The Victorian Era

The Victorian Family and the Home

Article · Society & Daily Life · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Victorian family was the central institution of the period, the basic unit of the social, the economic, the moral, and the emotional life of the British people. The cultural ideal of the Victorian family was a patriarchal household with a father at the head, a mother as the “Angel in the House,” and a brood of well-brought-up children educated at home and at school, attended by a small army of servants in the upper-class home and a single maid-of-all-work in the middle-class home. The ideal was set out in the conduct books of the period, codified in the new doctrine of “separate spheres,” promoted in the sermons of the established church, illustrated in the domestic novel from Dickens to Gissing, and embodied in the suburban villa, the country house, the seaside holiday, and the Christmas dinner. The reality was, of course, more varied, and the working-class family, the immigrant family, the single-parent family, the destitute family, and the family of the workhouse were all features of the period.

The “Separate Spheres” and the Angel in the House

The doctrine of “separate spheres” held that the wife belonged to the home, the husband to the world; the wife to the private, the husband to the public; the wife to the moral, the husband to the economic. The doctrine was rooted in the older Protestant domesticity of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was given its most influential expression in Coventry Patmore’s poem of married love, The Angel in the House (1854–62), and in Sarah Stickney Ellis’s conduct book The Women of England, their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1839), which ran to sixteen editions in twenty years. The wife was the guardian of the morals of the household, the educator of the children, the nurse of the sick, the visitor of the poor, the supporter of the church, and the centre of the family’s social life; the husband was the breadwinner, the disciplinarian, the representative of the family in the public world, and the master of the household.

The doctrine was reinforced by the parallel American idea of the “Cult of Domesticity” and the “Cult of True Womanhood,” which were read on both sides of the Atlantic in the women’s magazines, the domestic novels, and the etiquette books of the period. The American idea held that a true woman was defined by her piety, her purity, her submissiveness, and her domesticity, and the Victorian version held that the home was a sacred place and the wife was its priestess. The two ideas met in the work of the American writer Catharine Beecher, whose A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) was widely read in the Anglo-Saxon world, and in the work of the British writer Mrs Beeton, whose Book of Household Management (1861) was the bible of the middle-class wife.

The Patriarchal Father

The Victorian father was the head of the household, the legal owner of the family’s property, the breadwinner, the disciplinarian, the moral guide, and the representative of the family in the church, the law, and the politics of the period. The patriarchal father of the ideal Victorian family was a man of the Who were the Victorian upper class? or of the How did the middle class grow in the Victorian era?, who earned the family income through his profession, his business, or his property, who managed the family’s finances, who decided on the education of the children, who chose the husbands of his daughters, and who represented the family in the parish, the hunt, the county, and the House of Lords. The patriarchal father is a central figure in the Victorian Novel of the period, from the stern Mr Dombey of Dickens to the tyrannical Mr Pontellier of Kate Chopin.

In practice, the Victorian father was often a more absent figure than the ideal suggested. The working-class father spent long hours in the factory, in the mine, in the workshop, or in the field, leaving the practical care of the children to the mother. His middle-class counterpart was frequently absent on business, in the City, in the colonies, in the army, or in the navy, so that the day-to-day management of the household fell to his wife; the upper-class father might be away for the London Season, on the grouse moor, or in the House of Lords, leaving the running of the house to the housekeeper, the steward, and the wife. The great Victorian novelists — Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope — explored the moral and emotional consequences of the absent father in some of the most powerful pages of English fiction.

The Children and the Cult of Childhood

The Victorian period saw a revolution in the ideas and the practices of child-rearing. The high infant mortality of the period, the campaigns of the great sanitary reformers, the new science of paediatrics, the new theories of childhood, the new Children’s Literature in the Victorian Era, and the great Life for Victorian Children campaign of the period all contributed to a transformation in the way children were seen, treated, and educated. The ideal of the Victorian child was the well-brought-up child of the middle and upper classes, the child who was breastfed, who was raised in the home, who was educated at home or in the school, who was protected from the dangers of the city, who was inoculated against the diseases of childhood, and who was prepared for the duties of the adult life.

The education of the children of the period was a particular concern of the middle-class and upper-class family. The boys of the upper class were sent to the great boarding schools — Eton (founded 1440), Harrow (1572), Winchester (1382), Rugby (1567), Westminster (1560), Charterhouse (1611), Shrewsbury (1552), and Marlborough (1843) — and then to the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The boys of the middle class were sent to the grammar schools, the proprietary schools, and the new day schools; the boys of the working class were educated at the Sunday school, the dame school, the ragged school, and the board school, and from the 1870s onwards at the new board schools established under the Education Act of 1870. The girls of the upper class were educated at home by the governess, a middle-class woman who had fallen on hard times and who was paid a salary of £30 to £100 a year; the girls of the middle class were educated at home, at the small private school, or, from the 1850s onwards, at the new girls’ day schools. The great girls’ schools of the late Victorian period — Cheltenham Ladies’ College (1853), Roedean (1885), Wycombe Abbey (1896), and the North London Collegiate School (1850) — were the achievement of a small group of women reformers, of whom the most prominent were Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham, Frances Mary Buss of North London, and Sophia Jex-Blake, the first woman to enter the medical profession in Britain.

The Numbers and the Realities

The actual numbers of the Victorian family give a sharp picture of the realities. In 1901 the average household in England and Wales contained 4.6 persons; one in three of the “marriages” recorded in the 1901 census were not in fact marriages in the sense of the law (they were cohabiting couples, and the high number reflects the distress of the great cities and the relative ease of divorce under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857). The divorce rate rose from 1 in 200 marriages in 1860 to 1 in 130 in 1900; the number of deserted wives was unknown but was certainly in the tens of thousands; the number of illegitimate children born each year was around 40,000 at the start of the period, falling to under 30,000 at the end; workhouse populations included roughly 50,000 children; some 30,000 more were confined in reformatory and industrial schools; the Foundling Hospital, founded by Thomas Coram in 1739, sheltered 400; and Barnardo’s homes, established by Thomas John Barnardo from 1867, housed 8,000 by 1900.

The Home as Setting

The home of the period was the physical setting of the family life, and the period saw a revolution in the design, the furnishing, and the decoration of the British home. The middle-class home of the late Victorian period was a terraced house, a semi-detached villa, or a detached villa in the new suburbs of Clapham, Camberwell, Brixton, Dulwich, Hampstead, Highgate, and Stoke Newington. The parlour was the formal room of the middle-class home, the dining room was the room in which the principal meal was eaten, the kitchen was the working room, and the bedroom was the private room. The upper-class home of the period was a country house, a town house, and a London house; the country house was the seat of the family, the town house was the London house of the family, and the London house was the centre of the social life of the family in the Season. The great Victorian country houses — Chatsworth, Blenheim, Castle Howard, Woburn, Longleat — were the work of the architects of the period, and they were the subject of the Victorian Architecture and Interior Design of the period, the Victorian Furniture and Decorative Arts of the period, and the Famous Victorian Buildings and Landmarks of the period. The home was the principal setting of the family’s rituals — the What was a Victorian wedding like?, the What were Victorian funeral customs?, the What is a Victorian parlor?, the What was a Victorian kitchen like?, and the Victorian Food and Dining of the central ritual.