Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (87 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

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21. B. R. Mitchell,
Abstract of British Historical Statistics
36. Infant death rates begin in 1839: they were 151 per 1000 in that year, 154 in 1840, and they hardly changed until the end of the century.

22. Harriet Sarnoff Schiff,
The Bereaved Parent
(New York: Viking, 1977), 114115.

23. If we turn to the leading authorities on historical demography in order to establish whether child deaths became less common in the nineteenth century, we find that the obstacles to arriving at an answer are almost insurmountable. The publications of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and especially the monumental work by E. A. Wrigley and R S. Schofield,
The Population History of England, 15511871: A Reconstruction
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), offer state-of-the-art discussions of the reliability of parish registers and bills of mortality, of the possibilities of back projections and generalized inverse projections, and of the difficulties of family reconstruction, which, like most discussions of methodology, are intended for other demographers and result largely from the fact that there is not enough information to give full and reliable answers to the direct questions with which we began: what happened to infant

Page 233

mortality between 1750 and 1850 and how is that related to family size and social class? Less up-to-date works such as Thomas McKeown's
The Modern Rise of Population
(London: Edward Arnold, 1976) are more likely to provide answerswhose reliability, of course, the layman is not competent to judge.

24. McKeown,
Modern Rise of Population,
52.

25. Richard Vann and David Eversley,
Friends in Life and Death: The British and Irish Quakers in the Demographic Transition I650I900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

26. Ibid., 242.

27. Chapter 45. All the quotations from
Doktor Faustus; das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkuhn, erzahlt von einem Freunde
(Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1947) occur in chapters 44 and 45. My translations.

28. Albert Camus,
La Peste
(1947) part iv, section 3. My translations.

29. Letter to Eliza Fox, 26 April 1850:
The Letters of Mrs Gaskell
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), 112.

30. Letter to Anne Shaen, 24 April 1848, Ibid., 57.

31. To Eliza Fox, Ibid., 112113.

Chapter 5.

1. Dickens to Lewis Gaylord Clark, 28 Sept. 1841:
Letters,
Pilgrim edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-), 2:394.

2. Speech in Boston, 1 Feb. 1842: quoted in
Letters,
2:394.

3. Dickens to John Tomlin, 23 February 1841. Ibid 2:217.