‘A very Moloch of a baby’

Abstract

Abstract Dickens’s portrayal of babyhood comprises comical creations as well as complex symbols and infants as victims of social injustice, yet, especially his funny babies are often overlooked. The first chapter explores how Dickens satirizes the growing commodification of babyhood in Victorian Britain and, in playing with readers’ expectations, produces comical scenes that strengthen rather than undercut his social criticism. His exposure of failed middle-class projects of child rescue urges his readers to reconsider prevailing ideas of charitable intervention, while he uses comically exaggerated infant behaviour to render working-class practices of child care mundane and familiar without sentimentalizing them. His representation of working-class baby-minding, a practice that Victorian philanthropists notoriously misunderstood, exemplifies how Dickens could combine comedy and social criticism to draw attention to topical issues, upend clichés, and at the same time create individualized infant characters. His Christmas book for 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, produces a grotesquely comical image of a baby, minded by a small boy, as ‘Moloch’, a deity demanding child sacrifice. While Baby Moloch becomes central to a reassessment of emotional attachment, the narrative complicates middle-class rescue work. The simultaneity of the comical baby and infants as symbols of suffering is then further developed in Bleak House (1853), whereas in Our Mutual Friend (1865), the failed rescue of an orphaned toddler dramatizes pressing issues involving paid child-minding and unregulated adoption. The analysis of Dickens’s fictional infants simultaneously reveals the different narrative roles of the comical baby in Victorian literature.