Abstract
The history of the family has become a major focus of research in recent decades and yet siblings have hardly featured. This book brings together Davidoff’s substantial research into middle-class siblings over the long nineteenth century. This is an important contribution to a sparse historiography that extends our understanding in content, chronology, and concept. The study ranges beyond Britain in the long nineteenth century (1780–1920) and draws insight from other countries, time periods, and academic disciplines, including sociology, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. The history of the family can lack academic rigor, “Since,” argues Davidoff, “almost everyone starts life in a family … many people consider themselves an authority on the subject, a belief that fogs the clarity of much thinking” (p. 8). The author “clears the ground” and this book is certainly lucid, sophisticated, and comprehensive. The study also contributes to the wider movement within history that seeks to undermine boundaries between political, social, economic, and cultural history.
The layout of the book is somewhat unconventional. It is divided into three sections by two approaches: the first contemporary (part I) and the second historical, with a case study of the middle classes (part II) and themed chapters (part III). The subject of siblings draws the modern and the past together; of course, the nineteenth century is not too distant from our own period and Davidoff uses its proximity in order to reflect upon the present. It is an ambitious, wide-ranging book; all aspects of sibling life have been examined. The prose is wonderfully rich, but also a little dense.
Part I “Exploring kin and their kind” is composed of two chapters, the first of which examines modern expert opinions, including those from the social sciences, and popular views on family, kinship, and household. The chapter provides a review of the compartmentalization of disciplines and understandings of kinship and family relations within each: anthropology, sociology (and the subfields of the sociology of family and the sociology of childhood), demography, psychology, genetics, history (and historical demography), law, and the challenge posed to each by feminism. Davidoff argues that these disciplinary boundaries have distracted academics from the central place of the family in a comprehensive analysis of society, but that these distinctions are now beginning to disintegrate. The second chapter, “Finding siblings,” explores the reasons (or lack of them) for the neglect of siblings in research. This is contrasted with the prevalence of siblings in myth and metaphor—Biblical stories, folk tales, ballads, fiction and poetry, newspapers, film—and the issues these raise of sameness and difference, brotherhood and sisterhood, fictive kin.
Part II “The lattice of kinship: a historical case study” consists of five chapters in which Davidoff locates the experience of siblings within the defining, and changing, demographic features of middle-class family life. It begins with an exploration of “the people and the setting”: the middle classes comprised 15–20 percent of the population in 1850 (p. 52), ranging from the “fringes of the gentry to prosperous small shopkeepers, farmers and artisans” (p. 3). There was considerable diversity within this stratum. The family was central to class identity, cohesion, and status. Gender, religion, associational and philanthropic culture, and their interdependence with class, also loom large as essential categories for historical analysis. Continuities with Davidoff’s previous work are evident. Duty to family was integral to religious culture, while siblinghood was heavily gendered and Davidoff paints a vivid picture of the lifelong differences in the experience of sisters and brothers.
The very great changes in fertility and mortality over the nineteenth century had significant implications for sibling relationships. The large number of children born to many middling Victorian couples until at least mid-century meant for a long line of siblings and Davidoff argues that an “intermediate” generation was thereby generated between parents and younger children, through which ideas and behavior spread in both directions. The frequency of the death of a parent also resulted in the addition of stepsiblings to “reconstituted families.” The decline of this “clan-like” “long family” from the later nineteenth century to the two-child norm changed the nature of familial experience. The reduction in family size meant a loss of this intermediate generation and the complex relationships between groups of siblings, but it also brought with it the potential of the concentration of parents’ time and resources on individual children. It also had important implications for the intimacy of the household members and notions and experiences of privacy, personal identity, and self.
There is analysis of each point in the life-cycle for brothers and sisters—childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age—as well as in terms of kinship extension through siblings to aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, sisters-in-law, and brothers-in-law (chapters 5–7). The density of the “lattice” of kinship is analyzed and it is argued that kinship became more important to the middle classes during the nineteenth century. Kinship and business networks were entwined and interdependencies were generated and maintained through marriage. However, tensions between individual and/or mutual advantage and familial obligation had to be negotiated.
The title of part III “Life’s longest relationship: essays on sibling themes” reminds us that sibling relationships were frequently the longest relationships in life; longer than those with parents and children, spouses, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and acquaintances. This section examines particular themes: intimacy and incest, the rise and fall of “close marriage” between cousins, and the impact of sibling loss through absence and death. Interesting insights on the history of sexuality are revealed: we are told that in the early modern period, adultery generated most concern and that anxieties over incest heightened only from the later eighteenth century. Legal changes were made to the prohibited degrees of marriage relating to in-law categories. Chapter 10 is devoted to a case study of Anne, William Ewart, and Helen Gladstone and chapter 11 to the Freud family. Indeed, the experience of specific middling families threads throughout the book, with the relationships between William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Charles Darwin and Fanny Wedgwood also featuring, among others. The difference in approach between part I and parts II/III illustrates the distinction between kinship definitions and actual relationships.
The conclusion brings the story back up to date and contemplates the implications of the historical case study for contemporary society. The appendix contains seven very useful graphs analyzing the 1881 census in terms of household size and the familial composition of middle-class households. These provide the demographic and quantitative context for analysis of the qualitative evidence. However, it is necessarily a static picture and the significant change over time described by Davidoff might have been illustrated with comparisons with the 1851 and 1911 census.
I would like to make a call for similar research into the working-class family. Davidoff argues that, “Among the rural landless and wage-earning urban labourer classes, no matter how strong emotional ties might have been, their fragile domestic economy as seldom able to provide material and financial support necessary to sustain numerous and intricate sibling bonds beyond early childhood. Although even here in times of migration, job seeking, and crises, people relied on ‘claiming kin’” (p. 3). While there are a number of excellent studies of working-class childhood and family life, no historian has taken such a long chronological sweep nor focused in particular upon siblings. Research that links the Georgian and Victorian periods to the twentieth century, when dense working-class familial networks were identified by Young and Wilmott, would be fruitful and provide much-needed comparative material.
This is a remarkable book and one that is relevant to all who wish to study the long nineteenth century. It tells us a huge amount not just about the history of the family but also about class, gender, religion, culture, and politics.