Friends of the Family: English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940 - Tapa dura

This work seeks to explain what a reverence for family values meant in practice for the Western world s most family-conscious culture. Victorian England can be credited with inventing the ideal of the home inviolate, an ideal best condensed in the notion that an Englishman s home is his castle. It was during this period that the family emerged as a subject of continuous discussion by politicians and of intervention by middle-class reformers. The discussion tended to address specific problems domestic violence, juvenile criminality, and the fate of illegitimate children, among others rather than focusing on the family as a whole. The reformers not only set the agenda of family-focused debates but also supplied the leadership for a vast array of interventionist groups philanthropists, civil servants, magistrates, medical practitioners, educators, and child psychologists whose common goal was to save the family, especially the working-class family, from itself.