Volume 45, Number 3 · February 19, 1998
Delightful Tears
By Rosemary Dinnage
Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
by Laurence Lerner
Vanderbilt University Press, 252 pp., $29.95
Oscar Wilde said that one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop without laughing. Even earlier, an essay by the critic Fitzjames Stephen defied current attitudes by noting sourly that any interesting child in Dickens's fiction 'runs as much risk as any of the troops who stormed the Redan.' Yet huge numbers of Dickens's contemporaries, men and women, ordinary readers and intellectuals, were overwhelmed by Nell's exquisite death and the death of little Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son. Abundantly and unchecked, the tears flowed. Is it cynical of us to find these juvenile deathbeds disgustingly false, cloyingly sentimental today? Are we even in a position to understand the Victorian experience of dying children?
Review, 3606 words
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