Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (79 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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say anything, that I should simply pass on the texts to my readers without comment. A brief example of what this would have produced can be seen in the bibliographical note, and it is now clear to me that these quotations gain in interest from the discussion surrounding them. That is, at any rate, one justification for my having gone ahead and written a book instead of just compiling an anthology. I hope the book will be perceived as a sounding box in which the voices of the bereaved and the memory of the dead still resonate.
 
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Notes
Bibliography
Index
 
Page 223
Notes
Quotations from novels are identified by chapter rather than page, since different readers are likely to have different editions of these; date of original publication is given in the bibliography.
Chapter 1
1.
Times,
7 Nov. 1817 (all future newspaper references are to 1817 unless otherwise stated).
2. "An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte" (1817) in
Shelley's Prose; or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy,
ed. David Lee Clark. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), 165.
3. Lord Shaftesbury to the House of Commons, 7 June 1842: Parliamentary Debates 3rd Series LXIII, 13211352. (Text taken from Robert A. Rosenbaum,
Earnest Victorians
(New York: Hawthorn Books, 1961).>
4. Friedrich Engels,
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
(German edition 1845; English translation 1886; reprint, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952), 289291.
5. John Skinner's Journal of a Somerset Rector covers the years 18031834; text taken from Robert Cecil,
The Masks of Death
(Lewes: Book Guild, 1991), 113.
6. Thomas Carlyle,
Chartism
(1839), chapter 1. In
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,
Edinburgh Edition (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), 112.
7. All quotations in this section are from the
Memoir of Catherine and Craufurd Tait,
ed. William Benham (London: Macmillan, 1879). Mrs Tait's narrative is on pages 159243.
8. Rev. G. L. Prentiss, D.D.,
The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1883), 133, 137.
9. William Canton,
The Invisible Playmate: A Story of the Unseen
(1894),
WV Her Book
(1896),
In Memory of WV
(1901). Quotations from one-volume Everyman edition (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1911).
10. Paul Ricoeur,
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences,
ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. part ii.
 
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11. Both quotations from
Josephine Butler, An Autobiographical Memoir
(Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1909), 49, 51.
12. Josephine Butler,
Recollections of George Butler
(Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1892), 157.
13. Josephine Butler to her son Stanley; quoted in Margaret Forster,
Significant Sisters
(London: Seeker & Warburg, 1984), 176.
14. Margaret Oliphant,
Autobiography
(1899), ed. by Elisabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
15. This has of course become one of the most controversial issues in recent literary theory, under the influence of Derrida in philosophy and Foucault and Hayden White in the writing of history, as well as innumerable literary theorists. A fierce but intelligent and well-documented attack on the decontructionist insistence that there is no escape from textuality can be found in J. G. Merquior,
From Prague to Paris
(London: Verso, 1986). Entering into this theoretical issue would clearly be beyond the scope of this book, but it is natural, even necessary, nowadays to ask oneself where one stands. The naive realist belief, that access to the thoughts and feelings of the past is unproblematic, is everywhere in retreat, but it is important not to replace it by an equally naive post-structuralism, claiming that such access is impossible and that all we can understand is our own way of constructing it. "The remedy for bad history," asserts Melchior, "is more and better historya far cry from wholesale distrust." If there is no absolute signified, this does not mean that there is no signified at all or that language is ultimately about itself.
16. The Kipling papers are in the University of Sussex Library. The passages quoted are in boxes 19/2, 19/3, and 19/4.
17. Leonard Huxley,
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900), 1:213220.
18. Harriet Sarnoff Schiff,
The Bereaved Parent
(New York: Viking, 1977), 114115.
19.
The Journal of Emily Shore
(London: Kegan Paul, 1891). The quotations occur on 280, 319, and 352.
20. See the introduction to the bibliography for references to other child deaths.
21.
Times,
6 Nov. 1817.
22. Florence Nightingale,
Notes on Nursing
(London: D. Appleton & Co., 1860). Quotations occur on 26 and 10.

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