Death and Diaspora : Part Five

Caroline had, at the time of Hannah’s death, given birth to six children. Now, only half that number remained alive. Caroline still had Amelia. She still had Samuel. She still had Rebecca, and of course, Moses her beloved husband, and her father James Westcott. She had suffered already too much grief but was by no means alone with it. People in the street where the Wertheim’s lived often looked unto the house where there had been all of this loss, and secrete a look of pity to Moses on his way to work, and Caroline as she made the miniature journey to her father’s house. James had now retired, and in 1845 was aged 67. Later however, sometime shortly after Hannah’s death, he moves, this time into the Clifton area. This is the last we hear of James for a few years. Caroline must have felt the distance grow between her and her father, despite how close recent events had brought them so much closer.

But Caroline gave birth again, in 1846. Yes, you guessed it reader…another daughter! Once again, in an avid attempt to keep the name in the family, the name Louisa was chosen for a third time. Louisa III was born into a family changing face. Two years later, along came another child, this time a son, and he was named Aaron Isaac. He was Caroline’s eighth child, fifth surviving.

Yet, as 1845 was such a turning point for the Wertheim’s, so was 1849. The family in the 1840’s had so suddenly become a target for tragedy and a such a symbol for sorrow, it is perhaps difficult to realise just how beaten down Moses and Caroline had become. The business of life rocketed for them, and too many times in so little space had they visited the cemetery where their daughters lay rested.

However, 1849 brought with it peril nothing like Moses and Caroline had ever seen before. In early 1849, their first daughter Amelia passed away, the last surviving of the set of twins that were the first Caroline bore. She died of phthisis, a wasting condition that weakened organ tissue. But even after yet another death, the family carried on. Caroline had begun to develop a thicker skin, and as sad it is to state, she grew and learned to expect her children to die, living in the hope that at least one might survive to produce her with grandchildren. Moses had a much more difficult time accepting this. He was a sensitive man, and the times had failed to harden him.

In 1849, terror hit Bristol. An epidemic of cholera swept through the city in one of the worst epidemic’s in nineteenth century England. It came in July, and lasted for three months. It preyed on the young, old, strong, feeble, and men, women and children of all classes. Despite an increase in hygienic care in the region, cholera could not be stopped. Why? It was in the water. In the very water that kept the Wertheim’s alive. In the drains, the streets, and in cups on the dinner table. And it had the Wertheim family in its sights. Sometime in August, Aaron Isaac contracted it, and the medicine men came to the house in Cathay. At this time, as in the 1851 census two years later, the family were now lodging in the home of a Beer house keeper named Elizabeth Jenkins. Somehow, Caroline had found time to work from this house, as a Tailoress with a fellow lodger, Rebecca Adams.

Perhaps with this slight neglect, Caroline made her youngest child vulnerable. She chose a wrong time to take a focus away from her children, in an effort to make more money to keep them safe. In a way, she was very much holding a double edged sword. In her attempt to keep poverty and disease away, she had in fact left the door open for it.

Cholera hit the house in September sometime 1849, and claimed little Aaron in October. So much loss, so much hurt, so much grief. Why her? Why them? A sign of the times or an unbearable sense of a previous sin of some sort?

Whatever it was, Caroline was about to lose one of the most important figures in her life. She had survived most of the worst, but was by no means through it yet…