The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (review)

When Virginia Woolf sought to illustrate the workings of the "infantile fixation" underpinning male dominance, she turned to Victorian biography for her examples: in Three Guineas (1938), she famously settled on fathers who aimed at achieving total control over their children's lives. The tyrannical trio of Edward Barrett, Patrick Brontë, and Thomas Jex-Blake envisioned their daughters as their personal property. Yet Woolf includes a counterexample in the shape of Benjamin Leigh Smith, who educated his children together at home and endowed them with equal portions of his estate. All of these fathers, whether immune or not to the patriarchal disease, had high-achieving daughters—as did Leslie Stephen, himself clearly infected with it. The evidence of biography thus seems to suggest that "the louring villain in the drawing-room preventing wives and children from fulfilling themselves in the world beyond the home," to cite one aspect of "the bullying stereotype of the Victorian father" that Valerie Sanders aims to dismantle in this book (5), may have stood in the way of daughterly self-assertion and professional success, but could not ultimately prevent it. A kind father might be a blessing, but a cruel one was not necessarily a curse.

And, indeed, the fathers on whom Sanders concentrates were neither wholly cruel nor entirely kind, a point she makes by turning away from what children say about their fathers to how men express themselves on the subject of fatherhood. In "changing the perspective from which he is viewed," Sanders seeks to reconstruct "the father's own position" rather than rely on the ambivalent testimony of "memoirs published by traumatised children" (3), such as Woolf herself. Using a rich archive of private correspondence and contextualizing her findings within masculinity studies and social histories of the family, Sanders acknowledges that the discourse of paternal power had an emphatically public dimension "in spaces dominated by male hegemonic discourse: parliamentary debates, newspaper journalism and in the law courts, where an entirely male assembly continued for much of the century to defend the father's privileges" (9). Linking the changing status of paternal rights over the course of the century to the "lengthy and painful struggle to admit wives into a more equal legal partnership with their husbands so far as the management of their children was concerned" (13), Sanders also notes that while motherhood—however legally disadvantaged—was typically assumed to be the natural vocation and prime duty of women, the practice of fatherhood had few guideposts and no roadmap. Many fathers in her sample only came to know and see themselves as fathers at moments of acute loss: "It was the reliving and retelling of short lives and painful deaths that forced many Victorian fathers to confront for the first time the real meaning of fatherhood" (25).

Many, we might say, but not all: Sanders's hypothesis both does and does not explicate the well-known tragedy of Dean Tait (later to become Archbishop of Canterbury), five of whose daughters died within a few weeks' time; William Macready's loss of a beloved daughter, so painful that he begged his friend Charles Dickens to show mercy on Little Nell; and the wrenching death of Charles Darwin's Annie, considered alongside comparable losses suffered by his friends and allies, Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker. While some of these fathers also had sons who predeceased them, Sanders does not dwell much on a discernibly gendered difference here, in which dead daughters, even more idealized in death than in life, are imbued with an angelic aura while the dead sons of high-achieving professional men are not so easily dispatched to the realm of sentiment. Perhaps in keeping with her case study method, Sanders hazards few generalizations across the particulars of individual instances of fatherhood, but her reliance on this method arguably conceals as much as it reveals about the gendered dynamics of same-sex and cross-sex fathering.

On the evidence of her sample, to...