 | 4. Josiah Gibbins in
Records of the Gibbins Family
(1911); quoted in Davidoff and Hall, 331.
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| 5. Many of the apocryphal New Testament writings consist of sayings attributed to Jesus. The first of these is from the pseudo-Matthew, ch. 18, the second from the Gospel of Thomas, ch. 9.
|
| 6.
The English Dialect Dictionary
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), s.v. "old.".
|
| 7. Frances Hodgson Burnett,
Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin's
(London: F. Warne & Co., 1888).
|
| 8.
The Journal of Emily Shore
(London: Kegan Paul, 1891), 5.
|
| 9. Walt Whitman, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (1855),
Complete Poetry and collected Prose
(New York: Library of America), 393.
|
| 10. Garrett Stewart,
Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), chapter 2. Stewart's discussion of the death of Mrs. Gradgrind shows the interest but also, very clearly, the limitation of his approach. Here is the sentence from
Hard Times
: "The light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency went out; and even Mrs Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquietetch himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and patriarchs." Once again Stewart fastens on a grammatical oddityalso, as it happens, inserted at proof stage. He writes:
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| | Since even in the revised version we cannot at first understand "emerged" as anything but an intransitive form, we think we are engaged upon the main action of the clause, the shadowy Mrs. Gradgrind's emergence from the Valley of the Shadow in a still finite verb phrase, only to realize that the sentence must in fact parse as turning about a faintly false passive with unstated agent"having (been) emerged"dependent upon the subsequent main verb phrase, "took upon." This strained passive aura is evocatively in phase with Mrs. Gradgrind's diminished force of character yet again (and quintessentially) in death. Somewhere, unsaid, betweeen "went out" and the grammatical disembodiment of "emerged'' lies the evasive interval of death.
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| The "strained passive aura" could indeed be regarded as "evocatively in phase" with the diminution and death, but then so could any syntactical break or subversion of our grammatical expectationsathe breaks and subversions that are so common in the style of the inimitable Dickens. Once Stewart has established (or at any rate claimed) a parallel between syntactical breaks and death, it can easily become a formula to be applied mechanically, and the sophisticated critical vocabulary cannot altogether conceal this.
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| 11. The importance of religion in the commonplaces of the Victorian death-bed
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