Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (49 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

 
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lordship rides up to watch and sneer, and when told "your cutting off the water-course has been to me one of the greatest advantages I ever had in my life; for which, whether meant or not, allow me to thank you" (chapter 27), he loses his temper and spurs his horse violently. The blind and helpless Muriel is standing in the horse's path and is knocked down. Once again, the plot leaves nothing to chance.
After the kick, "Muriel lay day after day on her little bed in an upper chamber, or was carried softly down in the middle of the day by her father, never complaining, but never attempting to move or talk." When she sobs out that she cannot walk, the narrator (who is John Halifax's great friend) tells us, "I think in that moment [John] too saw, glittering and bare, the long-veiled Hand which, for this year past, I had seen stretched out of the immutable heavens, claiming that which was its own" [chapter 28]. This time there is to be no escape, and Muriel dies before the chapter is over, as sadly and splendidly as little Nell, with the extra touch that the climactic sentence is able to say, "She saw, now."
And what does she see? "Dim conceptions of white-robed thousands wandering in the golden Jerusalem, by the jasper sea."
2
The Book of Revelation, shorn of its paranoiac and vindictive elements, provides much of the stock imagery for glimpses of heaven, as in this sentence from
Misunderstood
, a forgotten novel by Florence Montgomery (1869). Little Humphrey, who is here dying, had been a boisterous lad, constantly leading his little brother Miles into mischief, and his boyishness is used to sentimental effect when he makes his "will":
I leave my knife with the two blades to Miles. One of the blades is broken, but the other is quite good. I've got twopence somewhere: I don't exactly know where, but give them to lame Tom in the village. (277)
Humphrey is motherless, and this has the advantage, as it had for Paul Dombey, that there is someone familiar to welcome him into heaven: "Not strange to him that throng of angels, for foremost among them all, more beautiful than any, is the figure of his mother, standing as in the picture, looking down upon him with a smile." The Victorian imagination, as we saw in chapter 2, preferred a heaven that was familiar.
 
Page 129
Better Dead?
The child deathbed is what literary historians call a toposa widely used theme, accompanied with a more or less fixed set of details. Once a topos has established itself, it recurs from author to author with remarkably little change; and literary history, if conscientiously done, can therefore grow very repetitive. This chapter will not be concerned with literary history, strictly speaking: it will not treat the novels in chronological order and will not seek to establish which authors had read which others (though there can be little doubt of the enormous influence of Dickens). My concern will rather be with the methods by which pathos is aroused and the reasons for its popularity, and with the religious and political significance of the topos. Most of the novels we shall look at were extremely popular, though not always for quite the same reasons. The stern evangelicalism of Mary Sherwood's
The Fairchild Family,
for instance, must have appealed to a rather different public from the pathos of Nell and Muriel, but it probably has more child deaths than any other novel of the century.
Part i of
The Fairchild Family was
published in 1818, followed by two further parts in the 1840s. It was an enormously popular improving story in its day; subsequently, it has enjoyed a mild notoriety as a document of stern and repressive Calvinism. The first of its child deaths comes about one-seventh of the way through, when Augusta Noble, daughter of the local landowner, is burnt to death. She "had a custom of playing with fire, and carrying candles about, though Lady Noble had often warned her of the danger."
3
Her disobedience results in her dying in agony, and the episode is headed "Fatal Effects of Disobedience to Parents." Eighty pages later little Charles Trueman dies with exemplary Christian patience. The pain about his heart is sometimes so bad that he cannot help crying out; but he asks God to give him grace to bear it with patience and to cry, "Thy will be done." He explains that he wishes to die because he knows himself to be a grievous sinner, and he tells little Henry Fairchild not to cry because he is happy now. The clergyman who is present asks Charles to explain to them why he is happy, ''that we may all here present lay fast hold of the same hope, which is able to make a dying bed so easy." Charles turns his dying eyes towards him and quotes Job: "I know that my redeemer liveth; and though after my skin worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh shall I see God" (pages 160169). This section is called "A Happy Death." Two-thirds
 
