Fervent Fevers/Christian Consumptives: 19th Century Idols of Innocence

Jo and Laurie, before he marries her sister. Pencil drawing from Little Women 1994.

‘Tis the season for re-watching Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women, the film released in the-year-of-our-lord/my-birth 1994, and coincidentally one of my Christmas favourites. But I wouldn’t consider myself an Alcott fan. While I love Jo as the proto-feminist, aspiring writer and independent spirit of her age, I consider myself more of a Claire-Danes-crying-face, Thomas Newman score, Susan Sarandon-complaining-about-corsets, enthusiast. A feminist take on Alcott’s text, Armstrong's screenwriter, Robin Swicord, thankfully leaves Meg as “model housekeeper” (51) between the two covers of Good Wives where it belongs, but incorporates the most crucial aspect of the sequel – Beth’s death.

Beth has fascinated me for as many Christmases as I can recall, because she seems to exemplify that trope of the too-good-for-this-world nineteenth-century heroine. The term heroine is an overstatement here, as Beth doesn’t display much in the way of character, existing more to serve the plot and further Jo’s self-fulfilment. In fact, I would argue that Claire Danes’ performance gives more character to Beth than any number of re-readings could eke from the novel. And even so, her absent presence is the most tangible aspect of Armstrong’s film, with the unforgettable sequence that gets me every time - Jo closing the window against her departing spirit and the scattered rose petals on Beth’s emblematic dolls. Carried by Newman’s intensely melancholic “Valley of the Shadow”, Beth seems to crystallise that morbid fascination threading together those other emblems of nineteenth-century fervid purity - Helen Burns (Jane Eyre), Dick and Oliver (Oliver Twist), and George Arthur (Tom Brown’s Schooldays).

Beth of course, seems destined only to die. The novel is peppered with premonitions from the death of her canary Pip, to the Hummel’s dead baby whom she unwittingly cradles, unaware of the scarlet fever she is contracting (Machado). As Carmen Maria Machado underlines, it is “impossible to imagine her adulthood [like Oliver, Helen or Arthur]. Not even just the reader; Beth can’t imagine it, either.” She quotes the famous line; “I’m not like the rest of you; I never made any plans about what I’d do when I grew up; I never thought of being married, as you all did” (Good Wives 170). Machado stresses that beneath the weight of grief, Beth becomes flat; “faultless, angelic, positively uncomplicated … [h]er only imperfection—shyness”. While Beth doesn’t strictly fall into the Christian consumptive category – the novel is based on Alcott’s transcendentalist family – her embodiment of goodness serves to develop the moral integrity of her sisters, as she herself is symbolically purified even further by fever.

Even before her death, Beth is a phantom; more an emblem of religious morality than a fully-fledged character. She cannot even be an ideal to aspire to, as her preserved innocence is wholly unattainable, and intrinsic to the ‘perfection’ of death. This trope is an interesting one, and seems to pervade Victorian sensibility. A host of characters, not limited to the ones I’ve mentioned, but definitely deified, seem to exist as stereotypes and cyphers of virtue. Oliver is a fascinatingly ambiguous allegory, if not angel, who can easily be read through the Victorian obsession with childhood innocence, which brought to its extreme, culminates in the image of preservation through death – the most ‘angelic’ child is the dead child.

Remaining untouched by all of his adversity, Oliver is an impenetrable shell despite the gothic forces surrounding him. At the start of the novel, he even sleeps amongst the coffins of the Sowerberry’s establishment, and is later framed in Book 2, chapter 7, lying motionless on a curtained bed. In his lying-in-state, he is “a mere child, worn with pain and exhaustion and sunk into a deep sleep. His wounded arm … crossed upon his breast, and his head reclined … his long hair … streamed over the pillow” (238). This state of passivity and stasis suggests he could already be dead; he certainly escapes death many times and is described here in an image that reflects those deeply disturbing portraits of deceased children which so preoccupied the Victorians.

Cruikshank, George. “Oliver Recovering from the Fever”. Sixth steel engraving for Oliver Twist, 1837. Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/cruikshank/ot7.html.

Dick too fits the trope of the consumptive child. Consumed by his virtue, he like Helen Burns, welcomes death – “I was glad to die when I was very young; for, perhaps, if I lived to be a man, and grew old, my little sister, who is in heaven, might forget me, or be unlike me; and it would be so much happier if we were both children there together” (Dickens 139). In a recent review I read, Lynne Vallone considers Pat Jalland’s Death in the Victorian Family, which argues that Victorian children’s literature concerning death “served as a warning to children to reform and obey, lest they be taken unprepared for final judgment” (Vallone 222). While stark and cold to modern readers, Vallone highlights its consolatory importance as a preparation in the face of Victorian mortality rates, which for Dick and his sister, offers the paradisal afterlife of perpetual childhood.

