The history of the family, at least for the nineteenth century, has reached a certain maturity. Though not yet incorporated into mainstream history - that would be too much to expect - it now boasts a considerable specialist literature and some useful general surveys.1 Undoubtedly the driving force has been the aspiration of women's history to reconstruct the lives of women in the past. Now that the personal records of women are being studied with such attention, there is a wealth of insights into their experience as daughters, wives and widows. Jeanne Peterson's account of the Paget family and their circle in Victorian England is a typical example.2 For the nineteenth-century women's historian, there is the added bonus that this was the period when the claims of women to have the dominant influence in the family were taken most seriously - as witness the persistent appeal of the Angel Mother. Hence to research the history of the Victorian family promises results which will feature women as agents, and not merely as victims of patriarchal oppression.
In many ways, the most impressive thing about the history of the family is the speed and confidence with which it has moved beyond this initial position. The family is not only a women's concern. It is the most important context for the study, of childhood (still enormously under-researched); and it is fundamentally about men as well: in the psychological sense that they are emotionally formed by their early domestic experience, and in the social sense that it is men who take the initiative in establishing a family and who must usually shoulder the burden of maintaining it. In short, the family must be seen as a whole, embracing all its members - as a field which is constructed in relational terms around generation and sexual difference. That is essentially what the history of gender means when applied to the family. It is already a well-established genre, chiefly as a result of the path-breaking work of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall on the English middle class. In their book Family Fortunes the family is seen not merely as a private sphere reserved for women and children, but as a central ingredient of men's class identity and of an emerging middle-class culture.3
One important aspect of Family Fortunes is its close attention to religious issues. The authors convey a real sense that the lives of middle-class men and women between 1780 and 1850 were embedded in a religious culture. If historical understanding depends on entering (in some sense) the mentality of our subjects, then this approach to the history of class formation is surely indispensable. It has, however, been rather lost sight of in more recent work. Jeanne Peterson considers the church as a career which engaged wives as well as husbands, but not the meanings which religious allegiance conferred on family life. James Hammerton's fine study of cruelty and divorce in Victorian marriage tends to understate the influence of religion, in order to do justice to the play of conflicting legal principles.4 But placing religion on the sidelines in this way is simply not an option for the Victorian historian. All denominations in this period placed a heavy emphasis on the family. More important for my purpose, they saw the family as a whole, with prescribed and interlocking roles for every member. Of course these roles were not necessarily followed, not least because the various religious traditions taught conflicting lessons. Yet the fact remains that, in the middle class at least, an avid reading public was steeped in a public discourse on family which was articulated almost entirely in religious terms.
That discourse is one obvious focus for research. Sermons and advice literature can tell us much - as Davidoff and Hall showed in their absorbing account of the Congregationalist minister John Angell James, the so-called 'Bishop of Birmingham'.5 The highly influential writings of Sarah Ellis, married to a member of the London Missionary Society, are another rich source on family mores.6 Didactic literature of this kind can supply an analytical frame for studying the history of the family, and it is not difficult to track its influence in particular homes. The problem with this approach is that family experience becomes a means of illustrating a number of general propositions, instead of being explored for its own sake. In order to grasp how religion was experienced through domesticity, and how domesticity was understood in religious terms, we need to see the family in something like its actual complexity and integrity, even if this means looking at rather few of them.
In this chapter, my point of departure is the domestic experience of three nineteenth-century middle-class men: Joshua Pritchard, a Manchester exciseman; Isaac Holden, a West Riding mill-owner; and Cornelius Stovin, a Lincolnshire farmer. Each shows the ways in which religion permeated family life and family decisions. Each man was a Methodist, thus allowing the varieties of family experience within a particular tradition to come into focus. And each case study concerns primarily the husband or father, because it is still true that men are under-represented in family studies. The challenge of gender is to study the history of men, not on term s which reinforce their privileged access to the historical record, but from a truly relational perspective. 'Masculinity', so often loosely employed in common speech to indicate a men-only world premised on the exclusion of women, needs to be reclaimed as a historical identity constructed in relation to femininity. There is no better place to start than the domestic sphere, where masculinity is formed through early relations of nurture and discipline, and later articulated every day through identity and conflict with the opposite sex.7
Joshua Pritchard worked for the excise authorities, based in Manchester. He was a man of strong domestic affections towards his wife Mary, whom he married in 1818 when he was twenty-eight, and towards his four children. And, like his wife, he was a devout Methodist, apparently a Wesley an. Occupation, family and religion were the elements from which a new middle-class identity was forged in the early nineteenth century. Pride of place is often given to the first. Such was the power of the work ethic and of 'calling' in a secular sense, that we might assume that Pritchard was an exciseman first, preoccupied with his reputation as a public servant, and only secondly a husband and a Methodist. Nothing could be further from the truth. His letters and diaries contain almost no reference to his work experience. What they reflect very directly is a painful conflict between work and the rest of his life. Being an exciseman meant being available for sudden postings of several months at a time to other towns, depending on the pattern of illegal distilling.
