Dickens's Queer Children

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Notes

I would like to thank participants in the 2006 Dickens Universe at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at the Neo-Victorianism conference at the University of Exeter in 2007, especially Rachel Carroll, Holly Furneaux, and Regenia Gagnier, for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this argument.

For these positions, see Robert L. Caserio, et al.

Robson notwithstanding, the wizened child figure is not limited to males: in Nicholas Nickleby, the “Infant Phenomenon” is clearly an adult woman parading the theatrical stage as a child to drum up business, and in Our Mutual Friend (1865) Jenny Wren swaps places as breadwinner and caregiver with her delinquent parent, Mr. Dolls.

In this period, sulfur was taken as a laxative.

The threat of violence classifies Dodge's extorted labor as slavery under twenty-first-century definitions; see Kevin Bales (10).

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Notes on contributors

Susan Zieger

Susan Zieger is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (Massachusetts, 2008). She is currently working on a cultural history of media addiction and its intersections with gender and sexuality. Her work has also appeared in Victorian Studies, American Literature, PMLA, and Genre.