Family Ties in Victorian England

Claudia Nelson is Professor of English and director of Women's Studies at Texas A&M University. In addition to coediting three anthologies of essays, she is the author of Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children's Fiction, 1857-1917, Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850-1910 , and Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption in America, 1850-1929, which won the Children's Literature Association award for the best scholarly book of 2003 in the field of children's studies.

In this well-written, well-researched sociological study of the Victorian family, Nelson links life and literature, showing literary attempts to inculcate virtue as defined by the culture and the individual author. Drawing in court cases and life stories of Victorians both well known and obscure, the author argues that Victorian literature offers a middle-class viewpoint that the working classes are morally inferior and shows the extent to which family, supposed to be the bedrock on which Victorian society was built, nonetheless appeared vulnerable. Employing the extended family, stepparenting, and adoption, Victorian writers could present poor parenting without attacking the assumption that all women are maternal. Not surprisingly, Nelson finds girls' and women's training and roles different from those of men and boys--boys raised to support families and given leisure and freedom, girls removed from school as young as seven (if they were needed to care for siblings) and expected to cater to the needs of brothers throughout life. This fascinating, timely, and eye-opening study adds to Nelson's outstanding Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850-1910. Highly recommended. All readers; all levels.