The Victorian Baby of Popular Fiction

This chapter explores babyhood as a distinct, if still loosely defined, part of childhood in nineteenth-century fiction. The Victorian baby emerged as a sentimental icon in popular culture, yet even as it was being constructed and circulated as a recognisable and useful figure, writers began critically to reflect on its swift commercialisation. Several discourses helped to shape infancy and early childhood in the nineteenth century, as the baby became the object of scientific study, a topic in household manuals and magazines, the target of new products, from patented baby food to educational toys, and an easily exploitable image that could help sell soap or promote charity projects. While taking this multiplicity into account, this chapter concentrates on the awareness and self-reflexivity with which novelists participated in, but also endeavoured to intervene in, the marketing of modern babyhood. Their representations register a dynamic engagement with an undeniable sentimentalisation that formed a powerful force in driving interest in early childhood, child rights, and infant care, even as it boosted a commercialisation that became critiqued as exploitation. Thus, Charles Dickens may have influentially contributed to the persistent association of the Victorian baby with sentimentality by creating some of the most memorable images of literary babyhood, but a closer look reveals how he managed to hold sentimentalism and satirical portrayals in balance. In some of the most comic moments, realistically detailed infant and toddler behaviour threatens to destabilise an emergent iconic figure, while he simultaneously succeeds in developing an intricate symbolism constructed on sentimentalised infancy. In sharp contrast, Yonge produces anti-sentimental but vivid descriptions of babies and baby care, partly to unravel the fabric of everyday life, partly to provide hands-on advice for her main target readership of girls and young women. Similarly, Elizabeth Gaskell critically negotiates how fiction should present changing approaches to infant care. Some writers, like Trollope, may simply dismiss or gently poke fun at dominant associations, but a juxtaposition of divergent versions of literary babyhood helps us to recalibrate critical discourse on the Victorians’ creation of the sentimentalised baby as a literary icon.