Parenting in England 1760-1830: Emotion, Identity, and GenerationParenting in England is the first study of the world of parenting in late Georgian England. The author, Joanne Bailey, traces ideas about parenthood in a Christian society that was responding to new cultural trends of sensibility, romanticism and domesticity, along with Enlightenment ideas about childhood and self. All these shaped how people, from the poor to the genteel, thought about themselves as parents, and remembered their own parents. With meticulous attention to detail, Bailey illuminates the range of intense emotions provoked by parenthood by investigating a rich array of sources from memoirs and correspondence, to advice literature, fiction, and court records, to prints, engravings, and ballads. Parenting was also a profoundly embodied experience, and the book captures the effort, labour, and hard work it entailed. Such parental investment meant that the experience was fundamental to the forging of national, familial, and personal identities. It also needed more than two parents and this book uncovers the hitherto hidden world of shared parenting. At all levels of society, household and kinship ties were drawn upon to lighten the labours of parenting. By revealing these emotional and material parental worlds, what emerges is the centrality of parenthood to mental and physical well-being, reputation, public and personal identities, and to transmitting prized values across generations. Yet being a parent was a contingent experience adapting from hour to hour, year to year, and child to child. It was at once precarious, as children and parents succumbed to fatal diseases and accidents, yet it was also enduring because parent-child relationships were not ended by death: lost children and parents lived on in memory. |
Contents
1 | |
IDEALS REPRESENTATIONS AND MEANINGS | 17 |
PUBLIC FAMILY AND PERSONAL IDENTITIES | 95 |
TRANSMITTED VALUES SHARED ENDEAVOURS AND EVOLVING RELATIONSHIPS | 167 |
Conclusion | 245 |
Appendix | 253 |
255 | |
275 | |
Other editions - View all
Parenting in England 1760-1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation Joanne Bailey Limited preview - 2012 |
Parenting in England 1760-1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation Joanne Bailey No preview available - 2012 |
Common terms and phrases
Advice affection authority Autobiography Bailey behaviour Bewick body caring century child childhood collective comfort considered continued course Courtauld Family cultural CYLAL daughter death described died distress domestic duty early eighteenth century Elizabeth Shaw emotions example explained father feeling George Courtauld give Gray happiness heart hope husband ideals identity individual infant instruction James John John Shaw labouring Lady Lady’s later Letters lives marriage married Mary maternal means Memoirs memory mind moral mother nature never nursing observed offered offspring parenthood parents perhaps period Place political poor published Quaker qualities relationships religious remembered role Samuel sense sensibility separation sister social society Sophia Soundy tender Thomas tion values virtue wife women Wright writing wrote young