Dickens’s preeminence in nineteenth- century British literature andhis influence on the novel cannot be measured. One area in which hisinfluence was no less than essential was that of his treatment of childhood.The importance Dickens attached to childhood and the innovativeways in which he represented the child’s point of view generatedand have shaped one of the central features of the British novel eversince. In both quantity and quality, Dickens’s repertoire of childcharacters and his ways of representing the subtleties of the childlikeperspective have rendered him, in the eyes of many, the best writerabout childhood.1Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist (1838), was the first Englishnovel for adults that placed a child at its center throughout.2 Whatfollowed in the 1840s was an unprecedented literary interest in childcharacters and child subjectivity. Claudia Nelson points out that withthe rise in the popularity of the Bildungsroman, there were more andmore fictional representations of child protagonists turned adult(Nelson, 1999: 78–9). A growing number of novels followed Dickens’sexample in suggesting that early life had a shaping value for a character’sadult life.

In Dickens’s work and thatof writers that immediately followed, fiction corresponded to the ideathat the child embodied the original, pure self that should be exploredand reconstructed in order for adults to understand who they were.

According to Robert Tracy, Dickensscrutinizes childhood “to find the origin of the mature successful personality,”yet childhood for him was not only “a time of growing awarenessof the surrounding world and of the individual’s place in that world,”

GREAT EXPECTATIONS-demonstrates this particular sensitivity to children’s sense of beingwronged:In the little world in which children have their existence whosoeverbrings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finelyfelt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child canbe exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and itsrocking- horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as abig- boned Irish hunter. (Dickens, 1985b: 92)

It is often taken for granted that he was anunequivocal and vehement opponent of injustice to children in allits forms: familial, institutional, explicit, and covert.10 Yet, Dickens’srepresentation of neglected children is not free of the ambiguities andinconsistencies that characterize his writing on other social matters. It isthe very mixture of private and public concerns surrounding the toposof child neglect that poses a problem for Dickens, and this problemmanifests itself in ideological and aesthetic inconsistencies. Beyondthe evident moral indignation and commiseration, as well as autobiographicalidentification, which mark Dickens’s writing about ill- usedchildren, his stance toward such figures is complex. Side by side withcompassion and empathy, these figures sometimes invoke less clearlypronounced responses of anxiety, estrangement, and rejection.

Galia Benziman - Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture [2012][A]