nothing, love may cost a great deal). There are even better candidates than Florence if we are, mischievously, to seek a Dickensian identity for that figure pointing upwardsMr. Pickwick perhaps, or even Pecksniff, saying, "There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me."
So when at the moment of death Paul enters heaven, it is a heaven that may have no existence except its effect on earth. "Tell them that the print upon the stairs at school is not divine enough. The light about the head is shining on me as I go." What is intended is clearly that Paul is seeing Christ in glory, but it is tempting to claim that he is actually looking into a mirror, so placed as to send the light down to us. That he should say all this himself might be acceptable to the Christian reader if Paul were in fact entering heaven, and perhaps to the agnostic reader if he is willing to suspend his disbelief; but if Paul is a living child still, and the mouthpiece of his author, then the comparison with Pecksniff may not be merely mischievous.
Nell, Dickens, and Mary
Death permeates
The Old Curiosity Shop
but not until the second half of the book is it clearly attached to Nell herself, and even then one cannot be sure that her association with images of death means that she is ill herself. The first suggestion that she is likely to die comes in chapter 45, and from then on it strengthens her attractiveness to everyone she meets: "Even careless strangers even they saw iteven they pitied hereven they bade him [the grandfather] good day compassionately, and whispered as they passed." We are often told that we treat death today with the embarrassed evasiveness with which the Victorians treated sex: this is true, but we see here that they had some of our embarrassment too.
If Nell is to die, why are we so far into the novel before she is clearly identified as Death's victim? The delay may not need explaining: plot and
 
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rhetorical strategy may prefer that she does not fall ill too soon. But it may also be because Dickens had not yet decided on the outcome. In a letter to Thomas Latimer, Dickens claimed that he had "the design and purpose" of the story "distinctly marked in my mind from its commencement," and that he intended "to stamp upon it from the first the shadow of that early death."
19
But Forster claimed in his
Life
that it was he who suggested to Dickens that Nell should die, even quoting a letter in which Dickens thanks him for his ''valued suggestion."
He had not thought of killing her when, about half-way through, I asked him to consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy endings, so that the gentle pure little figure and form should never change to the fancy.
20
We cannot know the truth; but we can observe a different, but parallel, issue about how early the death of Paul is implied. When Dickens had finished the first number of
Dombey and Son,
he read it to his circle of English acquaintances at Lausanne; and "old Mrs Marcet, who is devilish cute, guessed directly (but I didn't tell her she was right) that little Paul would die."
21
Did Mrs. Marcet feel that an old-fashioned child should not grow up, because that would remove the basis for his quaint wisdom, or did she detect the incipient pathos that would eventually kill Paul? She plays the same role as Forster did with Nell, the difference being that Dickens is now in charge: he does not need anyone to detect the resonances of his text; he is aware of them, has even planned them, andd decides not to tell.
Before leaving little Nell we ought to relate her death to its biographical contextwhich is, after all, what Dickens himself did. He and Kate did lose a daughter, Dora, who died in infancy in 1851, but that was after both
The Old Curiosity Shop
and
Dombey and Son
were finished and published; the death that he believed lay behind Nell's was that of Mary Hogarth, and this view was accepted, and enlarged on, by Edmund Wilson, the first truly modern and post-Freudian of Dickens's critics.
22
The death of Mary is one of the most intense, and famous, episodes in Dickens's life. After his marriage to Catherine Hogarth in 1836, her younger sister Mary came to live with them, and on 7 May 1837 she was taken suddenly ill after a visit to the theater and died the next day, in Dickens's arms (a point he mentions
 
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almost every time he tells the story). Dickens's letters on the subject express overwhelming grief. "Since our marriage," he wrote,
she has been the grace and life of our homethe admired of all, for her beauty and excellenceI could have better spared a much nearer relation or an older friend, for she has been to us what we can never replace, and has left a blank which no one who ever knew her can have the faintest hope of seeing supplied.
23
He writes hereand in several other lettersin the plural, but in the more intensely grief-stricken passages he moves from "our sufferings" to saying "I have lost the dearest friend I ever had. Words cannot describe the pride I felt in her, and the devoted attachment I bore her." He loved her "more deeply and fervently than anyone on earth," sometimes (by no means always) adding, "after my wife.''
24
For months after her death he dreamed of her every night. He even set his heart on being buried with her and was almost frantic with distress when, four years later, her young brother George died and was buried with her instead. Needless to say, this has fascinated Dickens's biographers, and not only those inclined to psycho-analyzing their subject. Dickens never wrote about his wife with such passion, not even in the early, happy days of their marriage. It seems a classic instance of splitting, the sexual attraction felt towards Kate and the idealization bestowed on Mary. And if we add the third sister, Georgina, who later came to live with them and remained with Dickens to look after the children after the marriage broke up, we can postulate a threefold split: Georgina the practical housewife and child-rearer, Kate the sexual partner and focus of domestic resentments, Mary the idealized angel-figure. That one man should find three sisters among whom to divide his affections in this way seems like a story invented to fulfil male fantasies.
In January 1841 Dickens wrote to Forster:
This part of the story is not to be galloped over, I can tell you. It is such a very painful thing to me, that I really cannot express my sorrow. Dear Mary died yesterday, when I think of this sad story.
25
The death of Little Nell predates all the fictional child deaths discussed in this and the next chapter and is the cause as much as the result of literary

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