Julie-Marie Strange. Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914

Histories of the family have overwhelmingly focused on mothers and children. Julie-Marie Strange’s study of fatherhood is one of several that have appeared in the last decade, showing the maturation of the field to encompass men’s roles within the family and to interrogate men’s gendered identities. In the British case, John Tosh’s work on the history of masculinity in the nineteenth century has made explicit calls to historians to examine men as domestic beings, their interior lives, and their identities and roles as husbands and fathers. Meanwhile Karen Harvey’s research on the eighteenth century has emphasized the need for more attention to how men make and relate to “home.” Strange’s layered and complicated book, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914, takes up these subjects, exploring in particular father-child relationships and evidence of attachment and affection in working-class autobiography. Much work, my own included, tends to collapse the husband/father into “the provider,” failing to differentiate how children and wives related in unique ways to this masculine presence in their lives. Strange conceptualizes her book as a needed correction to this conflation. In particular, she aims to challenge the stereotype of the Victorian working-class father as distant or absent. To accomplish her goals, Strange undertakes close readings of working-class autobiographies mostly written in the mid-twentieth century, but whose authors were born between the mid-1860s and 1910, to tease out material to help us understand the varied meanings of fatherhood. These life stories tell tales of fatherhood past, but also provide insight into the autobiographers’ own contexts, including their own lives as parents and how new mid-twentieth-century ideals of more involved fathering shaped the narratives the authors chose to construct. Strange’s innovative method offers new insight into working-class autobiography, pulling out stories of fathers’ attachment to and affection for children where we might not expect to find them. Strange argues that while most writers did not focus on their feelings for their fathers, the anecdotes they related reflected “what mattered” (15) and in this way reveal how fathers themselves mattered to their children’s lives and identities.

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