Competitive Infant Care in Domestic Fiction

This chapter analyses the critical representation of changing baby care methods in Charlotte Yonge’s fiction to parse the growing awareness of competitive parenting advice in Victorian culture. As a religious novelist dedicated to producing realist accounts of family life, Yonge creates unidealized infant protagonists who exhibit realistically described, age-appropriate behaviour. While they demonstrate the effects of different childrearing methods, Yonge avoids producing model children or parents. Instead, she depicts baby care as demanding domestic work that is rendered more difficult by the growing onslaught of contrasting opinions. Whereas her early marriage novel Heartsease (1854) describes maternal involvement in the day-to-day care of the young heroine’s first-born with unprecedented detail, both The Daisy Chain (1856) and Nuttie’s Father (1885) highlight the difficulties of a ‘mother-sister.’ In asserting the superiority of domestic realism over sensationalism, moreover, Yonge rewrites popular infant impostor plots while drawing on child abduction cases in the press and, in her late novel That Stick (1892), critically tackles the notorious vilification of workhouse nurseries. This still seldom discussed domestic writer thus negotiates shifting attitudes to and representations of babies and baby care. Her comments on changing practices alert us to the competitive parenting prevalent in Victorian Britain, how such a sense of competition was fostered by divergent childrearing advice, how damaging this could be, and how it already began to attract critical remarks at the time.