Emma

Emma is Philip Carey’s former nurse and one of his earliest sources of affection and security. After his mother dies, Emma tells the child that he will not see her again and that she is in heaven; when Philip is sent away from the home where she has cared for him since he was a month old, she comforts him and helps him prepare for the move. Her practical tenderness makes her a maternal presence at the moment his family life is broken apart.

Identity and Early Care

Emma has looked after Philip from infancy, and the intimacy of that long service is explicit in her sense that he is almost her own son. Her bond with him is not merely a matter of household duty: when he learns that his mother is gone, he seeks Emma and weeps against her, and she answers his grief with soft words and reassurance.

The first news she gives Philip is difficult for him to understand. She tells him that his mother will not return and explains that she is in heaven, while Philip can only ask why. Emma thus mediates the child’s first encounter with death, putting an incomprehensible loss into the religious language available to him without making the loss itself any less immediate.

Separation and Consolation

After the death of Philip’s mother, his uncle announces that the boy must leave the next day. Philip may take his toys and one object to remember each of his parents by; everything else is to be sold. In the midst of these arrangements, Philip turns to Emma and hides his face in her bosom, crying as though his heart will break. Her embrace gives him a human refuge while the household is being dismantled and his future is decided by adults.

Emma promises to visit him and never forget him. As she helps prepare his clothes, she tells him about the country he is going to and describes her own home in Devonshire: her father keeps a turnpike on the road to Exeter, and there are pigs, a cow, and a new calf. The homely particulars redirect Philip’s attention from grief to the approaching journey. When he later asks what he should take to remember his parents by, Emma sends him to the drawing-room to choose something, supporting his participation in a decision that carries emotional weight for him.

Narrative Significance

Emma’s role is concentrated in Philip’s childhood departure, but the scene establishes the difference between emotional care and the impersonal decisions governing the household. His uncle is occupied by correspondence and bills, while Emma stays with Philip, comforts him, and helps him through the practical work of leaving. Her promise to remember him cannot prevent their separation, yet it preserves a connection beyond the home he is losing.

The scene also gives Philip’s early bereavement its human scale. Loss is presented not only as the death of his mother but as a sequence of changes: the journey away, the sale of the household’s belongings, the choice of keepsakes, and the parting from the woman who has cared for him since infancy. Emma’s tenderness is the counterweight to that upheaval, and her presence helps make the child’s transition bearable without suggesting that grief has disappeared.