Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780–1920 by Leonore Davidoff (review)

Siblings loom large in our collective consciousness and in fiction: think Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, or Tom and Maggie Tulliver. Yet, as Leonore Davidoff demonstrates, siblings have been neglected in the academic disciplines (anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis and history) that might have been expected to pay attention to them. It has been the relationship between parents and children that has attracted scholars. For psychoanalysis this has been central, and so has it also for historians who have endlessly debated whether parents in the past loved their children. A study of siblings is therefore extremely welcome and necessarily pioneering. Davidoff concentrates on English bourgeois families in a long nineteenth century, using their diaries, letters and other biographical material and, as she nears the twentieth century, oral history, to reveal the nature and changing character of sibling relationships. She also analyses the 1881 census to identify the characteristics of middle-class families. A typical couple in this social stratum before the later nineteenth century had a large family with a considerable age span between the oldest and the youngest. The mother might be pregnant with her youngest at the same time as her eldest daughter was with her first-born. When Jane Strachey gave birth to her youngest, James, in 1887 her eldest daughter, aged twenty-eight, already had two children. James became their “Uncle Baby”. Davidoff brilliantly evokes the domestic life of these large families, space and privacy at a premium, the siblings splitting up into groups by age and gender, elder children mothering or fathering and often teaching their younger sisters and brothers—for Edward Lear his sister Ann, twenty-two years his senior, was “my mother”. This world of what Davidoff calls “long” families began to wane away quite rapidly in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as middle-class families, for reasons which are still puzzling, began to limit family size.

Part of Davidoff’s purpose in focusing on long families is to remind us that cultural formations are as important as evolutionary psychology in any attempt to understand human behaviour, both individually and collectively. The “private sphere” as she puts it, is “a motor of history” (228). Davidoff is also contributing to the long-running debate on the making of the middle classes, and what she fully demonstrates is the importance of kin relationships in this process: for, a generation down, siblings took on the additional role of aunts and uncles. An uncle might take a boy into his business. Aunts would find a place and a home for a niece. These large family networks were crucial to the workings of capitalism in the period of the industrial revolution. Business historians have typically focused on links between fathers and sons, but those between siblings were equally important. Cousin marriage, frowned on in the twentieth century, was common, a means of extending the network. And frequently two families became linked together through “double sibling marriages” (two sisters from one family marrying two brothers from another) or “sibling exchange marriages” (a sister and brother from one family marrying a brother and sister from another). The links between the Darwin and Wedgwood families or between the Courtaulds, Taylors and Bromleys, explored in depth here, are well-known but by no means atypical.

Davidoff’s larger purpose is to see if she can unpick and unveil the emotional life of siblings. She starts with the romantic idea of the self which for men became linked to the idea that marriage with a loved one was simply an extension or completion of the self. Or it could be that the loved one was a sibling, as for Mary and Charles Lamb, and perhaps for Dorothy and William Wordsworth. The intensity of the language of friendship in letters between siblings suggests to the modern ear an erotic and incest element in sibling relationships. More worrying to contemporaries was a man’s potential erotic attachment to his wife’s sister, one of the...