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Authors: Laurence Lerner

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Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (58 page)

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Page 154
the religious dimension of the death, but this is diverted into something like an aside. It is Ethel who is given this conventional reflection:
It had been with a gentle sorrow that Ethel had expected to go and lay in her resting-place the little niece, who had been kept from the evil of the world in a manner of which she had little dreamt. Poor Flora! she must be ennobled, she thought, by having a child where hers is, when she is able to feel anything but the first grief. (Part ii, chapter 20)
The lively Ethel is probably the nearest thing to the heroine of the novel and perhaps the least appropriate character to be given this conventional reflectionnot only conventional but also wrong, since, as we have seen, Flora is not ennobled. Nothing is made of this reflection on the infant's own spiritual welfare: though she was "kept from the evil of this world," and therefore has a good chance of heaven, her presence there is no more certain than that of the enskied Mrs. May, a constantly beneficent presencethough she, after bearing eleven children, can hardly be said to have escaped the world and its evils.
Diagnosisand Nondiagnosis
And what did these fictional children die of? The answer may be even more elusive than in the case of the real children, because in addition to the embarrassment, reticence, and fear that are present in the accounts of real disease, we need to add the effect of vagueness in assisting plot development or character portrayal.
The death of Muriel Halifax is perhaps the clearest case of sacrificing medical plausibility to literary effect. That she dies not of disease but from the kick of a horse is, I suggested, for reasons of plot, but for reasons of pathos she does not die immediately, lingering on for several weeks in order to expire gradually and beautifully. "When we asked her if she felt ill, she always answered 'Oh, no! only so very tired.' Nothing more" (chapter 28). When she tries to get out of bed she finds she cannot walk and has to hold onto furniture and says, "I can't walk, I am so tired." We are not told where the horse's kick lands, but it was presumably on the abdomen, and the most likely cause of death would have been injury to the spleen or kidneys; in both cases, the pain would have been severe. "Only tired, Nothing more" is fine for the atmosphere of resignation but highly implausible medically.
 
Page 155
But of course most fictional children, like most real children, died not of injury but of disease. The disease is seldom named, and contemporary readers probably did not pause to name it; but if asked, they would surely have described it as consumptionthat is, pulmonary tuberculosis. Little Eva wastes away, spiritualized and more or less without symptoms: her most definite signs of weakness come when she is told of Prue's death, as if her disease manifests itself primarily as a way of responding to the sufferings of others. The first person to give it a name is her mother, and she does so only indirectly:
"I don't see as anything ails the child," she would say: "she runs about, and plays."
"But she has a cough."
"Cough! you don't need to tell me about a cough. I've always been subject to a cough, all my days. When I was of Eva's age they thought I was in a consumption. Night after night, Mammy used to sit up with me. O! Eva's cough is not anything." (Chapter 24).
Marie's self-pity is of course the novelist's way of directing our sympathy towards Eva. Consumption is what she was thought to have had, and the implicitindeed, almost explicitauthorial comment here is of course that Eva
has
got it. Marie's crude explicitness saves the novelist from being so indelicate as to name the disease herself.
Paul Dombey's disease is not named either, and the nearest we come to a medical account is the remark made by the apothecary to Mrs. Pipchin:
Lying down again with his eyes shut, he heard the Apothecary say, out of the room and quite a long way offor he dreamed itthat there was a want of vital power (what was that, Paul wondered!) and great constitutional weakness. That there was no immediate cause forWhat? Paul lost that word. (Chapter 14)
This is an odd passage. The intended effect is clearly that the overheard remark should convey more to us than to Paul, so that the pathos will be heightened by his inability to grasp what is happening to him. We have no difficulty in concluding that the lost word was "alarm," but that tells us little. Indeed, all the apothecary's expressions are so vague that to attribute much meaning to them would argue a medical ignorance and complacency
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