Death and Diaspora : Part Three

The census in 1841 is an odd document. Not only is it the first real record we see the Wertheim’s thereon, as a family, but it is also a document that has so much emotion attached to it. Here, for me, knowing what was in store, the 1841 is a document through which innocent faces seep, a life without detriment, despite cordial poverty. This family were happy, they wanted for nothing, and yet, this 1841 document is the first and last time we see them together like this. In this small, slim street in Bristol, the politics of war and the ills of depravity did not touch this family, as much s the many. Now, however, this was all about to change.

One night in January 1842, in the very midst of a winter chill, Caroline awoke in her bed to the cry of her daughter, Louisa, not yet three years old. Merely a toddler. She was coughing abnormally, and her nose was running. A cold Caroline thought, and so she brought Louisa into bed with her and Moses, to keep her warm. It was a cosy scene. Yet, as the night passed through the coughs became more apparent, their frequency moreso, and Moses made a point of turning to his wife to warn she had a fever. “Look at you” she said to her daughter. “You poor thing.”

However, when Louisa’s temperature rocketed the next day, she quickly descended into fever, and when the doctor called to Avon Street, he diagnosed Louisa with Whooping Cough. A frantic Caroline – who had been taught by her father to expect to bury a child one day- would cling to the arm of her husband and stare down at the bed where their daughter lay, peaceful and sleeping, waking only to splutter a few times an hour.
This carried on until January 13, when Louisa stopped breathing. The doctor was called again, but Moses, young yet wise, knew nothing could be done. As Caroline sat on the bed, her children came to surround their sister, in a combined effort to keep her warm in her final hours, but it was futile. The doctor placed his fingers on Louisa’s neck and then her wrist and gave a sigh, on which Caroline burst into tears. She immediately went next door to the arms of her father James Westcott, as Moses cradled his dead daughter.

At present, Louisa’s burial location is unknown.

With all of the pain and the sorrow and heartache that comes, with losing a child as she did, Caroline struggled for a while to come to terms with the loss of Louisa. For a month she sat and did not eat as she should have, she hardly spoke, until Moses managed to persuade her to start having more children. In November 1842, she gave birth again, joyfully, to a baby girl. There was no question in it; she was named Louisa, after her sister. Somehow, Caroline saw this as a blessing in light of the daughter she had taken from her, and Moses was over the moon. He seems to be a real family man, and Caroline was his ray of light. Together, they pulled themselves through heartbreak, and the darkness of Louisa’s death had been replaced with the light of another birth.

Forward they went. Look back they did not. They remembered Louisa, and loved their new daughter of the same name. To Caroline, with her husband at her side, what might have been was not important anymore. The present mattered for them, they had been blessed after tragedy, and so they spurred onwards. Yet, it was what the future had waiting for them that would test them both even more…