When she remarried, she inherited a stepdaughter who was schizophrenic. Mrs. Cameron herself had to endure the greatest tragedy a parent can face - the death of a child. Everywhere you look in these Victorian lives, you see sudden and early death, sickness, disaster. You also see incredible kindness and flexibility. Orphans seem to move with ease from one family to another.
Women remarry and raise other women's children.
Death did the job divorce does now in cutting down the timeline of family groups, but without the cynicism divorce brings in its wake. In fact, with quite the opposite, a certain amount of justified sentimentality. Wives were treasured as saints and mothers as Madonnas. Children dead young were angels. These metaphors are the stuff of Cameron's imagination, producing great works like The Dream , The Kiss of Peace , and Mary Mother , but also some I find silly, as when she stuck wings on children to make them angels.