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‘How I Managed’

The second chapter explores how nineteenth-century parenting publications shaped popular narratives of babyhood and baby care. A critical analysis of the power of the print media in producing as well as spreading rapidly commodified advice material allows us to reconsider the still persistent phenomenon of competing books on babies in its historical context. The expanding market of expert instructions reconfigured images of babyhood, codifying the baby as a source of anxiety that required clinical knowledge and intervention. Women writers of popular childrearing manuals such as Eliza Warren, the main rival of the bestselling Isabella Beeton, packaged infant care advice in narratives, at once trading on and endeavouring to reshape this market. A crucial link between putatively professional, systematically presented, parenting instructions and the interpolation of infant care advice in popular fiction, Warren’s full-scale childrearing manual in narrative form, How I Managed My Children from Infancy to Marriage (1865), provides a test case of the shifting focus on personal experience and new expert knowledge in the selling of parenting publications. Since the nineteenth-century market for these publications was informed by a general move to hands-on, practical advice, Warren’s strategies in creating her authorial persona to market a mother’s experience formed a symptomatic and influential component in the impact of advice literature both on perceptions of baby care and on the literary baby.