Download or read book Family Ties in Victorian England written by Claudia Nelson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorians were passionate about family. While Queen Victoria's supporters argued that her intense commitment to her private life made her the more fit to mother her people, her critics charged that it distracted her from her public responsibilities. Here, Nelson focuses particularly on the conflicting and powerful images of family life that Victorians produced in their fiction and nonfiction—that is, on how the Victorians themselves conceived of family, which continues both to influence and to help explain visions of family today. Drawing upon a wide variety of 19th-century fiction and nonfiction, Nelson examines the English Victorian family both as it was imagined and as it was experienced. For many Victorians, family was exalted to the status of secular religion, endowed with the power of fighting the contamination of unchecked commercialism or sexuality and holding out the promise of reforming humankind. Although in practice this ideal might have proven unattainable, the many detailed 19th-century descriptions of the outlook and behavior appropriate to fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and other family members illustrate the extent of the pressure felt by members of this society to try to live up to the expectations of their culture. Defining family to include the extended family, the foster or adoptive family, and the stepfamily, Nelson considers different roles within the Victorian household in order to gauge the ambivalence and the social anxieties surrounding them—many of which continue to influence our notions of family today.
Download or read book Family Ties written by Mary Abbott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: r s1mily Ties provides a vivid and accessible introduction to the dynamics of life in English families of all ranks from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of World War I. Sections on methods, approaches and sources allow readers new to the study of the past to explore some of the historian's fundamental concerns: cause and effect; continuity and change and the nature and reliability of evidence. The chronological and thematic organization of the book enables readers to examine a number of sub-themes such as the history of childhood or of marriage. Combining extensive contemporary quotations and an unusual variety of illustrations with a wide range of written and material sources, the book provides a fascinating insight into the history of the family and encourages the reader to become a sceptical and imaginative investigator, prepared to venture beyond the historian's traditional documentary sources.
Download or read book British Family Life 1780 1914 Volume 1 written by Claudia Nelson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 2064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The five volumes of this collection focus on various aspects of family life. Drawing on rare printed sources and archival material, this collection will provide a balanced, contextualized picture of family life, during a period of intense social change. It will appeal to scholars of social history, gender studies and the long nineteenth century.
Download or read book Daily Life in Victorian England written by Sally Mitchell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-11-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was life really like in Victorian England during its transition from provincial society into modern urban power? Discover the effects of increased women's rights, technological advances, and Charles Darwin's discoveries on everyday life. This volume offers a fascinating glimpse into Victorian daily living, including women's roles; Victorian Morality; leisure; health and medicine; and life in all settings, from workhouses to country estates. This edition features an extensive guide to contemporary primary source material and further research, including information about finding authoritative sources easily on the Web. Illustrations, interactive sidebars, a chronology and glossary further illuminate the details of Victorian culture. This volume is an ideal source for students and teachers alike. Discover the effects of increased women's rights, technological advances, and Charles Darwin's discoveries on everyday life. Engaging narrative chapters explore all aspects of the Victorian experience, including: fashion, morality, courtship and mourning rituals, crime and punishment, public school requirements, legal status (marriage, divorce, inheritance, guardians, and bankruptcy), sports like croquet and foxhunting, and the importance of religion.
Download or read book British Family Life 1780 1914 Volume 4 written by Claudia Nelson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 2064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The five volumes of this collection focus on various aspects of family life. Drawing on rare printed sources and archival material, this collection will provide a balanced, contextualized picture of family life, during a period of intense social change. It will appeal to scholars of social history, gender studies and the long nineteenth century.
Download or read book Precocious Children and Childish Adults written by Claudia Nelson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms “child-woman,” “child-man,” and “old-fashioned child” appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser-known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, Precocious Children and Childish Adults illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.
Download or read book Family First written by Ruth A. Symes and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the history of family roles and relationships—and how to learn more about your own ancestors. A blend of social history and family history, Family First looks at relationships and our attitudes and experiences surrounding them—fathers, mothers, babies, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and the elderly, friends and neighbors. This book examines how readers might learn more about how their own ancestors functioned in these relationships, and what records might tell us more. Each chapter starts with a guide on how to interpret the most common and direct of family history sources, then goes on to examine each relationship in its changing historical contexts—how, for example, did the role of a father differ in the Victorian period from earlier periods? What similarities and differences were there in behavior and roles between fathers of different social classes? How did fatherhood change in the context of the two world wars? How has family size changed? How have opinions shifted about marriage between cousins? Explore these questions and more in this intriguing book.
