Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (13 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 31
So end many hopes and planssadly enough, and yet not altogether bitterly. For as the little fellow was our greatest joy so is the recollection of him an enduring consolation. It is a heavy payment, but I would buy the four years of him again at the same price.
A letter of condolence from Charles Kingsley produced from Huxley what is probably the most interesting and eloquent letter he ever wrote, a passionate defense of his agnosticism (a few years later, he was to coin the term). In contrast to the Kipling consolations, Christian belief is here quite explicitly considered and rejected. The arguments are familiar enough nowadays, and we shall revert to them in the next chapter: that our passionate wish for personal immortality, so far from being an argument in favor of it, is precisely the reason we should be especially skeptical about it; that arguments based on the nature of personality as the surest thing we know and therefore, in some sense, enduring lead to "mere verbal subtleties"; and that the claim that belief in future rewards and punishments is necessary to morality on this earth is a "mischievous lie." This last conviction is directly linked to the child's death::
As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the words, "If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why the very apes know better.
There are two ways for God to disappear. As we read the Kipling correspondence, we can observe that God has slipped, silently and unnoticed, out of human consciousness. As we read Huxley's letter, we can see that God has been defiantly expelled. The motive for the latter has often been political: the radical atheism that runs from the French Revolution through Shelley, Richard Carlile, and Huxley's contemporary James Thomson claims that priests have often been the allies of kings in their oppression of humanity. Huxley's irreligion has no such explicit political content (despite his intellectual radicalism, Huxley held fairly conservative political views), but there is no doubt about the defiance: he even strikes a heroic posture
 
Page 32
that is appropriate to this radical tradition and quotes Luther's famous "Gott helfe mir, Ich kann nichts anders"; and after a half-ironic suggestion that if he had lived a couple of centuries earlier he could have fancied a devil scoffing at him, "asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind," he ends the thought very earnestly:
Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.
17
All trace of irony has now disappeared from this self-dramatizing heroism. How utterly different from Georgie Burne-Jones, responding to Josephine's death: "Mystery it all isbut we are part of it, and no trouble that happens to us is a new one in the world." She does not know whether the mystery is a Christian one: Christian belief has merged into a kind of humanist pantheism ("I wonder whether you felt behind you any breath of the sympathetic support from the great tides of feeling that your trouble has set in motion"). But she would have fed the clergyman's pieties into her grief whether she believed in them or not, not even perhaps knowing if she believed, but accepting the vocabulary as appropriate to the occasion. The smile that lingered on after the Cheshire cat had vanished may have been intended by Lewis Carroll as a joke, to show that everyone in Wonderland is mad, but it can also be seen as a brilliant metaphor for our cultural history: Christian doctrine may fade away, but the sentiment of consolation it had given rise to lingers on.
***
My period of intense religiousness, although not by design, helped me through the first year of Robby's death in a very practical manner. I began to develop a routine, to plan my day around the evening Kaddish service. The advantage of religious belief when a child dies is enormous. It is a source of comfort. If your faith offers no daily religious service, or if you do not choose to partake in one, set aside ten minutes a day, at the same time every day.
18
Why is it immediately obvious that this comes from the twentieth century? Neither Catherine Tait nor Elizabeth Prentiss, nor any other bereaved parent of a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, though they
 
Page 33
would not actually have disagreed with these statements, could have thought in this way. What is here assumed is that religion is an option among others. In the humane and thoughtful book from which this is taken,
The Bereaved Parent
, written in 1977 by Harriet Sarnoff Schiff, herself a bereaved parent, coping with a child's death is seen as a psychological problem for the survivor, needing treatment like any other problem. The dead child is purely an absence; religion is not a matter of belief but of ritual and psychological function (even the sentence about the advantages of "religious belief" does not really refer to belief but to ritual and institutional practices). It is seen as a method that will work very well for some, not at all for others, and in the secularized, tolerant world of modern America no blame attaches to the choice. Concentrating in this way on the psychological function of religioncalling it "religion," as if the choicee between the Christian or Muslim or (as here) the Jewish version was a secondary matterdoes not seem to have weakened that function at all. Religious belief has faded like the Cheshire Cat; but religious sentiment, like the smile, continues as strong as ever.
A Child Speaks
The great limitation in our study of these children, is, of course, that they do not speak to us directly: we normally hear only what the bystanders say about them. In discussing the difference between one child death and another, we are mainly dealing with differences between the narrators, who are usually the parents. This is most obviously true in the case of infant death, for the human being in the first year of life is literally
in-fans
, unable to speak. But even in the case of the Tait children, we only have access to their consciousness through what Mrs. Tait tells us they said; will there not therefore be a special interest in those records that are left by the child? Of course, there are a host of reasons for treating these with skepticism: the children who write them will not be typical, will not be young, obviously will not be dead, and we must take it on trust that adults have not tampered with the writing.
Emily Shore was certainly an exceptional child. She kept a journal from the age of eleven until she died of consumption in 1839, at the age of nineteen. The extracts published by her sisters in 1891 run to 350 pages, and she had also written romantic novels, histories of Greece and Rome, and a great deal of natural history. The journal is rich in botanizing observations,

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