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"The first in-depth study of Dickens's creative engagement with popular science and medicine, this book brings to light the scientific entertainments, shows and institutions, and the material and print cultures that revolutionized the ways in which Victorian audiences encountered childhood. It explores Dickens's literary and journalistic writings, his private interests and public causes across the span of his long career. In doing so, it offers a new way of understanding Dickens's preoccupation with childhood by showing how his fascination with novel scientific ideas about childhood and with new practices of scientific inquiry shaped the development of his narrative techniques and aesthetic imagination. Drawing on fascinating archival material, this book reconstructs Dickens's experience of mesmerist trials and hospital ward tours, anatomical museums and popular scientific performances. It provides new readings of some of Dickens's most famous works, including Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son and Our MutualFriend, as well as of lesser-known texts. Dickens's child characters were a source of inspiration to many medical writers, institutions and journalists, and the book also traces how these groups appropriated Dickensian characters and motifs in order to debate and bolster the authority of new scientific ideas. "--
List of contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Experimental Subjects: Oliver Twist and the Culture of Mesmerist Experimentation 2. Hothouse Children: Dombey and Son and Popular Medical Child Health Manuals 3. Dickens, the Social Mission of Victorian Paediatrics and the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children 4. The Feelings of Childhood: Dickens and the Study of the Child's Mind 5. Monstrous Births and Saltationism in Our Mutual Friend and Popular Anatomical Museums Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Report
"Katharina Boehm's Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood offers the reader an insight into Dickens's public campaigning on behalf of GOSH, identifying in his fund-raising work a key moment where developing medical discourses helped shape Victorian understanding of childhood. ... The book is wide-ranging in its engagement. ... this book explores how childhood became a site of inscription for medical discourses and how Dickens, always with his finger on the pulse, captures these trends in his writings." (Laura Peters, Modern Language Review, Vol. 111, October, 2016)
"The contextual rationale for this study is done subtly and convincingly; one finishes the book with a sense that Dickens has been left out of scholarship on 'literature and science' for too long. Indeed, the scientific context allows Boehm to offer new and penetrative readings of novels that we all assume to know well. ... provides a timely and well-written demonstration of how Dickens's child characters are the product of a complex interplay between scientific and literary methods of creativity." (Andrew Mangham, Sharp News, Vol. 24 (4), 2015)
"[A] scholarly and engaging book... Historians of science will find it as compelling as Dickensian scholars." (Hugh Cunningham, The Dickensian)
"This timely book... takes a wide view of Dickens' career, with attention to novels, journalism, popular shows, medical pamphlets, and archival materials... Boehm's innovative methodology is a model for scholars who seek inventive ways to approach cultural and historical context while remaining grounded in material evidence... By reading Dickens with renewed emphasis on the body and medical health, Boehm helps children's literature scholars wake up to those odd, gritty, uncomfortable child characters of the golden age who, unlike Tiny Tim, resistsentimental appropriation." (Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Lion and the Unicorn)
