Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940 (review)

George Behlmer has provided us with an exceptionally well researched book that connects the social history of English families with the history of family-oriented state and voluntary institutions. It is one of the paradoxes of modernity that family and home, regarded as the most private sphere, have come to be the focus of public concern and multiple interventions. This book is a history of this paradoxical outcome, a story of intrusions but also of limits.

Behlmer tackles an extraordinarily wide range of institutions, public and private. He shows how evangelical home ministries opened the way for visits by health authorities. He treats the impact of compulsory schooling, of vaccination campaigns, and returns to the subject of his first book, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He has a very original chapter on what the Victorians liked to call “mental science,” the prelude to child and family guidance movements of the twentieth century.

The book then moves on to the law and paralegal adjudication of family matters. Here Behlmer shows himself to be both a master of legal history and a keen observer of court practice. His study of one Southwest London police court provides us with a fascinating description of how the working classes used it to adjudicate their marital relations during a period when they had no recourse to divorce law. His discussion of the efforts of the magistrate, Claude Mullins, to wield his powers to concilate partners is equally original and revealing.

There is an equally good discussion of the practices of England’s juvenile courts and the emergence of a kind of judicial patriarchy in the interwar period. But perhaps most original is Behlmer’s discussion of legal adoption in Britain, which did not come until 1926, almost three quarters of a century after adoption began to be regulated in the United States and other western countries. He shows that, while informal adoption was extremely widespread at all class levels, the term “adoption” had gotten a bad name due to the baby-farming scandals of the late nineteenth century and to some of the unscrupulous practices of childcare entrepreneurs like Dr. Barnardo. It was not until after the monumental loss of life in World War I that pressure mounted to protect the rights of adoptive parents, though by then the distinction between the families of origin and what Behlmer calls “artificial families” was indelibly inscribed.

The importance of this book lies in the fact that its author is concerned not just with ideas, but with actual practice. He has consulted the records of over a dozen city and county record offices, plus the archives of several private organizations. The fine chapter on adoption is based on extensive research in the archives of the Children’s Society of London, which contain the records of the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society, supplemented by work in oral histories contained in the Family Life and Work Experience Archive at Essex University.

There are limits to how far Behlmer has been able to follow the families whose lives were touched by these various institutions, however. The court and agency records reveal only occasional glimpses of their clients, in part because the kind of “case work” method that evolved early in the United States came so much later to Britain. Behlmer has not been able to do for his families what Linda Gordon and Barbara Melosh have been able to do for their American counterparts.

But this should not detract from what this book accomplishes. It makes clear that there never was some golden age of privacy and self-sufficiency such as that which Margaret Thatcher (and, more recently, Tony Blair) imagine to have existed “back then.” The high value placed on family made this impossible. Middle class reformers intervened early and often in the private affairs not only of their inferiors but their own peers. Yet they failed...