Family Ties in Victorian EnglandThe Victorians were passionate about family. While Queen Victoria's supporters argued that her intense commitment to her private life made her the more fit to mother her people, her critics charged that it distracted her from her public responsibilities. Here, Nelson focuses particularly on the conflicting and powerful images of family life that Victorians produced in their fiction and nonfiction—that is, on how the Victorians themselves conceived of family, which continues both to influence and to help explain visions of family today. |
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... purity movement , an attempt to establish high moral standards in private life that also embraced temperance , included not only feminists but also evangelical Christians and proponents of eugenics , the scientifically oriented belief ...
... purity was at issue . The Custody of Infants Act of 1839 , which remained in force until 1873 , barred mothers who had committed adultery from gaining custody of their young children . The presumption was that unchaste women were ...
... purity of the middle - class home was of enormous importance to dominant Victorian culture . If the innocence demanded of wives and children was sullied by the knowledge that husband and father , or perhaps son and brother , was ...