"Little Liz"

Charles Dickens is a by-word for impossibly angelic children, especially impossibly angelic female children like Little Nell.   But B. L. Farjeon's "Little Liz," which I found in Jack Doig's Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction, takes the Dickensian angel and pushes it to the farthest boundary of melodrama--and then right on through.  The plot is simple: Liz, age six, is the daughter of Bill, a poor Englishman who came to Australia during the Gold Rush in order to pay off a debt.  Bill has been prospecting with our narrator, Tom, and gone absent for several months while he retrieves his daughter from their caretakers; it's when he returns that things are truly set into motion.  For Liz, says our narrator, is "a little angel" (loc. 694), and he falls "in love with her at once" (loc. 707).  Our narrator is not alone.  Everyone adores little Liz, from the man who gives her a dog, the trusty Rhadamanthus, to the working men who would do favors for them "and would never take anything for it but a kiss from her pretty lips" (loc. 746), to the bushrangers who ambush them but call it off at the first sight of her.  Liz denies her kisses only to the man with whom Bill has partnered at a quasi-magical mining site, Teddy the Tyler, who "tried to force her" (loc. 782), with unfortunate results.  Eventually, once Bill, Tom, and Liz return to the site together, things come to a fatal head with Ted...

Teddy is bad.  He is irredeemably bad.  We know he is bad because Liz dislikes him, and Liz is willing to like everybody, including men initially out to rob and possibly kill her daddy.  Liz, by contrast, is perfectly good, and the story's title certainly invites Dickensian comparisons.  So far as it goes, this contrast between absolute evil and absolute innocence is straight out of melodramatic tropes.  But the story does some weird things with its melodramatic excess.  Because this is a Gold Rush story, the plot is loaded with the desire for Mammon; Bill, rejoicing in the sheer overflow of gold at his site, tells Tom that he "worship[s]" his find because of what he sees it doing for his Liz, who will be able to "hold her own with the best lady in the land" once he finishes with her (loc. 865).  Now, this is problematic language, to be sure--but it also rings suspiciously of Great Expectations.  Instead of making a gentleman, he plans to make a lady.  Yet Bill's hunger for the gold that will supposedly ensure his angelic darling a life of leisure is in stark contrast to Liz's own currency of innocent kisses.  This currency, one notes, circulates entirely among men.  This story has no women other than Liz (who is, of course, a girl, not a woman); you could use it to define "homosocial."  Liz's innocent, chaste kisses enable relations among men based on mutual cooperation, altruism, and love. from the workers who sacrifice themselves to help to Tom himself, who fantasizes about building a life with her and Bill--an alternative family in which men, too, can mother.  In Liz's little world, there is no profit, no exploitation, and no hierarchy. 

The difficulty, though, is that Liz's effectively anti-capitalist kisses, which can literally bring about world peace, have been inextricably bound up with the violent world of greed, as signified by Teddy the Tyler.  It's no accident that Teddy's attempt to "force" kisses from Liz has distinct rape-y overtones: Teddy's ominous, quasi-demonic presence reminds the reader of the less savory desires accompanying the gold that Bill seeks to turn to angelic ends.  Tom's and Bill's joyous fantasy life is built on their quest for gold, not in opposition to it; rather than seeing Liz's nature as the guarantor of future happiness, they see cash.  Moreover, the appalling Ted's presence acts as a counterweight to Liz's, consistently inspiring brutal violence (Bill beats him up repeatedly)--yet Tom and Bill never contemplate getting rid of Ted entirely, even though Tom points out, reasonably enough, that "[h]e'd murder the lot of us, Bill, [...] if we give him a chance" (loc. 900).   Desire persists.   It's impossible to avoid noticing that Liz, the carrier of innocence and solution to all the world's ills, is also a weak child incapable of defending herself; when Ted decides to kill her, even the big dog can't stop him.  

Farjeon's conclusion explodes in a melodramatic orgy of overheated emotion.  Tom suffers from "blinding tears"; Bill, in Lear-ish form, wails "[s]he is only sleeping. Feel her heart, Tom, it is beating.  Feel, feel, I say!" (loc. 1020).   The scene, in fact, owes something to the death of Little Nell.  Here's Liz:

As she lay with her eyes turned blindly to the sun that was smiling on the hills, and bathing them in light, I could scarcely believe that she was dead.  In her innocent young face the roses were still blooming, and in her pretty little hands were grasped a few of the wild flowers she had been gathering.  I stooped, and kissed her pure fresh lips.  Then I turned away, for blinding tears were in my eyes, and a darkness fell upon me. (loc. 1020)

And here's Nell:

She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death. Her couch was dressed with here and there some winter berries and green leaves, gathered in a spot she had been used to favour. "When I die, put near me something that has loved the light, and had the sky above it always." Those were her words.

It's not a direct lift, obviously, but Farjeon has clearly paid attention: we have here the same emphasis on light, on nature, on the dead child's pure and perfect body.  The very title "Little Liz," as I've already noted, invokes "Little Nell," and Bill is in some ways a far more fit version of Nell's grandfather (which would make Ted an even worse Quilp, if that were possible).  But Liz's death has no redemptive function and enacts no permanent transformation, locally or nationally.  Unlike Nell's grandfather,Bill free of Liz's influence declines into pure violence: he and Ted promptly murder each other, leaving poor Tom all alone (so to speak) to narrate the tale.  The ending is as though the fan response to Nell's death were actually imported into the text: "Within twenty-four hours five hundred men were in the gullies.  The helped me to bury Bill and little Liz in one grave, and to put a fence round it" (loc. 1068).  This melodramatic overflow--five hundred?!--is not a testimony to the triumph of Liz's lasting influence, but the last gasp of its failure.  Even our narrator, as he concedes, has fallen far from his few weeks of moral improvement at Liz's hands.  So much for the Dickensian innocent.