Divine children: the Davisdon sisters and their mother.

Abstract

In fiction, poetry, and consolatory literature we often find a child marked out from other children by a precocious spirituality and unusual goodness and known by these special signs to be designed for early death. The notion that there were, among ordinary children, extraordinary ones not meant to reach adulthood clearly had immense reconciling power in an era when many children did in fact die young. Such deaths became more bearable when these children were conceived to have been set apart from the first and consecrated to a special mission.1 The cult of the divine child was part of a larger trend of sentimentality, parodied in Mark Twain's morbid poetess Emmeline Granger ford, who arrived after the doctor but before the undertaker to write her "tribute" to the dead prodigy. Yet it was taken quite seriously by other literary figures of the time. Lucretia Maria Davidson (1808-1825) and Margaret Miller Davidson (1823-1838) were two sisters whose brief lives and longer literary careers, as presented by their mother and prestigious biographers, read like fiction. The tale of these two young victims of consumption and their relationships to their family and literary pursuits seems to be a sentimental novel in itself. It is also a case study in the experiences and education of young American women of the period. The Davidson papers held in the Special Collections of Rutgers University consist of extensive correspondence, notebooks, and various papers of Lucretia, Margaret, their ever-influential mother, Mrs . Margaret Mil ler Davidson, and other members of the family; many of these papers have never been published.2 An examination of some of the material may reveal the unedited voices of the two young