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Nature, Nurture, Narrative, Law: The Wellesley Case, Oliver Twist, And The Victorian Anxiety About Parentage, Sarah Abramowicz

Studio for Law and Culture

Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist heralded the popularity in Victorian England of a new type of novel, the novel of child development, that traced the experience of displaced child protagonists as they found their place in the world by working out their relationships with a series of parents and parent-figures. At the same time, the newly prominent field of English child custody law began to articulate why and how parentage matters for a developing child. An examination of one of the first highly publicized English custody disputes, Wellesley v. Beaufort, brings out some of the concerns about parentage at work …