Victorian Studies

Abstract:

Victorian "hidden mother" photographs are portraits of babies in which adult figures are draped with textiles, blocked with furniture, tucked behind a mat, orotherwise (often ineffectively) obscured. Fascination with them habitually turns on their presumed erasure of nineteenth-century women's labor; however, modern assumptions about the production of these photos have shaped consumption of them. This essay locates these images within multiple contexts: the technologies of their production, growingsentimental ideals of middle-class motherhood, and the ways that carework and its cultural (in)visibilities varied widely by gender, race, and class in the period. Arguing thatthe mother figures' persistent presence (not hiddenness) is fundamental to these photographs, this essay makes a case for reading them as revealing intimacies and documenting tenderness rather than evincing erasures.