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

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 as...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wagner, Tamara Silvia
Other Authors: School of Humanities
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/ninecentstud.29.2015-16.0071
https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146488
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
id sg-ntu-dr.10356-146488
record_format dspace
spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-1464882023-03-11T20:05:59Z “A very Moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in Dickens Wagner, Tamara Silvia School of Humanities Humanities::Language::English Humanities::Literature::English Charles Dickens Victorian Literature 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. Accepted version 2021-02-18T08:43:24Z 2021-02-18T08:43:24Z 2019 Journal Article Wagner, T. S. (2019). “A very moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in Dickens. Nineteenth Century Studies, 29(2015-16), 71-97. 0893-7931 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/ninecentstud.29.2015-16.0071 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146488 2015-16 29 71 97 en Nineteenth Century Studies © 2015-16 Nineteenth Century Studies Association. All rights reserved. This paper was published by Penn State University Press in Nineteenth Century Studies and is made available with permission of Nineteenth Century Studies Association. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider NTU Library
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Humanities::Language::English
Humanities::Literature::English
Charles Dickens
Victorian Literature
spellingShingle Humanities::Language::English
Humanities::Literature::English
Charles Dickens
Victorian Literature
Wagner, Tamara Silvia
“A very Moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in Dickens
description 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.
author2 School of Humanities
author_facet School of Humanities
Wagner, Tamara Silvia
format Article
author Wagner, Tamara Silvia
author_sort Wagner, Tamara Silvia
title “A very Moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in Dickens
title_short “A very Moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in Dickens
title_full “A very Moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in Dickens
title_fullStr “A very Moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in Dickens
title_full_unstemmed “A very Moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in Dickens
title_sort “a very moloch of a baby” : left to be minded in dickens
publishDate 2021
url https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/ninecentstud.29.2015-16.0071
https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146488
_version_ 1761781371686092800