Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (48 page)

Read Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century Online

Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
3.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 124
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The interview concludes with an account of the effect of the child's death on the mother:
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
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
 
Page 125
presence of the child when alive: this seems to invest the uplifting poems of Hemans and Sigourney with a peculiar unreality.
But moral influence? That she did not feel able to work as a prostitute when her child was alive is understandable, even admirable, but it killed the child. After his narrative, Mayhew adds a paragraph of commentary whose severity may surprise us:
Although this woman did not look upon the death of her child as a crime committed by herself, it was in reality none the less her doing: she shunned the workhouse, which might have done something for her, and saved the life, at all events, of her child.
He thought she should have gone to the workhouse, though he can understand why, like Betty Higden, she wouldn't. Mayhew was too conventionalor too reluctant to offend his readersto suggest that she should have become a prostitute, but that would probably have saved the child's life. There is clearly a sense in which he was right to hold her responsible for the death; and it may well be an awareness of this that lies behind the intense and painful bitterness with which she regards her "rise" in the world.
Dickens's novels are by far the most celebrated examples of child pathos; but the subject is everywhere in nineteenth century fiction, and I turn now to the others.
40
 
Page 126
4
Heaven Claims Its Own:
Child Deaths in Nineteenth Century Fiction
and After
Muriel
She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. One could almost fancy the little maid had just been said "goodnight" to, and left to dream the childish dreams on her nursery pillow, where the small head rested so peacefully. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life.
The pathetic description of little Nell on her death bed not only stirred the hearts of thousands of readers, it activated the pens of a good number of imitative novelistsas can be seen from the quotation above, which blends the description of Nell with that of little Muriel Halifax, in Dinah Mulock's
John Halifax Gentleman
,
1
into a seamless web of cliché. Though the death of Muriel was not as sensationally successful as that of Nell, it must have drawn plenty of early Victorian tears and illustrates most of the regular devices for eliciting pathos.
Muriel is born blind, so from the outset she is an object of pity: she is her father's first and favorite child, bears her affliction without complaint, and is a cheerful and loving daughter. The first hint of her death comes in chapter 25:
 
Page 127
"Is Muriel anxious to be grown up? Is she not satisfied with being my little daughter always?" "Always."
Her father drew her to him, and kissed her soft, shut, blind eyes.
The difficulty of accepting that children grow up and leave the nest is treated in later chapters, when the sons fall in love and quarrel, and the point implied in this exchange is, of course, that dying young is the only way to remain a child.
In order to lose no opportunity for pathos, Muriel is in effect given two deaths: first she catches smallpox, then is kicked by a horse. She recovers from the first and dies of the second, but I have little doubt that contemporary readers, as soon as she caught smallpox, expected her to die. The novelist who puts her trust in careful plotting does not let anything happen by accident; it would not be enough to tell us that smallpox broke out in the village and Muriel caught it, since that would be accident. Her exposure to the disease must in some sense be self-caused, and this point is made doubly. First, John Halifax allows the families of his workmen to come to his house when they are evicted by the wicked aristocratic landlord, and one woman brings her sick child, who (she knows but does not say) has smallpox, thus repaying the kindness by bringing infection into the Halifax household; and then, to underline self-causation even more, Muriel, very curious about death, steals into the room where the dead child is lying and touches the body. From the first moment when the father is told that she has sickened ("it seemed to him almost like the stroke of death. 'Oh, my God! not her! Any but her!'"), all seems set up for a deathbed scene, with tears from the family and the reader alike. But only half a page later we learn that God "brought us safely through our time of anguish: He left us every one of our little ones."
Why is Muriel saved? "I trust in God," says her father when she sickens. "This trouble came upon us while we were doing right; let us do right still, and we need not fear." In a Christian context, child death obviously raises the question of trust in God's love, and relying on that trust to bring the child through must, since children do dieand frequentlyresult in naiveté or irony. In this novel the trust appears to be rewarded, and the shrewd reader might then guess that Muriel is, after all, going to die.
Her death is caused by Lord Luxmore's horse. He is the wicked landlord who plagues the Halifax family and who tries to ruin John by divertingg the stream that runs his mill; when John Halifax installs a steam engine his

Other books

The Cup of the World by John Dickinson
Last Call Lounge by Stuart Spears
Hook, Line, and Mated by Jenika Snow
Turn Up the Heat by Susan Conant, Jessica Conant-Park
The Monster Story-Teller by Jacqueline Wilson
The Secret Mistress by Mary Balogh
Memo: Marry Me? by Jennie Adams