As we state in Gender and Fatherhood ‘the Victorians inherited a highly moralized understanding of the family as a microcosm of God’s kingdom, and a concomitant reverence and deference toward the position of head of household as representing God’s authority within the family. The popularity of family prayers, led where practicable by the father, cast a spiritual aura over his leadership within the home.’ But the nature of God’s Fatherhood was one of the most hotly debated questions in the Victorian Christian community: was he a stern and judgemental or tender and forgiving. What paternal model did he offer good Christian men? In a whole range of religious material – sermons, hymns and tracts we found ‘an attempt positively to identify core elements of the father’s role’ (16-17).

Leading family prayer was considered one of the most important duties of the Christian father, as exemplified by Robert Burns's poem 'Scene in a Scottish Cottage', illustrated by John Dawson Watson and engraved by the Dalziel Brothers for English Sacred Poetry (London: Routledge & Co., 1862), pp. 213-5.

The Scottish essayist and poet Janet Hamilton argued that the Sabbath was particularly important for the working man since this was the only day reserved for his family. Not only should he take his children out to play in the fields and attend worship, but he should also help his wife by nursing the children. She would have approved strongly of Ebenezer Elliott's 'Sunday in the Fields', illustrated by John Dawson Watson and engraved by the Dalziel Brothers for English Sacred Poetry (London: Routledge & Co, 1862), pp. 223-4 (http://www.dmvi.cardiff.ac.uk/imageDetail.asp?illus=ESP052). Helen Rogers examines Hamilton's strictures on fatherhood and parenting in her chapter 'First in the House: Daughters on Working-Class Fathers and Fatherhood', pp. 126-37.

Providing religious education was one of the principle ways in which fathers were supposed to give moral guidance and protection to their children. This was the case whatever their creed. The picture 'Lighting the Lamps, Eve of the Sabbath' by Simeon Solomon, engraver unknown, demonstrates another tender image of the protective, doting parent. The image illustrated an anonymous article on 'Jews in England', in Once A Week, 7 (9 Aug 1862), pp. 190-6, which can be viewed at http://www.dmvi.cardiff.ac.uk/imageDetail.asp?illus=OWF028

As Megan Doolittle points out in her chapter, the refusal to give children a religious upbringing was one of the very few grounds upon which some fathers lost their rights of custody: 'While a Catholic, Jewish or Muslim father could not be prevented from bringing up his children in his own faith, an atheist was seen as depriving his children of eternal life, a pressing concern in an age of high infant and child mortality' (see Megan's chapter, 'Fatherhood, Religious Belief and the Protection of Children in Nineteenth-Century English Families', pp. 33-4).

The temperance movement provided some of the most vivid and explicitly prescriptive models of good and bad fathering. The association between domestic  manliness, moderation and economy was beginning to emerge by the late eighteenth century, especially among the middling classes, as we can see in Morland's 'Comforts of Industry' and 'Miseries of Idleness'. The destructive effects of drunkenness on the family were a recurrent theme of evangelical literature and Religious Tracts from the 1790s onwards and of the 'Condition of England' novels and domestic fiction of the 1840s. It continued be a focus of fiction and illustration, as we can see here in the illustration 'Sam Shuck "On the Loose Again"' in Mrs Henry Wood's serialized story 'A Life's Secret', published in the periodical Leisure Hour, 11, 528 (6 Feb 1862), pp. 81-84, that can be viewed at http://www.dmvi.cardiff.ac.uk

By the 1840s the temperance was becoming a mass movement, promoted forcefully by middle-class evangelicals but also adopted by many working-class reformers and by the Sunday school movement. In Gender and Fatherhood we argue that the temperance movement, 'perhaps more than any other, was responsible for the promotion of two dichotomous father figures: one sober, industrious and affectionate who spent his leisure time predominantly with his family; the other drunken, negligent and brutal who wasted his time in the alehouse, returning only to wreck his home and family’ (p. 10). For 'The Drunkard's Progress. From the first glass to the grave' by N. Currier, 1846 (shown here) and a fascinating collection of temperance propaganda see 'Temperance: Selected Images from the Collections of the Library of Congress' at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/paTemper.html

While temperance literature was highly melodramatic in depicting the evils of drink, it echoed the very real concerns of families on low incomes, for whom the effects of a drunken father could be devastating. Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl’, dedicated her poem ‘The Drunkard’s Wife’ to her mother’s youngest sister ‘whose history’,

Johnston

wrote, ‘falls a little short of the picture painted by my humble pen’. The poem ends:

Ah! Poor Hannah, thou once wert the pride of our land,

And how worthy the wooers that sought thy fair hand?

