When angels deserve to die: child death in historical perspective

Abstract

As medico-sanitary technologies delivered longer individual lifetimes middle class Victorians were tantalised by the possibility of denying death. Meanwhile, as post-Enlightenment Europe’s became disenchanted the living created new spaces – mortuaries, cemeteries - distancing themselves physically from the dead. Living began to haunt the dead, visiting them, marking them out. Death became a condition to be known and studied. Contemporaneously childhood was enchanted, or sacralised, redefined in metropolitan culture as separate from adulthood – a subject for nostalgic remembrance. New literary cultures socialised children, recasting them as associates of fairies (fallen angels) thus closer to the dead. The dead child in public emerged as a dangerous, unstable presence, and a threat to the nation. Images of dead children acquired new currency, in didactic forms delivering controlled doses of fear, inoculating children against the ‘dangers’ of public space. Since the expected outcome of this process was the public, self-governing, rational individual, being a ‘good child’ in public meant behaving like an adult - in effect eliminating the notion of a public space for children. This paper explores some of these tensions in relation to British metropolitan and colonial cultures.