If one had to select for some time capsule just one photograph with which to evoke both the essential fabric of Victorian society and its self-image, there could surely be no better choice than a snapshot of the family. From the regal pose of Victoria, Albert, and progeny, and the languid grouping of rural, aristocratic family taking tea on the lawn with servants discreetly gathered in the background, down through the bourgeois family in the drawing-room, the picture of somewhat self-conscious probity and solidarity, to the slum family sullenly peering out at the alien photographer in the dismal court, it was en famille that the Victorians liked to be remembered and were so often recorded, not in photographs alone, but also in song, print, and paint. A visit to the Royal Academy at any time in the early Victorian period, for example, would have afforded views of the family ‘at prayers, at interminable meals, on holiday at the sea, on picnics in the country, at birthday and wedding celebrations or just enjoying the domestic hearth.’1 And, for those evenings around the hearth, a variety of family journals were available: among them at mid-century were The Home Circle, The Home Companion, The Home Friend, Home Thoughts, The Home Magazine, Family Economist, Family Record, Family Friend, Family Treasure, Family Prize Magazine and Household Miscellany, Family Paper and Family Mirror.2
There were few aspects of their society the Victorians regarded with greater reverence than the home and family life within it. Lord Shaftesbury was typical in stressing the vital importance of the family unit to society:
There can be no security to society, no honour, no prosperity, no dignity at home, no nobleness of attitude towards foreign nations, unless the strength of the people rests upon the purity and firmness of the domestic system. Schools are but auxiliaries. At home the principles of subordination are first implanted and the man is trained to be a good citizen.
To Shaftesbury the husband’s ‘authority’ and the wife’s ‘genial influence, constituted two domestic pillars of society.3 Even the normally staid City Press, a paper for solid City merchants and bankers, spoke in softer tones when it wrote of the family: ‘“Home” means comfort, rest, peace, love, holiness. There is sanctity in the word home, growing out of the sweetness of the affections it cherishes.’4 The City Press’s use of the word ‘sanctity’ was not casual, for the Victorians deified or at least ascribed spiritual properties to the home. Ruskin, in a famous passage, referred to the ideal home as ‘the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division … it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods’, while to J.A. Froude, adrift in a world of unbelief, ‘It is home … Home — yes, home is the one perfectly pure earthly instinct we have.’5 Whether valued as a nursery of civic virtues or as a refuge from the tensions of society, the family was worshipped throughout the Victorian period; it was more than a social institution, it was a creed and it was held as a dogma carrying all the force of tradition that family life distinguished England from less stable and moral societies. One Edwardian observer noted:
It is customary to point to the ideal of a united and home-loving family as the deepest tradition of English life. The English dinner, with its complete circle — the father at the head, the mother at the foot of the table, and the youngest saying grace — it is a picture frequently compared with the restaurant life of the Continent, or the greater independence of boys and girls in the United States. So strong is the belief in this family life as the key to true English happiness, so intense the desire to retain it throughout the land, that it has become usual to test each social or economic reform that is advanced by calculating its effect upon this national characteristic.6
In short, the Victorians regarded it as axiomatic that the home was the foundation and the family the cornerstone of their civilization and that within the family were first learned the moral, religious, ethical and social precepts of good citizenship.
It is, therefore, most surprising that the Victorian family has not yet been studied with the intensity of breadth of treatment that it merits or that the wealth of varied sources invites. The important published work of Peter Laslett, Lawrence Stone, and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure into the origins and nature of the modern nuclear family have been in the early modern, not the Victorian, period. No ‘school’ of nineteenth-century family historians has yet appeared, the pages of a specialist journal such as Victorian Studies are almost completely devoid of articles specifically concentrating on the family and no historian has yet attempted to demonstrate how closely reality conformed to the ideals so piously expressed by Shaftesbury and others.7 We thus know far more about the voting habits of the Victorians, the flow of their investments, the development of their local and central government agencies or their views on salvation or the Middle Ages than we do about the relationship, in the various classes of society, between Victorian parents and children or husband and wife, or their views on childbirth, the duties of children, or obligations of parenthood. Despite the present popularity of urban history, we still know very little about the interaction between the multifarious processes of urbanization and the composition and function of the family. Some forty years have passed since G. M. Young, in his Victorian England. Portrait of an Age, drew attention, in remarks all too brief, to the family as one of only two ‘vital articles’ of a ‘common Victorian faith’.8 In a brilliant aside, Young suggested that in the ‘incidents and circumstances’ of family life might perhaps be found ‘a clue to the Victorian paradox — the rushing swiftness of its intellectual advance, and the tranquil evolution of its social and moral ideas. The advance was in all directions outwards, from a stable and fortified centre.’9 In the forty years since Young first suggested this ‘clue’, the Victorian paradox has been studied at length, but its familial roots, and their supposed stability and strength, have been practically ignored, and only a handful of serious studies have appeared which take, as their main theme, various aspects of the Victorian family.10 Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the attention so far devoted by historians to the Victorian family is in inverse ratio to the importance and esteem in which the Victorians themselves held it.
This failure to subject the Victorian family to critical examination is all the more remarkable in view of the ‘new’ social history and the upsurge of interest in labour and urban history. Although over the past decade there has been a decided shift in historical research away from the public sector, with its emphasis upon political policies and administration, to the private, and to a study of heretofore neglected classes and groups, Victorian historians have apparently been reluctant to invade the privacy of the home. The door of the Victorian family has been opened only a crack, and the threshold has been seldom crossed.
Thus the student of Victorian society still lacks a body of systematic material on the Victorian family and for information on the inner dynamics, stresses, and structure of family life in nineteenth-century England it is still necessary to piece together random material contained in the standard biographies. Many of the biographies are particularly rewarding — the recent works of Blake on Disraeli, Checkland on the Gladstones, Clive on Macaulay, and Mazlich’s psycho-historical study of the Mills, father and son, for example — but the biographical approach, traditionally conceived, has several limitations. For obvious reasons it has concentrated mainly on the ‘eminent’ Victorians — Shaftesbury, Peel, Nightingale, Arnold, Carlyle, Darwin and the like — and quite apart from the problems of typicality and representational value of such distinguished figures, questions of upbringing and family relationships are generally handled only as preludes or background material to the main subject’s life of crowded achievement. Only rarely does the intimacy of family life serve as the leitmotif of, rather than just the overture to, the historical orchestration of the life of thought and action.11
It was to discuss this unhappy state of affairs — unquestionably the largest area of ignorance about Victorian life — and to encourage historians and literary critics to focus more specifically on the family that the Northeastern Victorian Studies Association held a symposium on the Victorian family in the spring of 1975. The Victorian Family represents, in revised and expanded form, the best of the papers presented there. It lays no claim to being comprehensive. The topics discussed are perhaps idiosyncratic in their subject matter, but it is hoped that the breadth of topics and treatments will provoke discussion and point the way to future exploration. It is hoped also that this book will suggest that family history is too broad a subject and involves too many problems to be handled in any one fashion or to be confined to any single methodological orthodoxy. Family history is in its infancy and, as with all new academic disciplines (urban history for example), there is a danger that scholars may become more concerned with finding a ‘correct’ approach than with encouraging diversity. Seven years ago, with the publication of a seminal symposium on The Study of Urban History, urban historians, employing traditional research techniques based upon traditional sources, received a sharp rebuke and challenge, for it was asserted that Clio should embrace genuinely inter-disciplinary techniques and embody quantitative data. ‘History’, we were told, ‘does not of itself provide a sufficient basis on which to rest a real understanding of ...