Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture [Hardcover]

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.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

Katharina Boehms Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood offers the reader an insight into Dickenss 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 Dickenss child characters are the product of a complex interplay between scientific and literary methods of creativity. (Andrew Mangham, Sharp NewslÓK