Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully
enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of
English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians
attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the
family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the
point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a
fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson
explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox
energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a
story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private
pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The
friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions
of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics.
The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama:
the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord
Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the
Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise,
celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House. The
literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson,
Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such
public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the
controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant
return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful
incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life,
one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between
public and private spheres.
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