Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (12 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 28
Jay clearly leans towards the first view, that the modern self has disintegrated and that a fragmentary narrative is therefore a sign of proto-modernism. I, on the other hand, regard literary revolutions as less fundamental than that. There has always been a fragmentary quality to experience,, and random jottings have always been a natural way of recording experience. I see no reason to believe that if Oliphant had published her
Autobiography
she would have left her jottings unarranged. I do not see her as anticipating modernism; I see her as making random jottings and not arranging them, in a way that modernism has subsequently legitimated.
Josephine & Noel
Josephine Kipling, eldest child of Rudyard and his wife Caroline, died in New York on Sunday 6 March 1899, at the age of six. The death came just as her father was recovering from an attack of pneumonia that had almost killed him, and as a result it achieved world-wide publicity. Kipling was perhaps the most popular living writer, and when it was known that he was dangerously ill in a New York hotel, letters and telegrams of concern poured in from all over the English-speaking world. The unfortunate doctors and the even more unfortunate wife, as if fending off the reporterss were not difficult enough, were bombarded with exhortations to put raw onion poultice on his chest and the bottom of his feet, to "use oxygen by the bowel" and to inject 1 per cent common salt solution "and save husband's life." The news that he was recovering was accompanied by the news that his daughter had died (this was known to the world before it was told to Kipling himself); consequently, the flood of letters grew even greater, congratulations on recovery followed by sympathy at the loss. The masters and boys of St. Edmund's School, Canterbury, begged respectfully "to be allowed to express to Mr. Rudyard Kipling our thankful pleasure at his recovery from recent severe illness, and our hope that he may be spared to write many more books which may be, like those of the past, the delight of boys both of larger and smaller growth. At the same time, we write to offer our deep sympathy to Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Kipling in the great loss which has come upon them." The military attaché at the British Embassy in Washington sent "a soldier's heartfelt congratulations on your stubborn gallant fight, and on your truly British victorythe most popular, I believe, since Waterloo." Henry James wrote two emotional, very Jamesian and illegible letters, one congratulating the ''dear demonic indestructible
 
Page 29
youth" on the fact that he had "visited the mountains of the moon and come back on a taut wire, in the cold light of that satellite and with every opera-glass on earth fixed on youwith no balancing pole but your inimitable genius," followed next day, when he heard about Josephine, by a ruefull letter to Caroline wishing that he could recall the first::
Please believe in the abounding sympathy with which I think of you. Dear little vanished delightful Josephine and dear little surrendered sacrificed soul! Forgive this incoherent expressionI am only thinking of her being worsted in the battle, and of the so happy form in which I saw her last winter at Rottingdean. But how can I even seem to allude to what you feel? Magnificent have you both been and still more will have to be now. But I believe in you up to the hilt. The best and kindest day to my sense will be when you are at peace together again in this corner of the land. Don't read my other letterread this. More than ever constantly and tenderly yours, Henry James.
In most of the letters, the balance tilts more to congratulation than to consolationunderstandably enough from those who read the father and did not know the daughter. So delight in his recovery tends to be followed by a mere concessive clause, "though the shadow of the dear little lost one is over it." (Josephine is described as "little" in letter after letter, a verbal detail I shall revert to).
Josephine attained her sudden world-wide fame by accident. Her death would not have attracted anywhere near so much attention if it had not been for the coincidence of her father's narrow escape. Yet though this made her, briefly, the most celebrated dead child in the world, the letters that matter are clearly those that would have been written anyway, such as the note from Kipling's neighbor in Rottingdean ("My little Molly and your sweet little maid were such friends and Molly now talks so constantly of her that we cannot but feel very deeply ourselves the loss"), and above all those from Kipling's mother and his aunt Georgiana, wife of Edward Burne-Jones.
Here is Alice Kipling to her sister:
My darling Georgie,
Deeper and deeper yet. There has come a telegram from New Yorktelling us that little Josephine died this morning at 6.20. The apple of her father's eyethe delight of his heart! How will he bear it? and poor Carrie
 
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already worn with sorrow and crushing anxiety. In the letter which I asked Margaret to send on to youCarrie makes no mention of Josephine being
ill
except for whooping coughbut from the moment I knew the poor child had pneumonia I have been afraid. The dear-bright-pretty childsix little happy yearsand now a memory only!
Georgie wrote an affectionate, emotional letter to Carrie:
There is not a heart untouched with sympathy for you I am sure. Here where she has lived, the news has sent a chill through everyone. Many refused to believe it, and some came almost trembling to ask if it could be true. Oh my poor darlings, this great distance makes it feel as if I was talking to the stars.
What is striking in all this material, especially if we compare it to the Tait or Butler deaths, is the disappearance of God. There is as much tenderness, as much grief and as much need for consolation, but there are no reassurances that she has joined her heavenly Father or that those who mourn for her will later be reunited with her, and there is no hint that she is better dead. There is, to be sure, one letter from a clergyman which refers to "the profound faith of Mr Kipling," but even this is almost withdrawn again: "I know too well the profound faith of Mr Kipling and his unfaltering courage to doubt as to his power to accept this bereavement." If the faith is profound, we might comment, then there is no need for courage. The letter continues: "A new wonder will arise in his soul, and new sweetness and depth in his poetry. He will reveal some new, clear, indubitable vision upon which many mourners for children will look and be comforted.'' This seems carefully balanced on the edge of making credal statements: "wonder," "sweetness," "depth," "vision" are all terms that could, but need not, imply Christian belief and, perhaps, rather carefully avoid doing so. I know nothing about that clergyman, Charles Orris Day, but without questioning the genuineness of his belief we can see his letter as illustrating the tendency of Christian consolation to become secularized. When he writes, "Alas! that this sweet flower is transplanted; though growing eternally more lovely somewhere, I must believe," we can wonder if there is an element of skepticism in the last three wordswhich could mean, "As a clergyman I am not allowed to say otherwise."
16
Almost forty years earlier, T H. Huxley's eldest son Noel died of scarlet fever, shortly before he turned four. Huxley took consolation for his grief in the memory of the life:

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