Fathers and Sons in the English Middle Class, c. 1870–1920 by Laura Ugolini (review)

In April 1870, notes Laura Ugolini in a chapter of this study headed “Conflict and Reconciliation,” a surgeon, Joseph Wilson, was shot twice in the head by his son Charles. The son’s motive was unclear, but it was noted that just before the shooting Charles had been reading Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), in which Jonas Chuzzlewit murders his father, Anthony. The real-life father, unlike Dickens’s fictional character, miraculously survived his son’s murderous attempt, and Ugolini argues that such incidents were rare. While her discussion of father-son relationships from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century reveals a broad spectrum of variations on a theme of manly awkwardness and irritation, interspersed with melodrama, fathers usually emerge as “safety nets, supporters and advocates” (203).

Ugolini’s Fathers and Sons in the English Middle Class, c. 1870–1920 covers the full lifespan of fathers and sons, convincingly demonstrating how the relationship, despite being founded on a basis of unequal power and authority, remained something that was frequently needed by both, albeit through a process of shifting perceptions and experiences. Her evidence is drawn from memoirs, conscription appeals, newspaper reports, and private papers as well as twenty-seven oral history interviews from the Family Life and Work Experience Project, led by Thea Vigne of the University of Essex in the 1970s. While some of Ugolini’s examples are literary (names one would expect to see, such as Edmund Gosse, Samuel Butler, and Alec Waugh), the majority are not, which is both a strength and weakness of the book. On the one hand it broadens our knowledge of real everyday father-son relationships (as opposed to the fictional or exceptional), while on the other, it reflects the lives of ordinary men who reported their experiences in relatively mundane, unliterary, even at times, Pooterish, language. There are, however, quirky and unexpected insights: for example, the fascination of Keith Vignoles, from Grimsby, with how his father cut the toast so it came out in more pieces than seemed logically possible. Exploring fathers’ studies was another treat, especially unearthing the paraphernalia of disordered desks.

Ugolini is rightly keen to dispel stereotyped images of harsh patriarchs and traumatized sons. Indeed, this stereotype is now firmly dismantled, and as she argues, the reality for fathers was more a matter of striving to make their sons decent and manly, while maintaining an equable relationship. Some of her most revealing observations concern the ways fathers played with young children, talked to them at meals, or managed their career choices. Adulthood inevitably came with more problematic issues to navigate, such as sexuality (both the sons’ and the fathers’), religion, and military service. While some worried about the risk of genetic predisposition to degeneracy, others grew closer through regular correspondence during the First World War. In one of Ugolini’s more bizarre examples, Kenneth Hare fell out with his father over poetry. Between him and his parents there was, he claimed, “a dividing partition as impenetrable as a combined fireproof and black-out curtain” (169).

Ugolini’s chapter themes and structures reinforce the value of comparisons as she identifies dominant themes, such as “Responsibility and Authority,” “Conflict and Reconciliation,” “Closeness and Divergence,” and “Emancipation.” Each chapter, moreover, follows a systematic pattern, in which she explains what she intends to do, moves swiftly through a series of examples, and then summarizes her conclusions. All is admirably clear and well organized, but there is a formulaic feel to it. Every chapter offers a series of examples of behavioral characteristics, along the lines of “Ernest Sadd Brown’s father suffered from the after-effects of rheumatic fever. . . . John Crittall’s father was a loving man. . . . Similarly, Fred Brown’s father was ‘on very friendly terms’ . . . while William Kenrick’s father was ‘interested mildly at a distance’” (89). This is a succinct way of covering a lot of ground...