But their love to thy bosom no joy could impart –

It was falsehood and beauty that won thy young heart.

When I look on thee now, and think what thou hast been,

When thy young hopes, unclouded, flew on like a dream –

When I see thee a victim by drunkenness curs’d

Mem’ry seems but a phantom that fancy hath nursed.

And that child which so fondly thou hold’st to thy breast,

Unconscious of woe, it now slumbers at rest;

Should it live unto manhood, like its father to turn,

Ah! far better for thee it were laid ’neath the urn.

For its father’s a drunkard! The lone hours of night

Beholds thee, poor Hannah, sit trembling with fright,

And the weak dying embers to ashes decay,

Whilst thou wait on his coming till dawning of day.

Alas! wretched Hannah, how I feel for thy woes,

And I long to behold thee in peaceful repose,

For thy heart wears a history of heartrending strife,

But death will soon release thee, thou poor drunkard’s wife!

From Autobiography, Poems and Songs of Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl’, (William Love: Glasgow, 1867) pp. 59-61

It is well established that representations of womanhood in the nineteenth century often depended on the dichotomous opposition of the pure and impure woman, the mother and the fallen woman. Interestingly, representations of paternity could be similarly prescriptive and didactic, contrasting good and bad fathers. The contrast is explicit in George Morland’s ‘The Comforts of Industry’ and ‘The Miseries of Idleness’, both of 1790, and held by the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

With the open door, ‘The Comforts of Industry’ plays on the theme of the family man returning from labour, underlining the father’s role as provider but, like a good domestic man, he has left his work behind and his attention is firmly on his family. He seems to have returned with his elder son who holds out something to show his mother and sister. With his hand on his son’s sleeve, the father is gently introducing his son to the outside world, and preparing him, perhaps, for the role of protector and provider that one day he too will fulfil.

While the industrious man’s family lives in modest comfort, the drunkard’s children starve; the inebriated parents deaf to their cries. There is no companionship between husband and wife, except for the drink, and consequently no affection for their children. There are no signs that this father has been out to work and the home is bare. The contrast between the two paintings indicates clearly that provision was not just an economic function and as we argue, ‘breadwinning itself could be construed as an eloquent expression of care’ (p.21). The moral of Morland’s pair is that a father’s industry is synonymous with love, nurture and protection.

An example of the father’s homecoming can be found in one of the most popular poems by Robert Burns, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ (1785). Like much of Burns’s verse, it warmly celebrates the pre-industrial Scottish peasant family. Verses 2-6 are reproduced below. The full annotated poem can be found at http://www.robertburns.org/works/82.shtml.

All the engravings are from Robert Burns, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, in Favourite English Poems (London: Sampson, 1862), pp. 61-71, illustrated by Charles West Cope, engraver unknown. They can be viewed at http://www.dmvi.cardiff.ac.uk, (FEP055, FEP056, FEP057, FEP058)

Robert Burns, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ (1785)

November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh;
The short'ning winter-day is near a close;
The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh;
The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose:
The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes, -
This night his weekly moil is at an end,
Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,
Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o'er the moor, his course does hameward bend.

At length his lonely cot appears in view,
Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through
To meet their dead, wi' flichterin noise and glee.
His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie,
His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie's smile,
The lisping infant, prattling on his knee,
Does a' his weary kiaugh and care beguile,
And makes him quite forget his labour and his toil.

Belyve, the elder bairns come drapping in,
At service out, amang the farmers roun';
Some ca' the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin
A cannie errand to a neibor town:
Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman-grown,
In youthfu' bloom-love sparkling in her e'e-
Comes hame, perhaps to shew a braw new gown,
Or deposite her sair-won penny-fee,
To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be.

With joy unfeign'd, brothers and sisters meet,
And each for other's weelfare kindly speirs:
The social hours, swift-wing'd, unnotic'd fleet:
Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears.
The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;
Anticipation forward points the view;
The mother, wi' her needle and her shears,
Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new;
The father mixes a' wi' admonition due.

Their master's and their mistress' command,
The younkers a' are warned to obey;
And mind their labours wi' an eydent hand,
And ne'er, tho' out o' sight, to jauk or play;
"And O! be sure to fear the Lord alway,
And mind your duty, duly, morn and night;
Lest in temptation's path ye gang astray,
Implore His counsel and assisting might:
They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright."

