Examine the treatment of children and infant mortality from victorian Essay

Examine the treatment of children and infant mortality from victorian writers with special reference to Charles Kingsleys water babies and Thomas Hardys poem To an unborn pauper child - Essay Example In fact this period is also a time when infant mortality was high and the threat of mortality facing infants was 30 times worse compared to what it is today (Garrett, 2006, p.253). Carroll captures this nature of parenting explicitly through fairy tale world known as Wonderland. In the fiction, the characters of authority are shown to be funny and rather absurd at times. The paper undertakes the treatment of children and infant mortality by Victorian authors like Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy. Carroll’s work is still published as a children’s classic collection and loved by young and adults alike. Lear, a rival of Carroll also published his limericks, which criticizes the social code of behavior in the Victorian society. Like Carroll, Lear also puts forth certain inevitable violent ends of the characters. The White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland keeps on reminding the reader that it will be prone to losing its head if he is late to arrive at the Duchess’. (Charney, 2005, p.284) This also reveals the inevitability of social codes and none of the writers could escape that. The Duchess symbolize a typical strict parent of the Victorian age as she tosses her baby pig up into the air and sings the following lullaby to her son, ending every line with a rough shake to the baby: â€Å"Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases† (Carroll, n.d., p.44). This is also a parody to the p oem of Bates â€Å"Speak Gently†. The story also shows the coming of age of the child Alice, as she tends to forget her nursery poems and finds the characters conversing in a language unknown to her. This introduces her to a whole new world when she resides at the crossing stage from childhood to adolescence. Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies is a fairy tale, which condemns child