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Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–5) contains a structurally and thematically important narrative about moving house that prompts a much-needed recalibration of how we can read representations of domestic labour in Victorian fiction. Gaskell explores how homemaking is changing and perhaps needs to change in a modern, industrial world and how this can be expressed by dramatising the practicalities of house-moving. A close look at the representation of domestic labour – and how it is brought to a crisis through relocation – reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the novel, while drawing attention to the representation of hands-on housework in Victorian literature. In plotting the practical tasks of house-moving in unprecedented detail, Gaskell renders the general speeding up of daily life concrete and relevant for her target readership. While interpolating practical advice, she also tests out how everyday, domestic challenges could, or should, be represented in fiction. An approach that takes the focus on housework in North and South seriously also resolves the supposed problem that domestic concerns pose in an industrial novel.

This paper investigates the representation of domestic accidents in popular Victorian fiction. Taking Mrs Henry Wood’s Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862) as a case study, I discuss how accidents at home signpost changing reactions to risk and risk-management as much as to the work of managing a household. Women’s writing is more likely to depict the home as the site of domestic labour, as a place of worry even, rather than as a stable space that stands apart from or in opposition to work. Wood goes further in turning housework into a sensational topic, capitalising on a growing tendency in Victorian print to expose the hazards of everyday life, while importing new ideas of risk into household management. A critical reconsideration of accidents in the Victorian home allows us to trace how the representation of household hazards impacted on shifting concepts of chance, coincidence, and risk, as well as on attempts to make sense of them in and through narratives. Ministry of Education (MOE) This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its Academic Research Fund Tier 1 (Project ID: 2019-T1-002-061).

This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.

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.

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.

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.

The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture explores the representation of babyhood in Victorian Britain. The first study to focus exclusively on the baby in nineteenth-century literature and culture, this critical analysis discusses the changing roles of an iconic figure. A close look at the wide-ranging portrayal of infants and infant care not only reveals how divergent and often contradictory Victorian attitudes to infancy really were, but also prompts us to revise persistent clichés surrounding the literary baby that emerged or were consolidated at the time, and which are largely still with us. Drawing on a variety of texts, including novels by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, and Charlotte Yonge, as well as parenting magazines of the time, childrearing manuals, and advertisements, this study analyses how their representations of infancy and infant care utilised and shaped an iconography that has become definitional of the Victorian age itself. The familiar clichés surrounding the Victorian baby have had a lasting impact on the way we see both the Victorians and babies, and a close analysis might also prompt a self-critical reconsideration of the still burgeoning market for infant care advice today.

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.

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.

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.

Oliver Twist, Bleak House, ‘No Thoroughfare’, King Arthur and The Fatal Three let us map how Victorian literature generated and exploited the fascination with the orphan. These narratives capitalise on the popularity and flexibility of this figure while reworking pervasive paradigms. With growing self-reflexivity, they tackle established patterns to express particular preoccupations with society and often with narrative form itself. Bleak House dismantles expectations of sentimentalised orphans and their identification as the ideal resolution in foundling tales, answering questions that Oliver Twist raises, but largely leaves unanswered. ‘No Thoroughfare’ plays with the easily clichéd significance of the double in orphan narratives. King Arthur allots unprecedented attention to the adoptive parents, while reverting to the foundling tale as an adjustable framework for adoption narratives. Conversely, The Fatal Three trades on, yet also redeploys, the sensational potential of the orphan figure in order to challenge attitudes to and representations of adoption. When Braddon challenges the representation of the orphan child as a potential threat in sensation fiction through a direct intertextual reference to Bleak House, she asserts the lasting significance of mid-century orphan narratives and further develops their potential to express changing preoccupations with society and with literature itself.

Parenting advice has becomea booming industry as well as probably one of the most contested discourses. Its proliferation and continued diversification are often considered a particularly contemporary problem, yet the virulent marketing of “expert” advice on childrearing has its roots as much in the nineteenth-century publishing industry as in the overlapping Victorian cults of domesticity, maternity, and childhood. The nineteenth century saw an explosion of advice literature on the physical, moral, and intellectual education of infants and young children. Childrearing, or parenting, rapidly created a niche market, producing specialised manuals and magazines for mothers, the precursors of the current parenting advice literature. As Victorian novelists tapped into the anxieties that these publications both addressed and further fostered, they laid bare the pressure that the childrearing discourses were exerting on mothers, yet popular authors also quickly realised how their own writing offered a vehicle for specific conceptualisations of motherhood. Harrowing scenes were used to dramatise the effects of different parenting practices; protagonists’ quarrels about such practices served both as characterisation devices and as comments on ideological conflicts between different concepts of childrearing. In the most self-consciously insightful moments, the growing supply of information came itself under criticism. Victorian novelists actively participated in shaping and circulating parenting advice in print. The sensationalised nursery fascinatingly expressed the anxieties surrounding childrearing and showed how versatile the interpellation of mothering instructions in fiction could be.

