David Copperfield & Breastfeeding

I've been reading David Copperfield (by which I mean the book by Dickens, not the magician), and I was surprised by several references to breastfeeding. When David comes home from a term at school, he sees his mother: "She was sitting by the fire, suckling an infant, whose tiny hand she held against her neck. Her eyes were looking down upon its face, and she sat singing to it... [S]eeing me, she...kneeled down upon the ground and kissed me, and laid my head down on her bosom near the little creature that was nestling there, and put its hand up to my lips." In the original text, the tender scene is even illustrated (above--although it's blurry here).

Later, in a more humorous example of nursing, David describes his landlady, Mrs Micawber: "a thin and faded lady, not at all young... with a baby at her breast. The baby was one of twins; and I may remark here that I hardly ever, in all my experience of the family, saw both the twins detached from Mrs Micawber at the same time. One of them was always taking refreshment."

We often think of the Victorians as prudish and repressed, but Dickens treats nursing as completely natural. Many modern-day Americans see nursing as sexualized, but I was interested to see Dickens portray it in a matter-of-fact way.