Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910

Abstract

This book explores the ways that families were formed and re-formed, and held together and fractured, in Britain from the sixteenth to twentieth century. The chapters build upon the argument, developed in the 1990s and 2000s, that the nuclear family form, the bedrock of understandings of the structure and function of family and kinship units, provides a wholly inadequate lens through which to view the British family. Instead the volume's contributors point to families and households with porous boundaries, an endless capacity to reconstitute themselves, and an essential fluidity to both the form of families, and the family and kinship relationships that stood in the background. This book offers a re-reading, and reconsideration of the existing pillars of family history in Britain. It examines areas such as: Scottish kinship patterns, work patterns of kin in Post Office families, stepfamily relations, the role of family in managing lunatic patients, and the fluidity associated with a range of professional families in the nineteenth century. Chapter 8 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com. Intro; Contents; Notes on Contributors; List of Figures; List of Tables; Chapter 1 Introduction; Context; The Size and Shape of Co-residential Units; The Extent of Nominal and Fictive Kinship; The Meaning of Family and Kinship; Trends in the Utility of Family and Kinship; Chapter Structure; Part I Economies of the Family; Chapter 2 Family Fortunes: Marriage, Inheritance and Economic Challenges in Scotland c.1660-1800; Overview; Inheritance Laws and Family Property: Fideicommissa, Entails and the Enlightened Attack on 'feudalism'; Public Finances and Family Fortunes Negotiating Family Interests: Litigation in the Court of Session, Appeals to the House of Lords, and Private Statutes, c.1660-1800Conclusion; Chapter 3 Victorian Professions: The Galvanising (and Shaping) Force of Death on Families; Introduction; The Victorian 'Professional' Family; An Experiential Account of Bereavement in a Professional Family; Declining Fortunes in Nineteenth-Century Dundee; Widows and Spinsters; Conclusion; Chapter 4 "The Widows and Orphans of Servants Are Dying": The Conflict of Family in the Design and Application of Nineteenth-Century Civil Servant Pensions; Overview Constructing the Post Office FamilyThe Superannuation Debates; The Familial Role in Postal Work; Conclusion; Part II Family Processes; Chapter 5 Step Motherhood in the Nineteenth Century: Elinor Packe and Continuing Family Cohesiveness, 1900-1911; Overview; Sources and Background to the Packe Family; The Packe's and Their Interconnections; Conclusion; Chapter 6 Balancing the Family: Edward Wrench, Baslow G.P., c.1862-1890; Overview; The Baslow Practice; Husband and Wife Working Partnership; Balancing Family Commitments; The Impact of General Practice on Family Life; Conclusion Chapter 7 The Family and Insanity: The Experience of the Garlands Asylum, 1862-1910Overview; Family as Instigators of Care; Maintenance of Family Ties; Family as the Cause of Insanity; Conclusion; Chapter 8 Conceptualising the 'Perfect' Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Philanthropic Institutions; Overview; The Nineteenth-Century Context; The Experience of the Waifs and Strays Society; Conclusion; Part III Reconstituting the Family; Chapter 9 Negotiating the Blending of Families: Tension and Affection Between Step-Parents and Children in Early Modern England; Overview The Remarrying Widow-Why Marry Again?Step-Parents and the Law: Stereotype and Reality; Affectionate Bonds in Blended Families; Conclusion; Chapter 10 Family Beyond the Household: Constituting and Reconstituting as Kin; Themes and Context; Reconstructing Genealogies; Cardno and Fraser: Social and Economic Tensions, 1820s-1860s; Kinship in the Long-Term, 1870-1910; Conclusion; Chapter 11 Configuring and Re-configuring Families in Nineteenth-Century England; Overview; Sources; Fluid Families; Beyond the Memorial; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index