Colonial settler narratives comprise chiefly fictional as well as autobiographically inspired or anecdotal writing about emigration and settler life. The 19th century saw an increasingly systematic mass migration across the globe that proceeded on an unprecedented scale. Global movements, including emigration and return, were facilitated by improved transport technology, new trading routes, and burgeoning emigration societies. A new market for writing about migration and the settler world emerged. The settler narratives of British colonizers present a valuable record of growing public interest in the experience of emigrants and settlers at the time. Whereas accounts of first-hand experience at first simply formed a central part of an expanding information industry and were promptly harnessed by pro-emigration propaganda, settler narratives quickly evolved into a diverse set of writing that consisted of (1) prescriptive and cautionary accounts, presented in narrative form, (2) tales of exploration and adventure, including bush yarns and mateship narratives, as well as (3) detailed descriptions of everyday settler life in domestic and increasingly also New Woman fiction. Equally important, writing produced within the settler colonies had a twofold relationship with British-authored literature, written at the imperial center, and hence participated in the formation of literary traditions on several levels. Exploring Victorian narratives of the colonial settler world helps map how genre travels and becomes transformed, shaping the literature of a global 19th century. These narratives provide a rich source of material for a much-needed reassessment of the diverse experiences and representations of emigration and settlement in the 19th century, while demanding renewed attention as an important part of literary history.

This essay analyses Lilian Turner's Three New Chum Girls (1910) to show how settler authors played with colonial cliches as part of a critical reaction to shifting imperialist and nationalist ideologies at the turn of the century. In particular, Turner redefines the derogatory colonial term “new chum”—commonly used to describe a recent emigrant in the settler colonies—to suggest what the welcome of new arrivals ought to be like. Yet if her deliberate reworking of stereotypes consequently contains an element of wish-fulfilment, the narrative also offers a startlingly stark portrayal of settler life. Emigration, Turner contends in the novel, is neither easy nor a solution to problems at home. Nor does settler Australia provide a convenient space for fortune-seeking sojourns. Turner thus dismantles two clusters of common cliches: emigration as a pat ending in fiction and settlers' return to the homeland as an equally expedient plot twist. The self-irony that runs through much of her intertextual rewr...

The Victorian baby, so ubiquitous in nineteenth-century popular culture and so notoriously sentimentalised and commodified, is a curiously little studied topic. It tends to get subsumed in overviews of Victorian child cults and children’s literature. Or we find it reduced to a footnote or a brief aside in analyses of maternity. Ten years ago, Sally Shuttleworth urged in a discussion of “Victorian Childhood” that it was high “time to add age, and more specifically childhood, to the triumvirate of class, gender and race.”1 Meanwhile, Childhood Studies approaches have reinvestigated the Victorians’ cultural preoccupation with the child, including its role in art and literature, yet most studies focus on older children.2 Revisionist work on maternity has likewise constructively questioned the realities of the so-called separate spheres, successfully upending a welter of received notions about the ideologies and practices of domesticity.3 Yet scant attention has been accorded to the actual object of mothering: the infant itself. The focus instead seems exclusively on the mother, reducing the infant to a mere accessory in her experience.4 Although two vital developments in Victorian Studies – the influence of Childhood Studies and the revaluation of nineteenth-century discourses on maternity – are thus playing together to engender new critical interest in representations of infancy, there has hitherto been no sustained study of the Victorian baby. In this essay, I shall explore how Charles Dickens’s highly influential representations of babies – and in particular his comical babies – play with and thereby transform readers’ expectations of what babyhood should look like in nineteenth-century culture. His creative use of clichés makes us rethink the still prevalent association of the Victorian baby with idealised domestic bliss and an often sappy sentimentality. Accepted version

Jane Eyre helped to shape new literary and cultural directions in the 1840s through its intersecting themes of the governess, the child, and the transposed Gothic. In bringing together two vulnerable groups, the orphaned child and the impecunious middle-class woman, the novel creates a powerful paradigm that gives high visibility to particular cultural anxieties. The figures of the orphaned child and the governess were to become a pulse point for Victorian discourses on women. While governess novels proliferated in the 1840s, challenging early Victorian domestic economy, Jane Eyre simultaneously uses the dispossessed and unprotected woman to create new forms of narrative agency.

Elizabeth Murray's Ella Norman; or, a Woman's Perils (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864) is a vehement anti-emigration narrative that indicts female emigration societies. Conceived as a thesis novel to condemn the organized transportation of single middle-class women, it is a governess narrative set in colonial Australia that at once reflects and participates in the controversial debates on unmarried women's ‘superfluity’ in Victorian Britain. At a time when discourse on female emigration to2 Australia was dominated by rhetoric advocating social solutions and presented personal happy endings, Murray took as her subject the disastrous effects of misleading propaganda material to produce an angry indictment of emigration societies. As a model failed emigration narrative, Ella Norman exemplifies the way fiction could be deployed to criticize projects of systematic resettlement. Accounts of how emigration features in nineteenth-century fiction might long have been dominated by representations of such schemes a...