Download or read book Family Life in Britain 1650 1910 written by Carol Beardmore and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-03 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways that families were formed and re-formed, and held together and fractured, in Britain from the sixteenth to twentieth century. The chapters build upon the argument, developed in the 1990s and 2000s, that the nuclear family form, the bedrock of understandings of the structure and function of family and kinship units, provides a wholly inadequate lens through which to view the British family. Instead the volume's contributors point to families and households with porous boundaries, an endless capacity to reconstitute themselves, and an essential fluidity to both the form of families, and the family and kinship relationships that stood in the background. This book offers a re-reading, and reconsideration of the existing pillars of family history in Britain. It examines areas such as: Scottish kinship patterns, work patterns of kin in Post Office families, stepfamily relations, the role of family in managing lunatic patients, and the fluidity associated with a range of professional families in the nineteenth century. Chapter 8 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com
Download or read book Queer Victorian Families written by Duc Dau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorians elevated the home and heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. Yet alongside the middle-class domestic ideal were other families, many of which existed in the literature of the time. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature is chiefly concerned with these atypical or "queer" families. This collection serves as a corrective against limited definitions of family and is a timely addition to Victorian studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection opens up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. Broad in scope, subjects range from Count Fosco and his animal "children" in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the nexus between disability and loving relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Queer Victorian Families is a wide-ranging and theoretically adventurous exposé of the curious relations in the literary family tree.
Download or read book Middlemarch written by George Elliott and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2009-03-09 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary masterpiece written from personal experience, Middlemarch is a deep psychological observation of human nature that revolves around the issues of love, jealousy, and obligation. Eliot's feminist views are apparent through the novel: she stresses the fact that women should control their own lives.
Download or read book The Family Novel in Russia and England 1800 1880 written by Anna A. Berman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between family structures and narrative structure in the nineteenth-century novel. Comparing Russia and England, it argues that the two nations had fundamentally different conceptions of the family and that these, in turn, shaped the way they constructed plots. The English placed primary value on the vertical, diachronic family axis—looking back to ancestors and head to progeny—while the Russians emphasized the lateral, synchronic axis—family expanding outward in the present from nuclear core, to extended and chosen kin. This difference shaped the way authors plotted consanguineal relations, courtship and marriage, and alternative kinship constructions. Idealizing the domestic sphere and emphasizing family continuity, the English novel made family a conservative force, while Russian novels approached it as a backward site of patriarchal tyranny in desperate need of reform. Russian family plots offered a progressive, liberalizing push toward new, nontraditional family constructions. The book's comparative approach calls for a re-evaluation of reigning theories of the novel, theories that are based on the linear English family model and cannot accommodate the more complex, Russian alternative. It reveals where these theories fall short, explains the reasons for their shortcomings, and offers a new way of conceptualizing family's role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel. Classics from Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev are contextualized in the broader literary landscape of their day, and Russia's great women writers regain their rightful place alongside their male counterparts as the book draws together family history, literary analysis, and novel theory.
Download or read book Invisible Men written by Claudia Nelson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Invisible Men focuses on the tremendous growth of periodical literature from 1850 to 1910 to illustrate how Victorian and Edwardian thought and culture problematized fatherhood within the family. Drawing on political, scientific, domestic, and religious periodicals, Claudia Nelson shows how positive portrayals of fatherhood virtually disappeared as motherhood claimed an exalted position with imagined ties to patriotism, social reform, and religious influence. The study begins with the pre-Victorian role of the father in the middle-class home--as one who led the family in prayer, administered discipline, and determined the children's education, marriage, and career. In subsequent decades, fatherhood was increasingly scrutinized while a new definition of motherhood and femininity emerged. The solution to the newly perceived dilemma of fatherhood appeared rooted in traditional feminine values--nurturance, selflessness, and sensitivity. The critique presented in Invisible Men extends our contemporary debate over men's proper role within the family, providing a historical context for the various images of fatherhood as we practice and dispute them today.
