conventions; so it is natural that we should look for an extra-literarythat is, a biographicalsource for it. But Mary was a young woman, Nell is a child. How important is this difference?
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To answer this, it will be best to look first at a similar liminal case in the fiction.
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The most important link between childhood and death in
Our Mutual Friend
is purely metaphoric. "Come up and be dead," Jenny Wren calls to Riah, the kindly old Jew who has befriended her. Sitting on the roof, far from the squalor by which she is normally surrounded, Jenny sees "the clouds rushing on above the narrow streets," and "the golden arrows pointing at the mountains in the sky from which the wind comes, and you feel as if you were dead" (book 2 chapter 5). Jenny is a pathetic child, crippled, poor, and with a drunken father to support. She does not die, but Mrs. Marcet would have been forgiven for expecting her to, for death seems ever lurking when she appears. She sees her father die, she retreats to a kind of heaven on the roof and refers to it as "being dead," and she is surrounded with the icons of death, especially with flowers and angels. She describes to Eugene how she keeps smelling flowers, though she has seen very few flowers indeed, in her life:
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 | | As I sit at work, I smell miles of flowers. I smell roses till I think I see the rose-leaves lying in heaps, bushels, on the floor. I smell fallen leaves till I put down my handsoand expect to make them rustle.
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And, as well as flowers, children: but not the children she meets and is mocked by:
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| | They were not chilled, anxious, ragged or beaten; they were never in pain. Such numbers of them, too! All in white dresses, and with something shining on the borders, and on their heads. They used to come down in long bright slanting rows and say all together, "Who is this in pain?"
(Our Mutual Friend
2:2).
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These children are easy enough to identify; and although Jenny does not die, I have no hesitation in adding her to the company of Nell and Paul,
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