Time and Thought

Charles Lamb’s Dream Children reminded me of Henry James’s short novel The Turn of the Screw, set in Victorian England. Both deal with a pair of children that the narrator is taking care of who have supernatural associations. For Lamb, the children are figments of his own imagination, created by dwelling on what his life could have been like if he had married Ann Simmons. In the end, the children fade into nothing, as they explain to Lamb that their identity essentially is nothing. In James’s work, the children claim to see apparitions of deceased servants formerly employed at their estate. These sightings continue until the older child’s heart stops and he collapses into his governess’s arms.
Time becomes an important dimension for each of these works. Lamb mentally changes the past and then projects himself into an altered future. As the children fade away, the past and future are torn away from him, leaving him only with the present. For James, however, the present stops along with the child’s heart, and the governess is left to ponder what happened in the past that led to the current situation. It appears that time and issues of what could have been are important to both Romantics and Victorians.