Download or read book Family Secrets written by Deborah Cohen and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Sunday Telegraph and Times Higher Education 'Book of the Week', Deborah Cohen's Family Secrets is a gripping book about what families - Victorian and modern - try to hide, and why. In an Edinburgh town house, a genteel maiden lady frets with her brother over their niece's downy upper lip. Would the darkening shadow betray the girl's Eurasian heritage? On a Liverpool railway platform, a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old illegitimate son for adoption. She had dressed him carefully that morning in a sailor suit and cap. In a town in the Cotswolds, a vicar brings to his bank vault a diary - sewed up in calico, wrapped in parchment - that chronicles his sexual longings for other men. Drawing upon years of research in previously sealed records, the prize-winning historian Deborah Cohen offers a sweeping and often surprising account of how shame has changed over the last two centuries. Both a story of family secrets and of how they were revealed, this book journeys from the frontier of empire, where British adventurers made secrets that haunted their descendants for generations, to the confessional vanguard of modern-day genealogy two centuries later. It explores personal, apparently idiosyncratic, decisions: hiding an adopted daughter's origins, taking a disabled son to a garden party, talking ceaselessly (or not at all) about a homosexual uncle. In delving into the familial dynamics of shame and guilt, Family Secrets investigates the part that families, so often regarded as the agents of repression, have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day. Written with compassion and keen insight, this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors. Born into a family with its own fair share of secrets, Deborah Cohen was raised in Kentucky and educated at Harvard and Berkeley.She teaches at Northwestern University, where she holds the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship of the Humanities.Her last book was the award-winning Household Gods, a history of the British love-affair with the home.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture written by Brenda Ayres and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture exposes, explores, and examines what Victorians once considered flagrant breaches of decorum. Infringements that were fantasized through artforms or were actually committed exceeded entertaining parlor gossip; once in print they were condemned as socially contaminative but were also consumed as delightfully sensational. Written by scholars in diverse disciplines, this volume: Demonstrates that spreading scandals seemed to have been one of the most entertaining sources of activities but were also normative efforts made by the Victorians to ensure conformity of decorum. Provides a broad spectrum of infractions that were considered scandalous to the Victorians. Identifies Victorian transgressions that made the news and that may still shock modern readers. Covers a gamut of moral infractions and transgressions either practiced, rumored, or fantasized in art forms. This handbook is an invaluable resource about Victorian literature, art, and culture which challenges its readers to ponder perplexing questions about how and why some scandals were perpetrated and propagated in the nineteenth century while others were not, and what the controversies reveal about the human condition that persists beyond Victoria’s reign of propriety.
Download or read book Exploited Empowered Ephemeral written by Denise Burkhard and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Childhood in neo-Victorian fiction for both child and adult readers is an extremely multifaceted and fascinating field. This book argues that neo-Victorian fiction projects multiple, competing visions of childhood and suggests that they can be analysed by means of a typology, the 'childhood scale', which provides different categories along the lines of power relations, and literary possible-worlds theory. The usefulness of both is exemplified by detailed discussions of Philippa Pearce's "Tom's Midnight Garden" (1958), Eva Ibbotson's "Journey to the River Sea" (2001), Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith" (2002) and Dianne Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale" (2006).
Download or read book Family Likeness written by Mary Jean Corbett and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed. In Family Likeness, Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of "family" and even helped refine those borders. Corbett takes up historically contingent and culturally variable notions of who is and is not a relative and whom one can and cannot marry. Her argument is informed by legal and political debates; texts in sociology and anthropology; and discussions on the biology of heredity, breeding, and eugenics. In Corbett's view, marriage within families—between cousins, in-laws, or adoptees—offered Victorian women, both real and fictional, an attractive alternative to romance with a stranger, not least because it allowed them to maintain and strengthen relations with other women within the family.
Download or read book Thicker Than Water written by Leonore Davidoff and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering new study of nineteenth-century kinship and family relations, focusing on the British middle class, and highlighting both the similarities and the differences in relations between brothers and sisters in the past and in the present.
