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Green Mount Cemetery, John Pendleton Kennedy, and Elizabeth Kennedy’s Unusual Grave Marker

Green Mount Cemetery, dedicated in 1839, is a paradigm of the rural cemetery movement which transformed American burial practice.  Like other mid nineteenth-century reform efforts such as temperance, abolition, and women’s rights, it was an attempt to improve society. Yet Green Mount has not attracted the attention enjoyed by other early rural cemeteries, such as Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts (the first, founded in 1831), Green-Wood in Brooklyn, and Laurel Hill in Philadelphia (both founded 1838), despite its innovative landscape design and significant architecture and sculpture. The Maryland Historical Magazine published the only thorough scholarly study of the cemetery, by R. Kent Lancaster, in 1979.  In recent decades, scholars in a range of disciplines have turned increasingly to rural cemeteries as exceptional resources: accessible, outdoor museums with tangible (if somewhat weathered) objects of study. As an art historian who concentrates on sculpted grave markers, I found Green Mount a historical treasure with compelling stories to tell.  One story involves a founder of the Maryland Historical Society, John Pendleton Kennedy and the unusual, even provocative sculpture that marks the grave of his wife, Elizabeth Gray Kennedy.

As American cities grew, urban burial grounds became notorious for overcrowding, desecration, and fear of the transmission of disease.  Reformists advocated for placing burial grounds outside cities, designed in the English country garden style, hence “rural,” with winding pathways, varied terrain and plantings, and a vast scale—a deliberate contrast with the grid of city streets and haphazard arrangement of urban burial grounds.(1) As the cities’ first large designed green spaces, locals and tourists flocked to the rural cemeteries to experience nature and admire the monuments.

GM plan 1840 PS

Green Mount Cemetery Plan, 1840
(Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University, https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/34956)

 

John Pendleton Kennedy was a politician, writer, and a founder of the Peabody Institute.  The subject of five biographies and innumerable accounts of his government and literary work, Kennedy is best known today for his accomplishments as a writer, including forging a national literary identity by defining the plantation genre of Southern fiction.  Kennedy’s first novel, Swallow Barn: Or a Sojourn in the Old Dominion, 1832, “helped to articulate a version of the national story especially concerned with the history of the American South and its ‘peculiar institution’ slavery,” although Kennedy, an ardent nationalist, sided with the Union during the Civil War.(2)

Kennedy figured in Green Mount’s founding and was an early cemetery patron.  In 1839, he presented the cemetery’s dedication address, emphasizing Green Mount’s advantages over urban burial grounds, its natural beauty an inspiring force that ameliorated the fear of death.  “I do not wish to lie down in the crowded city” he intoned, “much less have my dust give place to the intrusion of later comers,” but instead be buried “beneath the bowery trees, on some pleasant hill-side, within sound of the clear brattling brook; where the air comes fresh and filled with the perfume of flowers.”  The cemetery’s first public report indicates Kennedy owned four lots in section M.(3) Five family members are buried in two of the lots: John, Elizabeth, Eliza and Edward Gray (Elizabeth’s parents), and her sister, Martha Gray. Its eclecticism—all markers differ in appearance, unlike later family lots with matching stones—is characteristic of early rural cemeteries.

Kennedy-Gray lot in Green Mount Cemetery (Photo by Author)

Kennedy-Gray lot in Green Mount Cemetery
(Photo by Author)

Benz IPBF2 GM scuPS (2)

Elizabeth Gray Kennedy Grave, Green Mount Cemetery
(Photo by author)

Although Kennedy is the best-known occupant, Elizabeth’s marker has attracted more attention, and some confusion. Emily Lantz wrote in the Baltimore Sun in 1924, “above her grave is a marble statue the significance of which none of the present generation appears to know.  It represents a little girl, seated and weaving a wreath of flowers.  At her feet an unseen serpent is coiled and about to strike.  A watchful dog strives vainly to awaken the absorbed child to knowledge of her peril.” Lancaster described it as “a lovely, romantic piece of sculpture—a young girl, unaware . . . that the faithful mongrel at her feet, looking up at her with love and concern, pins down a writhing serpent with its paw.  Is it an allegory of death, some moments in Mrs. Kennedy’s girlhood, or simply a favorite carving that she or perhaps some trustee chose for her grave?”  He concluded, “most such questions cannot be answered.”(4)

