Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

This book takes a fresh look at childhood in Dickens' works and in Victorian science and culture more generally. It offers a new way of understanding Dickens' interest in childhood by showing how his fascination with new scientific ideas about childhood and practices of scientific inquiry shaped his narrative techniques and aesthetic imagination. 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 Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction....Pages 1-14 Experimental Subjects: Oliver Twist and the Culture of Mesmerist Demonstrations....Pages 15-45 Hothouse Children: Dombey and Son and Popular Medical Child Health Manuals....Pages 46-78 Dickens, the Social Mission of Victorian Paediatrics and the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children....Pages 79-111 The Feelings of Childhood: Dickens and the Study of the Child’s Mind....Pages 112-144 Monstrous Births and Saltationism in Our Mutual Friend and Popular Anatomical Museums....Pages 145-168 Conclusion....Pages 169-173 Back Matter....Pages 174-236