Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (3 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 2
The bulletins issued during her labor were short and resolutely optimistic, announcing first that labor was "going on very slowly but, we trust, favorably," then that she had been delivered of a still-born male child, followed by the sentence, "Her Royal Highness is doing extremely well." Four hours later she was dead. The only cause given by the newspapers for the death was exhaustion. Jesse Foot, a well-known surgeon, wrote a letter to the
Sun
, which he later published as a pamphlet, proposing a public inquiry and probing the details of the bulletins to ascertain whether Sir Richard Croft, the obstetrician, was present all the time (
Sun
, 12 Nov.). Foot's letter was careful not to make any direct accusations, and even suggested that the medical men themselves should be in favor of such an inquiry; but it is clear that public sentiment was convinced that Croft had been negligent. The
Morning Chronicle
tells us that this question was the topic of every assembly; and a year later Croft shot himself.
Such a national calamity naturally gave rise to discussions of Providence. "How dark and mysterious are the ways of Providence," wrote a correspondent from Exeter. "Who can tell why virtue in the bloom of spring is so often suddenly snatched away?" (
Times
, 13 Nov.). A number of other correspondents were quite confident that they knew why. "Civis" wrote to the
Times
on 11 November asserting "the certainty of retributive justice in one form or another upon national guilt," and describing the forms of guilt that, in his opinion, had led to this particular retribution: "the state of the parks at night an evil which can only here be adverted to,'' causing the metropolis of the British Empire "to bear too near a resemblance to the profligate and polluted capitals of Italy and France." To this he added profanation of the Sabbath, the licensing of public houses that were applied to purposes which cannot be named, and the lottery: the death of the unfortunate Princess being a "fearful admonition" from God about these national vices. A similar but more generalized indignation appears in a paragraph in the
London Chronicle
:
Arrogant and self-conceited criticism delights to assign imaginary causes for these unexpected and extraordinary events; but it usually overlooks the great cause of all, the Will of the ALMIGHTY. (
London Chronicle
, 19 Nov.)
The logic of attributing a death to the anger of God is obviously tricky, as we see if we ask whether the Will of the Almighty is equally the cause of all deaths or whether poor Charlotte was singled out from others dying "in
 
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the bloom of spring" for special admonition. the
Times
was more cautious in its wording: "That she died by natural causes is true; but that she died for some moral purpose or end, is no less so" (19 Nov.). More cautious, but no more logical: yet this is an area in which rigorous logic could too easily be seen as dangerous. The
Times
editorial insists that there is no half-way house between "full and complete Christianity" and ''absolute Atheism," and that unless one grants that there is a moral purpose in such a death one will be reduced to a complete denial of God and Providence. This is an issue that untimely deaths continued to raise throughout the century.
Most of what we have so far looked at could be described as the Establishment response to the death of the Princess. The
London Chronicle
, an extremely conservative paper, in the course of its contemptuous dismissal of the criticisms of Sir Richard Crofts and his colleagues, criticisms "which sink to nothing before the high medical reputation of the Gentlemen who attended her Royal Highness," attacked the "reptiles" who break in upon the occasion of national sorrow to preach sedition, blasphemy, obscenity, "and whatever else shocks decency and outrages public morals" (17 Nov.). Many of these reptiles now make livelier and more intelligent reading than the orthodox. Leigh Hunt's paper, the
Examiner
, provides a mild example: much of what it says about the event is conventional enough, and its insistence that we should feel infinitely more for Leopold as a man than as a prince is, after all, the same point that the
Times
and the
Morning Chronicle
make, though the rhetorical emphasis has shifted when the
Examiner
exclaims, "What are kings and dynasties to us, especially in an age like the present compared with this abrupt reminding us of the naked humanity of us all?" (9 Nov.). Reminders of our common humanity have alwayss been common to both conservative and radical rhetoric, the difference being that in the one case they are intended as a distraction from politics, in the other as having political consequences. And we have moved from rhetoric to explicit politics when the
Examiner
launches its complaint against "the indecent advantage taken of the Princess's death by the Ministerial Papers to keep a comparative silence, day after day, on all other subjects."" What aroused particular indignation in the
Examiner
was the proposal that people should conduct themselves "
as if
some dear relative were lying deadas if people had not hundreds of causes of grief
besides
this!" (16 Nov.). That fiery radical Thomas Wooler in
The Black Dwarf
went further: not only did he refuse to mourn "merely for a Princess" while being very ready to regret "the helpless fate of the wife and mother," he also took
 
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issue with those editors who demanded the cessation of public business as a sign of mourning. Most newspapers reported that shopkeepers had spontaneously closed their shops, and many expressed indignation at those who had not. The
Times
rebuked the citizens of Norwich for their feverish commercial activity to meet the demand for bombazines, a favorite material for mourning, insisting that "it is not in common nature to have the heart and mind so absorbed by the love of gain" (13 Nov.);
The Black Dwarf
observed caustically that this writer "forgets himself to drop his avocations, and exhibit the extent of his affliction by dropping his pen, and closing the office of his publication" (19 Nov.).
The most scathing contempt came from William Cobbett, then in America, but continuing his choleric attacks on the political establishment. An innkeeper at Esher called Carpenter, who had been largely supported by her patronage "was so affected when he heard of the demise of the Princess, that he nearly fainted. He was seized with indisposition, and talked of nothing but the death of the Princess. On the next day he expired!" (
Observer
, 28 Nov.). One can hear Cobbett snorting as he read this story:
Coupling this fact with the sight of the news-papers lined all round with black, I really began to fear that a considerable portion of the nation were actually dead, or in a dying state. (
Cobbett's Political Register
, 25 April 1818)
On the day Princess Charlotte died, three working class leaders of the ineffectual Pentridge Rising were executed at Derby. The coincidence provides obvious material for radical comment on the national calamity, and it was well exploited in the
Examiner
, it also provides the main argument of Shelley's
Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte
, which he wrote on 1112 November but never published. The conventional view distinguished clearly between the compassion for personal loss aroused by the death of the Princess and the political judgment that would condemn the Pentridge insurrectionists for threatening the basis of society. But Shelley, with some ingenuity, subverts this contrast, first by political comment on Charlotte:
She was born a Princess, and those who are destined to rule mankind are dispensed with acquiring that wisdom and that experience which is necessaryy even to rule themselves. She had accomplished nothing, and aspired to

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