My research can answer these questions, using new information discovered about the sculpture’s original appearance, creator, patronage, and meanings. Elizabeth’s sister Martha selected it, but John for paid it, initially for their home at 12 West Madison Street without thought of it as a grave marker.  Later it was moved to Green Mount.  The key to interpreting the marker is a duplicate discovered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which reveals the polished surface and crisp details it once featured. Inscribed on the base is “G. M. BENZONI F. A. 1852 ROMA,” identifying the artist as Giovanni Maria Benzoni, an Italian sculptor of international reputation.(5)  The sculpture’s title, Innocence Protected by Fidelity, reveals its narrative.  The girl is Innocence, a state augmented by sleep.  Dogs are longstanding symbol of fidelity.  The dog stamps forcefully on a snake by the girl’s foot.  At one level, the dog simply saves her from snakebite.  But if this is its only connotation, we would expect a prosaic title like Dog Protecting Girl from Snake.  Instead, Innocence Protected by Fidelity implies a deeper level of meaning.  Snakes symbolize evil and knowledge, rooted in Eden’s serpent, but also transformation because they shed their skins and sexual desire due to their phallic shape.  Innocence is often a euphemism for virginity.  Flowers, here placed strategically on the girl’s lap, are associated with fertility. Benzoni emphasized her breasts – one exposed by the dress’s dropped shoulder, the other accentuated by clinging drapery.  They are beginning to bud and her belly is rounded, the first signs of puberty, suggesting an imminent sexual awakening that the dog can only temporarily halt.  The sculpture allegorizes the fraught transition from childhood innocence to the knowledge of adulthood. Why was this sculpture selected as Elizabeth Kennedy’s memorial and what did it mean to her family and nineteenth-century cemetery visitors?

Elizabeth Gray Kennedy in 1835. From the book, John Pendleton Kennedy, Gentleman from Baltimore, by Charles H. Boehner, 1961.

Elizabeth Gray Kennedy in 1835.
From the book, John Pendleton Kennedy, Gentleman from Baltimore, by Charles H. Boehner, 1961.

What we know of Elizabeth comes mostly from John Kennedy’s journals and letters.  Although she appears retiring compared to her industrious husband, during Kennedy’s political career she maintained homes in Washington and Baltimore frequented by prominent guests.  Washington Irving, a family friend, noted in 1853, “Mrs. Kennedy had one of her soirées a few evenings since, when all of Washington poured in upon us.”  Kennedy wrote that his greatest blessing in life was “a home made dear to me by the affectionate and constant devotion of a wife who has done everything in her power to render me happy.” Martha also played a role; a memorial tribute mentioned “his wife, who, with her sister, has rendered his home for more than thirty years so dear and delightful to himself.”  The sisters, described as inseparable, were typical of many affluent women, their efforts focused on the domestic sphere.  Kennedy commented that Elizabeth “takes amazingly deep root in her household.”(6)

The Kennedy-Gray family were art lovers, important given Elizabeth’s memorial’s incorporation of a museum-quality sculpture.  Considered a successful commercial center but lacking in culture, Kennedy envisioned for Baltimore an art institution as early as 1841, writing, “I wish to write a lecture upon the means of improving our city . . . but especially a plan for a Free Public Library, a Museum and School of Art.”  Kennedy was an incorporator of the Maryland Historical Society in 1844, acting as secretary and later vice-president. The Society’s art gallery opened in 1848, the first historical society art gallery and one of the earliest public art galleries in America.(7) Kennedy’s focus shifted to the Peabody Institute in the 1850s, aiming to establish a gallery there for “the improvement of the taste, and, through it, the moral elevation of the character of the society of Baltimore.”(8) Kennedy’s concern for public venues for the visual arts is consistent with his support of Green Mount, a sculpture garden in addition to a cemetery.

John Pendleton Kennedy in 1825. From the book, John Pendleton Kennedy, Gentleman from Baltimore, by Charles H. Boehner, 1961.