But this past tense – “I was glad to die when I was very young” – begs the question, did Oliver surmount his “considerable difficulty in … tak[ing] upon himself the office of respiration” (3) in chapter one? As the liminal and mystical figure “poised between this world and the next” (3), Oliver serves to highlight the high rate of fictional child mortalities across nineteenth-century literature. Just like Beth March, he too hovers between life and death, never fully occupying this world or a subjectivity of his own.

It is unsurprising that literature responded to the frightening mortality rates of the nineteenth century, due in no small part to the virulence of such diseases as tuberculosis/consumption, scarlet fever, and typhus. Between 1820 and 1880, according to Dr Alan Swedlund’s study (159), scarlet fever had reached global epidemic proportions. In 1840 alone, England suffered almost 20,000 deaths from scarlatina/scarlet fever (Douglas), while tuberculosis remained rife by the late-1800s, claiming up to 80% of its victims (“Curiosity Collections: Tuberculosis”). Meanwhile, typhus accounted for most of London’s fever deaths during its worst outbreak from 1837-8, including as it did, both cholera and influenza (Douglas).

Typhus and spring invade Jane Eyre's Lowood concurrently, the season furnishing “herbs and blossoms to put on a coffin” (78). Just as Beth is modelled on Alcott’s sister Lizzie, so too the “biographical model of Helen Burns is … the character of Charlotte’s oldest sister Maria Brontë” (Morse 4). As Jane’s moral teacher, Helen is tasked with guiding the protagonist towards an understanding that life is “too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs” (Brontë 60). Burns, like a crucible, transforms Jane’s anger into more productive channels of socially sanctioned passion. On Jane’s “pedestal of infamy” she notices Helen for what she symbolises – “a martyr”, “thin … sunken … like a reflection from the aspect of an angel” (69). Through the aptly-named Miss Temple’s kind attention, Helen's powers are “roused” and her light “kindled”, she “glowed” and “shone” (74), becoming the wellspring of “radiance”, of “pure, full, fervid eloquence” (75). But the reader knows by dramatic irony (and nominative determinism) that her fever has already set in, and these are mere symptoms of “her spirit … hastening to live within a very brief span” (75). Helen tellingly dies of consumption not typhus, and like Beth, she “live[s] in calm, looking to the end” (61). Both literally self-effacing, they march and burn as idols of spring innocence and angelic agents of moral becoming. Consumed by goodness, there is no question that any of these characters could survive to adulthood, or even imagine growing up. As readers, we can’t envision their maturity, for their unspoilt characters are devoid of any complexity. Helen could be voicing Beth’s trademark humility when she says, “I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world” (83). Instead, taken prematurely, they are “cherished like a household saint in its shrine” (Good Wives 219).

But to me the most disturbing of these emblems is little George Arthur of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, who probably deserves a blog post of his own. Like Helen, Dick, and Beth, Arthur serves as a moral guide to the novel’s protagonist, Tom, in all his ethereal or pious allegory. Set in Rugby - Thomas Hughes’ alma mater - and written for Hughes’ own son who died before he reached the age to attend, this novel touchingly portrays a vicarious coming-of-age. As boarding school marked a boy’s passage from the feminine domestic sphere - or “petticoat government” (50) - to the public masculine world of learning, sport, and achievement, this novel concerns itself with the patriarchal ideology needed to turn British boys into good imperial men.

It might be supposed that masculinity in a boys’ school is necessarily represented in a vacuum. Hughes’ influential school story after all “clearly functioned to create the gendered masculine subject” aligned with “imperial imaginaries” (Reimer 216). But while he takes a stand against the ‘fagging’ which continued into the 20th century, Hughes nevertheless depicts the deeply unsettling “small friend system” (182). Clarified in an ominous note, we are told this system “was not so utterly bad from 1841-1847”, creating such “noble friendships between big and little boys” that he couldn’t omit the reference. Furthermore, and most significantly – “many boys will know why it is left in” (182). The passage he couldn’t leave out concerns “one of the miserable little pretty white-handed curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad language, and did all they could to spoil them for everything” (182). For these ‘Muscular Christian’ types – those “good English boys, good future citizens” (58), trained through rugby and Rugby to defend and expand the empire, are not really in a masculine vacuum. Their hapless victims, like Arthur (“a queer chum for Tom Brown” (174)), become the Angels in the House, as a sort of training ground for marriage. As Maureen M. Martin asserts, while “this homosocial network demanded heterosexuality of its adult members, it winked at the homosexual attachments and experiences” at public school (483-4). And Arthur as “embodiment of idealized femininity” provides Tom with “celestial help” (484).

