The Victorian Family

1-5

6
Ideal of the Family

Family provided retreat from stress and turmoil of industrial

world
Idealised as centre of stability
Pleasures and virtues of home life were major theme in art and
literature.
Household viewed as separate from the world of work fostering
love, co-operation, and peace
Differentiation of sexual spheres: men in public sphere and
married women in the home: 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 (Shaftesbury)

7 Middle-class Family - Middle-class family taking

tea.
Note: unmarried daughters usually remained within the home until
married.

8 - Middle-class family

Family structure was primarily nuclear.

Family more isolated from its larger kinship network, although
unmarried women often lived with married siblings
Aristocratic families had closer kinship ties beyond nuclear core
Working class families less privatised for they often housed
lodgers within the home and extended family relationships were
important for mutual support in times of dislocation and crisis

9 Companionate Marriage

Companionate marriage was norm with participants exercising

free choice based on mutual love, subject only to parental veto.
Choice of marriage partners narrowed in 1835 by Lord
Lyndhursts Act not modified until 1907
Romantic ideal of Victorian marriage not based on equality
Families conceived as child-centred because their needs
determined domestic activity.
Mothers usually undertook the bulk of instruction of infants
whilst fathers were in charge of discipline and added their own
specific instructions.
Needed seclusion and dedicated family, domestic space.

10 Home

Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England:

Every Englishman has, in the matter of marriage, a romantic

spot in his heart. He imagines a home, with the woman of his
choice, the pair of them alone with their children. That is his own
little universe, closed to the world.

John Ruskin, In Queens Gardens (1864), described 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.

11 Working-class Family

12 Working-class Family

Subject of intense debate

Anxieties raised on issues such as child care, birth control, and
gender roles exposing contradictions in separate spheres
ideology
Used model of the family to assert masculine privilege and the
rhetoric of masculinity was used throughout the Chartist
movement

Letter from Blandini to the Bradford Observer in 1871 typifies

this. He called for the adoption of a 9 hour day for men and a 6
hour day for women and children, justifying this difference by
arguing that:

wives and daughters shall be restricted to six hours per day, to

give them a chance to learn domestic duties, for why should
females be employed outside the domestic hearth. The
domestic hearth is the only sphere in which they can shine in all
their brilliance. What business have they outside of it?

13 Working-class Mothers

Working class mothers singled out for particular approbation.

Factory womens lives rendered them suspect for their important
role as mothers.
Her poor cooking, inadequate cleaning and thriftlessness slowed
the improvement of conditions for her family.
These commentaries blamed the poor for their problems and
offered a solution on an individual basis.
Blame for social ills could be moralised, personalised and
transferred from the public sphere of politics and the market to
the private sphere of the family.

14 Family Structure

In 1861 67% of families were headed by husbands and wives;

18% by widows/widowers and 15% by bachelors/spinsters. For
the remainder of cases the head was absent.
For families with children the average was 2.94 children per
family. A quarter had 4 or more children at home.
From around 1870 there were changes in the composition of
families. The mortality rate began to fall due to improving
standard of living, better nutrition, public health reforms, and
the decline in death by infectious diseases.
Also fall in the birthrate which meant number of children in
families fell. Marriages in the late 1860s produced an average of
6.16 children by 1881 this had fallen to 5.27 and by 1914 much
more dramatically to 2.73. 43% of women married in 1870-9 had
between 5 and 9 children and 18% had ten or more.
There were important social differentials in this decline in
fertility and mortality.

15 Parental roles

Parental roles became more sharply defined in the Victorian

period
Fathers pre-eminent role was frequently being usurped by the
mother in the Victorian period and therefore the fatherhood was
profoundly redefined.

Roberts work on Victorian fathers uncovered three common

characteristics: remoteness, sovereignty, and benevolence.

16
Poor Victorian Children
The poor Victorian Children lived a very different life than the children of wealthier families.
They didnt have the nice houses to live in or the extravagant toys, clothes or fine foods
that the rich kids had. They lived in much smaller houses or even single rooms.Poor
Victorian Children Family1
Poor Victorian Children-FamilyLiving in these tight quarters caused the family to be much
closer. Without the presence of a nanny the parents raised the children and were the
guiding force in their lives. This did not always translate to a more loving atmosphere
though. Since a large part of the poor children had to work public jobs to help support their
families many parents thought of children as income, and having more children who
worked raised the income of the home. Many parents had 10 or 12 or even more children
for this reason alone
How old did children have to be to work in Victorian Times?
Victorian children would be made to go to work at a very young age. As unbelievable as it
sounds, sometimes even 4 or 5 years old. Actually this was not unique only to the Victorian
age, children had been expected to work for centuries before this.Victorian Children at
Work
They worked very hard and for long hours every day. On the job safety was not a major
concern and they were expected to work in filthy conditions many times. They really had no
choice in the matter. Their parents made them work to help pay the bills at home.Victorian
Children at work-Factory1

17
Wealthy Victorian Children
Life for Victorian Children in Victorian times (1830 to 1900) was nothing like childhood in
todays world. For the wealthy there was an overwhelming sense of boredom and the
constant prodding to be proper and polite with very little parent to child communication. For
the poor Victorian Children life was much different. The poor children had to work public
jobs for their families to survive. Toys were nothing more than homemade dolls or wooden
blocks. On the other hand their family life was tighter and more loving.
While the wealthy children may have been spoiled and had a much better life than the poor
children, they also had what would seem to be a sad, redundant and affection-less
existence.

Children were mostly raised by a nanny who would teach the child what was proper and
what was not. Day to day living was nothing more than a lonely monotonous routine and
very formal.
Wealthy Victorian Children rarely communicated with their parents except for a specified
time each day.
~Winston Churchill once said that he could count the times he had been hugged by his
mother as a child~
Parents would hire a nanny or nurse to do the brunt of the child rearing. They would
instruct the nanny what they wanted to have instilled into their children such as manners,
education, propriety, how to dress and so on. The nanny was in effect a substitute parent.

18 Post Mortem family photographs

The Victorian Era was a pretty morbid time in human history. One of the most unsettling
traditions of the era was the practice of post-mortem photography (that is, photographing
the dead). post-mortem photography. This practice involved taking the portraits of dead
people, with their living relatives posing beside them. It was their way of bringing the living
and the deceased together (as well as providing a souvenir for the family to hang on their
wall).Meghan of Cvlt Nation explains this strange trend further: One hundred years ago
in America and the UK, seeing portraits of dead relatives or children on peoples walls was
totally normal, and in fact expected.While today, we prefer to remember our ancestors as
they lived, the Victorians felt that capturing their dead flesh was a way to pay respect to
their passing.

19 Conclusion

The privatised emotionally bonded family was the dominant

model and characterised all levels of society
It was enduring and engendered strong feelings of both love and
rage. So in reality was often a source of tension and disquiet.
Victorian family may be viewed as a self-sufficient unit and
inward looking. But there was an interplay between the public
and domestic roles.
Contemporary debates about the family focused attention on
issues of domesticity rather than on unequal burdens of gender
roles.
Middle class blamed social ills on the problems of family life
among the working class.
Working class men accepted the legitimacy of domestic ideology
but sought to turn that ideology on its head by blaming the
competitive system for forcing the
working class family away from its preferred ideal and mothers
out to work.
Neither group attempted to reconcile their beliefs with the
reality of family life.