"A Very Peculiar Sorrow": Attitudes Toward Infant Death in the Urban Northeast, 1800-1860
1987; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2713127
ISSN1080-6490
Autores Tópico(s)Homelessness and Social Issues
ResumoONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL FACTS OF ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN FAMILY LIFE WAS that, in places such as New York City, as many as one-quarter of all children born in a single year were expected to die before their first birthday. Middleand upperclass parents living in the towns and cities of New England and the Middle Atlantic states were fairly realistic about their chances of losing a child in infancy.2 Of his first child born in 1803, John Pierce wrote to his father-in-law, Often think when doting upon her, how uncertain is her continuance.3 Thirty-nine years later Pierce received a letter from one of his own daughters, who expressed the same kind of tentativeness about the survival of his grandchild: I wish you could all see the darling, & if she lives & all is well, intend you shall see her next spring.4 No matter how resigned parents were to the possibility that their babies might die, they were seldom able to defend themselves adequately against the emotional pain that inevitably accompanied the loss of an infant. Parents mourned deeply when their babies died.5 Days have passed since my sweet babe has lain in the silent ground, wrote Christiana Cowell. I go about my domestic duties in moaning, sighing over the melancholy void that death has made. Everything around her reminded her of her lost child. There sits her empty cradle, she continued, more to lull the weary pain of my darling babe. shall never see her sleeping there again. Her clothes, the little chair, the toys all bring to my heart a pang of yearning sorrow. 6 Fathers were no less sensitive to the death of an infant. Two months after the death of his daughter, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted in his journal, I feel very sad to-day. miss very much my dear little Fanny. An inappeasable longing to see her comes over me at times, which can hardly control.7 Nehemiah Adams summed up such feelings when he asked, do you not think that the death of a dear little child is a very peculiar sorrow? It seems to me that have seen people in more anguish under the loss of little children than in any other affliction. 8 In their private attempts to cope both emotionally and intellectually with their affliction, parents in the first half of the nineteenth century began working through the grieving process by performing funereal rituals and preserving memories of their
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