Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 by Julie-Marie Strange (review)

Victorian working-class autobiographies repeatedly feature birth stories of mothers in labor and fathers searching for, preparing for, discussing, or at work. It would be easy to read these accounts as face-value evidence of fathers' peripheral role in even the most important goings on of the household. Indeed, both the Victorians and subsequent scholars thereof have located the working-class father in relation to the family primarily as a wage earner (when they locate him in relation to the family at all). Historians have produced a robust scholarship on working-class motherhood, beginning with Ellen Ross's Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (1993), and made important interventions (notably those of John Tosh) to center middle-class fatherhood in the home. In her nuanced study, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914, however, Julie-Marie Strange argues that scholars have unwittingly absented the working-class father from the family, in part, she notes, because "middle-class scholars have a preconceived notion of what affect and attachment look like that precludes interrogation of obscure working-class selfhoods" (5). In her study of dozens of published working-class autobiographies, Strange elucidates alternate iterations and expressions of affect, and by so doing, claims a place for the working-class father within the home and family.

Strange turns to autobiography as an alternative to working-class histories constructed from official discourse, relying instead on the recollections of her historical subjects. In choosing this pool of sources, the study examines a stratum of the working-class described as neither "rough" nor "respectable" (17). Strange attends to the limitations of the genre, aware that authors wrote in hindsight for particular ends. Many of these authors—often Labour Party members or radicals, and largely, though not wholly, male—were invested in casting their fathers as upright, hard-working providers to bolster their autobiographies' political agendas. As Strange notes, furthermore, many authors wrote in the interwar period, and likely struggled to reconcile their Victorian childhoods with changing notions of more playful and demonstrative fatherly love. Strange reads her sources with a careful eye to such concerns, using authorial crafting and omission to her analytic advantage. As she puts it, "the choices authors made in constructing the stories of their childhoods provide insights into how adults thought fathers 'mattered'" (13).

In searching for working-class affect, Strange dismisses love as a largely irrelevant term; it was not included in most autobiographers' lexicons. Instead guided by insights from sociology and anthropology, Strange seeks signs of attachment between fathers and their children in deeds—fatherly provision, protection, and fulfilment of obligation—rather than words. As the working-class father was most often characterized as a wage earner, Strange's first two chapters interrogate the meaning of providing for a family, or the failure to do so. Autobiographers likely emphasized their fathers' labor to convey respectability, but nevertheless, Strange argues, these authors may have simultaneously understood wage-earning for the family as a "transcendental act of devotion" (12). Labor also could act as a shared experience and vocabulary for fathers and their older sons. Building on the insights of anthropologist Daniel Miller, Strange likewise contends that mundane acts that ostensibly fulfilled paternal obligation could nevertheless be imbued with love and affection. For children of otherwise undemonstrative men, something as simple as a father sharing his pocket money could signal affection for and attachment to his children.

A particular innovation of the work is Strange's third chapter, "Man and home: the inter-personal dynamics of fathers at home," which attends to the spatiality of fathering. In it, she focuses on the material household—tables, chairs, domestic goods—and the ways in which the use of these everyday objects "could mediate the quality and character of father-child relationships" (85). A family gathered around a table for tea, for example, "offered a suspended moment, apart from busy chores, that fixed father...