is also impossible to tell what weight should be given to first-generation educational influences, acting on cost-conscious parents, and what weight to second-generation influences, acting on parents who had themselves been through school. Information on both the precise chronology of family limitation and of school-going habits is insufficiently exact to sort these out, and there is no reason why both stages should not have been at work. In broad terms, however, the educational cap fits. The latecomers to family limitation among the working classes were precisely the latecomers to schooling, the dockers, builders’ labourers, and agricultural labourers who needed the spur of compulsion before their children went to school, and whose families only began to shrink significantly in the 1880s. The miners, as always, remain an exception, since they had not neglected their children’s education but still continued to have a lot of offspring.
In the schoolroom, as with the piano or the trip to Blackpool, there is a mirror image of a sort of middle-class habits and pastimes and middle-class sexual-reproductive responses. But there is very little to suggest that the formative working-class experience was in some way communicated by or copied from the middle classes, or that the working-class response was a matter of adopting habits or attitudes disseminated by the middle classes. That there were some influences working like a yeast in society at large, which emanated from the middle classes, is not to be denied; and these undoubtedly included general exhortations to prudence – although nothing so vulgar and unseemly as specific birth-control advice – which were relevant to the adoption of family limitation within the working classes. The weight of the evidence and its interpretation, however, leads to the conclusion that the middle classes and the working classes each took their separate paths, for their own separate reasons, which led, with different timing, towards the small families of the twentieth century. Broadly similar responses to broadly comparable circumstances, occurring at different times and places, were more in the nature of womankind and mankind than in the fabric of the class structure. In this fundamental matter of the family the classes worked out their own destinies and their own controls, from a common pool of techniques, and any appearance of a percolation downwards from the top of society to the bottom was a mirage of chronology rather than a fact of emulation.
Many early Victorians supposed that they were witnessing a ‘crisis of the family’ that threatened, unless successfully tackled and resolved, to undermine the entire fabric of society and to sweep the nation into turbulent, uncharted, and perilous times of chaos and anarchy. Other social problems might be more visible, more specific, more readily identifiable, more immediately insistent, and apparently more soluble: child labour, women’s underground labour, chimney sweeps’ boys, agricultural gang labour, even massive problems like poor relief, urban sanitation, or illiteracy, all these seemed to fall into that category. But for many the most menacing, because the most insidious, problem of all was what they saw as the disintegration of the family, eating away like a worm at the very foundations of all social order. Disintegration, it was thought, was being produced by the factory system, by large-town living conditions, by irreligion, and by the weakening and destruction of traditional moral and social bonds and restraints on the unbridled and irresponsible indulgence of individual lusts and selfish appetites. Feminine rebellion against the duties and functions of childbearing and home-keeping seemed to be looming; and with the approaching collapse of parental, particularly paternal, authority, the end of the family as the basic unit of education and social training, or socialization, which transmitted all the habits and standards that enabled society to function, seemed to be in sight. Such were the views of Peter Gaskell or Friedrich Engels on the left, Richard Oastler or Michael Sadler on the right, William Greg or James Kay (Shuttleworth) in the centre, and they came to form part of standard educated middle-class opinion at the time, in varying degrees of intensity and alarm.
The family, plainly, did not collapse. It persisted as an institution cherished, tolerated, or accepted by the vast majority in all classes of society, certainly into the final quarter of the twentieth century. At this point awareness of the prevalence of single-parent ‘families’, of the incidence of divorce, of the large proportion of children with broken-home backgrounds, of the pervasiveness of permissiveness, and of the rebelliousness of teenagers, bid fair to make alarm over the approaching disintegration of the family part of standard educated conservative middle-class opinion in the 1980s. What happened in the intervening 150 years was that the family adapted itself to changing circumstances and functions, in a way which possibly it had always done, although it had never before been called on to adapt so rapidly and so radically. The mutual attraction of the sexes, the desire for companionship in ‘pair-bonded’ arrangements, and the wish to have children for their own sake and not merely as an unfortunate, and now dispensable, by-product of copulation, are probably sufficient to ensure that the family will continue to adapt, adjust, and survive. Well-meaning or interfering people were not lacking, in the nineteenth century, to help the family – meaning the working-class family – on its way to adaptation and survival, and their agency should not be ignored even if it may be doubted whether it was crucial for the purpose in mind. Religion, evangelicalism, education, factory acts, children’s acts, all these undoubtedly had some influence on the ways in which family life and family behaviour changed and developed, and contributed to making the family of 1900 different from the family of 1830. The major determinants of change, however, were the material circumstances of the men and women trying to bring up families, and the social influences of their kin, their neighbours, their workmates, and their inheritance from their own upbringing and ancestry. Well-meaning people, or busybodies, will not be lacking in the 1980s, peddling their recipes for rescuing the family from disaster. The future is quite capable of looking after itself; Victorians, in all classes, looked after themselves, but some classes were more bombarded with advice, instruction, and orders than others.
A multitude of observations, arguments, inferences, and prejudices converged to form the apprehensions of the alarmist early Victorians. There was the ‘virtual castration’ and transvestism of the wife as breadwinner wearing the trousers, noted by Engels as the consequence of the demand of the mills for female workers, and echoed by Ashley (Lord Shaftesbury). Engels in fact derived his view that ‘when women work in factories the most important result is the dissolution of family ties’ from Gaskell and his writings of the early 1830s in support of the campaign to regulate factory working hours and conditions. Gaskell asserted that ‘the chastity of marriage is but little known among them [factory workers]: husband and wife sin equally, and a habitual indifference to sexual rights is generated which adds one other item to the destruction of domestic habits’, the other items including, one imagines, the ‘parental cruelty, filial disobedience, neglect of conjugal rights, absence of maternal love, destruction of brotherly and sisterly affection’ which he listed in a slightly later book. Such views were the stock-in-trade of the ‘factory movement’ which aimed at improving factory conditions through legislation, and while they made excellent propaganda for audiences and readerships that had no personal knowledge of factory life, they were not therefore necessarily true or grounded on fact. Closely associated with these views was the variant which held that all female employment outside the home, whether of married or unmarried women, whether in factories or elsewhere, made women into bad housewives and mothers because it deprived them of domestic training or inclination, and hence weakened the family. From the other end of the generational telescope it was held that family ties and parental discipline were being eroded by the premature, and immature, financial independence of youths who could earn a living wage from the age of fourteen or fifteen in the mills. Millgirls were further spoiled for future family life and motherhood, it was supposed, by the presumed bawdy licentiousness of their working lives, constant deflowerings in the carding rooms or lunch breaks, as it were. Sexual harassment by overlookers or foremen was widely believed to be common, and Engels thought that ‘the factory owner wields complete power over the persons and charms of the girls working for him’, a belief shared by the French liberal journalist Leon Faucher who visited Manchester in 1844 and solemnly accepted local yarns and pub gossip about the millowners’ seigneurial rights over the bodies of their millgirls. Engels, at least, who had shacked