In his recollections of their childhood, Robert Burns’s brother Gilbert Burns (1760-1827)

Remembered that 'Robert had frequently remarked to me that he thought there was something peculiarly venerable in the phrase, "Let us worship God!" used by a decent, sober head of a family, introducing family worship. To this sentiment of the author, the world is indebted for "The Cotter's Saturday Night". . . . I do not recollect to have read or heard anything by which I was more highly electrified! The fifth and sixth stanzas and the eighteenth thrilled with peculiar ecstasy through my soul.’ Leading family worship was one of the most important duties expected of the good Christian father, as we discuss in the introduction to Gender and Fatherhood.

Gilbert Burns claimed that ‘The cotter in the "Saturday Night" is an exact copy of my father in his manners, his family devotion, and exhortations; yet the other parts of the description do not apply to our family. None of us were "at service out among the farmer's men". Instead of our depositing our "sair-won penny-fee" with our parents, my father laboured hard, and lived with the most rigid economy, that he might be able to keep his children at home, therby having an opportunity of watching the progress of our young minds, and forming in them early habits of piety and virtue; and from this motive alone did he engage in farming, the source of all his difficulties and distresses.' Gilbert’s insistence on his father’s ability to maintain his family may be read as evidence of the increasing prevalence of the ‘father-as-breadwinner’ norm and the pressure on men to live up to it, even in the early nineteenth century.

For Gilbert Burns and a discussion of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night see http://www.robertburns.org/encyclopedia/CottersSaturdayNightThe.233.shtml).

The front cover of Gender and Fatherhood depicts a detail from Frederick Daniel Hardy’s painting The Volunteers (1860) held by York Art Gallery, which we discuss in our Introduction, ‘The Empire of the Father’. This homely image of an involved father – albeit one who of necessity must come and go – depicts the qualities of domestic manliness that were much lauded, especially in the early Victorian decades.

The focus on the home of a respectable but humble man is interesting, for the working-class man was the subject of some of the most sympathetic and, conversely, some of the most condemnatory depictions of paternity, examples of which can be found elsewhere in this blog. Hardy painted many homely family scenes. ‘Baby’s Birthday’ (1867) is held by Wolverhampton Art Gallery and can be viewed at http://www.everyobject.net/story.php?uid=15155

Hardy’s ‘The Volunteers’ refers to a common theme in narrative painting – the returning soldier or sailor.

An example of this tradition is found in a pair of paintings by Julius Caesar Ibbetsen, c. 1800 - ‘An Unmarried Sailor’s Return’ and  ‘A Married Sailor’s Return’ - which contrasts the dissolute bachelor sailor and the loving family man by Julius Caesar Ibbetson c.1800.

As in Hardy’s Volunteers, the intimacy between the Married Sailor and his children suggests his devotion and steadiness as a family man. Both paintings can be seen at the Tate Online (http://www.tate.org.uk)

The returning soldier or sailor was part of a broader narrative tradition on the husband’s and father’s homecoming and especially of the return of the labourer, found in poetry and painting. An example is this is John Dawson Watson's illustration 'Or climb his Knees the envied Kiss to share' to Thomas Gray's 'Elegy written in a country Churchyard', engraved by the Dalziel Brothers for English Sacred Poetry (London: Routledge & Co, 1862, pp. 173-83). The labourer's wife is baking at the table, just like Hardy's soldier's homely wife.

The tradition of the returning labourer is discussed by Brian Maidment in his fascinating examination of periodical illustrations in ‘Domestic Ideology and its Industrial Enemies: The Title Page of The Family Economist (1848-1850) in C. Parker (ed.), Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995), pp. 25-56.

Welcome to our blog which accompanies the collection of essays, Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Until recently, paternity was a much neglected area of family and gender history and so we hope to develop this blog to point to important new work on fatherhood and to suggest sources for further study. In his ground-breaking study of middle-class manhood, John Tosh argues that “of all the qualifications for full masculine status, fatherhood was the least talked about by the Victorians” (A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, p. 79). By contrast, the essays in Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century seek to show that “the characterization of fathers in art, literature and public debate was more extensive and nuanced than has hitherto been acknowledged” (Broughton and Rogers, p. 1). In this blog we seek to illustrate that claim further by reproducing a wide range of images of fathering which are suggestive of the often complex and sometimes ambivalent, as well as conventional, ways in which fatherhood was represented.

Many of the illustrations shown here are taken from J. Thomas, P. T. Killick, A. A. Mandal, and D. J. Skilton, A Database of Mid-Victorian wood-engraved Illustration http://www.dmvi.cf.ac.uk, [accessed 4 March 2007]. This site provides a wonderful collection of illustrations selected from periodicals 1860-2 which illuminate many aspects of Victorian society and culture.

Please contact us if you have any comments about our blog or material you would like to share with us.