Friends of the family : the English home and its guardians, 1850-1940

This work seeks to explain what a reverence for family values meant in practice for the Western world s most family-conscious culture.

Victorian England can be credited with inventing the ideal of the home inviolate, an ideal best condensed in the notion that an Englishman s home is his castle.It was during this period that the family emerged as a subject of continuous discussion by politicians and of intervention by middle-class reformers.

The discussion tended to address specific problems domestic violence, juvenile criminality, and the fate of illegitimate children, among others rather than focusing on the family as a whole.

The reformers not only set the agenda of family-focused debates but also supplied the leadership for a vast array of interventionist groups philanthropists, civil servants, magistrates, medical practitioners, educators, and child psychologists whose common goal was to save the family, especially the working-class family, from itself.