John Pendleton Kennedy in 1825.
From the book, John Pendleton Kennedy, Gentleman from Baltimore, by Charles H. Boehner, 1961.

Martha and John were active art collectors, often gallery and studio hopping together while traveling abroad.  Kennedy’s travel journals offer the family’s most sustained consideration of artists and art.  They also reveal how Benzoni’s sculpture came to Baltimore.  In Rome they visited American expatriate sculptors, including Thomas Crawford, “lady sculptor” Harriet Hosmer, Edward Sheffield Bartholomew, Edmonia Lewis, Randolph Rogers, Joseph Mozier, William Rinehart, and Chauncey Ives. The Kennedys were frequent guests of William Wetmore Story, watching him create the sculpture of George Peabody in the east garden of Mount Vernon Place.  On their last day in Rome, April 16, 1868, Kennedy met Benzoni, although Martha apparently visited his studio before:

Martha has bought a pretty little statue from Benzoni – Cav. Giovanni Benzoni, as his card says – Via del Borghetto no 73 – for which I negotiated the purchase today. – It is a figure of a girl asleep, guarded by a dog, who has his paw upon the head of a serpent that is in the act of attacking the foot of the child.  He is represented as barking to awaken her to danger.  The price I asked to pay is $120 which the sculptor is to receive from Maquay, Pakenham and Hooker when he delivers the statue to them.

Kennedy continues with arrangements to ship works Martha ordered at other studios, including a mosaic table top, a bronze sculpture, and a painting of Faust’s Margaret.(9) Martha was actively acquiring large paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts that would have a significant presence in their home.  No images of the Madison Street house’s interior appear to exist, but wealthy Americans constructed their domestic environments like mute stage sets, using art to reveal their character and emotional sensibility.  Innocence Protected by Fidelity is typical of the sculpture that decorated the entry halls and sitting rooms of the well-to-do.(10) Period discussions of Benzoni’s work reveal its appeal for patrons like Martha, and the widespread recognition it received.

Giovanni Maria Benzoni was born in Songavazzo in north central Italy in 1809. He studied in Rome, and was considered a successor of Canova and Thorvaldsen.  Benzoni opened his first studio in 1832, eventually employing up to fifty assistants who made multiple versions of popular works.  Benzoni maintained his predecessors’ neoclassical style and subjects, although Innocence Protected by Fidelity marks a shift in both.  An increasing romanticism and realism characterized Italian sculpture at mid-century, in contrast with neoclassicism’s historical themes and idealization.  Benzoni’s work tows a middle line, maintaining neoclassical generalization of form, such as the smooth planes and simplified dress of Innocence, and romantic realism in the subject and detailed carving of the flowers and dog.(11)

Benzoni’s clientele included European nobility, Pope Pius IX, and American collectors J. Pierpont Morgan and Theodore Havermeyer. He received extensive notice at the first international exposition, London’s Crystal Palace of 1851, where he exhibited a version of Innocence Protected by Fidelity. This attracted many English-speaking patrons to his studio.  In 1854 The Art-Journal published the detailed commentary of “Florentia,” noting his success with sentimental themes:

Giovanni Maria Benzoni, self portrait. (Image from Wikipedia)

Giovanni Maria Benzoni, self portrait.
(Image from Wikipedia)

Among the numberless Roman sculptors none is more justly celebrated than Benzoni. . . .  He is, par excellence, the delineator of nature in her best-chosen and happiest moods.  Soft and gentle emotions, tender sentiments, the artlessness of childhood and innocency of youth, are breathed into the marble with a facility of skill certain of successfully touching the sympathies.

She then writes of Innocence as exemplifying Benzoni’s “unaffected and natural expressions of domestic incidents, so gracefully rendered, as to have drawn tears from many eyes. . . . these children are living and moving, really appealing to the heart as would their living representatives.”(12) This sentimental contemporary subject appealed not only to Martha but many others; Benzoni’s studio produced 32 versions of Innocence.  It is remarkable that one now resides in a Baltimore cemetery. A clearer understanding of its implications—and what it might have meant to Martha Gray and the Kennedys—is possible by examining its intersection with contemporary cultural currents.

