"The Sweetest Little Thing That Ever Died:" Nineteenth-Century Comfort Books and the Creation of the Immortal Child

Abstract

Abstract:This article focuses on "comfort books," texts about children's deaths written by and for bereaved parents in the United States and Great Britain, and circulated transatlantically during the nineteenth century. In these texts, the dead child emerges as the ideal child: passive, forever innocent, and forever possessable. In contrast to earlier morality tales that focus on the death of children, these stories are not presented as warnings to other children but as something that adult readers, authors, and parents can take pleasure in, as the dead child is frozen permanently in its ideal form, unable to grow up or change. This eternal infancy is imagined to extend to the afterlife, with many comfort book authors expecting to meet embodied versions of their children in heaven, preserved forever at the age at which they died. These texts worked to bolster the always uneasily situated "cult of the child" that emerged in the Victorian era. This rising figuration of childhood as a time of innocence, powerlessness, and unproductivity was challenged by the prevalence of real children who not only grew, changed, and desired but were incredibly productive and appeared to exercise (often limited) agency in their own lives and careers. Made into objects rather than people, dead children fulfill the need for a stable, unchanging model of childhood in ways that living children cannot. The dead child becomes a real-world version of Peter Pan, the boy (or girl) who never grows up and who therefore embodies perfect childhood.