Introduction

Abstract

Dickens lived in and wrote about a society that was discovering childhood as an enthralling object of scientific inquiry and popular scientific entertainment. He saw the worlds of childhood and science converge in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways when he toured the wards of children’s hospitals, attended scientific shows, participated in mesmerist experiments and gazed at foetuses floating in preservation jars stacked on the shelves of anatomical museums. During Dickens’s long career, knowledge about the child was produced, consolidated and contested in a number of slowly emerging scientific fields, ranging from paediatrics and child psychology to biology and the various disciplines that investigated the natural history of man.¹ In this process, diverse groups — including pioneering medical doctors, parents, radical mesmerists, journalists, evolutionary biologists, showmen and philanthropists — struggled for authority in defining the meanings of childhood, child health and development. In this book, I explore how Dickens’s engagement with novel medical and scientific conceptions of the child, and with disputes over scientific credit and prestige, shaped the development of his narrative techniques and aesthetic imagination.