Hughes, Arthur. “Tom’s Visit to Arthur After the Fever.” Illustration from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 1869. Tuft’s University, www.dl.tufts.eedu/imageviewer/9z903709m#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&xywh=-2858%2C7599%2C3123.

True to his trope, Arthur is most angelic when closest to death. Framed like Oliver, “on the sofa by the open window, through which the rays of the western sun stole gently, lighting up his white face and golden hair”, Tom is reminded of “a German picture of an angel” (236). Martin differentiates between “the noble and the noxious” relationships, considering Arthur and Tom’s an example of the former by contrast to those “curly-headed boys” ear-marked by “the big fellows” and Hughes’ footnote (492). Instead, the unsettling quality of Arthur’s character lies in his “tendency to consumption” (187). Tom must leave this homosocial/sexual relationship behind in order to inherit the heterosexual world after matriculation. Finally consumed, Arthur ascends with Helen, Dick, and possibly Oliver, presumably to join the heavenly host where bodily suffering fades into amorphous afterlife.

Corbaux, Louisa. “Lithography Illustration of Oliver Twist”, from the exhibition of 1851. British Library, www.bl.uk/collection-items/illustration-of-oliver-twist-by-louisa-corbaux.

Works Considered

Alcott, Louisa May. Good Wives, 1869. Penguin Popular Classics, 1995.

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women, 1868. Puffin Classics, 2008.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Penguin, 1994.

“Curiosity Collections: Tuberculosis in Europe and North America: 1800-1922.” 2018,

Harvard Library, www.curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/contagion/feature/tuberculosis-

in-europe-and-north-america-1800-1922.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist or, The Parish Boy’s Progress, edited by Philip

Horne, Penguin Classics, 2009.

Douglas, Laurelyn. “Health and Hygiene in the Nineteenth Century.” The Victorian

Web, 11 Oct. 2002, www.victorianweb.org/science/health/health10.html#:~:text

=In%20the%201830s%20the%20”new,of%20the%20next%20four%20years.

Foote, Stephanie. “The Thing About Beth.” Avidly: Los Angeles Review of Books,

18 Jul. 2016, www.avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/07/18/the-thing-about-beth/.

Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. 1857. Puffin, 1971.

Kincaid, James R. “Dickens and the Construction of the Child.” Dickens and the Children of Empire,

edited by Wendy S. Jacobson, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 29-42.

Machado, Carmen Maria. “The Real Tragedy of Beth March”. The Paris Review,

29 Aug. 2019, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/29/the-real-tragedy-of-beth-march/.

Martin, Maureen M. “‘Boys Who Will Be Men’: Desire in Tom Brown’s Schooldays.”

Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 30, no. 2, 2002, pp. 483–502. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/25058601.

McCallum, Robyn. “The Present Reshaping the Past Reshaping the Present: Film Versions of

Little Women.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 24, no. 1, 2000, pp. 81-96.

Morse, Deborah D. “Brontë Violations: Liminality, Transgression, and Lesbian Erotics in

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.” Literature Compass, vol. 14, no. 12, 2017, pp. 1-14.

Reimer, Mavis. “Traditions of the School Story.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s

Literature. Cambridge UP, 2009, pp. 209-225.

Renton, Alex. “School of Hard Knock: The Dark Underside to Boarding School Books.”

The Guardian, 8 Apr. 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/08/school-boar

ding-secrets-crimes-alex-renton-kipling-rowling-dahl-churchill.

Simons, Judy. “Gender Roles in Children’s Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s

Literature. Cambridge UP, 2009, pp. 143-158.

Swedlund, Alan C., and Alison K. Donta. “Scarlet Fever Epidemics of the Nineteenth

Century.” Human Biologists in the Archives, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp.159-177.

Vallone, Lynne. “Review: Fertility, Childhood, and Death in the Victorian Family.”

Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 28, no. 1, 2000, pp. 217–26. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/25058500.