ABSTRACT
Writers such as George Behlmer, Leonore Davidoff, and John Tosh, are evidence of a contemporary approach to the history of family life that focuses on the myriad diversities and intricacies of the nineteenth-century family and frequently does so with reference to both quantitative and qualitative sources. Most work was limited to single families or small elite groups or was based mainly on impressionistic literary sources". Carolyn Dever's 1998 publication, Death and the Mother from Charles Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins, situates parental death, specifically the dead mother, at the center of Victorian fiction and argues that this loss, as a narrative technique, is fundamental to numerous novels. There are numerous maternal deaths in the children's tales of the period, yet these deaths seldom enable the degree of character development that Dever perceives within adult fiction; the stories for children are primarily domestic tales engaging with potentially credible events.
