Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (81 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

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13. Rev. W. S. Thomson, in
Recognition of Friends in Heaven,
77.
14. Sigmund Freud,
The Future of an Illusion
(1928), ch. 6 (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 51.
15. It is always interesting to find the Victorians anticipating modern views; so I here observe that Freud's argument can be found in W. R. Greg's contribution to the "Modern Symposium," in the journal
The Nineteenth Century
in 1877. He informs us that he has read most of the pleadings in favor of the doctrine of the Future State, "but these pleadings, for the most part, sound to anxious ears little else than the passionate outcries of souls that cannot endure to part with hopes on which they have been nurtured and which are intertwined with their tenderest affections." (
The Nineteenth Century
2: 508).
16. C. S. Lewis,
A Grief Observed
(1961): Bantam edition (New York: 1976), 28.
17. Louis de Blois (15061565),
The Spiritual Mirror.
Quoted in Patrick Grant,
A Dazzling Darkness: An Anthology of Western Mysticism
(London: Collins, 1985), 340.
18. T. S. Eliot, East Coker, section 3,
Collected Poems
(London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 201.
19. Angela of Foligno (ca. 12481309),
The Divine Consolation
III, 7, in Grant,
A Dazzling Darkness,
229.
 
Page 226
20. Henry Vaughan, "The Night,"
Silex Scintillans
(1655), part ii.
21.
Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry, with extracts from her journal and letters
(1847) (London: Library of the Society of Friends), 237.
22.
The Young People's Treasury and Little Gleaner
18, n.s. (1896): 107.
23. "Theodora," in
The Recognition of Friends in Heaven,
71.
24.
The George Eliot Letters,
ed. Gordon S. Haight, 7 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 4:183.
25.
Our Little Ones in Heaven, with an Introduction by the Late Rev. Henry Robbins, MA
(London: Sampson Low, Son & Co., 1858), 212216.
26. "The Mother's Sacrifice," by Lydia Sigourney. (Much reprinted, e.g., in
Our Little Ones in Heaven
, 45). This is by no means Sigourney's only poem on a dead child. In fact there are so many that her biographer Gordon Haight claims that having devised a formula for such poems she used it "over and over again with a monotonous similarity of metaphor." The "formula" involves a conclusion in which the spirit of the dead child flies heavenward to "seek [its] place Amid yon cherub train." Since she lost her first three children at birth, we can assume that the monotony of the formula is due to lack of talent not lack of feeling. See Gordon S. Haight,
Mrs Sigourney
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930).
27. Josephine Butler,
Autobiographical Memoir
, 5354.
28. Shelley, "To William Shelley" (1819).
Poetical Works
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), 581. Other Shelley poems taken from the same edition.
29. Walt Whitman,
Song of Myself
(1855), #6,
Complete Poetry and Collected Prose
(New York: Library of America, 1982), 194.
30. Richard Holmes,
Coleridge: Early Visions
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1989), 224.
31. Wordsworth, "The Childless Father" (1800):
Poetical Works.
ed. Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19401959), vol. 2. All other Wordsworth poems taken from this edition.

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