This is a working paper offering some of my thoughts on the characteristics of the sounds, silences, and echoes of dying, death, and the afterlife relating to child death in Anglophone literatures of the nineteenth-century. I will look at the ways in which bereavement accounts by public figures such as Charles Darwin and Samuel Iraneus Prime, infant elegies by writers such as Felicia Hemans, David Macbeth Moir, and Lydia Sigourney, and prose works by Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher-Stowe attempted to capture, record, and recall these sonic aspects in written form as a means of positively manifesting the intangible experience of loss into something more material, and as part of a wider cultural endeavour offering consolation in the idea of a shared collective grief.

At the same time, through an examination of some of the same elegies and through prose works such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘A Nurses’ Story’, Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘The Lost Ghost’, and M.R. James’s ‘The Lost Hearts’, I will suggest that something darker is revealed in their mournful dirges; bitterness toward a cultural movement that glorified child death as an immortalisation of beauty, innocence and piety, or as salvation from a life of misery on earth, and anxiety and fear that the afterlife for children was not a space of eternal happiness, play, and singing. It is my contention however, that all of these auditory markers should, nevertheless, be read as social constructs – not inherently associated with children, but cultural indicators that contributed to the idealisation and silencing of ‘the child’ during this period.