'how like death they are!': Death and Childhood in the Novels of Charles Dickens

Abstract

This thesis studies the intersection between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on childhood and Victorian attitudes towards death in the moribund child of Charles Dickens's novels. By the nineteenth century, the literary 'child' became a highly symbolic figure. Emerging from the debates around educating children, Romantic poets instead would use ideas of childhood subjectively to examine social institutions, cultural values, even ideas of selfhood and the formation of identity. The child thus frequented literature as a theoretical vehicle, typically as an idealised version of the child than representative of real children's lived experiences. Even as these discourses on childhood were developing, ideas about death and dying were also shifting. While the eighteenth century predominantly imagined the dead to be in a dark, isolated, and horrific place, the Victorians welcomed the dead into the social community and incorporated death in daily life. In light of these attitudes, the dead child proves to be a unique figure: at once mourned because a precious life has been lost but also praised because in death their innocence is eternally preserved. In Dickens's prolific imagination, however, the moribundity of the child presents an identity unique to itself. This thesis emphasises how Dickens formulates the inner world of childhood through death itself and how this new version of a 'moribund' childhood then participates in the contemporary discourses and attitudes related to death. I focus on the novels Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), Dombey and Son (1846-48), and Bleak House (1852-53). In each chapter, I study Dickens's characterisation of the child, and how this representation reflects his thoughts on the cultural practices, interior processes, emotional responses, and literary traditions associated with death and dying. In studying the moribund children of these novels, this thesis sheds new light on Dickens's imaginative expressions of death through the mode of childhood itself and on his use of this figure to navigate issues of culture and identity.