ABSTRACT
A journey made as a boy prisoner on a slave-ship is a much more terrible event than a short stay in quarantine with a well-meaning aunt and uncle. These narratives describe experiences of loss of different intensity, ranging from the minor separations from family involved in a holiday, to the larger anxieties evoked by evacuation, forcible eviction, or a parent’s mysterious absence through illness. States of loss have both external and internal meanings in these stories. Many of the children or child-like central characters in these stories are shown to experience relationships and states of loss not only in external fact, but in their imaginations, through symbolic representations of themselves or their loved objects. Several of the stories hint to us that the events they describe are to be taken as much as what can happen in a child’s imagination than as literal truth.
