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  • A Somber Pedagogy—A History of the Child Death Bed Scene in Early American Children's Religious Literature, 1674–1840
  • Diana Pasulka (bio)

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"Protest against child labor in a labor parade." From a photograph of two girls at a protest wearing banners, in English and Yiddish, with the slogan "Abolish Ch[ild] Slavery!!" Probably taken May 1, 1909 in New York City. The George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsc-00150.

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Cursory review of popular culture of the nineteenth-century United States reveals the presence of what is, to contemporary eyes, a macabre and curious literary convention. To historians familiar with childhood or nineteenth-century studies, the trope of child death, so ubiquitous in nineteenth-century literature, is as puzzling as it is familiar. The subject of child death was pervasive as evidenced by the fact that two of the most famous fictional characters of the era are pious but doomed children, Harriet Beecher Stowe's' Little Evangeline St. Clare and Charles Dickens' Little Nell. What social, demographic or religious developments led to the sensationalist portrayal of child death particular to this era? The pervasiveness of the phenomenon demands a critical treatment, and scholars have begun the process of examining the subject from multiple perspectives.1 This essay contributes to these analyses by examining the theological precedents for the literary genre of sentimental literature that had as its subject the dying child.

The history of this literary phenomenon is by no means linear, and attention to its materialization reveals a story of coincidence and fortuitous timing. An analysis of the formative texts where the trope of child death appears reveals that Puritan theology dictated the form of this literary convention. The books where the trope first appears were intended to be read by children and adults who oversaw their education. They were used primarily for the purpose of religious education or catechesis. The first popular text featuring child death as a repetitive trope was James Janeway's A Token for Children, which combined elements of medieval martyrologies with British Puritan literary elements that featured effusive religious testimonials.2 This form contributed to the creation of a formula that was later appropriated and expanded by authors who published with early nineteenth-century religious tract societies. [End Page 173]

The Child Deathbed Scene as Literary Trope and Bearer of Cultural Meaning

This essay builds on the work of others who called for a reconsideration of the value of nineteenth-century popular texts as agents of cultural formation rather than as poorly written, sensationalistic narratives littered with stereotypical characters and formulaic plots.3 The value in popular texts lies in the cultural work they perform, not necessarily in their artistic merits. Texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly, among others, is lauded for its work in making slavery intolerable to a large audience. The pious, religiously inclined child who undergoes a debilitating illness culminating in a triumphant death is a trope, and narrative stereotypes like Stowe's Little Evangeline St. Clare were revealed to be powerful symbols that "convey enormous amounts of cultural information in an extremely condensed form."4 This essay will reveal how the trope of child death emerged from late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Puritan literature to become a major literary motif of nineteenth-century popular culture. In each case of its appearance, the trope of child death works as an authorizing framework. The child poised between life and death frames "the truth" of the narrative, which varies with changing contexts. What remains constant, however, is the cultural work performed by the trope.

Scholars of the nineteenth century have demonstrated the ways in which the trope of child death was used strategically to authorize several specific narratives. In her work on the portraits and reproductions of the image of Stowe's character Eva St. Clare, Jo-Ann Morgan reveals that the juxtaposition of the white female child, nearing death, with the older African American, slave, Uncle Tom eased anxieties regarding the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement by "emasculating Tom and eulogizing Eva."5 She notes that...

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