Dickensian Childhoods:

Blighted Victorian Children in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

Abstract

In The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), Michel Faber deliberately evokes characters and themes related to childhood from some of Charles Dickens’s best-known works. Faber’s motives for doing so are contradictory and complex: he re-emphasises certain of Dickens’s key insights concerning Victorian childhood, particularly its miseries, and he even aggressively strives to outdo Dickens in ‘authentic’ details, but he also poses implicit challenges to Dickens’s depictions of idealised children and his celebration of childishness in adults. Although Faber’s position is representative of that of the neo-Victorian author, he also denotes the position of his contemporary readers as implicated by their desire to revisit and witness the abject suffering of children in the nineteenth century. Faber’s work generates critical insights into Dickens’s works and offers a revised definition of childhood in the Victorian era with broader applicability to the present.