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of the way through, the children's grandmother talks of the death of her childhood friend Evelyn Vaughan. It is preceded by the sudden death of Evelyn's favorite little friend Francis Barr, aged four, who is playing in the road when a carriage comes along at full gallop, killing him on the spot. Evelyn, aged ten, saw "her little loved one cold, yet beautiful, in death, having one small hand closed upon a lily, and the other on a rose," then "uttered a wild shriek, and fell senseless to the floor." Because her constitution is "naturally delicate," she never recovers from this shock, and in the next chapter she slowly wastes away and dies. Her death is also exemplary: her last night is one "which, no doubt, she will remember through all eternity as the most blessed of her existence." God opens her heart: she was ''enabled to see and to receive Him as the beginning and end, the author and finisher of her salvation," and "from that happy moment the dying Evelyn remained in a state, not only of perfect peace, but sometimes of joy inconceivable; not one dark cloud seemed to pass over her mind (pp. 384392). Near the end little Annie Kelly, daughter of a ne'er-do-well family, steals into a concert where her neighbor is singing, is enraptured by the sacred music, but "as might be expected, the poor child, from over-mental anxiety, long watching, and sleeping in the cold, awoke next morning with all the symptoms of fever." Her kindly neighbors take her in so that she can die in good hands ("by the wise and merciful dispensation of Providence, the bad father of Annie just at this time, while from home, met with an accident"which results in his continued absence and that of his wife, so that Annie and her brother can conveniently move next door: thus "it was arranged that the work of grace should be allowed to have full liberty for operating"). She dies in Christian faith and humility, and alsowith some difficultypersuades her unregenerate brother to be baptized along with her (something their bad parents had failed to do earlier). Her actual death is theatrically perfect:
She then murmured a few words, of which some only were heard: "Homelightredemptionblest redemption there." After which her eyelids droppedone gentle sigh escaped, and the redeemed dove had passed the portals of the gates of everlasting glory. (522)
As well as these sustained episodes, there are at least three other child deaths mentioned: that of little Theodore, son of the Marchioness of Roseville in the valley of the Waldenses (this story illustrates the wickedness
 
Page 131
of Roman Catholics); and that of the Fairchilds' two cousins, Emily and Ellen (Emily, dying first, comforts Ellen by saying "do not cry, gentle sister, we shall not be parted long"). Sherwood children, we see, have a life expectancy no better than those of Dickens.
The Fairchild Family
is Calvinist in theology and rigidly conservative in politics. Its most important lesson is that the human heart is utterly wicked and that no good deed or even good thought is possible without the direct intervention of God's grace, made possible by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. This lesson is continually drummed into the children:
"You know, my dear," said Mrs Fairchild, "that our hearts are all by nature wicked?"
"Oh yes! mamma, I know that," answered Lucy. (128)
Asked for a biblical reference, Lucy eagerly quotes Mark 7:2123:
From within, out of the hearts of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within, and defile the man.
And when Evelyn is dying, she asks that Mrs. Harris should not visit her, "because she tells me what is not true":
She tells me I am good; she has always told me so, and I once believed her, and that made it worse when I found out that I was not good. (387)
There is an awkward problem attached to the doctrine of total depravity accompanied by justification by faith alone, especially when predestination is added in: if good deeds can play no part in salvation, since that depends only on grace, then the sinner chosen by God will be saved, the good man who relies on the light of nature will be damned. This can lead, by a small further step, to the antinomian heresy, the claim that the elect
ought
to commit adulteries, fornications, murder, thefts, in order to show that abstaining from these is of no avail in the eyes of God.
This worthy children's book does not, of course, intend to suggest that, but it comes alarmingly close through the character of Bessy, the lively, thoughtless, good-natured girl whose "low practical jests often produce more mischief than more decided acts of hostility." In a discussion on the

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