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Authors: Laurence Lerner

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

Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (65 page)

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Page 176
The most interestingand intenseresponses, however, came from Dickens's friends. John Forster, Dickens's future biographer, wrote, after hearing Dickens read the concluding chapters:
I could not say to you last night my dear Dickens how much this last Chapter has moved me. But I cannot resist the impulse of sending this hasty line to say it now. It is little to tell you that I think it is your literary masterpiece. The deeper feeling it has left with me goes beyond considerations of that kind. I felt this death of dear little Nell as a kind of discipline of feeling and emotion which would do me lasting good, and which I would not thank you for as an ordinary enjoyment of literature.
7
This patronizing attitude to mere literature will turn out to be of great importance as we trace the later fortunes of child pathos. One more voice, perhaps the most interesting of all, is that of Macready, the actor, who had become a close friend of Dickens's, and who wrote:
I do not know how to write to you about the papers I read last night:I almost wish to defer any further thought upon themI have suffered so much in reading them I have a recurrence of painful sensations and depressing thought. This beautiful fiction comes too close upon what is miserably real to me to enable me to taste that portion of pleasure, which we can often extract (and you so beautifully do) from reasoning on the effect of pain, when we feel it through the sufferings of others.You have crowned all that you have ever done in the power, the truth, the beauty and the deep moral of this exquisite picturebut my Godhow cruel after all!it is true that we must be taught in all things through enduranceand the best charity is clear and bright through every lesson you teach.I have had thoughts and visions of angelic forms and picturess of the last sad truth of our being here, in constant succession through the night.I cannot banish the images you have placed before us.Go on, my dear, excellent friendmake our hearts less selfish.
8
Many years later, after the publication of his
Life of Charles Dickens, a
Mrs. Jane Greene wrote to Forster, describing how her uncle
was so enchanted with little Nell that anyone might have supposed she was a
real living
child in whose sad fate he was deeply interested. One evening while silently reading he suddenly sprung from his chair, flung the book violently
 
Page 177
on the ground, and exclaimed "The Villain! The Rascal!! The bloodthirsty scoundrel!!!" His astonished brother thought he had
gone mad,
and enquired aghast of whom he was speaking? "Dickens," he roared, "he would
commit murder!
He killed my little NellHe killed my sweet little child"!
9
Paul's death was as rapturously received as Nell's. The
Westminster Review
spoke for many when it joined the two together:
The happiest and most perfect of Dickens' sketches is that of 'Little Nell' in the story of
Humphrey's Clock.
Her death is a tragedy of the true sort, that which softens, and yet strengthens and elevates; and we have its counterpart in 'Little Dombey', in the new work of this gifted author.
10
Both this reviewer and Macready, we can notice, use moral terminology in praising the pathos ("strengthens and elevates," "make our hearts less selfish"), a point that will turn out to be important. And once again the most revealing response to the book comes in private letters, and none more so than that of Francis Jeffrey, the fierce critic of the
Edinburgh Review,
scourge of sentimentality, whom we have already encountered reproaching Wordsworth. Jeffrey's stern outside hid (or hardly hid) a very soft center:
Oh, my dear Dickens! what a no.5 you have now given us! I have so cried and sobbed over it last night, and again this morning; and felt my heart purified by those tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed them; and I never can bless and love you enough. Since that divine Nelly was found dead on her humble couch, beneath the snow and the ivy, there has been nothing like the actual dying of that sweet Paul. Every trait so true, and so touching. In reading of these delightful children, how deeply do we feel that "of such is the kingdom of Heaven;" and how ashamed of the contaminations which
our
manhood has received from the contact of earth.
11
In fairness I ought now to mention that the editors of the Pilgrim edition of Dickens's letters, Madeline House and Graham Storey, are skeptical about assertions of national grief over Nell's death. "For the response of the public in general," they claim, "little evidence has been collected."
12
Since they then go on to cite a good deal of such evidence, their skepticism actually rests on the facts that much else in the novel was praised besides Nell, that some of the evidence does not actually specify the shedding of
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