For Joshua these periods were a desolate exile from all he held dear. 'I can assure you', he wrote to Mary from Nottingham, in 1835, 'that my mind is continually hankering after you and the children.' The lodgings were comfortable, and they belonged to 'one of John Wesley's hearers... a tried stone'. 'But yet I want you to talk with, and the children to play with a bit, to drive dull care away.' He had to content himself instead with buying expensive presents for all the children - including a watch for his eldest boy.8 After eighteen years of marriage Joshua still found these separations almost insupportable. From London he wrote: 'Bless you Mary, I love to be at home, I now wish you were with me, I am sitting by the fire alone. O bless you my Love, my Dove, my Dear one, my best, my sweetest.' As a saved believer he was confident that he would never be parted in spirit from his wife, but this made the physical separation no easier to bear. From one posting, with leisure on his hands, he wrote in 1836, 'I have now time to talk to my Mary, but no my Mary to talk to me. There are 3 Marys in the house but not my Mary.' Self-pity sometimes got the better of him. On one occasion he complained, 'O yes, to be sure, Joshua must write long letters, but I wonder who writes long letters to him,' In 1837 he told Mary that, though he no longer had the same 'bloom of youth' as when she had first fallen in love with him, 'thank God our Love, IS not abated'. That seems to have been the truth. It brought Joshua intense happiness, but their repeated separations were less than manfully endured.9
In Joshua's mind there was at times an even stronger tension between family and religion. This was not because the family was at odds with his religion. Mary Pritchard was a Methodist too, and great care was given to the spiritual upbringing of the children. Joshua could sign off his letters home by sending his love to 'all the Class', knowing the message would be passed on. But there was a conflict in his mind about purity. As the rhapsodizing of 'My Dove, my Dear one' suggests, Joshua was a man of strong sexual need. His conscience was not to be satisfied with the comforting notion that marital sex was divinely sanctioned (in the way that, say, Charles Kingsley argued). He believed his passionate nature was a spiritual diversion for his wife. 'I can assure you', he wrote from London in 1835, 'that I very frequently thought, when I was at home, and have also thought so since, that I was a hindrance both to you and the children, and that in consequence of my passionate Spirit, you will be enabled to serve God better in my absence than when at home with you.'10
Joshua also questioned whether he should be so attached to any human being - lest she become 'in the place of Christ' to him.11 Fourteen years previously, as a newly married man, he had been tormented by an even more disturbing thought: that he had a calling to the ministry which could not be obeyed so long as he had responsibility for his wife and baby daughter. He wrote in his diary:
Oh that I could for faith incessant cry to the great, the holy, the high! I have almost been ready to beseech the God of love to take my Wife arid child to himself and then I would labour for him by his grace and assistance in this world below - and then again when I looked on my child and she of my bosom with whom I had took sweet counsel, I did not like to part with either of them. It is a struggle to me which way the contest will turn.12
In the event, Joshua's conscience allowed him to resist the call and remain in secular employment. But he remained a Methodist before anything else - certainly before occupation and sometimes before family.
