‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’
‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’
This is the conclusion of Kipling’s harrowing story of child abuse, ‘Baa-Baa Black Sheep’, and it reminds us that the Victorians knew all that one can know, or need to know, about the misery that may be inflicted on children. They also knew where best to deploy that knowledge: in a fictional narrative. No biographer has ever doubted that this story came from Kipling’s own painful experience as a child. No critic has ever supposed that he might have written it more effectively as what we now call a ‘misery memoir’.
The wretchedness and humiliation of his consignment to the blacking factory haunted Dickens all his life. Readers may be grateful. Without the blacking factory we might never have had Oliver Twist or David Copperfield. But we may also be grateful that Dickens chose to channel his experience of child abuse through fictional characters. It’s less embarrassing and more moving.
It’s doubtless unfair to make a comparison between the misery memoirs that are so popular now and the works of writers like Kipling and Dickens. It would be more reasonable to measure them against popular bestselling novels, always bearing in mind Anthony Powell’s observation that ‘an immense self-pity’ is ‘in general an almost essential adjunct of the bestseller’. For this is surely characteristic of the genre. The author is crying out, ‘Look at me, see how I have suffered, feel my pain’. Casting aside reticence, the author delights in exposing the humiliation and abuse suffered, and displaying gaping wounds.
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