Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (46 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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For a stronger example, there is Florence's encounter with the widowed father. Still grieving over Paul, Florence meets a "very poor man, who seemed to have no regular employment," whose function in the book is to love his daughter, thus providing a foil to Mr. Dombey. The daughter is sick and cross, in contrast to the angelic Florence; in fact, she is not only sick but dying, and the father is pleased to get even an impatient gesture out of her, "because the day'll come, and has been coming a long whilewhen to get half as much from that unfort'nate child of minewould be to raise the dead."
The effect of this on Florence is that she imagines herself ill: "if she were to fall ill, if she were to fade like her dear brother, would he then know that she had loved him; would she then grow dear to him?" After one paragraph of imagined illness, the next begins: "Yes, she thought if she were dying, he would relent," and in the scene of reconciliaton she imagines she says, "It is too late for anything but this; I never could be happier, dear father!" and dies (chapter 24).
Not only does she die: she is then absorbed into the imagery that came to dominate Paul's death, the golden water on the wall, the dark river, and all the mournful apparatus that she now looks on "with awful wonder but not terror." There is no open mention of the self-pity that we would assume to be the normal state for imagining oneself dead: Florence's pity must come from us.
Even Florence, then, must "die." Is the image of childhood inextricably bound up with death? The usual association with children is, after all, the continuance of life: they carry on our existence after we die. Before leaving Dickens, I will ask briefly if there is any trace of this in
Dombey and Son
. The direct opposite of the Dombey family would be a family in which children are constantly being bornwould be, in fact, the Toodles.
Polly Toodle, Paul's "old nurse" is married to a stoker on the new railway. We know that Dickens intended to point the comparison between Dombey and Toodle as fathers: in a deleted passage, Toodle tells Mr. Dombey that he means to bring up his eldest son, little Biler, to his own occupation.
37
But such parallels are superficial compared to the enormous contrast between the two families. Every time we see the Toodles there are "numbers of new babies." There is an endless supply and a constant vagueness about the actual numbers (you would have to be a Scrooge to count them): "'Polly, my gal,' said Mr. Toodle, with a young Toodle on each
 
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knee, and two more making tea for him, and plenty more scattered aboutMr. Toodle was never out of children, but always kept a good supply on hand " (chapter 38).
Children are seen almost as one sees food; there is no shortage of either in the Toodle household, which exudes an air of contentment, Mr. Toodle having "made over all his own inheritance of fuming and fretting to the engines with which he was connected." Two things are striking in the representation of this family. First, the husband is there for stud purposes only. It is not, of course, put like this, because of the convention of sexual reticence, but it is hard to see that he serves any other necessary function. Not even his financial support is mentioned. The women (Polly and her sister) run the family; the husband, when he is home, enjoys the pleasure of domestic life in a purely passive way.
And second, as well as sex, pregnancy is not mentioned. Despite the vast number of children, we never see Mrs. Toodle pregnant, nor is there the slightest hint of the physical burden of bearing them. They appear by magic, in this very masculine view of family life. The one character who is always described as being "in an interesting condition" is Mrs. Perch, wife of the messenger at Dombey's office, and the treatment of that is purely comic.
There is one other numerous family in the novel, that of Mrs. MacStinger. She has only three children, but they take up enough space forr thirteen. There is no father, nor any mention of what happened to him. He cannot have been long dead, since the baby is so small, but there is no sign of grief; and though there is not the slightest hint of either sexual desire or domestic bliss associated with her, she is nonetheless on the hunt for a new manas Bunsby discovers. Nineteenth century conventions of reticence extend beyond sex to include a great deal of bodily function. Not death, but, as we have seen, illness, if conceived of as a physical experience, and likewise pregnancy, which the masculine imagination is too frightened of to take seriously. Is it going too far to say that one reason Dickens associated children with death is that he was embarrassed at associating them too openly with life?
Pathos into Anger
One further variant of the pathetic-child death in Dickens, on which this chapter will conclude, is the political. Here we need to consider the
 
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social standing of the children who die; they virtually all fall within the social range of Dickens's readership. Dickens was read, as all Victorian novelists were read, overwhelmingly by the middle classes; and in his pages, no aristocratic children die, and hardly any of the children we have so far looked at belong to the proletariat. Nell is poor, but she has come down in the world; culturally she quite obviously belongs to the middle class. The Cratchits are shabby genteel, near the bottom, socially, of Dickens's readership. Little Dick is perhaps the only case who falls quite clearly below it. The introduction of the Bumbles, after Dick has died, adds to the pathos a touch of anger at the workings of the Poor Law, for when it comes to the death of proletarian children pathos may not be the only ingredient: it can be supplemented, even replaced, by indignation. This can be seen in
Bleak House
, where there are two deaths of poor children, very different from each other. Jo the crossing sweeper is poor, ignorant, and a pure victim. He is connected with the plot by a number of ingenious links, but essentially he is there to be told to move on, to declare that he "never knowd nothink," to catch smallpox, recover from that, and die of the need for pathos. But his death is also part of the political message of the book:
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
Jo is not only a victim but also a moral touchstone: good characters are kind to him, bad characters bully him. He dies in the company of Allan Woodcourt, the good young doctor, and Mr. Snagsby the law-stationer, and dying he has, for the first time, a good deal to say for himself.
"Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?"
"Never knowd nothink, sir."
"Not so much as one short prayer?"
"No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr Chadbands he wos a-prayin' wunst at Mr Sangsby's, and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin to hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but
I
couldn't make out nothink on it. Different times, there wos other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alones a-prayin, butt they all mostly sed as the t'other wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talkin to theirselves, or a-passin blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin to us.
We
never knowd nothink. I never knowd what it wos all about." (Chapter 47)

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