Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (73 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 202
If the evaluative paragraph I have added is, as I have proposed, optional, it is not essential for the argument that followed. In that argument I examined the moral and theological function of the poem, describing it as containing a reversal of the duck-rabbit kind, claiming that consolatory writing (not only poems) about the death of a loved one constantly tends towards such reversals. That argument belongs to cultural history; whereas my optional paragraph belongs to literary criticism strictly conceived, and is concerned with the poetic quality of the lines. The two issues are theoretically distinct: it is quite conceivable that a poem of great subtlety and originality could be a duck-rabbit. I have therefore written two accounts of the poem, one concerned with artistic quality, the other with ideological function. They are independent of each other, but I believe them both.
Synchronic Discrimination
And so to the question that I have kept postponing, conscious that the attempt to answer it, though important, may be impossible: Is the rejection of sentimentality an example of historical relativism (one age rejects the values of a previous age) or can it be granted some sort of timeless validity? Even if we give the first answer we may still share the rejection, for we do not need to grant absolute or timeless status to our beliefs in order to hold them. But when one age reads a past age, the difference between these two positions is clearly important.
If the question can be answered, it will be in one way only: we need to discriminate within the same age. If we can find Victorian critics who share the modern condemnation, or if we can find some nineteenth century child pathos that, as modern readers, we admire, then the global confrontation between two solid blocks of history has, at least, been broken down.
There was of course one group of critics in the nineteenth century who condemned the sentimental deathbeds, for what at a first glance seem very different reasons from the twentieth century: these were the Evangelicals. An article on "Modern Novels" in the Christian Remembrancer in 1842 has a good deal to say about
The Old Curiosity Shop
, objecting "most strongly to the way in which [Nell's] dying and her death are worked up." It praises the writing ("nearly the best composition we ever encountered in our author's pages"), but then objects:
 
Page 203
If we except her haunting the old church, not a single christian feature is introduced. The whole matter is one tissue of fantastic sentiment, as though the growth of flowers by one's grave, and the fresh country air passing over it, and the games of children near it, could abate by one particle the venom of death's sting. To work up an elaborate picture of dying and death, without the only ingredient that can make the undisguised reality other than "an uncouth hideous thing"; to omit all reference to that by means of which alone the one enemy has "grown fair and full of grace, much in request, much sought for as a good"; this is not dealing fairly by us.
53
This critic is trying hard to be fair. He assures us anxiously that he is "far indeed from demanding the direct introduction of religion in a novel," but insists that once the author has raised our expectations, once he has forced us to think about death and what it means, there can be only one way of dealing with it. Dickens might have protested that his intentions
were
Christian; but the softened, emotive religiosity that he offers does not, for this critic, count as Christianity. For him, an example of a Christian writer is not Dickens but George Herbert, someone whose poems are built firmly on doctrine.
That is obviously not the objection of Huxley, or of Leavis, or of Careyor is it? It may not be as wholly unrelated to theirs as at first appears, for what this critic dislikes is a kind of self-indulgence, a pleasure which the author takes in contemplating his own sweetening of death. We do not need to accept Christian doctrine to accept that death
is
a hideous uncouth thing, any more than we need accept it to value Herbert's poem. And looking at the rest of this critic's discussion of
The Old Curiosity Shop
, I find myself developing a respect for him. His remarks on Quilp are astonishingly shrewd: he obviously enjoyed the "jollifications with rum punch and such like" and declares that he is a man of genius and that Mrs. Quilp was in love with him. This is true, and almost Freudian; and at other moments he is Dostoyevskian too: "If a man be neither saintly nor sensual, we believe there is nothing left for him but to be satanic"this might be about Stavrogin! I am therefore willing to grant him the honor (if honor it is) of being a proto-modern; and I claim him confidently as evidence that not all Victorians were besotted by sentimentality.
Then there is Fitzjames Stephen, whose cool detachment on child deaths has already been quoted and who wrote of Nell's death,
 
Page 204
He gloats over the girl's death as if it delighted him; he looks at it touches, tastes, smells and handles as if it was some savoury dainty which could not be too fully appreciated.
54
This is indistinguishable from the twentieth century objections quoted earlier: there is the same accusation of self-indulgence, the same distaste as in Huxley, the same moral disapproval as in Leavis.
Or there is the
Saturday Review
, not often friendly to Dickens, which wrote in 1858:
No man can offer to the public so large a stock of death-beds adapted for either sex and for any age, from five and twenty downwards. There are idiot deathbeds where the patient cries ha!ha! and points wildly at vacancypauper death-beds, with unfeeling nurses to matchmale and female children's death-beds, where the young ladies or gentlemen sit up in bed, pray to the angels, and see golden water on the walls. In short, there never was a man to whom the King of Terrors was so useful as a key figure.
55
There is nothing here about Dickens's sticky secretions: he is seen purely as the showman "offering to the public" a set of tricks that are "useful" to him: Dickens's vast sales are surely being hinted at here. The
Saturday Reviewer
clearly considers himself removed from this gullible public.
"Children are not diminutive angels," declared Francis Jacox firmly in 1868, expressing a decided preference for "troublesome, ill-behaved children over the good little boys and girls who never dirty their pinafores, and decline eating their dinner till grace has been said." He chooses the child death as the prime example of what he dislikes:
It has been said that if anybody can get a pretty little girl to die prattling to her brothers and sisters, and quoting texts of Scripture with appropriate gasps, dashes, and broken sentences, he may send half the women in London, with tears in their eyes, to Mr Mudie's or Mr Booth's.
56
I have already quoted Henry James on
Our Mutual Friend
, who also treats the author as showman and performer, not as giving us the overflowings of his own heart (he "has been accustomed to draw alternate smiles and tears, according as he pressed one spring or another"); and I suggested that the James we see in that hostile notice belongs very much to the Victorian Age.

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