VICTORIAN FAMILIES IN FACT AND FICTION Also by Penny Kane ASKING DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONS (editor with David Lucas) *CHINA'S ONE-CHILD FAMILY POLICY (editor with Delia Davin and Elisabeth Croll) THE CHOICE GUIDE TO BIR1H CONTROL (with John Porter) CHOICE NOT CHANCE: A Handbook of Fertility Control (with Beula Bewley and Judith Cook) CONSUMER GUIDE TO BIRTH CONTROL (with Margaret Sparrow) DIFFERENTIAL MORTALITY: Methodological Issues and Biosocial Factors (edited with Lado T. Ruzicka and Guillaume Wunsch) EHKAISY [Contraception] *FAMINE IN CHINA 1959-61: Demographic and Social Implications THE SECOND BILLION: People and Population in China SUCCESSFULLY EVER AFTER (with Shirley Sloan Fader) TRADITION, DEVELOPMENT AND THE INDIVIDUAL (edited with Lado T. Ru;dcka) THE WHICH? GUIDE TO BIR1H CONTROL *WOMEN'S HEALTH: From Womb to Tomb *Also from St. Martin's Press Victorian Fatnilies in Fact and Fiction Penny Kane Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-23762-3 ISBN 978-1-349-23760-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23760-9 © Penny Kane 1995 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1995 978-0-333-61825-7 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1995 ISBN 978-0-312-12517-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kane, Penny. Victorian families in fact and fiction I Penny Kane. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-12517-2 1. English fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Domestic fiction, English-History and criticism. 3. Family --Great Britain-History-19th century. 4. Great Britain-History- -Victoria, 1837-1901. 5. Family in literature. I. Title. PR878.D65K36 1995 823'.809355-dc20 94-34226 CIP This book is for my families - Maslins that were; Forrester-Woods, Kanes, Ruzickas, Boltons and BB that are - with love. Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction ix 1 Family Fluidity 1 2 Time and Thought 16 3 Visions of Childhood 37 4 Literacy and Learning 57 5 The Single Girl 75 6 Love and Marriage 92 7 Births and Babies 114 8 Fertility Limitation 133 9 Conclusions 151 Bibliography 160 Index 167 vii Acknowledgements As usual, this book owes its existence to the encouragement and support of my husband, Dr Lado Ruzicka. His enthusiasm for the original idea, his painstaking reading and comments on the manuscript, have helped me immensely; he is not, of course, responsible for its remaining deficienciE!S. I am also grateful for the continuing encouragement ofT. M. Farmiloe and Annabelle Buckley at Macmillan. viii Introduction The generalisations men accept about life, the morality which commends itself to them, are in some way reflected in the plays they see, in the songs they sing, in the stories they enjoy; and it is our duty as historians to try to understand that reflection. G. Kitson Clark, 1962 During the nineteenth century, across Europe as well as in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, there was an extraordinary and quite unprecedented happening. People began to have fewer children, and went on having fewer children. It hap pened at slightly different times in different countries - in Britain, the fertility decline started around 1870 - but in each, it led to a reduction in the size of families which, with minor fluctuations, became and has remained a generally accepted norm. Behaviour change on this scale is rare and unless there is some obvious immediate cause, such as a major technological develop ment, very difficult to interpret. Why did people suddenly and simultaneously begin to feel that two, or three, children would be preferable to five or more? What had altered in their way of living and thinking which even put the possibility into their heads? This book is an attempt to suggest, through individual stories taken from biographies, letters and novels, some of the influences which might have impacted on our Victorian ancestors. At the same time I have tried to outline the broader demographic background which they were simultaneously creators of, and influenced by. About people in the aggregate, demographers can tell us a great deal - for example, how many children were born, and to whom; when they married; how many children they had and at what ages; their life-span; where they lived and the jobs they had. A great deal of work has been done by demographers, too, in attempting to find explanations of why people behaved the way they did, by correlating the information about them with characteristics of their environment and society at large. Thus they can tell us that those who were in a higher social class, or had more education, married later or had smaller families. Or that miners and farmers changed their fertility behaviour later than people in other occupations. ix Introduction X One particularly elaborate effort to learn more about the declines in fertility in Europe was initiated by demographers at Princeton University. The Princeton Project has collected and analysed material about each of the seven hundred provinces or regions into which the European countries are divided. The Project has produced indi vidual country studies as well as comparative ones; naturally, these have been a major source of ideas as well as data for this book, in addition to the work of British demographers. Information about marriage, fertility, household size, longevity and so on is available for the whole of Britain for most of the nine teenth century. To learn about the earlier patterns of demographic phenomena, the special techniques of historical demography are needed. Much of what we now know is based on reconstructing family histories from parish records. Although the data are not as comprehensive as those taken from a census and modem vital re gistration systems, enough reconstruction has now been done in Britain - notably by the Cambridge Group for the Study of Histori cal Populations - to provide a reasonably comprehensive picture of demographic behaviour from the sixteenth century onwards. The major limitation of demography, though, is that it does look at aggregates; it cannot tell us about the behaviour of individuals, let alone why they behaved as they did. For that, one has to learn individual stories and listen to individual voices. Using biograph ies and letters or diary-entries to explon~ the past is not unusual. Including novels as 'evidence' may need more explanation. When we read novels, we generally read for the plot, the characters, the language, the author's insight or wit; we tend not to notice con sciously the small brush-strokes, the detail by which the novelist makes up his world. Nobody, for instartce, reads Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1857) for its description of thE! house of her wet-nurse. But the description is there; it is so detailed that you could draw a picture of that home; and it tells us a great deal about the conditions in which French children were expected to survive - if they could - and, implicitly, about how parents viewed children. Novels are, in fact, a rich source of information about how people lived at the time, and what they thought. As historical sources of corroborative detail, 'do not overlook the novel', wrote Barbara Tuchman (1981), and she was right. I have been surprised and excited, trawling through nineteenth-century books, to see just how much there is about families and their relationships and condi tions, as well as about love and marriage.