For Joshua domesticity meant not only the bliss of a happy marriage but also the loving duty due to his children. The standards he set himself were exacting, especially for his first child, Mary Ann, born in 1819. He recorded his successes and failures in a special section of his diary which, he addressed to her in the second person, intending her to read it when she was older. For Joshua the most important pointer to his daughter's spiritual state was her attitude to prayer. 'Prayer is a solemn thing which your Father is often obligated to tell you,' he wrote. At eighteen months Mary Ann was joining her hands before meals. Her parents tried to get her to kneel down with them at afternoon prayer, and her backsliding was variously attributed to bad influences, playfulness and the machinations of the devil. Blackmail was also attempted: when she was five Joshua told her that, if she was unwilling to pray with him, God 'could affect you and make you unwell'. Shortly before, she had had a dream that God wanted to take her - Joshua told her to keep this in her memory for the rest of her life, just as he surely never forgot his own wish that God would take both wife and daughter in the cause of the Gospel. Mary Ann's life proved short enough. She died before reaching her teens, probably never having read the diary her father had written for her edification. Unfortunately there are no records of that time which might tell us whether she died in morbid repentance of her earlier failures in prayer, or whether she had attained her own assurance of God's grace, Joshua did not believe she was perfect - 'she had her little ways' he later conceded - but he was confident that she was with her Father in heaven.13
As often happens when parenting is undertaken too zealously, Joshua was less demanding of his three subsequent children.14 He allowed himself to take more pleasure in their company, to play with them and to lavish presents on them. But they could have been in no doubt that life was to be lived in godly earnest. 'Tell the children that their Father had them all up before the throne of Grace,' Pritchard told his wife in 1835 when he was away on business. He urged them to pray themselves, holding up the example of Mary Ann as someone who had attended to prayer and had properly regretted her lapses. He drew particularly pointed lessons for his one remaining daughter, Emma: Mary Ann was interceding for her, and she must emulate her qualities of meekness and modesty.15 The spiritual destiny of his children, his wife and himself weighed on his mind as ultimately the only real foundation of life.
With Isaac Holden, my second case study, the claims of work were much more to the fore. He was not, like Pritchard, at the beck and call of his superiors, but a self-made entrepreneur whose career is a vivid illustration of the new industrial class. Born in Scotland, the son of impecunious English immigrants, Isaac Holden began his working life as a child labourer in a Paisley cotton mill. But he came of strongly Methodist stock - his paternal grandparents had been converted by John Wesley himself - and this gave him access to a closely knit, dispersed community, for whom helping one another in business had been explicitly prescribed by the founder.16 Having briefly considered the Methodist ministry, in 1830 Isaac secured the post of book-keeper in a firm of Wesleyan worsted manufacturers at Cullingworth, near Keighley in the West Riding. This gave him the means to marry Marion Love, who came from a very similar Methodist background in Scotland. Fourteen years of stability followed. The Holdens had four children without mishap, and Isaac became more and more indispensable to the Cullingworth mill. In 1846, however, he left his employment to set up on his own, arid Marion died of tuberculosis. At just the time when Isaac's hands were full with what turned out to be a failing business (a mill he had leased in Bradford), his home was without a head and he was deprived of his domestic support. His solution was to marry again, but this time to marry money. Sarah Sugden was a spinster as old as he was, from another Methodist mill-owning family. They were married in 1850, and they set up home near the factory where Isaac could now make an entirely fresh start.17
But this was not quite the whole picture. The new start was made not in Yorkshire, but in France - at St-Denis near Paris. If this seems a move of breathtaking boldness, it is not surprising that Sarah Sugden was not ready for it either. She complained (probably with some justice) that amid all the preparations for marriage Isaac had not dealt plainly with her in this matter. Isaac intended to stay in France for some years in order to give his factories there his full personal supervision. Sarah wanted him to settle in Yorkshire again, and ideally to abandon business altogether for the ministry. Seven months after the wedding she left St-Denis for her family home in Oakworth, with no date fixed for her return. She stayed with her brothers, for whom she had kept house for so many years, until the disagreement could be resolved. There followed a period of intense correspondence, at the end of which it was agreed that the family home would be at St-Denis, but that Sarah would live: in Oakworth for two extended visits amounting to three or four months each year. In effect she had two homes, with a managerial role in each of them. This compromise brought to an end the acute phase of their quarrel, but the old tensions regularly resurfaced whenever the couple were separated, up to Isaac's return to Yorkshire in 1860.18
