Death, gloom, etc.

Speaking with my Victorianist's cap on, I was more amused than anything else by these complaints (via Scott).   While Victorian parents certainly provided an appreciative market for children's nonsense fiction that extended well beyond the Alice books--e.g., Catherine Sinclair's enormously popular Holiday House--as well as rollicking adventure tales and so forth, they also snapped up novels that would now strike us as rather...glum.*  If characters aren't being imprisoned by the Inquisition, they're being abused at Catholic schools, neglected by worldly family and friends, abducted by gypsies, subjected to loving punishments by God (my friend Emily Sarah Holt's characters tend to lose their children because of divine love), orphaned, impoverished, riddled with disease, and goodness knows what else. Now, if judged by the relevant Christian standards, these novels all have happy endings, either because Providence intervenes and everybody gets what they deserve, or because the children and other protagonists all wind up in Heaven.  Of course, for the children and others to wind up in Heaven, they have to die first.  Sometimes pretty horribly, as a matter of fact--I recently discussed one example (although Fabiola is right up there for concentrated gore).  Victorian fiction for young people practically staggers under the weight of corpses, whether of children,** innocent maidens and youths, or various and sundry parents.  Even when nobody gets tortured to death (something generally confined to religious historical novels, which are rarely complete without somebody dying, usually unpleasantly), many Victorian novels for youngsters insist that this is a world of suffering and persecution, to be patiently endured until death brings Heaven's reward. 

*--I wonder how modern children and parents would react to the parenting techniques in The History of the Fairchild Family, although I suppose that some would think that a trip to see a decaying, gibbeted corpse would be, well, totally awesome.

**--There's an excellent article on this topic by Elisabeth Jay: "'Ye careless, thoughtless, worldly parents: tremble while you read this history!': the Use and Abuse of the Dying Child in the Evangelical Tradition," in Representations of Childhood Death, ed. Gillian Avery and Kimberley Reynolds (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), 111-32.   

Comments

[Glen Breeze]

not so much a comment as a link - "Looking for Lewis Carroll" (www.lewiscarroll.cc) One of the most scholarly sites on the web - best resource for examining the current controversy of the "Carroll Myth" - carries articles from all the major players on both sides of the debate - Cohen, Gardner, Leach, Lebailly etc. Interesting review by Donald Rackin of "In the Shadow of the Dreamchild" - and response to it from Leach

[Marya]

And really, even in the less evangelical mainstream children's fiction--MacDonald, Alcott, all of Dickens, on up through Frances Hodgson Burnett--there's quite a bit of suffering to be sympathized with. I always found that to be part of the appeal! It is for the characters in those books, too, who usually find someone poorer and more helpless or friendless than themselves to look after.

[Imani]

I recently finished a collection of Breton folktales that were very Catholic (the Virgin Mary ranking as the most popular heavenly visitor/aid) and also featured an ending or two in which goodly Christians in danger were saved by, well, being killed and taken to heaven.

[Belle]

Scott's post is a hoot; I love the idea of a 10 month academic job. Wish I had one! Of course, some faculty do have the privileges he critiques; but that broad brush tars others with unfair dirt.

In your studies, don't you find such sweeping generalizations as irritating as I do (in a vastly different field)? Isn't there a mass of people out there who regard Victorians as having it all good, clean, pure? Don't you expend a lot of energy demonstrating that it wasn't all glory and sweetness?