The Child's Grave

Child mortality was disturbingly commonplace in Victorian England: the 100,000 infants a year who died before their first birthday accounted for one quarter of all deaths. In The Child’s Grave, Joshua Mann catalogued the responses of various family members to a young child’s death. Eyes downcast, leaning on each other for support, the dozen or more figures are rendered with a temperate sweetness that seems aimed at increasing the viewer’s sense of participation in sympathy and grief. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1857, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Epitaph on an Infant (1794) published alongside the catalogue listing:

Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,
Death came with friendly care,
The opening bud to heaven convey’d,
And bade it blossom there.

The verse seems to encourage the beholder not only to mourn the child Death has snatched away, but also to accept the turn of fate that has spared the child the disappointments of earthly life. Though much maligned in the century since its waning, Victorian sentimentalism can be viewed in the context of art’s power to socialize—that is, to establish standards of decorum and appropriate conduct for even the youngest members of society.