Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (60 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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which children figure first as little more than a nuisance (Jane Austen) and then as centers of consciousness in their own right (
Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss
). Death is always important in fiction, because it is both necessary for plot and the main surrogate for plot, a way of confronting characters with a sharply changed situation; so once children are prominent, we will expect them to die.
Does such a cavalier survey of the history of the novel tell us anything important? It is hardly surprising that the subject matter of fiction, like the universe, has a built-in tendency to expand, and it perhaps makes the popularity of fictional child deaths unsurprising; but for explanation, rather than description, of the phenomenon, we surely need to look outside literature. We explain one social phenomenon by looking at others, and the obvious place to look, in this case, will be demography. What can we find out about actual child deaths?
What would we expect to find? Not simply that a lot of children died, since what matters is the comparison between the death rate then and what preceded it. An infant death rate of 154 per thousand seems to us appalling, and in late twentieth century industrialized society it would be, but in 1840 it was not new.
21
To explain change, we must look for what changed. Nor, I suggest, will we expect to find that the death rate increased: an increase in an already familiar occurrence is not likely to bring it to our attention in a dramatically new way. More probably, the new factor will be that fewer children died: if child death can no longer be seen as inevitable, or at any rate normal, it will seem a worse blow when it happens. This would certainly be the case today: turning back to
The Bereaved Parent
, by Harriet Sarnoff Schiff,
22
a modern manual for coping with the death of a child, I am struck by the ongoing assumption that it is a situation almost impossible to accept, by the facts on how often it leads to marital break-up, by the intensity of self-reproach or reproach to one's partner that now seems almost inevitableall far greater than anything one comes across in Victorian writing. The obvious explanation is that child death is now so unusual in our society, and because unusual, that much harder to bear.
23
The argument whether the tremendous rise in population of the last two centuries was due to a fall in mortality or a rise in fertility remains unsettled: largely because these two trends are not independent of each other (a fall in the mortality of middle-aged men will increase the length of time married couples stay together and so increase the age-specific fertility of women in their late twenties and thirtieswhich we know rose in the
 
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eighteenth century). Then there is the question how far the fall in mortality is age-specific, that is, how far infant mortality (death in the first year) and child mortality (from one year to puberty) decline. There seems general agreement that there was such a decline: "there is little doubt," says McKeown, "that the reduction of mortality in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occurred predominantly in childhood."
24
But we need to be concerned not only with brute fact but with awareness: the way a child death would be perceived by those concerned, especially, of course, the parents, and the emotional impact it would have; and it is not at all certain that general mortality statistics will tell us this. What we need to know is how far the death of a middle-class child in, say, 1830 or 1860 was perceived as an unusualand therefore especially distressingevent. (I say "middle-class," because most of the accounts of child deaths we have, in fiction and in actuality, are by middle-class writers for predominantly middle-class readers. There is of course no reason to suppose that working classor aristocraticparents grieved any less, but if we are looking for extra-literary explanations for literary change, then the more accurate we can make the match the better). The figures we need must be class-specific and must compare one generation with the preceding one; for the way a set of parents viewed the death of a child would be influenced by comparison with the experience of their own parents and grandparents. Unless we can find evidence as specific as this, demographic speculation may well be useless.
The Abstract of British Historical Statistics
will not help much, both because it does not record infant mortality rates before 1838 and because it shows very little decline over the rest of the nineteenth centurywhich may well conceal a decline among the well-off and an increase among the poor. What will help is the study of Quaker demographic history by Vann and Eversley,
Friends in Life and Death
.
25
This work was undertaken not only out of loyalty to a particular group, the Quakers, but also because the Quaker habits of record keeping enable the scholar to discover far more about their vital statistics than about any other group. Of course there is no way of testing how far Quaker families were representativebut we do know they were overwhelmingly middle-class (the Society of Friends having by the late eighteenth century ceased to be a widespread popular movement among the poor).
Both adult and child mortality declined substantially among Quakers after 1750. Infant mortality rose in the early eighteenth century, peaked in
 
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the 1720s (as did most British mortality), declined sharply thereafter, and after the mid-century it declined fairly steadily. The drop in child mortality (aged one to fourteen) is fairly similar. ''There was a remarkable reduction in infant mortality in the cities in the later eighteenth century, accompanied by a fall in child mortality that was almost as impressive."
26
This reduction may well be specific either to the Quakers or to the middle classes: there is thought not to have been a fall in infant mortality among the working class until the later nineteenth century, with the arrival of widespread smallpox vaccination (inoculation before the introduction of vaccination may well have been ineffective or even harmful, and vaccination did not become widespread until after the mid-nineteenth century). Indeed, the historical demographers disagree about whether infant mortality in the whole population rose or fell in the early nineteenth century, when the sharp increase in urban slum populations must have greatly increased the chances of infection. It is agreed that the decline in mortality was mainly due to the decline in death from infectious diseases (smallpox and TB, the airborne diseases, being easily the most important); but urbanisation may have increased this among the poor while it was decreasing,, possibly due to improved nutrition, among the middle classes.
Can we draw any definite conclusion from all this? There is probably enough evidence to enable us to say, if we wish to, that declining infant and child mortality increased sensitivity to child death and thus made it more available as literary material; but there is certainly enough uncertainty about the evidence to make us skeptical of such materialist explanations, on the grounds that they are not specific enough .
But if this drives us back once more to literary explanations for literary change, on the ground that we do not know enough to find a single material cause, we ought at least to realize that isolating the question, as I have done, has a certain artificiality. For it is not just child deaths that are new in literature; it is childhood itself. We have all been children, but one would hardly realize this, reading poetry before Wordsworth, or any literature before Rousseau. And not only literature: why did society concern itself so little with children, establishing only a rudimentary educational system, showing little interest in their exploitation and suffering? Why was there no Lord Shaftesbury before the nineteenth century? My attempt to throw some light on literary change by limiting the inquiry to one topic may teach us something, but the questions expand like a Japanese paper flower in water.
 
