“We have orphans […] in stock”: Crime and the Consumption of Sensational Children

In Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, a pointed verbal altercation concerning the exchange of a child depicts orphans as commodities, articulating a double investment in the fiscal and the sentimental. The Boffins’ failure to obtain the infant they desire significantly complicates the very commodification of the victimized child on which Our Mutual Friend capitalizes. Braddon’s and Dickens’s piling up of orphans in these two books testifies to the massive consumption of sensationalized children in fiction during the 1860s. The first half of the nineteenth century can be credited with establishing the sentimentalized child as an iconic literary figure; novels of what came to be known as “the sensational sixties” were eager to convert it for sensationalized use. Strictly speaking, Lord Oakburn’s Daughters is not a detective novel, and its professional detectives – like the tellingly named Inspector Medler – meddle only in private affairs, but without yielding any results.