Read Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century Online

Authors: Laurence Lerner

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

Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (20 page)

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Page 49
oppressed, not by my feelings, but by the riddles, which the Thought so easily proposes, and solvesnever! A Parentin the strict and exclusive sense a
Parent
-! to me it is a
fable
wholly without meaning except in the
moral
which it suggests.
6
It is not easy to follow this train of thought; the very confusion might leave us wondering whether he suffered acutely and pushed the suffering aside in an attempt to philsophize about it, or whether personal grief was soon, and easily, swallowed up into the contorted reflections on religious belief and Pascal's rejection of Pyrrhonism and dogmatism into which the letter then drifts, leading to the observation that "my Baby has not lived in vain." The reason for that claim is impressive (though hardly Christian): the belief that however short the life it has an intrinsic value: "this life has been to him what it is to all of us, education and development." And Coleridge, we can observe, has had the grace to spell "Parent'' with a capital-though this could easily be undercut by observing how many other nouns the letter capitalizes, and remembering that he was busy learning German.
Does all this change the way we read Coleridge's child epitaphs? To resituate a poem in the biographical situation from which it has emerged is always illuminating, but should not lead us to lock it up there, as if it had never emerged. How we read poems depends not just on the discovering of evidence, but on our practice as readers, on whether we treat a poem on the death of an infant as a biographical document or as part of the practice of consolation in that (or any) social world.
The Future (and the Past) of an Illusion
Christian belief in an afterlife offers heaven as reward for the blest and hell as punishment for the reprobate. Philippe Ariès claims that in the later Middle Ages the emphasis fell on Hell and by the nineteenth century had shifted to Heaven, and, in an argument having some resemblance to Lawrence Stone's view, he attributes this to the growth of "affectivity," "a new type of family relationship in which affection outweighed every consideration of self-interest, law or propriety." As a result, a new type of paradise was created, "which is not so much the heavenly home as the earthly home saved from the menace of time."
7
This is the background to Victorian attitudes to death in general, and child death in particular.
Like any system of rewards and punishments, the Christian afterlife can be seen as serving a moral and psychological function in this life. Belief
 
Page 50
in hell, thundered from a thousand pulpits, has been used to cow not only thieves and whoremongers but also those who question constituted authority; belief in heaven has offered comfort against fear and grieffear of one's own annihilation, grief for the loss of loved ones. There is of course an asymmetry in the system: the function of hell is moral, whereas that of heaven is consolatory. Because being too confident of one's own salvation is pride, it is mainly for others that we can indulge in confident dreams of heaven: religion as consolation tells us that the lost one is now in a happier state, and this is especially necessary if the lost one is a child. A life lived out to term can be regarded as blessed simply by seeing it as a whole and accepting that the end came when it had to, but a life cut off before it had really begun offers no such possibility of consolation. The only reassurance is that the child is now an angel.
And what would heaven be like? Faith in a future life must naturally lead to speculation on its nature. The Victorians discussed this endlessly, and sometimes with surprising confidence. In a book edited by the Bishop of Ripon in 1866, called
Recognition of Friends in Heaven
, the authors all claim that the experience of heaven will be recognizable to our present selves. Most of the essays begin with a confident declaration of belief in an afterlife. "The instant horror with which the soul recoils from the thought of annihilation, its ardent longing after a perpetuity of existence are so many facts on which to found a very plausible conjecture that the soul of man shall live when the body is no more."
8
They then go on to make equally confident assertions about what the afterlife will be like. "The heart cannot admit for a moment," the Preface asserts, ''that we shall never see or know them [our loved ones] again." "Since man is a social being," writes the Rev. Norman Macleod, "so in Heaven there will be society:
It is unnecessary to prove what is assumed as so evidently true, and which I cannot really understand how anyone should doubt, and that is the recognition of our Christian friends in Heaven. What! shall memory be obliterated, and shall we forget our own past histories? (46)
And if we ask what alleviates the pain that we and our dying friends (including of course our children) experience when bidding farewell, the answer is, "the assurance that we shall very soon follow them, and in a short time shall meet again to part no more for ever."
Two points are particularly striking in these essays. The first is the assurance with which the authors know what the afterlife will be like. It
 
Page 51
holds no mysteries, and the Rev. W. S. Thomson even knows the reasons why souls in bliss do not wish to rejoin us:
It is not that they become forgetful of their friends upon the earthit is not because their affection for them cools or abates,it is not because they become indifferent as to their happiness or their welfare. No, very far from it; but it is because they can now measure time as they never measured it before, and see it to be a point not worth estimating, it is because, when they leave us, they know we are left in good hands. (58)
To know not only what happens in heaven but also why, to offer statements on the motives of the souls in bliss, removes all element of mystery from the kingdom of God. At times this confident knowledge becomes comic. As we listen to those we meet in heaven, writes the Rev. A. M. Aslane, "we may from their conversation discover who they are, [and] from whence they came into this world"just as when a British soldier in India, hearing a fellow soldier remark, "That is a Glendore thaw," realized that he was a fellow Scot and even a fellow parishioner. As well as retaining our local dialect, we shall also retain the conventions of making new acquaintances, and embarrassment will be avoided because Jesus Christ will be there to perform the necessary introductions:
Then can I suppose this friendship renewed too by introductions. Go back to the time when Jesus, with his three disciples, went up into Mount Tabor, where Jesus was transfigured: the disciples did not know Elijah and Moses, for they had never seen them before, and how then did they come to know the two worthies of a bygone age? I suppose the Saviour introduced the disciples to them, and if the Saviour condescended to introduce some of His people to others on Mount Tabor, do you not think that He will condescend on Mount Zion to do the same thing, or employ some of His angels, at least, to do it. (167)
Second is the frankness with which the belief is based on wishful thinkingnot only the general belief in immortality but also the details of its nature, including recognition and retaining of identity.
There is something that instinctively urges us to hope that in heaven we may see and know each other again; and as it cannot but be a source of the highest and most refined gratification for friends on earth to meet as friends in heaven,
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