by the great Blue Books. The two women are tempted by, and the man defiantly expresses, the view that it is better deadand not for any otherworldly reason. There is nothing radical about pathos; but at moments like this, we can almost accept the claim that Dickens was a radical.
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The world of the Blue Books: let us conclude with a child who was one of their statistics: a real child, who was better dead.
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Henry Mayhew's interviews with the London underworld (at almost exactly the same time as Bleak House was being written) include one very moving encounter with a prostitute who had lost a child. Deserted by her seducer and left to look after the child, she did "machine-work" until bad times left her unemployed, and then
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| | She saw her child dying by inches before her face, and this girl, with tears in her eyes assured me she thanked God for it. "I swear," she added, "I starved myself to nourish it, until I was nothing but skin and bone, and little enough of that; I knew, from the first, the child must die, if things didn't improve, and I felt they wouldn't. When I looked at my little darling I knew well enough he was doomed, but he was not destined to drag on a weary existence as I was, and I was glad of it.
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Gone are the commonplaces of pious poetry, that the child taken from the temptations of this world into the presence of God is better off as a result: this child is rescued not from sin but from hunger.
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The interview concludes with an account of the effect of the child's death on the mother:
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| | It may seem strange to you, but while my boy lived, I couldn't go into the streets to save his life or my ownI couldn't do it. If there had been a foundling hospital, I mean as I heard there is in foreign parts, I would have placed him there, and worked somehow, but there wasn't, and a crying shame it is too. Well, he died at last, and it was all over. I was half mad and three parts drunk after the parish burying, and I went into the streets at last; I rose in the world(here she smiled sarcastically)and I've lived in this house for years, but I swear to God I haven't had a moment's happiness since the child died, except when I've been dead drunk or maudlin." 39
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It was not the effect of the child's death, and the thought of being watched over by an angel, that exerted a moral influence on this woman, but the literal
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