Mercy Among the Children

Essential to the novel is the theme of poverty. The sense of stagnation is borne out in the dilapidation of the houses, the fact that the characters are perennially out of work, and their lack of education. When work does come, it is destructive to the body, falsely implicates the Hendersons, and is ultimately futile (Sydney’s hard-earned money is stolen). What Richards presents in the Hendersons’ existence is an absurdly impoverished life, or more accurately, the impoverishment of life itself. In contrast with the Darwinian worldview, progress does not accompany the passage of time in Richards’s novel: “For the river was hurrying on, like the world, and had no time to stop to reflect on the greater ideas of where it was going” ( 244). This Heraclitian river flows through the Stumps, like the River Lethe through the underworld. Yet, reminiscent of the “withered stumps of time” in 20th-century American poet T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922), time unfolds in this community without growth. The deaths of Elly, Sydney, Percy, and Cynthia Pit’s stillborn child are emblematic of a larger absence of hope. Lyle’s life, like the house in which the Hendersons live, resembles this wasteland when Lyle comes to visit years later, afflicted by brokenness: