A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father

"A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father"
Author	Henry Lawson
Original title	"A Child In The Dark: A Bush Sketch"
Language	English
Genre(s)	Autobiographical
Published in	Bulletin
Publication date	13 December 1902

Last updated March 05, 2019

"A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father" is a short story written by the iconic Australian writer and poet, Henry Lawson. The story, often considered to be partially autobiographical, considers the rather bleak relationship between a man and his family.

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country by total area. The neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north; the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east; and New Zealand to the south-east. The population of 25 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, and its largest city is Sydney. The country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.

Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson was an Australian writer and bush poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest short story writer".

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to the west and Scotland to the north-northwest. The Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, and includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.

Plot summary

A story by Henry Lawson, was written in 1902 and included in Triangles of Life (1913). The story records the return home to his farm on New Year's Eve of a poor carpenter, who discovers that his three children and the household chores have been neglected by his neurotic and slatternly wife; after cleaning up and attending to his family during the night, the workman returns to his trade next morning. The setting of the story (Pipeclay), the fact that the foreign father's name is Nils, and the tension between the parents, suggest that the story is autobiographical.

The story begins on New Year's Eve, with a father pacing steadily and hopelessly through the smothering darkness. He arrives home to his cold and uninviting hut.

The man's oldest son emerges from the darkness. He had been feeling sick, he says. But he is better now. He would like to help his father with the cooking and cleaning, but has neither the knowledge nor the means to do so.

The man's wife, Emma, calls from her bedroom. She is currently "bad again in the head" and whines constantly about her husband's utter uselessness. Everything is his fault. The following morning, New Years Day, the man rises from his sleep and leaves for the farming town at which he works. But the new year brings neither hope nor relief- it is just the beginning of another bleak, unpromising cycle of life. "And the old year died as many old years had died."

Characters

Nils:
- The father. He works at his trade in a farming town about five miles away from his home, and is struggling to make a farm and a home between jobs. He is constantly unappreciated by his wife, and finds little pleasure in arriving home to his family.
Emma:
- The mother. Though she is "a big, strong, and healthy-looking woman, with dark hair and strong, square features," she is considered to be "bad... in the head." She is convinced of her husband's uselessness, and is constantly complaining that she is misunderstood and her efforts are unappreciated, despite doing little work at all.
Nils, the elder son, called Sonny by his father:
- The oldest of three children in the household. "A pale, thinfaced, dark-eyed boy." He yearns to help with cooking and cleaning whenever he can, yet he lacks the knowledge and the means to do so. The father notices attempts at washing dishes and scrubbing floors that have been shortly abandoned, most likely the attempts of the oldest child.
The second-oldest son
The baby

Literary Significance

'A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father' is considered particularly significant, in that it was completed shortly before Lawson's attempted suicide that same year and so clearly marks the end of his creative period.

In his autobiography, Lawson quotes a friend's advice to him on a projected book about Bush people: "Treated ruthlessly, Rousseaulike, without regard to your own or others' feelings, what a notable book yours would be!"^[1] It is often believed that this story was begun under the influence of such advice.

An autobiography is a self-written account of the life of oneself. The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical The Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic". However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in 1809. Despite only being named early in the nineteenth century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity. Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or diary writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of a life from a particular moment in time, while the diary, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of moments in time". Autobiography thus takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment of composition. While biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints, autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. The memoir form is closely associated with autobiography but it tends, as Pascal claims, to focus less on the self and more on others during the autobiographer's review of his or her life.

The story itself is often read as a partial autobiography, perhaps recounting Lawson's obviously distressing childhood memories. Not unlike Lawson's famous early work, "The Drover's Wife," 'A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father" deals with the relationship of parent and child, but the writing style has vastly changed in the years separating the writing of the two. The sketch appears to lack the evocative impressonistic descriptions which carry so much emotional force in his best work, and is written with an impersonality of tone that is quite uncharacteristic.

Quotes

"It was so dark—with a smothering darkness—that even the low loom of the scrub-covered ridges, close at hand across the creek, was not to be seen. The sky was not clouded for rain, but with drought haze and the smoke of distant bush fires."
"these sounded more like the footsteps of one pacing steadily to and fro, and thinking steadily and hopelessly—sorting out the past. Only the steps went on."
"On the floor, between the sofa and the table, lay a boy—child almost—on a similar mattress, with a cover of coarse sacking, and a bundle of dirty clothes for a pillow."
"There you go again! Flinging your money away on rubbish that’ll be on the dust-heap to-morrow, and your poor wife slaving her finger-nails off for you in this wretched hole, and not a decent rag to her back."
"And the child knew he was watching him, and pretended to sleep, and, so pretending, he slept. And the old year died as many old years had died."
"And so the New Year began."

Publication Details

First published:Bulletin, 13 December 1902, under the title 'A Child In The Dark: A Bush Sketch'
Triangles Of Life, Melbourne, Standard Publishing Company (1913), Henry Lawson

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References

↑ The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories (First published 1986) Edited with an introduction by John Barnes - Introduction

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[1] The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories (First published 1986) Edited with an introduction by John Barnes - Introduction

v t e Works by Henry Lawson
Poems	Flag of the Southern Cross (1887) Andy's Gone with Cattle (1888) The Teams (1889) Freedom on the Wallaby (1891) Up the Country (1892) The City Bushman (1892) The Poets of the Tomb (1892) Saint Peter (1893) Scots of the Riverina (1917)
Poetry collections	In the Days When the World was Wide and Other Verses (1896) Verses, Popular and Humorous (1900) When I Was King and Other Verses (1905)
Short stories	The Drover's Wife (1892) The Bush Undertaker (1892) On the Edge of a Plain (1893) The Union Buries Its Dead (1893) Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster (1898) The Loaded Dog (1901) A Double Buggy at Lahey Creek (1901) A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father (1902)
Short story collections	While the Billy Boils (1896) On the Track (1900) Over the Sliprails (1900) Joe Wilson and His Mates (1901)