‘How I Managed’

The second chapter explores how nineteenth-century parenting publications shaped popular narratives of babyhood and baby care. A critical analysis of the power of the print media in producing as well as spreading rapidly commodified advice material allows us to reconsider the still persistent phenomenon of competing books on babies in its historical context. The expanding market of expert instructions reconfigured images of babyhood, codifying the baby as a source of anxiety that required clinical knowledge and intervention. Women writers of popular childrearing manuals such as Eliza Warren, the main rival of the bestselling Isabella Beeton, packaged infant care advice in narratives, at once trading on and endeavouring to reshape this market. A crucial link between putatively professional, systematically presented, parenting instructions and the interpolation of infant care advice in popular fiction, Warren’s full-scale childrearing manual in narrative form, How I Managed My Children from Infancy to Marriage (1865), provides a test case of the shifting focus on personal experience and new expert knowledge in the selling of parenting publications. Since the nineteenth-century market for these publications was informed by a general move to hands-on, practical advice, Warren’s strategies in creating her authorial persona to market a mother’s experience formed a symptomatic and influential component in the impact of advice literature both on perceptions of baby care and on the literary baby.

‘A very Moloch of a baby’

Dickens’s portrayal of babyhood comprises comical creations as well as complex symbols and infants as victims of social injustice, yet, especially his funny babies are often overlooked. The first chapter explores how Dickens satirizes the growing commodification of babyhood in Victorian Britain and, in playing with readers’ expectations, produces comical scenes that strengthen rather than undercut his social criticism. His exposure of failed middle-class projects of child rescue urges his readers to reconsider prevailing ideas of charitable intervention, while he uses comically exaggerated infant behaviour to render working-class practices of child care mundane and familiar without sentimentalizing them. His representation of working-class baby-minding, a practice that Victorian philanthropists notoriously misunderstood, exemplifies how Dickens could combine comedy and social criticism to draw attention to topical issues, upend clichés, and at the same time create individualized infant characters. His Christmas book for 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, produces a grotesquely comical image of a baby, minded by a small boy, as ‘Moloch’, a deity demanding child sacrifice. While Baby Moloch becomes central to a reassessment of emotional attachment, the narrative complicates middle-class rescue work. The simultaneity of the comical baby and infants as symbols of suffering is then further developed in Bleak House (1853), whereas in Our Mutual Friend (1865), the failed rescue of an orphaned toddler dramatizes pressing issues involving paid child-minding and unregulated adoption. The analysis of Dickens’s fictional infants simultaneously reveals the different narrative roles of the comical baby in Victorian literature.

Conclusion

The conclusion puts the continued commodification of Victorian babyhood into a different perspective by re-examining nineteenth-century discourse on an expanding baby industry that included baby care products as well as contradictory advice on their purchase, right usage, and ongoing innovation. It explores this industry as a product of and an additional force in the contestations surrounding competing forms of infant care that sharpened the paradoxical relationship between the sentimentalization of the baby and the commercial possibilities of anxious parenting, the increasing professionalization of infant care, and altogether the growing contestations surrounding the right way to look after your baby in print media. The ongoing commodification of the baby does more than attest to the lasting power and the distorting appropriation of Victorian baby-worship. A critical discussion of the growing culture of baby products at the time also prompts us to examine the significance of this culture today. In understanding and discussing its continued influence, we might become enabled to regard contradictory parenting advice and baby care products as presented in the media with more critical self-awareness as well.

Sensational Babies

The final chapter analyses the reconfiguration of the Victorian baby in the sensation genre. As sensation novelists participate in social and scientific discourses on infancy, the baby might exemplify theories of infant development or care; more provocatively, its sensationalization showcases how and why particular methods do not work or how normative attitudes require a critical rethinking. Mrs Henry Wood capitalizes on modern mothers’ self-doubts to produce new sources of sensationalism. Babyhood is not merely vulnerable and easily mismanaged, but also a target of criminal intervention, and in the process, Wood identifies parenting practices she disagrees with as a crime. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s fiction, by contrast, the baby features as an inadvertent impostor as well as a target in criminal plots. In his complex representations of maternal love for an illegitimate infant who has been removed from its mother, Wilkie Collins challenges normative conceptions of breastfeeding, illegitimacy, and adoption in Victorian Britain. Literary sensationalism, I contend, at once utilizes, criticizes, and thereby transforms images of babyhood in nineteenth-century popular culture. While sensation novelists participated in topical controversies surrounding new expert knowledge of infancy and infant care, genre developments produced as well as traded on changing attitudes to babies. A close look at these interchanges enables us to realize how different and self-conscious as well as culturally central the changing images of infancy were at the time and how they informed debates that still determine discourses on babyhood, baby care, and their expected roles in literature today.

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.

Introduction

The Introduction surveys the divergent representations of babyhood in the nineteenth century. It situates the present study at the intersection of new work on the modern family and changing parenting realities, as well as historical childhood and child care. After a detailed discussion of the most influential or mainstream portrayals of infancy in Victorian popular culture, such as the sentimentalized baby, the baby as victim in social reform writing, and the commodified baby, the Introduction addresses the importance of unusual, yet culturally significant depictions, including comical or sensationalized babies in fiction. How did these portrayals transform cultural fantasies and genre developments? How did iconic depictions of babyhood reflect, distort, or endeavour to change the lived realities of young children in Victorian Britain? The texts selected for close reading in the subsequent chapters include material that reveals unexpected sides to Victorian infancy, as well as works that have had a catalysing function for changing representational strategies. Critical attention to the diverse and at times ambiguous depiction of infancy in Victorian culture thus also produces new readings of canonical works that have hitherto not been considered from this angle.