The correspondence was not entirely acrimonious. As a couple the Holdens were united by their unquestioning loyalty to the Methodist way of life - the class, the chapel, the preaching, the hymn-singing. Both had been formed in this tradition from birth. In Sarah's family that tradition was reaffirmed by the duly recorded last words of her parents, both youthful converts to Methodism: 'Heaven! Glory! Come!' (her father), and 'I am on the Rock and have firm footing' (her mother).19 Isaac and Sarah had each won recognition for their leadership qualities - he as a possible candidate for the ministry, she as a class leader. Both took an Evangelical view of the world absolutely for granted. They conducted their social life entirely within the fold of the Methodist community, which was not difficult to do in the West Riding. There Methodists were very thick on the ground: in Bradford the Wesleyans alone amounted to 17.4 per cent of Sunday worshippers in 1851, the second largest group after Anglicans at 23.1 per cent.20 The devotion of the Holdens to Methodism was a lifelong commitment: in his seventies Isaac was to become a leading lay spokesman for the movement in the House of Commons; Sarah performed a ceaseless round of local engagements which only ended when, aged eighty-six, she caught a fatal chill after opening a bazaar at Haworth.21
Furthermore, the nature of Isaac's- work - 'masculine' and instrumental though it might seem - was in some ways common ground between them. Their marriage was one of occupational endogamy, like so many in the business classes of early industrial England. Sarah's brother, Jonas Sugden, headed the family worsted business in Oakworth; the house was close to the mill, and in her forty-odd years of living there Sarah had acquired much knowledge of the business. Indeed, she would have been failing in her duties as a class leader had she not done so. The Wesleyan leadership paid particular attention to the needs of businessmen, and class leaders whose flocks included businessmen were urged to acquaint themselves with their concerns. By the time she married Isaac, Sarah was well versed in the intricacies of worsted manufacture.22
The correspondence also reveals not only shared interests in religion and work, but a mutual physical attraction. This would certainly not have been taken for granted in a marriage between two people in their forties - one of them a virgin - with more than a suspicion of business convenience about it. Yet the letters allow no other conclusion. Isaac was the less inhibited of the two. To 'taste in imagination the sweet conjugal feeling' was not enough, he wrote from St-Denis in December 1850; the memory of her 'spirited and affectionate embrace' made him 'long to squeeze you well'. Eighteen months later he wrote. 'I had to go to my solitary couch thinking of you with heart warm and something else as warm. I feel the want of you more than on any former occasion.'23
On her side Sarah was not offended by this overtly sexual language. In the privacy of her bedroom at Oakworth, she imagined herself in Isaac's arms, 'entwined in each other's embrace', and she longed for the warmth of his flesh. The marriage carried an erotic charge from the beginning perhaps even earlier (though hardly any courtship letters survive). There is no sign of sexual guilt in either of them, which is interesting in view of John Wesley's profound discomfort with carnal desire.24
At the heart of this correspondence, however, was a disagreement about the nature of home and its claims on husband and wife. Sarah took her stand on two principles. First, she was alarmed at Isaac's devotion to material concerns. One of the issues which Methodist class leaders were expected to address with 'godly jealousy' was the conflict between business and spirit, With that experience behind her, Sarah did not hesitate to remind Isaac of 'the awful danger there is of being too much entangled with the world'. Any man who was prepared to immerse himself in work in a Catholic country was, in her view, far gone in this direction. 'You may think yourself different from other men and feel yourself adequate for what you engage in,' she warned him in 1858. 'but I trust you do not forget that the hand that strikes others is the same that may smite you.' This is surely the tone of the class leader rather than the wife.
In the second place, for Sarah the countervailing influence of home depended not merely on the immediate domestic circle, but on the community of which it formed a part. Sarah felt herself bound to this wider circle by ties of kinship as well as spiritual fellowship. She could not contemplate living without daily access to her brothers and sisters and chapel associates, from whom she derived her 'spiritual enjoyment'. Sarah Holden comes over in this correspondence as self-willed and outspoken, but it would be wrong to interpret her firmness as a bid for independence. Her view of marriage was entirely conventional. When engaged to Isaac, she had looked forward to 'a proper yoke to bear' and disclaimed any wish to be 'a lawless subject'. Her aim in this dispute was not autonomy for herself, but the restoration of the sacred proprieties of life by which they would both benefit. Her sense that his salvation and her own were at stake gave her the power to speak out.25
Isaac, on the other hand, was a workaholic in love with his factory. He had only to 'come within the sound of the dear old combing machines' and 'the old passion' came over him, and all other concerns (including his wife waiting for a letter) were forgotten in a moment. The pressing need to 'keep close to the Business' meant that he would not spin out his leisure time at home, or go on holiday, much less visit Sarah at Oakworth or Blackpool. How he ran his business, and where he located it, were matters between him and Divine Providence. 'As a Man of Business,' he told her, 'I enter into the most inviting openings that Providence places before me and remain, with contented mind, till Providence directs my path into a course more desirable' - as comforting a gloss on entrepreneurial ambition as one is likely to find. (In later life Isaac claimed to have been guided to the site of his first French factory by a dream.26) Sarah's views were therefore beside the point, however knowledgeable about business she might be. And, while Isaac invoked divine authority for his own preferences, he represented Sarah's attachment to Yorkshire as no more than a selfish desire to have her own way. Providence, it seemed, was profoundly gendered.
