Claudia Nelson's Family Ties in Victorian England is the second in Praeger's new series Victorian Life and Times, edited by Sally Mitchell. The audience for these books includes public library patrons, advanced high school students, and college undergraduates. The volumes in the series, then, are general surveys, with passages from contemporary documents and illustrations sprinkled throughout the texts. Nelson's offering takes on the formidable task of summarizing family history in less than two hundred pages and with minimal academic apparatus. The book includes separate chapters on spouses, parents, children, siblings, extended kin, and blended/foster families. In addition to looking at family experiences, she also discusses the representations of family roles in fiction and prescriptive literature, comparing the ideal with the reality. In other words, she focuses on both “Victorian families as they were and Victorian families as they were imagined” (13), which she argues need to be studied simultaneously to get a full picture of domestic life.

In each chapter, Nelson explores many of the topics studied by family historians for the past thirty years, including separate spheres, domesticity, and differences of class and gender. None of her findings will surprise historians, but she conveys most of the major issues clearly and well and avoids oversimplification as much as possible. For example, she describes the ideal middle-class wife and husband, with the man providing and the woman creating a nurturing, moral home through her spiritual influence. But Nelson also points out the difficulties for Victorians in achieving these goals, not only because people could not live up to them, but also because women outnumbered men by an increasing margin. In each chapter, the author gives telling examples of people who agreed with the ideals and did not question them, but also the exceptions who stepped out of their expected roles. Upper- and middle-class daughters, for instance, were supposed to marry; if not, they should look after their parents or their brothers in return for continued support. Yet Nelson points to examples such as Florence Nightingale and Angela Burdett-Coutts as women who lived full professional lives as single women. Brothers and sisters had one of the most idealized relationships for Victorians, as these ties had a male-female bond without sexual content. Although many brothers and sisters did resemble this picture, some were estranged (such as Marian and Isaac Evans) and others were incestuous, as with Virginia Woolf and her abusive brother, George. By including a wide range of experiences, Nelson offers a well-rounded picture of Victorian family life.

Nelson also discusses novels, short stories, and nonfiction prose to show the Victorian ideal, but also to interrogate it. One of the main points of her work is that Victorians often expressed their anxieties about family through fiction; for example, their concern about motherhood came through in depictions of neglectful or abusive stepmothers, and their uneasiness with sibling envy was often worked out through inheritance plots involving male cousins. Again, none of these insights will surprise historians or literary scholars, but will be instructive to a general audience. All the same, the notion of “ambiguity” or “anxiety” is easy to overuse and brings diminishing returns, and Nelson does not entirely avoid this pitfall. One will get the impression from reading this book that the Victorians were constantly worried and ambivalent about their family relationships, wracked by cognitive dissonance. There is truth to this generalization, but it can be overstated; in addition, so many scholars from different time periods have found “anxiety” about gender and family in the written prose that its usefulness as a concept is waning. And, as a result of this emphasis, the sense of fun and humor in family life is minimal in this work, but was surely also a part of family relationships in the nineteenth century.

As is clear from the above examples, Nelson's discussion of gender differences is excellent throughout. The book is somewhat less successful on the issue of class. Nelson discusses the much more difficult family lives of working-class Victorians, whose economic plight did not allow them to live up to middle-class notions of “proper” family life. However, the sections on the poor are not as extensive as those on the middle and upper classes, perhaps because few poor people left autobiographies or letters or wrote fiction. Nelson does not neglect them, but she does not give them equal space with more affluent families. Since working-class families were the majority of the population, this is a clear imbalance, although perhaps inevitable in a work that stresses published sources such as journals, novels, and didactic literature, and with such a strict word limit.

Nelson is a gifted writer with a firm grasp on both historical and literary issues and, considering the number of topics she had to cover in a brief text, she has done an admirable job of synthesis. This book will be helpful to introductory courses on Victorian literature or history, particularly ones stressing gender issues. Whether it will attract the general public is a different question; indeed, Praeger might want to find a larger font, and a more reader-friendly way of setting aside the primary-source quotations, if the publishers want to reach a wider audience. Still, undergraduate students will get a good sense of the most important questions in Victorian family studies from this text, thus meeting the main goals of this series.