Children Remembered: Responses to Untimely Death in the PastJust one hundred years ago, approximately ten percent of all infants born in the United States died before the age of one. In a major city like Chicago, one in four children would die before the age of five. It is difficult for us to imagine the profound effects of such a loss on an individual level—let alone how commonplace these deaths were. Historians have only recently begun to grapple with the experience of child death. Children Remembered explores the experience of parental grief over four centuries in America, England, and France. In contrast to Phillippe Ariès’s influential hypothesis of “parental indifference,” Robert Woods argues that parents did indeed care, memorializing their children through portraits, poems, and other forms of literature. Woods’s unique study transforms these creative expressions into a unique form of historical evidence that challenges disciplinary conventions. The first history to fully consider parental grief in all its expressions, Children Remembered is a groundbreaking addition to this burgeoning debate. |
Contents
Introduction the lines of life | 1 |
Après la mort des enfants | 7 |
Mortality Childcare and Mourning | 33 |
Children in Pictures and Monuments | 61 |
Emotions and Literature | 95 |
Poems Mainly of Child Loss | 131 |
The Vocabulary of Grief | 169 |
Parallel Histories Experience and Expression | 209 |
Acknowledgements | 217 |
Notes on the SixtyNine Poems | 219 |
Notes | 231 |
| 270 | |
| 281 | |
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Common terms and phrases
adults aged Anne Ariès's artist attitudes baby baptism Barbara Gamage Ben Jonson born Cambridge University Press cent Chapter child childbirth childhood mortality Clarendon Press Crulai cultural daughter dead demographic died dying E. A. Wrigley Early Modern early-age mortality eighteenth century elegy Elizabeth emotions England English epigrams epitaph especially example expression father figure France grief heaven Herrick Hesperides historians illustrated images indifference hypothesis infant mortality innocence Jacques Dupâquier Jane John Donne John Souch Jonson Lady literary live births London marriage married Mary maternal mortality Michel Vovelle mort mortality rate mother National Gallery nineteenth century Oxford University Press paintings parental indifference Paris parish Penelope Philippe Ariès poet poetry population portraits reception theory Robert Robert Herrick seventeenth century Shakespeare Shelley siècle social Sonnet 17 Sonnets sorrow stillbirth stillborn survival Sylvia Plath Tate Britain thee Thomas thou tomb Vovelle Vovelle's wife William young