This book sets out to retell the history of the English family between 1830 and 1960. Written collaboratively, it draws on the primary research of each author to shed light on those areas so often ignored in general social histories and histories of the family in particular. While acknowledging their importance, it sets to one side the usual focus on marriage and motherhood. Instead a range of other relationships, some familial, others contractual, are set in a more general historical context, alongside an exploration of how expectations and beliefs about the family operated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This approach challenges existing models to reveal the complex and shifting meanings of family life in our recent past.