Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (35 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

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BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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"Because it's not polite": besides Paul's bluntness, this injunction is exposed in all its superficiality and evasiveness: even Mrs. Pipchin knows thisthat is why she is snappish. When she tries to tell him a moral tale, it does not work:
"Never you mind, sir," retorted Mrs Pipchin. "Remember the story of the little boy who was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions."
"If the bull was mad," said Paul, "how did he know the boy had asked questions? Nobody can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I don't believe that story." (Chapter 8)
Just as Young Macduff turns his mother's cynicism back at her, so Paul inspects Mrs. Pipchin's story and gives it back as a dud. Simply by calling him "sir," as, earlier, "young gentleman," she shows that she is going to lose; if Paul really were a young gentleman he would accept arguments like "it's not polite," but he isn't: he is a child.
 
Page 89
Old-fashioned Children
When Paul is serving the function of wise child, he is described as "old- fashioned" with such regularity that the word could be called a stock epithet or a label: in the first half of chapter 14 he is called "old-fashioned" by Mrs. Blimber, Miss Blimber, the apothecary, and the clock-maker, and the boys of the school "all agreed that Dombey was old-fashioned." The meaning (still, we are told, current in Scotland) is no. 3 in the
OED
: "having the ways of a grown-up person,'' or "precocious, knowing": this meaning is not well documented in the
OED
itself, but the English Dialect Dictionary gives some excellent examples (some under the variant form "old-farrand"), such as "a three-year old child whom he saw smoking as awd-farrantly as a man of threescore" (it is easy to imagine little Paul Dombey smoking a pipe) oreven closer to Paul"she's an aud-farrand little lassie! She's like a lahtle grandmother."
6
"Old" here is, of course, the opposite not of new but of young; and sometimes when Paul is functioning as
puer senex
he is referred to simply as "old": "those old, old moods of his," or "Heaven and Earth, how old his face was as he turned it up again towards his father's." Of course, this is not the
puer senex
of hagiography, in which the fact of childhood is impatiently brushed aside, but the
puer senex
of folktale, in which we are aware of the grotesqueness.
There are other strangely grown-up children in Victorian fiction, such as Paulina Home in
Villette
, who is not associated with death, but who has her own frailtyan emotional vulnerability, covered over by stiffly formal and self-defensive manners. Like Paul she is compared to a grown-up, even to an old woman, and has something not altogether human about her: "whenever, opening a room door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pygmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted" (chapter 2). Paulina is not, however, referred to as "old-fashioned": the only other explicitly old-fashioned child I have come across in Victorian fiction is in
Sara Crewe, or What happened at Miss Minchin's
, a story by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Sara is "a queer little child, with old-fashioned ways and strong feelings." She is left at Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies by a father who then loses his money and dies; Miss Minchin tells her she must now work for her keep and asks, "Don't you intend to thank me for my kindness?" to which Sara replies "in a strange unchildish voice, 'You are not kind."' The story then describes Sara's desolate
 
Page 90
life, her ill-treatment by Miss Minchin, and her unpopularity with the other pupils: "Sara, with her elfish cleverness and her odd habit of fixing her eyes upon them and staring them out of countenance, was too much for them." Her one companion is her doll, Emily, until she makes friends with a slow-witted girl who is sent difficult books by her intellectual father and expected to read them; Sara reads the books and describes them to her friend, who is delighted and tells her that she makes the French revolution "seem like a story." With what today would seem like narratological sophistication, Sara replies: "They are all stories. Everything is a storyeverything in the world. You are a storyI am a storyMiss Minchin is a story."
7
Miss Minchin is disconcerted when she finds "the odd unchildish eyes fixed upon her with something like a proud smile in them." Once she boxes Sara's ears for laughing and asks what she was laughing at. "I was thinking," Sara explains. Ordered to apologize, she replies, "I will beg your pardon for laughing if it was rude, but I won't beg your pardon for thinking." The other girls are fascinated: "it always interested them when Miss Minchin flew at Sara, because Sara always said something queer, and never seemed in the least frightened.''
Regrettably, Sara grows less interesting as the story proceeds and she grows good, giving her buns to a beggar girl after an exemplary moral struggle; and less interesting still when she meets the man who had ruined her father and is presented with an implausible happy ending. But for the first part of the book she is very like Paul.
Paul is called "old-fashioned" and "old," Sara "unchildish," and these expressions mean much the same.
Unchildish
, of course, really means
childish
: unlike other children, to be sure, but with the vivid imagination and quirky wisdom that we do not expect in adults. When young, Sara fits, and enriches, the meaning of "old-fashioned" and would be at home in the Dickens world.
What the Waves Were Saying
Paul too loses his old-fashionedness, not through a happy ending but through death (which is presented as strenuously happy). There is a touch of pathos to the old-fashioned child, but in death Paul becomes pathos and nothing else. He dies in one of the great cultural set pieces of Victorian England, the chapter entitled "What the Waves Were Always Saying." As a child
 
Page 91
on Brighton beach, he had listened continually to the waves. That is not in itself unusual for a child: before Paul was (in either sense) conceived, Emily Shore was taken to the seaside at the age of twelve and found it fascinating:
None of us have ever seen the sea before, and therefore I at least was much delighted with it. It is a great pleasure to me to sit on the sands and watch the boats. I think it is also extremely amusing to watch a wave rolling on, gradually increasing in bulk, and at last breaking into foam.
8
We could not, even in this slightly archaic sense, use the word "amusing" to describe Paul's obsession with the waves; he uses them simply as a trigger for his morbid fantasy: "'I want to know what it says,' he answered, looking steadily in her face. 'The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?"' (chapter 8). Whereas Emily stared intently at the wave that so interested her, Paul stares at his sister, thinking only of his question. And in the end, of course, he learns the answer.
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.
9
Whitman's poem is almost contemporary with
Dombey and Son,
and its effect is both like and unlike Paul's death. Suppose we inserted those repetitions into Dickens's prose: "What were the wild waves saying? Death, death, death, death, death." We could hardly resist the temptation to read them with a weary sigh (Yes, yes, I
see
), not with the soothing restfulness they carry in the poem. Only in a lyric poem, where we are offered a single consciousness unsullied by other voices, can the lulling rhythm produce this kind of auto-hypnosis, this Romantic death wish. In the novel there are other consciousnesses besides Paul, and the reader stands outside looking on: this eliminates the hypnosis and enables the pathos. Pity is only possible when we are detached from the pathetic object.

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