Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood

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.

“Katharina Boehm’s Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood offers the reader an insight into Dickens’s 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 Dickens’s child characters are the product of a complex interplay between scientific and literary methods of creativity.” (Andrew Mangham, Sharp News, Vol. 24 (4), 2015)"[A] scholarly and engaging book... Historians of science will find it as compelling as Dickensian scholars." (Hugh Cunningham, The Dickensian) "This timely book... takes a wide view of Dickens' career, with attention to novels, journalism, popular shows, medical pamphlets, and archival materials... Boehm's innovative methodology is a model for scholars who seek inventive ways to approach cultural and historical context while remaining grounded in material evidence... By reading Dickens with renewed emphasis on the body and medical health, Boehm helps children's literature scholars wake up to those odd, gritty, uncomfortable child characters of the golden age who, unlike Tiny Tim, resist sentimental appropriation." (Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Lion and the Unicorn)

Katharina Boehm is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Regensburg University, Germany, and Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the English Department of Rutgers University. She is the editor of Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ( 2012) and co-editor of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2013). Her work has appeared in Victorian Review, Journal of Victorian Culture and Studies in the Novel.