 | 39. Henry Mayhew,
London Labour and the London Poor
(1851). Text from
London's Underworld
,ed. Peter Quennell (London: Spring, 1958), 222.>
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| 40. A survey of the vast body of Dickens criticism obviously lies beyond the scope of a book on child deaths; but because I have touched on so many points that recent criticism has dealt with, I will briefly mention a few more critics whose concerns overlap strikingly with mine. Alexander Welsh, in
The City of Dickens
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), which I am inclined to think the finest critical book on Dickens, explores the ambiguous parallel between death and the domestic hearth: "the power of an angel to save implies, even while it denies, the eventuality of death." Frances Armstrong, in
Dickens and the Concept of Home
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990) quotes a number of Victorian poems and essays to illustrate the religious and psychological function of home. Her discussion of Dickens's novels is uncriticalshe treats all examples as uniformly successfulbut for this very reason it gives an excellent account of Dickens's intentions. Anny Sadrin, in
Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) explores the theme of the wrong kind of love shown in Dombey's relationship not only with Paul but with other, vicarious sons and throws a great deal of light on Dickens's treatment of the moral complexities involved in the rituals of succession. My chapter, however, is less concerned with moral concepts, since I believe that these (along with Mr. Dombey) get pushed aside when Paul takes center stage in order to die.
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| 1. Into the description of the dead Nell in
The Old Curiosity Shop,
chapter 71, I have interpolated the third sentence, which is from the description of Muriel in chapter 28 of
John Halifax, Gentleman,
by D. M. Mulock (Mrs. Craik) (London, 1856).
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| 2. Florence Montgomery,
Misunderstood
(1869), 10.
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| 3. Mary Sherwood,
The Fairchild Family
(part i, 1818; part ii, 1842; part iii, 1847). I have used the Pilgrim edition (London, n.d.) which has 542 pages (no chapter divisions). Augusta Noble dies on pp. 8284.
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| 4.
Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry, with Extracts from Her Journals and Letters,
233 (see chap. 2, note 21).
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| 5. Charlotte Brontë,
Jane Eyre
(1848) chapter 7.
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| 6. Elisabeth Jay,
The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1979). Jay's excellent discussion of evangelical deathbeds and how they relate to child deaths in fiction overlaps both with the present discussion and with my next chapter. See her chapter on "Practical Piety," especially pp. 16267.
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| 7. Thomas Traherne,
Centuries of Meditations
(posthumously published in 1908), iii, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 110.
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