Child Labour and the Idolatry of Nature in “The Cry of the Children” and A Drama of Exile

Abstract

ABSTRACT The theology of creation underpinning Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (EBB) protest against child labour in “The Cry of the Children” (1843) has gone largely unnoticed by scholars. The poem portrays child labour as a horrific sign of what ecotheologian Norman Wirzba calls the modern idolatry of nature, the attempt to reduce the world’s meaning to human uses and desires. When shorn of inherent sanctity, “The Cry” implies, all of nature’s bodies, including children’s bodies, become available for sacrifice for utility and profit. This implication becomes clear when we consider the poem in dialogue with EBB’s A Drama of Exile (1844). Together, the poems indicate that in reducing creation to a means of production, modernity assaults Christ and his redemptive identification with the living earth. Yet the poems also call on readers to renounce the idolatrous bid to master the earth and instead to imagine themselves as co-labourers in creation's redemption through Christ’s body.