The theme of innocence was popular in nineteenth-century sculpture. M. D. Conway, reviewing sculpture at the 1867 Paris exposition, where Kennedy was a juror, complained, “it is impossible to go the rounds of these Sapphos, Modestys, Innocences, Virgins Bathing . . . impossible, I say, without feeling that they are quite as exhaustible as one’s self.”  Many works titled Innocence are untraced today, so may not depict children, but embodying innocence in the image of a child was prevalent, spurred by the belief that children are innately innocent.  This altered earlier views of children as inherently depraved because of original sin.  In the seventeenth century John Locke, and later Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, introduced radically different views of childhood as a joyful stage of life worthy of protection, contributing to romantic visions of childhood innocence.  Increasingly children were viewed as pure and natural, especially girls.(13)

Innocence Protected by Fidelity, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Innocence Protected by Fidelity, 1852.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Innocence is consistent with other period images of girls, featured in poses with symbolic objects such as flowers and small pets that reinforce their demure, domestic, dependent, and sweet natures.  Flowers, representing femininity and fragility, also suggested transience since most bloom for a short time, emphasizing the fleeting nature of childhood. In America, images of girls were especially popular in the 1860s, acting as antidotes to the tensions of the Civil War.(14) Yet recent studies complicate such images, reading them as not only accentuating girls’ innocence but also objectifying them, rendering them passive and subject to male authority, strategically disempowered at the time when adult women were demanding a stronger voice.  Certainly Benzoni’s Innocence lacks agency—she is asleep and therefore defenseless, thus the need for the watchful dog to protect her.  Some scholars offer darker interpretations of depictions of prepubescent girls as containing a latent eroticism.  Anne Higonnet argues that images of children located the concept of innocence in the child’s body, considered inherently pure because it was uncorrupted by sexuality.  This is one of the implications of Benzoni’s sculpture, accentuated by the title and the discordant detail of the snake. Benzoni invited attention to her breasts, and the blooms filling the fold between her legs connote her future “flowering.” That a sculpture highlighting a girl’s innocence may in fact sexualize her is disturbing, but in keeping with the conclusion that “an adult desire to stunt the development of young girls at the moment they begin to mature, to forestall their growth into sexual beings, underlies many of these representations.”(15)

We don’t know if Martha and the Kennedys recognized the layered implications of Benzoni’s Innocence Protected by Fidelity.  Instead as they experienced it daily in their Madison Street home, its expression of childhood’s fleeting nature was perhaps the most compelling reading. When Kennedy purchased the sculpture the belief in children’s innate innocence was even more pronounced than when Benzoni first created it.  Children were considered an important force for society’s perfection.  An essay titled “Children” by Kennedy’s friend and biographer Henry Tuckerman, published in 1867, argues that children are morally redemptive and could rejuvenate overwrought adults.  This is true even of depictions of children: “the image of childhood to poet and painters, to the landscape, the household, the shrine, the temple and the grave—is a redeeming presence, a harmonizing and hopeful element.” Children keep “before our senses and soul forever . . . the evidence of innocent, spontaneous, complacent human life . . . full of teaching for the loftiest intellect, of consolation for the saddest heart.”(16) Perhaps this is why Benzoni’s sculpture became Elizabeth’s memorial; Tuckerman suggested that the depiction of an innocent child was even at “the grave” a “redeeming presence” that offered “consolation for the saddest heart.”  One can imagine the comfort Martha received from contemplating Innocence Protected by Fidelity above her sister’s grave, particularly as it originally appeared, its glowing white marble a dramatic and spiritualized contrast with Green Mount’s deep green vegetation.

Arunah Abell’s gravemarker. (Photo by author)

The migration of Benzoni’s sculpture from the home to the cemetery raises new questions of interpretation.  What did it mean in such a distinctive context, which, despite the cemetery’s emphasis on beauty, was so pervasively death oriented?  Although unusual for a grave marker, Innocence Protected by Fidelity is in several ways thematically consistent with motifs found frequently in the rural cemeteries.  Carved flowers are one of the cemetery’s most popular motifs.  Placing real flowers by graves is an ancient practice that became more pronounced during the nineteenth century, consistent with the rural cemetery movement’s conflation of the burial ground and the garden.  This interest extended to carved plants that decorate the simplest to the most complex grave markers, such as Green Mount’s memorial to Arunah Abell, founder of the Baltimore Sun, a large marble sarcophagus decorated with sprays of roses, sunflowers, ivy, and ferns. At this time an elaborate “language of flowers” existed; cemetery visitors “read” the deceased’s characteristics through the plants depicted on their grave markers.  Specific symbols include flower buds marking children’s graves, open roses for women, and sheaves of wheat for the elderly.(17) Of the flowers on Elizabeth’s grave maker, outside the cemetery daisies symbolized innocence and purity and morning glories youth and the bonds of love.  Both open and close with the sun, and so embody the ephemeral, consistent with the emphasis on childhood’s passing.  The partially opened roses also support a narrative emphasis on transition in that they are not buds, symbolizing childhood, nor fully opened, symbolizing womanhood.  In the cemetery, carved daisies often decorate children’s graves (again indicating innocence), and morning glories symbolize resurrection. Dogs also appear in rural cemetery sculpture, functioning primarily as guardians, but here they guard the grave; much like Benzoni’s dog they imply fidelity, loyalty, and vigilance.

Rinehart Sisson kids GM

Grave marker, Children of Hugh Sisson, by William Rinehart, Green Mount Cemetery
(Photo by Author)

But the most obvious reason why Innocence Protected by Fidelity reflects other cemetery sculpture is that the girl is asleep.  In the cemetery images of sleeping children were common euphemisms for death. Although child mortality rates improved during the nineteenth century, about one in five died before age five.(18) Envisioning a child asleep rather than dead was consistent with romanticism’s view that death, like sleep, was temporary, and reunion awaited in heaven.  As noted, Benzoni’s sculpture accentuates the ephemeral; a rose has just fallen from her hand and the dog is about to bark.  Things will change, she will wake, in the next instant. In a cemetery context, perhaps it is not the transition from childhood to adulthood that is the sculpture’s most pronounced reading, but the brief transition between death and the life beyond.

Cemetery sculpture is unusually accessible since it is located in public spaces, yet precise information about specific stones is often hard to come by, another reason why Mrs. Kennedy’s marker is significant. It is unique in that research provides an unusual degree of information about its artist and contemporaneous reactions to it; how it came to Baltimore, the woman who purchased it, and the one whose grave it marks; its implications based on cultural currents; and how meaning shifted as its context changed.  Thus, Elizabeth Kennedy’s grave marker enhances our awareness of cemetery markers as salient historical resources.

(Elisabeth L. Roark)

Elisabeth Roark is Associate Professor of Art History at Chatham University. An expanded version of this article will appear in the Spring/Summer 2018 issue of the Maryland Historical Magazine.

Green-Mount-Cemetery-Tour-almost-sold-out

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Sources and further reading:

(1) On the rural cemetery movement, see Blanche M. G. Linden, Silent City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); and David Charles Sloan, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 44-95.   On Green Mount’s history, see Prospectus and Terms of Subscription of the Green Mount Cemetery (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1839); R. Kent Lancaster, “Green Mount: The Introduction of the Rural Cemetery into Baltimore,” Maryland Historical Magazine 74, no. 1 (March 1979): 62-79; and Gerald W. Johnson, “An Introduction to the History of Green Mount,” Green Mount Cemetery: One Hundredth Anniversary (Baltimore: Green Mount Cemetery, 1938), 10-72. On earlier Baltimore burial grounds, see Stephen J. Vicchio, “Baltimore’s Burial Practices, Monuments, and Notions of Grief and Bereavement, 1780-1900,” Maryland Historical Magazine 81, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 34-48.

(2) J. Gerald Kennedy, “National Narrative and the Problem of American Nationhood,” in A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865, ed. Shirley Samuels (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 15.

(3) John Pendleton Kennedy, “Address,” The Dedication of Green Mount Cemetery, July 13th, 1839 (Baltimore: Woods & Crane, 1839), 21. Report of the Board of Managers to the Proprietors and Lot-Holders of Green Mount Cemetery (Baltimore: Woods and Crane, 1840), 31, indicates Kennedy’s ownership of lots M31-34.

