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The first study to focus exclusively on the baby in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Drawing on novels by writers such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as well as parenting magazines and manuals, it analyses how representations of infancy shaped an iconography that has defined the Victorian age.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: 'A very Moloch of a baby': Left to be Minded in Dickens
- 2: 'How I Managed': Victorian Infant Care Instructions
- 3: Competitive Infant Care in Domestic Fiction: Charlotte Yonge and the Unidealised Baby
- 4: Sensational Babies
- Conclusion
About the author
Tamara S. Wagner is Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she teaches Victorian literature. Her books include Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English (2016), Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction (2010), and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 (2004). She has also edited collections on Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (2014), Victorian Settler Narratives (2011), and Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009). Professor Wagner currently works on Victorian babyhood.
Summary
The first study to focus exclusively on the baby in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Drawing on novels by writers such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as well as parenting magazines and manuals, it analyses how representations of infancy shaped an iconography that has defined the Victorian age.
Additional text
The Victorian Baby in Print is an extensive and often illuminating study,...Wagner offers an important contribution to our understanding of childhood, domesticity, and motherhood in Victorian culture.
