‘Ye careless, thoughtless, worldly parents, tremble while you read this history!’: the Use and Abuse of the Dying Child in the Evangelical Tradition

Abstract

Virginia Woolf had been brought up in a family for whom memorials to and biographies of the dear departed formed the life-blood of their literary tradition.² Yet what could the daughter of Leslie Stephen, biographer to a nation’s achievers, find to say of those killed in a state of unfulfilled promise, before they had attained the distinguishing features which might warrant an obituary notice? What afterlife was it possible to provide for those who had died without belief in a spiritual hereafter? For many Victorians who came after the era of the great nineteenth-century geologists it was no longer possible to look to nature for Wordsworthian consolation in imagining ‘a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years’,³ nor to seek in nature the analogies and guarantees of a Provident Creator’s care for the fall of the individual sparrow.’ The metanarrative of the Christian community had been replaced for unbelievers by transitional authorities such as Huxley, but logically this process allowed for further ‘evolution’ into entirely privatized ‘notions’ of death’s metaphysical and ethical significance. This alienation from shared interpretative traditions meant that any attempt to read another’s reactions must be hedged about by ironic quotation marks. Clarissa’s beliefs remain inscrutable partly because of the variety of nuance accruing to the information that she had read Huxley and Tyndall ‘as a girl’, or determined to behave ‘like a lady’.

Oddly enough, she was one of the most thorough-going sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way — her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting, and spoiling human lives, were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death — that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin Parry’s fault — all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t so positive, perhaps; she thought there were no Gods, no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.¹