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...

"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,...

The eleven contributors to The Girl's Own explore British and American Victorian representations of the adolescent girl by drawing on such contemporary sources as conduct books, housekeeping manuals, periodicals, biographies, photographs, paintings, and educational treatises. The institutions, practices, and literatures discussed reveal the ways in which the Girl expressed her independence, as well as the ways in which she was presented and controlled. As the contributors note, nineteenth-century visions of girlhood were extremely ambiguous. The adolescent girl was a fascinating and...