This article reframes debates about the figure of the colonial girl by examining her changing representation in Ethel Turner's fiction. Turner reacted critically and self-consciously to the cultural mythologization of the bush and what it meant for the confines of Australian writing for girls. She sought to reshape Australia's literary imaginary, while creating a distinctly Australian children's and, in particular, girls' literature. Turner is now primarily remembered for her creation of an iconic Australian Girl in her first and most successful book Seven Little Australians (1894), but Judy Woolcot dies young. The much debated death scene, however, constructively informs Turner's subsequent novels. As the Australian Girl's complex relationship to domesticity, national identity and femininity is being revisioned in the figure of Judy's younger sister in The Family at Misrule (1895), this girl's heroism is not simply grounded in the everyday life of late nineteenth-century Australia's rapidly expanding met...

Rhoda Broughton's Nancy (1873) was published when sensational representational strategies had become a staple of popular fiction and Broughton had established herself as a writer of sensational material. Broughton was keenly aware how the reception of her books was reflective of changing times and marketing strategies, yet with its pointedly anti-sensational, innocuous heroine, Nancy was to be her most misunderstood book. The novel aborts an adultery plot that seems at first inevitable, and which nonetheless provides occasion for titillating the reader. It tracks emotional turmoil, plays with short-circuited plot lines and exposes social expectations of unequal marriages. In creating an anti-heroine who transgresses the expected paradigms of Victorian sensation fiction, Nancy formed a catalyst for Broughton's complicated relationship with literary sensationalism.

This article reassesses nineteenth-century representations of Britain's geographical “antipodes” by looking at the figure of the returnee. While mid-Victorian sensation fiction expressed a redirected imperial panic by producing popular impostor plots, the resulting typecasting of the antipodal returnee as an intrinsically threatening figure increasingly prompted authors to react critically to this easy sensationalisation. Simultaneously, a new craze for impostor narratives was inspired by real-life scandals such as, most prominently, the Tichborne Claimant, an Australian butcher who claimed to be the lost heir to an aristocratic family. The case inspired a range of popular representations: from street ballads to heated debates about class issues and a number of novels, both in the metropolitan centre and in the settler colonies. My Young Alcides (1875) by the religious, didactic writer Charlotte Yonge, I argue, offers a revealing case study of domestic fiction's reaction to the easy appropriation and type...

Frances, or Fanny, Trollope may now chiefly be remembered for her travel writing and, in particular, for the controversial Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832 upon her return from ...

This article explores the role of Trollope's emigration experiences in the development of her “American novels”. It argues that Trollope was not merely rehashing the material of Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) in her subsequent fictional writing, but was instead using the theme of failed migration to explore a variety of questions about the impact of transatlantic relationships in the nineteenth century. Trollope clearly did more than simply satirize American society as she reworked the Victorian novel within overseas imaginative spaces.

In reassessing the representation of emotional distress in Charlotte Bronte's Villette, this article analyses the novel's reworking of epistolary elements. The seemingly 'preternatural' suspension of communication in the attic scene therein pinpoints three central elements: firstly, the nun's apparition embodies the invocation of outmoded literary forms. Secondly, the letter's displacement in a seemingly supernatural theft dramatizes the letter form's 'containment' in nineteenth-century fiction. As perhaps the most emotionally charged scene in the novel, Lucy Snowe's temporary loss of this letter simultaneously draws attention to a series of contrasting exchanges of letters that structure the novel. Their triangulation links the novel's plotlines together. That Paul Emmanuel's fulfilling correspondence is ultimately held in suspense constitutes the third element and final twist in the novel's thematization of a communication breakdown. Villette, I seek to argue, forms a particularly revealing exam...

Charlotte Yonge's critical engagement with different narrative paradigms translates concerns with the potential as well as the problems of mass-market literature into intricate plots of wilful misrepresentation. Reminding us of the interchanges between, as much as of the sheer variety of, newly differentiated subgenres in the increasingly volatile literary marketplace of the time, Yonge's evocation of financial fraud in her domestic chronicles does more than simply illustrate her startling appropriation of fashionable formulas. Forged papers and fake identities externalize preoccupations with a narrative's internal cohesiveness, working out a self-consciously religious writer's authorial anxieties through intriguing metonymic projections. This essay juxtaposes the embedded epistolary narrative of The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) with the rewriting of the earlier novel's most sensational plot in her collaborative letter novel Astray: A Tale of a Country Town (1886).