POOR TRAGIC CHILD

Victorian literature is littered with orphans and dying children. You can’t swing a torn stocking without hitting some poor little cherub being borne off to heaven on the wings of angels. Even perfectly sensible writers like Louisa May Alcott can’t resist the lure of the tragic sister. (And neither can readers – I can’t be the only one who read Beth’s death scene over and over and cried every time!)
But they weren’t just playing with our heartstrings. Though, of course, Charles Dickens knew exactly what he was doing when he killed off Little Nell and threatened to do the same to Tiny Tim.
They were also working out the simple, and horrific, reality of life in a world without antibiotics or vaccines for most childhood illnesses. A reality, actually, that’s all too understandable to many of us in this post-pandemic world.
While improved sanitation and medical care were starting to drive down child mortality rates, they were still extremely high by modern standards. It’s not an exaggeration to say every family knew someone who had lost a child…or had lost one themselves. And all of it amid the growing idealization of family and parental love.
All those feelings had to go somewhere, and where they went was the angelic dying child. Beth, Little Nell, and their ilk are whistling in the dark – or a safe way to deal with the unimaginable.
Close kin is the poor (usually orphan) child. In most books, this child suffers almost as much as the dying angel, but is miraculously rescued in the end. Think our good friend Tiny Tim, or Sara Crewe in A LITTLE PRINCESS. Again, all that misery is a safe way of dealing with the true horror of what happened to sick or vulnerable children.
Many readers ate this up the way we now devour the memoirs of people who’ve come through horrible experiences, and for most of the same reasons. And, just as those memoirs do for some of us, the stories inspired people to push to make social change.
However inspiring those stories were, though, there’s one person in Gilded Age New York who would never pick up Dickens: Ella Shane. She doesn’t need to read it -- she lived it.
As young Ellen O’Shaughnessy, she lived in a tiny, cold tenement room with her consumptive mother, Malka (Molly) Steinmetz O’Shaughnessy, scraping a thin living on piecework. Over time, her mother’s illness became worse, and young Ellen took up as much sewing as she could, finally leaving school to stay with her mother…and waking up one cold morning with her body. If her aunt hadn’t taken her in, she would have ended up in the orphanage.
So, though the safe and successful opera diva Ella Shane reads everything, she doesn’t read Dickens. And she usually doesn’t sew. When, in A FATAL FIRST NIGHT, she offers to sew on a button for the Duke, it brings back terrible memories. That flashback, as a modern reader would understand it, is probably the first time the Duke has seen vulnerability from the invincible Miss Shane, and it’s a pivotal moment in their relationship.
More, it’s a reminder that even the lucky orphan who’s rescued doesn’t escape unscathed…and they never forget where they’ve been.

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