“A very Moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in Dickens

• Main Author: Wagner, Tamara Silvia
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Language::English; Humanities::Literature::English; Charles Dickens; Victorian Literature
• Online Access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/ninecentstud.29.2015-16.0071; https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146488
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The Victorian baby, so ubiquitous in nineteenth-century popular culture and so notoriously sentimentalised and commodified, is a curiously little studied topic. It tends to get subsumed in overviews of Victorian child cults and children’s literature. Or we find it reduced to a footnote or a brief aside in analyses of maternity. Ten years ago, Sally Shuttleworth urged in a discussion of “Victorian Childhood” that it was high “time to add age, and more specifically childhood, to the triumvirate of class, gender and race.”1 Meanwhile, Childhood Studies approaches have reinvestigated the Victorians’ cultural preoccupation with the child, including its role in art and literature, yet most studies focus on older children.2 Revisionist work on maternity has likewise constructively questioned the realities of the so-called separate spheres, successfully upending a welter of received notions about the ideologies and practices of domesticity.3 Yet scant attention has been accorded to the actual object of mothering: the infant itself. The focus instead seems exclusively on the mother, reducing the infant to a mere accessory in her experience.4 Although two vital developments in Victorian Studies – the influence of Childhood Studies and the revaluation of nineteenth-century discourses on maternity – are thus playing together to engender new critical interest in representations of infancy, there has hitherto been no sustained study of the Victorian baby. In this essay, I shall explore how Charles Dickens’s highly influential representations of babies – and in particular his comical babies – play with and thereby transform readers’ expectations of what babyhood should look like in nineteenth-century culture. His creative use of clichés makes us rethink the still prevalent association of the Victorian baby with idealised domestic bliss and an often sappy sentimentality.