“The Two Homes: A Story Founded on Fact,” was featured in 1880 as a two-part story in a Band-of-Hope juvenile temperance publication. The first part represents a happy home, with a father who feels “as happy as a king!” because, though the family is poor, his children are happy to see him when he returns home. The second features a father who is a miserable drunkard. Except for one daughter who is dying of consumption, this man's entire family is dead. The father pawns his daughter's only comfort, her Bible, to buy drink (Stephanie Olsen, Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880–1914 [2014], 109).
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources frequently pointed to different kinds of fathers of all classes, from the devoted to the delinquent. It is surprising, therefore, that until recently fathers have been on the periphery of historians’ accounts of the family—often strangers in the home or feckless or abusive contributors to it—with historiography neglecting a wide range of fathers’ and children's experiences and practices in the process. Yet family history is definitively no longer only about mothers and children. Julie-Marie Strange takes on the admirable task of inserting fathers into working-class historical narratives. Strange's work is part of a larger scholarly effort to pay due attention to the history of fathers and fatherhood.
Strange leverages the topic of fatherhood to illuminate the “emotional lives of families” (i). Leaving fathers out would never provide such a complete picture. Topics include those most readily associated with successful fatherhood: working outside the home, providing, protection, authority, respectability. More crucially, Strange highlights characteristics that have been less frequently associated with fatherhood like attachment, fondness for children, family togetherness, vacations, play, and laughter. But this is no simple picture of happy fatherhood. Some autobiographers remember fathers who were violent, mean, or aloof, or who dealt with hardship or distress (including periods of unemployment) in less than ideal ways as far as their children were concerned.
Chapter 1, “Love and Toil,” questions the cliché that good fathers worked hard for their children and presents a range of emotional complexities regarding children's gratitude for their fathers’ sacrifices, fatigue, and dedication to their children as expressed through work outside the home. In chapter 2, “Love and Want,” Strange complicates this narrative by focusing on unemployed fathers, noting how children often argued that their fathers were no less good because of their lack of work, blaming joblessness on structural issues and the fathers’ “fragility” rather than failure (19). Chapter 3 focuses on men at home and their everyday domestic practices, exploring how they occupied time and space and shedding light on the intimacies between them and their children. Strange innovatively points to a father's things and places in the home as having emotional significance for children, poignant reminders of the father when he was not at home. Chapter 4 deals with men's leisure activities as a way for children to understand their fathers’ “authentic” selves, away from work. It also discusses family holidays like Christmas but is careful to point out that such holidays did not necessarily mean a time of togetherness. In chapter 5, Strange examines autobiographies’ treatments of comedy, fun and laughter, and especially the genre of tragicomedy as ways to deal with trauma and unhappy daily life. Who laughed with whom “emphasised the fluidity and tensions in the emotional dynamics of a household” (164). As Strange argues, comedy should be taken seriously as a “masculine mode of attachment” in speaking about children (20). Chapter 6 discusses the ambiguous and sometimes contradictory notions of fatherly protection and authority.
Strange uses working-class autobiographies of adults writing about their childhood recollections of home life and their fathers. The main focus of these autobiographies is often not fathers, forcing Strange to read widely to find evidence. Her method makes for an engaging view of the varieties of interaction between fathers and children and the diversity of adult memories of childhood perceptions of fathers. But while this source base is a strength, it is also a weakness. Readers are not presented with children's voices, but rather filtered, selective adult memories. As Strange points out, the writers of such autobiographies were generally a select group of usually male authors with political motivations. Strange is forced therefore to think critically and creatively. Doing so may leave gaps in the record, but it also opens room for new insights about masculine intimacy. For instance, Strange intuits that, for a son, starting work was sometimes a moment of closeness with and recognition of his father.
In addition to her major contribution to the history of fatherhood, Strange offers a modest contribution to the history of emotions. Importantly for Strange, practices are at the core here: “affective dynamics often emphasized deeds undertaken or promised” (190). Though she does not engage fully with the recent historiography of emotions, her most interesting innovation involves merging the history of material culture with the history of emotions. Notable is her discussion of father's chair. Much attention is focused on love as a set of practices, attachments, and ambivalences between fathers and children. This is a welcome and innovative view of this emotion in all its complexity.
Fatherhood and the British Working Class serves as a corrective to the idea that the principal value of fatherhood lay in financial provision, though Strange is quick to point out that often such provision had an affective significance for the father-child relationship. Strange is also right to make a distinction between the perspectives of wives and the often differing views of children. Children's experiences of their emotional attachment with their fathers were often far more complex than a simple elision of mother-child perspectives. In sum, the book is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarly work on the history of fatherhood.
