Charles Dickens and the sciences of childhood : popular medicine, child health and Victorian culture

Resource Information

The work Charles Dickens and the sciences of childhood : popular medicine, child health and Victorian culture represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Charles Dickens and the sciences of childhood : popular medicine, child health and Victorian culture

Title remainder

popular medicine, child health and Victorian culture

Statement of responsibility

Katharina Boehm, Assistant Professor, University of Regensburg, Germany

Creator

• Boehm, Katharina, 1984-

Author

• Boehm, Katharina, 1984-

Subject

• Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Criticism and interpretation
• Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Knowledge | Medicine
• LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
• LITERARY CRITICISM / General
• Literature and medicine -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Literature and science -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Children -- Health and hygiene -- Great Britain
• Children in literature

Language

eng

Summary

"The first in-depth study of Dickens's creative engagement with popular science and medicine, this book brings to light the scientific entertainments, shows and institutions, and the material and print cultures that revolutionized the ways in which Victorian audiences encountered childhood. It explores Dickens's literary and journalistic writings, his private interests and public causes across the span of his long career. In doing so, it offers a new way of understanding Dickens's preoccupation with childhood by showing how his fascination with novel scientific ideas about childhood and with new practices of scientific inquiry shaped the development of his narrative techniques and aesthetic imagination. Drawing on fascinating archival material, this book reconstructs Dickens's experience of mesmerist trials and hospital ward tours, anatomical museums and popular scientific performances. It provides new readings of some of Dickens's most famous works, including Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, as well as of lesser-known texts. Dickens's child characters were a source of inspiration to many medical writers, institutions and journalists, and the book also traces how these groups appropriated Dickensian characters and motifs in order to debate and bolster the authority of new scientific ideas. "--

Member of

• Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

823/.8

Index

index present

LC call number

PR4592.M43

LC item number

B64 2013

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture