Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers, eds. Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ISBN:1-4039-9515-X. Price: US$28.95 (paperback), $84.00 (hardcover)

Victorian fathers have a bad reputation. The canonical Victorian autobiographies, those vengeful reminiscences of Victorian childhood by such middle or upper middle-class sons and daughters as John Stuart Mill, Samuel Butler, Edmund Gosse, and Virginia Woolf show us the paterfamilias as demanding, rigid, and selfish. The emotional bond to their offspring ran from cold to frigid. Life with these fathers seemingly took place in a nurture-free zone. The first section, “Rights and Responsibilities,” deals with ideologies, especially how the Victorian discourse of fatherhood interacted with specific political movements, and how the representation of men playing private domestic roles was intimately connected to public policy. The fine essay by Matthew McCormack demonstrates how an ideal of fatherhood entered the public realm of franchise reform, showing that radicals seeking the vote employed a strategy of reshaping the image of the working-class father from abusive drunk to responsible middle-class breadwinner. Only by seeing the workers as bourgeois fathers could the upper classes allow them the vote. The essays on “Patterns of Involvement” take on the difficult task of reconstructing the emotional life of the father in his relation to children within the bourgeois Victorian household. The arguments point to a rethinking of the assumption that the male sphere was a non-emotional realm and foregrounds the tension for men between parental love and masculine reserve. For the inner lives of men as fathers material is scant and opaque. We have the autobiographies of those rebelling against the patriarch, but none by the patriarch himself. How wonderful it would be to read Philip Gosse or Leslie Stephen telling of their conflicting desire for discipline and love. Instead, we must look to public representations. In her essay on widowers with children in Victorian art Terri Sabatos looks to popular paintings such as The Widower by Luke Fildes in which a cottager bends over to nurse a child while a brood of children form a mock household on the cottage floor. From the fact that such popular images of the nurturing father take their subjects only from the working-class rather than the middle class, Sabatos concludes that these gendered representations perform the same ideological work of revaluing the laboring father as seen in the franchise debates, “to incorporate these ‘humble’ fathers back into middle-class ideology” (76). Margaret Markwick looks to images of the middle class in her chapter on fatherhood in Trollope’s novels. Perceptively exploring the unacknowledged complexity of masculinities in Trollope, Markwick sees a wealth of male nurturing exemplified in Trollope’s late masterpiece The Duke’s Children. Here Plantagenet learns to overcome his inhibiting patriarchal reserve. In his idealized aristocrat and in other novels Trollope “offers us an historically plausible account of men’s aptitude for child care” (94). I would agree that from such evidence we can “consider whether hands-on fatherhood was not, in fact, more of a Victorian ideal than we usually acknowledge” (94). The question mark at the end of the section titled “A Different Class?” suggests, quite accurately, that any study of nineteenth-century fatherhood must engage the disjunctions as well as the continuities in the complex interaction of the middle-class ideal of fathering with the economic conditions of industrial life. If the studies of middle-class fathers look to balance the icy paterfamilias with the nurturing, these highly specific studies of laborers modify while not replacing the stereotype of the alcoholic and violent working-class father as shaped by the economic violence committed against these men. Most interesting to me is the suggestion of gauging fatherly nurturing in the working-class by criteria different from the bourgeois ideals of emotional expression and verbal fluency. Thus, Andrew …