In an imaginative and sprightly work, Joanne Bailey sets out to make Georgian parenting better known, focusing on the history of parenting from ‘the inside out’. She examines the way in which parents from the labouring ranks upwards invested feelings, minds, bodies, time and energy in caring for their offspring, and how the concepts and practices of parenting were influenced by the culture of sensibility. All of this is supported by a wide variety of sources covering all ranks from pauper letters to the extensive correspondence of four landed families, along with memoirs, magazines, advice literature, ballads, poetry and fiction.
She begins by exploring parents and emotions, taking a corporeal approach to affect. By the eighteenth century, emotion was no longer seen as endangering reason and thus expressing the right emotion was encouraged. Parents were to be tender and kind. The culture of sensibility encouraged both sexes to use physical gestures to display their feelings and ensured that emotions were physically experienced in very specific ways: overflowing hearts and welling tears. Parents through nurturing bosoms, hugging arms and labouring bodies provided affection and sustenance. Eighteenth-century society idealised sensitivity and sympathy, making the disciplining and instructing of children essentially an exercise in emotion management. The overall goal was for children to be happy because a happy child was a virtuous one. Such traditional values as obedience and respect retained their importance but the style of delivery was different. Even though tenderness and physical punishment were not regarded as incompatible, kindness, persuasion and being an exemplary role model were the preferred methods for parents to exercise authority. But, for all that Georgian culture idealised the loving parent–child bond, parents, as shown in Part III, leaned on household members and kin to help with the arduous care of children.
Part II merges public discourse and personal memories to explore parental identity, both public and personal. Emotive parenting was linked to a person's sense of self because it advertised the ability to feel prized traits like sympathy and compassion. Parenting was also vital to other facets of identity: being a good father signalled that a man was also a good citizen and worker. Remembering parents also helped individuals formulate their familial and personal identities with respect to social status and personal worth. Alas, the parental self was a precarious one: easily undermined or broken. The ability to provide for a family was not under a parent's sole control. And, because children were seen as a ‘second self’, a parent's sense of self could disintegrate if a child died. Parents also held an essential role in the construction of national identity. Effective parenting produced a strong, healthy nation and a patriotic, secure society. Social relationships were based on reciprocal obligations and duties derived from Christian values and benevolent acts and these were often visualised through metaphors of parenting. The image of a nursing father, for example, signified benign paternal government, protection and instruction.
Throughout the book, Bailey reshapes accepted paradigms, notably gender dichotomies. Maternal self-sacrifice should not be equated with maternal self-effacement. The tender mother image was not a new marker of constraint, central to the developing cult of domesticity and concept of separate spheres. Selflessness incorporated fathers too and motherhood in fact provided a sense of self and a public identity. Thus, not only were personhood and motherhood not mutually exclusive, but also notions of male duty could not be separated from paternal love in motivating men to care for their children. Bailey takes issue with the portrayal of this as a feminised as opposed to a patriarchal form of fatherhood. Nor is it the case that the concept of the father as provider grew naturally out of a patriarchal manhood founded on the economic self-sufficiency of men along with the support of dependants. Women as well as men saw themselves as material providers.
She also challenges the model of an abrupt transformation from a social to an introspective self. Furthermore, she takes on the vexing issue of change and continuity. Parenthood was centred on the four domains of emotion, provision, discipline and instruction, and so appears to demonstrate continuity. In actuality it was responsive to social, political and economic trends and hence varied according to broader cultural trends, like the culture of sensibility. Tender, for example, had scriptural connotations in the early modern period whereas by the eighteenth century it was all about feelings.
Bailey concludes that she has uncovered a frighteningly unstable world, one that turned on the axes of love and care but could easily spin out of control. Parenting was stressful: anxiety, grief, anger, frustration and insufficient funds all took their toll. Not all parents aroused happy memories: some adult offspring professed indifference to a parent's death or deplored a parent's character or recalled harsh floggings. Bailey, for the most part and notwithstanding her conclusions, glosses over the strains. Sentiment and domesticity were the glue and core of familial relations for all ranks.
I cannot be the only seventeenth-century historian who would like more scrutiny of the concept of sensibility and the assumptions inextricably bound up with it for earlier and later time periods. Depicting the eighteenth century as the kinder era, sandwiched between the autocratic seventeenth century and the emotionally repressed nineteenth, is seemingly impossible to avoid. The concept encourages statements such as sensibility ‘encouraged more emotionally expressive styles of parenting’ (p. 246) or that ‘love humanized humankind producing a better, kinder, more compassionate society’ (p. 34). These cry out for deconstruction. Bailey's image is also a partial one. Wife beaters, profligate or abusive parents, or humiliated labourers do not factor in. Eighteenth-century attitudes to delinquent children, hungry adolescents or alleged offenders were not compassionate. How do the stated ideals and practices delineated in this book merge with other discourses such as hierarchy, order, rule of law or the legal power of the father?
