A pioneering study of Victorian and Edwardian fatherhood, investigating what being, and having, a father meant to working-class people. Julie-Marie Strange considers comedy, material culture, everyday practice, obligation and duty as sites for the development and expression of complex emotional lives, and the involvement between fathers and children.
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.
Advance praise: 'Julie-Marie Strange gives us a dynamic, contextual portrait of working-class fathers, through their own eyes and those of their children, which refuses all easy clichés about their parenting. Instead, Strange focuses on what gave fatherhood meaning - both having, and being, a father, across the early twentieth century. She is deeply attentive to, and respectful of, the mundane acts of care, material provision and ritual which make up the affective world of fatherhood. Never sentimental, Strange nonetheless re-enchants working-class fatherhood. [This book] provides a brilliant example of how both the history of emotions and of material culture might inform social history, and powerfully change the existing historical narrative.' Lucy Delap, King's College London
