Wagner, Tamara S. The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 320 pp.

Abstract

Like many mothers, the arrival of my first baby prompted me to attempt – somewhat fruitlessly – to negotiate the wealth of competing advice on infant care and child rearing. Sleep was a particularly contentious issue: leave the baby to cry until they are so exhausted they eventually fall asleep allowing you to enjoy a well-deserved glass of wine (although not before your ear drums have been permanently damaged by the endless screaming), or practice attachment parenting and strap the baby to you twenty-four hours a day until they are eighteen and heading off to university. Carving a successful parenting path through the onslaught of ‘helpful’ materials on the subject is not easy – and neither is it a new phenomenon, as Tamara Wagner’s excellent study of The Victorian Baby in Printdemonstrates. Victorian mothers were also subject to competing discourses around infant care: not only in advice literature, but in popular fiction as well, including domestic fiction, the sensation novel, and the works of Dickens. Wagner’s study explores representations of babyhood and infant care in these works, in a book that not only looks back to nineteenth-century literature and culture, but also speaks to contemporary concerns around baby rearing. Wagner writes eloquently in the Preface about the influence of her own experience of motherhood on her work, and it is fascinating to see the connections between Victorian and contemporary experiences of and attitudes towards child-rearing. Once upon a time, the personal was to be kept well away from academic research. There has been a significant shift in this respect in recent years, and Wagner’s book evidences the value of such endeavours.