The Child and the Thing

Abstract

This final chapter of Part I — a detailed analysis of a single, canonical work of nineteenth-century fiction and its scholarly reception —engages with Charles Dickens, the Imperial and childhood. Over the past thirty years, this triad has generated considerable critical interest, evidenced recently, for example, by a collection of essays: Dickens and the Children of Empire.¹ My concern is with a work that is not addressed by any of the contributors to this text: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens’s last, unfinished novel of divided consciousness has certainly been read in terms of the Imperial, with, for example, David Faulkner exploring the relationship between Muscular Christianity and Colonial practice within the novel, Hyungji Park comparing its staging of Empire to a contemporary culture of exhibition, Miriam O’Kane Mara reading it as a late critique of colonial consumerism, and Allan Lloyd Smith arguing that the work grants access to repressed Victorian investments in racial difference. Readings centred on the child are less common.² Indeed, there is no discussion of the child in any of the accounts listed above, and Amberyl Malkovich makes no mention of Drood in her recent Charles Dickens and the Victorian Child: Romanticizing and Socializing the Imperfect Child.³