But on the question of where Sarah should live, Isaac was more conciliatory. He certainly did not discount the importance of home. His invocation of 'its sweet social intercourse and its reciprocal duties of affection and fidelity' was an impeccably Evangelical sentiment. He knew that he needed a serious Methodist as partner to provide moral ballast to his home, while he got his hands dirty in the business; he needed this both for himself and for his two school-age daughters. As far as Isaac was concerned, all this could be as readily created in France as in England. The fact that in France he must do without the wider local community of the godly counted for little in his mind, since the hectic pace of his life at St-Denis left him no time to enjoy it. Isaac also knew that to live in or near Oakworth, as Sarah demanded, would involve more intercourse than he could tolerate with his in-laws, and especially with the head of the family, Jonas Sugden, whom he disliked intensely. But he refrained from ordering Sarah back to France, as was certainly his marital right. He knew that if she returned to St-Denis, they would probably both be made miserable; whereas if she remained in Yorkshire one at least of them would be content.27 'I feel willing to allow you to decide when you can willingly and cheerfully come to me.. .. Therefore rny dear Sarah enjoy yourself so long as you can be happier without: me, and do not decide on coming till you can be happy with me.'28 It was a generous gesture and it worked. Within two weeks Sarah was on her way to France, with the bones of a working compromise agreed. Isaac was temperamentally drawn to a companionate marriage rather than a patriarchal one. He believed instinctively that his wife's autonomy should be respected, and he quickly learned that this was also the path to securing her compliance.
We see here two contrasting views of domesticity grounded in the same quite narrow Evangelical tradition. Methodism furnished the materials for a feminine, as well as a masculine view of the world, and even for a measure of challenge to patriarchal authority. Isaac justified his scale of priorities by citing the guidance of Divine Providence which worked through the actions of men. In his eyes this justified a devotion to work and a somewhat narrow conception of domesticity, typical of the self-denying work ethic of first-generation entrepreneurs.29 Sarah took her stand on what she thought were the higher claims of home, founded on divine prescription and example. In this she echoed a generation of women's Evangelical writing, which asserted the moral prestige of women as guardians of the home, and the moral obligation on men to play their part in home life. The uneasy compromise between these two positions lasted for ten years. The tensions were only resolved when the couple moved back to Yorkshire in I860. By then Jonas Sugden had died. Isaac and Sarah moved into his house, which Isaac drastically remodelled so that its earlier associations were almost completely erased. The Holdens lived together as an exemplary Methodist couple for another thirty years.
Cornelius Stovin, my third example of Methodist domesticity, was also much preoccupied with the workings of Divine Providence. He could hardly fail to be, given that the prospects of his 600-acre farm at Binbrook in north Lincolnshire depended so much on the vagaries of the weather. Judging by his diary for the 1870s, hardly a day went by without uplifting reflections on the operation of Providence in the world. When his barley crop was drenched for the third time, he speculated that Divine Providence intended to drive him through prayer to more humble dependence on God. When the invention of new machinery undercut the bargaining power of his farm labourers, he exclaimed 'What a kind Providence!' His metaphorical view of the natural world tended in the same direction. Every cornfield, with its cycle of germination, growth and maturity, seemed to him an expression of the Divine plan, and a vivid refutation of the Darwinist heresy.30
Unlike Isaac Holden, however, Cornelius Stovin did not need to invoke Providence in order to justify his choice of occupation or his commercial decisions. He was a farmer like his father before him, and his wife, Elizabeth Riggall, was also the daughter of a local farmer. There were no clashes over calling or place of residence. But other causes of friction took their toll. Of the three marriages considered here, this was almost certainly the weakest. Elizabeth came from a wealthier family with expectations which Cornelius could not match. She objected to the poor amenities of Binbrook farm and nagged her husband to demand improvements from the landlord, whereas he would have been content with something 'chastely comfortable'. She complained, as did he, about the poor quality of domestic servants to be found 3 miles from the nearest village. Elizabeth's health was also poor. She was often not strong enough to nurse her growing family herself and frequently retired to her parents' house 20 miles away for extended periods of rest. Cornelius seems not to have anticipated how much he would miss her - perhaps because he had remained a bachelor until the age of thirty-one. He noted in 1875 that he seemed 'to have become so thoroughly domesticated that my happiness is diminished by their absence'. He found it hard to conceal his frustration. He wrote to her during one bitter November: 'You must not forget that your absence detracts from the sweetness and joy of my life. ... It is cool work entering my empty bedroom at night. You may be sure I wrap round me the bedclothes pretty close. ... It has been comfortless for me through the night by reason of the cold.'31
