Parenting in England is the first study of the world of parenting in late Georgian England. The author, Joanne Bailey, traces ideas about parenthood in a Christian society that was responding to new cultural trends of sensibility, romanticism and domesticity, along with Enlightenment ideas about childhood and self. All these shaped how people, from the poor to the genteel, thought about themselves as parents, and remembered their own parents. With meticulous attention to detail, Bailey illuminates the range of intense emotions provoked by parenthood by investigating a rich array of sources from memoirs and correspondence, to advice literature, fiction, and court records, to prints, engravings, and ballads. Parenting was also a profoundly embodied experience, and the book captures the effort, labour, and hard work it entailed. Such parental investment meant that the experience was fundamental to the forging of national, familial, and personal identities. It also needed more than two parents and this book uncovers the hitherto hidden world of shared parenting. At all levels of society, household and kinship ties were drawn upon to lighten the labours of parenting. By revealing these emotional and material parental worlds, what emerges is the centrality of parenthood to mental and physical well-being, reputation, public and personal identities, and to transmitting prized values across generations. Yet being a parent was a contingent experience adapting from hour to hour, year to year, and child to child. It was at once precarious, as children and parents succumbed to fatal diseases and accidents, yet it was also enduring because parent-child relationships were not ended by death: lost children and parents lived on in memory.

The first study of the world of parenting in late Georgian England. Based on extensive and wide-ranging sources from memoirs and correspondence, to fiction, advice guides, and engravings, Bailey uncovers how people, from the poor to the rich, thought about themselves as parents and remembered their own parents.

Illegitimacy, Family, and Stigma is the first full-length exploration of what it was like to be illegitimate in eighteenth-century England, a period of 'sexual revolution', unprecedented increase in illegitimate births, and intense debate over children's rights to state support. Using the words of illegitimate individuals and their families preserved in letters, diaries, poor relief, and court documents, this study reveals the impact of illegitimacy across the life cycle. How did illegitimacy affect children's early years, and their relationships with parents, siblings, and wider family as they grew up? Did illegitimacy limit education, occupation, or marriage chances? What were individuals' experiences of shame and stigma, and how did being illegitimate affect their sense of identity? Historian Kate Gibson investigates the circumstances that governed families' responses, from love and pragmatic acceptance, to secrecy and exclusion. In a major reframing of assumptions that illegitimacy was experienced only among the poor, this volume tells the stories of individuals from across the socio-economic scale, including children of royalty, physicians and lawyers, servants and agricultural labourers. It demonstrates that the stigma of illegitimacy operated along a spectrum, varying according to the type of parental relationship, the child's race, gender, and socio-economic status. Financial resources and the class-based ideals of parenthood or family life had a significant impact on how families reacted to illegitimacy. Class became more important over the eighteenth century, under the influence of Enlightenment ideals of tolerance, sensibility, and redemption. The child of sin was now recast as a pitiable object of charity, but this applied only to those who could fit narrow parameters of genteel tragedy. This vivid investigation of the meaning of illegitimacy gets to the heart of powerful inequalities in families, communities, and the state.

This book explores the relationship between middle-class fathers and sons in England between c. 1870 and 1920. We now know that the conventional image of the middle-class paterfamilias of this period as cold and authoritarian is too simplistic, but there is still much to be discovered about relationships in middle-class families. Paying especial attention to gender and masculinities, this book focuses on the interactions between fathers and sons, exploring how relationships developed and masculine identities were negotiated from infancy and childhood to adulthood and old age. Drawing on sources as diverse as autobiographies, oral history interviews, First World War conscription records and press reports of violent incidents, this book questions how fathers and sons negotiated relationships marked by shifting relations of power, as well as by different combinations of emotional entanglements, obligations and ties. It explores changes as fathers and sons grew older and assesses fathers’ role in trying to mould sons’ masculine identities, characters and lives. It reveals negotiation and compromise, as well as rebellion and conflict, underlining that fathers and sons were important to each other, their relationships a significant – if often overlooked – aspect of middle-class men’s lives and identities.

A pioneering study of Victorian and Edwardian fatherhood, investigating what being, and having, a father meant to working-class people. Based on working-class autobiography, the book challenges dominant assumptions about absent or 'feckless' fathers, and reintegrates the paternal figure within the emotional life of families. Locating autobiography within broader social and cultural commentary, Julie-Marie Strange considers material culture, everyday practice, obligation, duty and comedy as sites for the development and expression of complex emotional lives. Emphasising the importance of separating men as husbands from men as fathers, Strange explores how emotional ties were formed between fathers and their children, the models of fatherhood available to working-class men, and the ways in which fathers interacted with children inside and outside the home. She explodes the myth that working-class interiorities are inaccessible or unrecoverable, and locates life stories in the context of other sources, including social surveys, visual culture and popular fiction.

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

Was there a notion of childhood for the labouring classes, and was it distinctive from that of the elite? Examining pauper childhood, family life and societal reform, Levene asks whether new models of childhood in the eighteenth century affected the treatment of the young poor, and reveals how they and their families were helped through hard times.