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The Twentieth Century
Children die in twentieth century fiction tooless often, and in a very different way. In the first place, they die of meningitis: a peculiarly horrible death. Three such cases, regularly spaced through the first half of the century, show us that we are in a new, frightening age.
In Hermann Hesse's
Rosshalde
(1913), Pierre is the younger son of the painter Johann Veraguth and his estranged wife. Living on the country estate of Rosshalde, which Veraguth had bought and refurbished when they were first married, the couple lead separate lives, unwilling to separate finally because neither is willing to give up Pierre to the other. The first half of the novel depicts the careful efforts of the couple to control their hostility to each other; Pierre falls ill about half-way through and is diagnosed as having meningitisHirnhauptentzündung: the word means nothing to Veraguth when the doctor uses it to him, and he even makes bitter fun of the technical term, demanding that it be translated into an answer to the question, Will Pierre die?; and in the next to last chapter, he does. Phil Quarles in Aldous Huxley's
Point Counter Point
(1928) is the only child of the talented intellectual novelist Philip Quarles (who has some resemblance to Huxley himself) and his wife Elinor, who, frustrated at her inability to get any warm and genuine response to her love, has been considering an affair with the fascist politician Everard Webley, who is pursuing her with insistent (and, to her, rather attractive) machismo. The novel is an interweaving of several stories and a host of characters, and the illness and death of Phil (combined as it is with the grotesque murder of Webley) not only leaves Elinor "broken down" but also affects old John Bidlake, her father. Bidlake is a painter of genius, selfish and intensely sensuous, who, suffering from cancer and lost in self pity, has persuaded himself that his own fate is bound up with his grandson's, and he interprets Phil's death as his own death sentence. This is so similar to the obsession of Mr. Rarx in
The Wreck of the Golden Mary
that I find it hard not to believe that the well-read Huxley knew the story. Such borrowing is every author's right, of course, but it does throw an ironic light on Huxley's caustic remarks on Dickens's pathos, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
Thomas Mann's
Doktor Faustus
(1947) is the story of Adrian Leverkühn, the brilliant modern composer, whose pact with the devil is realized on several levels: the contracting of syphilis, a weird and terrifying conversation with his friend Schildknapp, half-identified as a devil figure,
 
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and an intermittent suggestion that the story of Adrian is that of Germany itself. Adrian's last work,
Fausti Weheklag
, Faustus's lament, is already taking shape in his head when he is distracted by a Lebenszwischenfall, an event that crops up in his life. His nephew Nepomuk Schneidewein, known as Echo, recovering from measles, comes to spend his convalescence in the house in the country where Adrian is looked after by the motherly Frau Schweigestill and her daughter. The five-year-old child (all three of these children are five or six years old) appears in chapter 44 of the novel and dies in chapter 45.
In each book, there is a larger framework into which the child's death fits. Pierre is the only one of these three children who is a major figure throughout the novel, but in his case too he has a wider function: Veraguth's decision to travel to Asia with his one close friend could lead either to a crisis in the relationship with his wife or to more indecisiveness and resentment; the matter is settled by Pierre's illness, which brings them together only in the sense that they accept the separation and the child's death with a new clarity and decisiveness. Phil's death brings no such resolution, for Huxley's slice-of-life novel is a book that avoids resolutions, and quite as important as the effect of the death on his mother (itself inconclusive) is its lack of effect on the larger world: to most of the characters it means far less than it does to the reader. Indifference is one of the recurring themes of this fitfully cynical novel. The most interesting and also the strangest in its significance for the book as a whole is certainly the death of Echo, because of the way it is made part of the Faustus story. When the narrator tries to speak a few words of comfort to Adrian, he is interrupted: spare yourself the humanist nonsense, he is told, he is taking him ("Spar dir," unterbrach er mich rauh, "die Humanistenflausen! er nimmt ihn"). Adrian regards Echo's death as part of the Devil's bargain: he had sold his soul, and this entitles the Devil to take the object of his love, so that he, Adrian, is responsible for Echo's suffering:
Welche Schuld, welche Sünde, welch ein Verbrechen daß wir ihn kommen ließen, daß ich ihn in meine Nähe ließ Du mußt wissen, Kinder sind aus zartem Stoff, sie sind gar leicht für giftige Einflüsse empfänglich.
27
What guilt, what a sin, what a crime that we caused him to come here, that I allowed him to be near me. Children are made of tender stuff, they're very susceptible to poisonous influences.

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