Parenting in England 1760-1830
Emotion, Identity, and Generation
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:5th Apr '12
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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.
Parenting in England draws on a diverse set of primary sources that includes the reminiscences of parents and children contained in autobiographies and memoirs, and material found in diaries and correspondence. Bailey also examines many forms of print and popular culture; ranging from prescriptive literature to novels, as well as using visual sources to great effect. * Hannah Barker, University of Manchester, Journal of Social History *
an outstanding book, which will open up a new area of research for historians of the family. * Dr Elizabeth Foyster, Reviews in History *
a detailed, fascinating picture from the letters of aristocrats, paupers, business and professional families, memoirs, diaries, biographies, paphlets, magazines, literary and visual works. * Pat Thane, History Today *
this study offers an extremely sensitive, historiographically wide-ranging, and methodologically innovative consideration of the subject of parenthood and parenting from the perspectives of both parents and children. * H. R. French, The American Historical Review *
this is an excellent contribution to our knowledge of parent-child relations, which should appeal to students as well as specialist historians of childhood. * Colin Heywood, English Historical Review *
In an imaginative and sprightly work, Joanne Bailey sets out to make Georgian parenting better known, focusing on the history of parenting from 'the inside out'. ... Throughout the book, Bailey reshapes accepted paradigms, notably gender dichotomies. * Linda Pollock, Journal of Continuity and Change *
attempts to recontruct the experiences and emotions of parenting and representations and social expectations of parents in the past are rare indeed. This Joanne Bailey achieves for the late Georgian Period. She constructs a detailed, fascinating picture from the letters of aristocrats, paupers, business and professional families, memoirs, diaries, biographies, pamphlets, magazines, literary and visual works. * Pat Thane, History Today *
Parenting in England thus sets out more clearly and richly than any historian has done before the range of meanings and experiences of parenthood. * Karen Harvey, Family & Community History *
ISBN: 9780199565191
Dimensions: 241mm x 161mm x 20mm
Weight: 636g
294 pages