Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (6 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 12
around the Princess the poor were dying every day in their thousands, unchronicled and (except by their unchronicled families) unremembered.
Sir, it is not possible for any man, whatever be his station, if he have but a heart within his bosom, to read the details of this awful document without a combined feeling of shame, terror, and indignation.
The awful document is the report of the Commission on the Employment of Children in Mines and Factories of 1842, perhaps the most horrifying of the great series of government reports on the Condition of England that appeared in the 1840s; and the remark was made by Lord Shaftesbury, speaking in Parliament, and quoting descriptions of the conditions, almost unimaginable to us today, in which women and children worked in the mines.
They carry coal on their backs on unrailed roads, with burdens varying from 3/4 cwt to 3 cwt,a cruel slaving, revolting to humanity. I found a little girl, only six years old, carrying 1/2 a cwt, and making regularly fourteen long journeys a day. With a burden varying from 1 cwt to 1 1/2 cwt, the height ascended and the distance along the roads, added together, exceeded in each journey, the height of St Paul's Cathedral. And it not unfrequently happens that the tugs break, and the load falls upon those females who are following, who are struck off the ladders into the depths below.
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The denunciation of the conditions of labor by the conservative evangelical Shaftesbury had much in common with that of the radical and atheist Friedrich Engels. In
The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844
> he describes suffering and death through an accumulation of factual detail: the final chapter, on the workings of the New Poor Law of 1834, describes the death of a man dismissed from the workhouse, of a patient "tied fast with cords passed over the covering and under the bedstead, to save the nurses the trouble of sitting up at night," and concludes:
As in life, so in death. The poor are dumped into the earth like infected cattle. The paupers are thrown into a ditch fourteen feet deep; a curate rattles through the Litany at the top of his speed; the ditch is loosely covered in, to be re-opened the next Wednesday, and filled with corpses as long as one more can be forced in.
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The Reverend John Skinner, writing in the first third of the nineteenth century, did not share the distress of Shaftesbury or the indignation of Engels:
But happy is it that people in the lower ranks of life are not possesed of the same sensibility as their superiors. If enjoyment be less, privation is in proportion.
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Since this book does not deal with the very poor, I must insert a sharp dismissal of this complacency. Skinner applies to class the same comfortable point that Lawrence Stone makes about chronology. In his influential
Family, Sex and Marriage in England I500I800
, Stone claims that strong, affective family bonds date only from the eighteenth century; before that, he believes, most people found it very difficult to establish close emotional ties to any other person.
The necessary reply to both Skinner and Stone is that ''the grief which does not speak Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break." We do not possess, from the poor in the nineteenth century, or from almost anyone in earlier times, much in the way of detailed accounts of intimate affectionn or of grief, the sort of account that moves us so profoundly and tells us how deeply Catherine Tait and Josephine Butler loved and mourned their children, but this does not entitle us to deny the feelings. The girls who fell off the ladder into the depths below were falling into oblivion as well as to their death; the poor who were dumped into the earth like infected cattle left no memorial and no name behind them (even Engels is only able to put a name to one of his examples). We can pay them the passing tribute of a sigh, and offer them the respect of believing that their grief was as great as that of the articulate whose records we possess; but we cannot explore what we have no evidence of.
If the contrast between rich and poor is no longer so extreme in our society, it is still with us on a world scale. The typical child death in our time is the photograph of the victim of famine in Africaemaciated, disturbing and anonymous. Such children are thrust in front of us, on television and in newspapers, because it is believed we can do something to help. But the impact of the image is not merely practical; it also serves to arouse our unease and even our guiltwhat have we done to deserve our freedom from such distress? In 1839 Thomas Carlyle made his famous plea for politicians to attend to the Condition-of-England question: "the condition
 
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of the great body of people in a country is the condition of the country itself."
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Today it is the people in other and poorer countries of whose condition we need to be reminded. In both cases, the dying child who is thrust into our attention is not an individual. Such children are important because there are so many of them, "dying thus around us every day," wrote Dickens. In both cases the child is voicelessmore so in the case of today's third world child, for if she, or her parents, could speak to us, we would not understand. And in both cases the call on us to act may succeed in doing good but may also produce a kind of hopelessness: the comfortable reader, trying to see the starving child as one of her own, may be confronted with a gap that the imagination cannot cross.
The Tait Children
In 1856 Archibald Campbell Tait, who later rose to be Archbishop of Canterbury, was Dean of Carlisle; he and his wife had five daughters and one son, ranging in age from ten downwards, and a sixth daughter was born in February, just before the terrible events now to be narrated. On Monday 3 March the third daughter Charlotte (Chatty) fell ill with what turned out to be scarlet fever, and three days later she was dead. Then, one by one, the remaining girls fell ill and died: Susan (aged one and a half) on March 11, Frances (nearly four) on March 20, Catharine (Catty), the oldest, on Easter Tuesday, and May (nearly 8) two weeks later. The only survivors were the one boy, Craufurd, and the new baby, Lucy.
Mrs. Tait wrote a narrative of these events, which was printed in the memoir of her and her son by William Benham (1879). It is the longest and most detailed account of child deaths in the nineteenth century that I have come across, filled with warm family affection and grief, and with an insistent religious faith that appears to be shared by the children. Chatty's illnesss began by her declaring that she was tired, then vomiting, then sleeping most of the night, but restlessly at times. After she had said her prayer, and "in a voice of exceeding clearness said the poem she been learning the day before," Mrs. Tait began to feel alarmed; and when the doctor announced that it was scarlet fever, the other children were isolated (but too late). Chatty's descent was rapid: she had a "spasm," and "looking at me in a strange wild manner, began to open her mouth in a fearful way"; when this was over, she looked at her parents and said ''I must go away." "Yes darling," the narrative adds, "away from your happy home on earth to that much brighter home above."
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