(4) Emily Emerson Lantz, “Do You Know the Street On Which You Live? North Avenue,” Baltimore Sun, March 2, 1924, Proquest; Lancaster, “Green Mount,” 69-70.

(5) “F. A.” is an abbreviation for the Latin phrase fecit “he made,” and anno, “year;” thus the inscription reads, “G. M. Benzoni made this in the year 1852, Rome.” An image of the Met’s version of the sculpture is available at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/196738.

(6) The first quote is from Pierre Munroe Irving, Life and Letters of Washington Irving, vol. 4 (New York: Putnam, 1867), 129. The second quote is from Kennedy’s will, included in Henry T. Tuckerman, The Life of John Pendleton Kennedy (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871), 480.  The memorial tribute is by [Robert C. Winthrop], “Tributes to the Memory of Hon. John P. Kennedy,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1871): 364.  The last quote is in JPK to Robert C. Winthrop, January 8, 1850, Robert C. Winthrop Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

(7) Tuckerman, Life of Kennedy, 481-89, 390; Patricia Dockman Anderson, “A Most Remarkable Group of Men,” Maryland Historical Magazine 101, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 401-29; and Anna Wells Rutledge, “Early Art Exhibitions of the Maryland Historical Society, Maryland Historical Magazine 42, no. 2 (June 1947): 124-36.

(8) The first quote is from Tuckerman, Life of Kennedy, 395; see also John Pendleton Kennedy, Peabody Institute, Address of the President to the Board of Trustees on the Organization and Government of the Institute (Baltimore: Peabody Institute, 1870), 20-22; Elizabeth Schaaf, “Baltimore’s Peabody Art Gallery,” Archives of American Art Journal 24, no. 4 (1984): 9-14; and Anna Wells Rutledge, List of Works of Art in the Collection of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Maryland (Baltimore: Peabody Institute, 1949).

(9) JPK Papers (microfilm), MdHS, “Journal of a Trip to Europe, January 1 to May 19 1868,” vol. 6, roll VI, Item 13(f), May 16, 1868.

(10) Lauren Lessing, “Angels in the Home: Adelecia Acklen’s Sculpture Collection at Belmont Mansion, Nashville, Tennessee,” Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 1 (April 2011): 40-57.

(11) Giuseppe Rota, Un artista bergamasco dell’Ottocento: Giov. Maria Benzoni, nella storia della scoltura e nell’epistolario famigliare (Bergamo: S. Alessandro, 1938); and Roberta Bertazzoni, “Giovanni Maria Benzoni, 1809-1873” (Songavazzo, 2009), http://www.antiqua.mi.it/opuscoloxwebAntiqua.pdf .

(12) Florentia [Frances Dickinson, Frances Minto Elliot], “A Walk through the Studios of Rome, Part II,” The Art-Journal 6 (October 1, 1854): 288-89.

(13) M. D. Conway, “The Great Show at Paris Again,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 35 (November 1867): 784.  Hugh Cunningham, “Introduction,” in Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2005), 1-17, 41- 42.

(14) Holly Pyne Connor, “The Flowering of Girlhood Narratives, 1850-1870,” in Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in Nineteenth-Century American Art, ed. Holly Pyne Connor, exhibition catalogue, Newark Museum of Art (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2012), 21; Claire Perry, Young America: Childhood in 19th-Century Art and Culture, exhibition catalogue, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 34-71.

(15) Anne Higonette, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London, Thames & Hudson, 1998), 8, 27, 30, 36-38.  The final quote is from Loren Lerner, “Innocence,” in Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia, vol. 2, eds. Claudia A. Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2008), 366.

(16) Henry T. Tuckerman, “Children,” The Galaxy 4 (July 1867): 315-21.

(17) Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers, A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 11-12; and June Hadden Hobbs, “Say It with Flowers in the Victorian Cemetery,” Markers XIX: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies (2002): 240-71.

(18) Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Sylvia D. Hoffert, “’A Very Peculiar Sorrow’: Attitudes Toward Infant Death in the Urban Northeast, 1800-1860,” American Quarterly 39 (1987): 601-16.