"The child's sob in the silence curses deeper": Language of Voice and Dialogue of Reform in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children"

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• “The child’s sob in the silence curses deeper”: Language of Voice and Dialogue of Reform in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children”
• Reilly L. Fitzpatrick (bio)

Like many of her literary contemporaries, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her poetic work have been reevaluated in recent years to determine whether her status as a white, educated, upper-middle-class woman disqualifies her from effectively advocating for marginalized populations—such as factory workers or enslaved women—since she did not experience their oppression firsthand. Increasingly cognizant of the use of privileged literary voices to appropriate and perpetuate oppression throughout history, scholars have recently identified and critiqued many authors that misrepresent and profit from marginalized experiences that are not their own. In considering the ethical and literary dimensions of this ongoing issue of representation, the language of voice is central. Does an author speak on behalf of those for whom they advocate, or speak instead of them? Is an author attempting to give a silenced population the opportunity to be heard, or to be a “voice for the voiceless” when they are actively participating in and benefiting from the cultural systems that silence those who could otherwise speak for themselves?¹ In this article, I ask these questions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 poem “The Cry of the Children” to determine whether her effort to advocate for industrial reform through verse creates space for silenced voices to speak or ultimately appropriates the suffering of working children to further her poetic reputation or artistic vision.

“The Cry of the Children” is alternatingly voiced by children working in British industrial contexts and a narrator; the poem explicates the brutality of children’s work in factories and mines and calls for widespread reform. EBB² belonged to the upper middle class and, as one contemporary reviewer points out, joins the protest against factory and mining industrialization without ever [End Page 285] having “visited one of those ‘hives of industry’” herself.³ From her privileged background, EBB’s only encounters with the working-class experience were mediated through various literary portrayals and publicized reports on factory and mine conditions. By writing a poem that speaks in the voices of these oppressed children and not just on their behalf, EBB seems to participate in the performative act of being a voice for the voiceless. Her poem articulates the cries of the children, not cries for them: as EBB assumes joint poetic speaker-ship through her narrator and the children, she utilizes her poetic authority not only to speak in an imagined narrative voice on behalf of industrial reform but also to speak in the very real voices of working children, voices that were consistently silenced at the time. Thus, EBB’s representative rhetoric of voice in the poem can be construed as a sentimentalized method of further silencing children and extorting their suffering for her own poetic and political benefit. However, in many ways, EBB anticipates these potential objections to her representation of industrial oppression and the call for reform in the voices of working children themselves through the poem’s profound dialogic paradigm. I argue that Elizabeth Barrett Browning effectively decenters herself as poet in “The Cry of the Children” in order to provide a platform through which children working in factories and mines can speak in their own words, on their own behalf. EBB utilizes her popular and poetic power to facilitate the absent but necessary dialogue between working children and the British government by using the rhetorical means of children crying and cursing in a chorus. Using dialogic poetic voice as the primary means by which she can avoid serving as a voice for the voiceless, EBB instead reattributes the children’s voices to themselves in a public forum so they can be heard.

While there are a number of scholarly texts considering EBB’s role and objectives as a poet in “The Cry of the Children,” scholars are divided on whether or not EBB empowers or appropriates working children’s voices in her poem, and none consider how her language of voice (manifested in the children’s crying and cursing) and dialogic construction contribute to this poetic tension. Fabienne...