Parenting in England is the first study of the world of parenting in late Georgian England. The author, Joanne Bailey, traces ideas about parenthood in a Christian society that was responding to new cultural trends of sensibility, romanticism and domesticity, along with Enlightenment ideas about childhood and self. All these shaped how people, from the poor to the genteel, thought about themselves as parents, and remembered their own parents. With meticulous attention to detail, Bailey illuminates the range of intense emotions provoked by parenthood by investigating a rich array of sources from memoirs and correspondence, to advice literature, fiction, and court records, to prints, engravings, and ballads. Parenting was also a profoundly embodied experience, and the book captures the effort, labour, and hard work it entailed. Such parental investment meant that the experience was fundamental to the forging of national, familial, and personal identities. It also needed more than two parents and this book uncovers the hitherto hidden world of shared parenting. At all levels of society, household and kinship ties were drawn upon to lighten the labours of parenting. By revealing these emotional and material parental worlds, what emerges is the centrality of parenthood to mental and physical well-being, reputation, public and personal identities, and to transmitting prized values across generations. Yet being a parent was a contingent experience adapting from hour to hour, year to year, and child to child. It was at once precarious, as children and parents succumbed to fatal diseases and accidents, yet it was also enduring because parent-child relationships were not ended by death: lost children and parents lived on in memory.

Based on vivid court records and newspaper advertisements, this 2003 book is a pioneering account of the expectations and experiences of married life among the middle and labouring ranks in the long eighteenth century. Its original methodology draws attention to the material life of marriage, which has long been dominated by theories of emotional shifts or fashionable accounts of spouses' gendered, oppositional lives. Thus it challenges preconceptions about authority in the household, by showing the extent to which husbands depended upon their wives' vital economic activities: household management and child care. Not only did this forge co-dependency between spouses, it undermined men's autonomy. The power balance within marriage is further revised by evidence that the sexual double standard was not rigidly applied in everyday life. The book also shows that ideas about adultery and domestic violence evolved in the eighteenth century, influenced by new models of masculinity and femininity.

Drawing upon vivid court records and newspaper advertisements, this study challenges traditional views of married life in eighteenth-century England. It reveals husbands' and wives' expectations and experiences of marriage to expose the extent of co-dependency between spouses. The book, therefore, presents a new picture of power in marriage and the household. It also demonstrates how attitudes towards adultery and domestic violence evolved during this period, influenced by profound shifts in cultural attitudes about sexuality and violence.

Brought up in the stately grandeur of Burghley House as heir to the earldom of Exeter, Henry Cecil seemed to have made a suitable match to the heiress of Hanbury Hall, but their marriage was to end in disaster when Emma eloped with Henry's friend, the local curate. Heartbroken, Henry turned his back on aristocratic life, taking up residence in a remote Shropshire village and marrying a farmer's daughter - without having obtained a divorce from his first wife.... The story of Henry Cecil's matrimonial entanglements became an overnight sensation in the 1790s, and even through into the twentieth century was still being told and retold in poetry, song, ballet and prose. 'A Noble Affair' untangles fact from fiction and explores the difficulties Henry faced in extricating himself with honour from the situation. Written by three scholars who have carried out extensive research into marriage, adultery, bigamy and divorce in eighteenth-century England, this new account illustrates just how limited the options once were for those who experienced marital breakdown, and discovers that in some respects Henry did indeed behave nobly.