There was also a significant difference between them in religious loyalties. Like the Holdens, the Stovins had the satisfaction of living in a region which was strongly committed to Methodism: according to Alan Everitt, some 40 per cent of the population of Lincolnshire were connected with it.32 But whereas Elizabeth belonged to the official Wesleyan church. Cornelius subscribed to the breakaway Free Methodists, who (in rural Lincolnshire at least) tended to be poorer and less worldly. She firmly believed that he could have made more of the farm, had he not given beyond his means to the circuit, and spent so much time as preacher and chapel official. In fact the way in which Cornelius interpreted the call of public duty meant that he was away from home much more than might be expected of a farmer. Apart from preaching engagements and circuit meetings, he was also a Poor Law guardian. These commitments kept him on the road a good deal. He relished the switchback character of his life: 'My career as an agriculturalist is wildly eccentric. One day I mount the pulpit and platform and pour forth a torrent of rude, sometimes incoherent eloquence. Another day I plunge heart and soul into my dear children's amusements.' In 1875 he summed up his objectives in life as '20 more years of hearty service in the cause of Christ... while improving my business,, making it more profitable, and my house ... so that my family may have a good start in life both physically, mentally and spiritually'. What made sense to him as an attempt to lead a godly life in all its manifestations caused friction with his wife.33 Cornelius was mortified by the lack of real communion between them, for he had elevated ideas about marriage. Years later, when giving a speech to mark the golden wedding of his parents-in-law, he observed that the unity of man and woman was like the fingers of a single hand, rather than two railway carriages coupled together.34
The vicissitudes of the Stovin marriage were common enough. More difficult to evaluate is how typical Cornelius's behaviour as a parent was, This was not what we might expect of a Victorian father, much less a devout Methodist. Cornelius conducted family prayers each morning. Like so many fathers, he looked somewhat apprehensively to the future, and he prayed for his children's spiritual as well as their mental advancement. He also looked to their early training in 'self-government', proudly recording how his eldest son Denison began his business career at the age of seven with a commission to spend 4s 6d on groceries in Louth Market.35 Yet Cornelius's attitude towards his children was anything but joyless and denying. He took an unequivocally Romantic position on the true value of the child. Of his second son Frank, aged two, he wrote in words that might have been inspired by the Lakeland poets: 'He is a splendid divinely constituted ray of sunshine to brighten my lonely hours. He laughs and sings and chatters and enjoys life as if he were on the borders of Paradise.' Cornelius was unperturbed by the demands that babies placed on everyone around them. When Frank was a few weeks old, his father remarked in appreciative wonder, 'He seems to have revolutionised the whole household. Every other interest has more or less to bend to his. At present his sway is almost royal.'36
Cornelius regularly stepped into the breach to make life easier for his invalid wife. On one occasion in 1874 when Elizabeth was well enough to go to chapel, he stayed at home with the baby. 'While the saints are honouring God in the chapel I will praise him at home,' he wrote. He bottle-fed babies without demur and saw them though the dark watches of the night when they were ill, recreating the model of the 'nursing father' which had been much more common early in the nineteenth century. He was undismayed by displays of temper in his children, knowing that they would soon be succeeded by laughter and joy. There were punishments (unspecified), but the emphasis was on affection: 'Parental discipline does not in the least interfere with or check their buoyancy.' Cornelius believed in self-expression, 'Every kind of innocent playfulness is encouraged,' he wrote, perhaps oblivious that this was in direct contravention of Wesley's killjoy teaching on the subject. Cornelius looked on with pleasure as Frank played with marbles, made 'original and spontaneous remarks' and clambered over the dining-room furniture. Cornelius was what Americans at that time referred to as a 'frolicking father'. He enjoyed a good romp and was to be seen chasing Frank around the kitchen. He took seriously his children's spiritual and moral development, but 'childlike joyousness' remained at the centre of his vision. Nothing could have been more different from Joshua Pritchard's preoccupation with every detail of his daughter's spiritual training.37
Some of this fatherly involvement arose from the pressing circumstances of the Stovin household. Because of the servant problem, there was limited scope for delegating childcare. As a result the little ones were not 'imprisoned in the nursery', and they received much more attention from their parents. But there was nothing forced or reluctant about Stovin's performance as an engaged father, it provided the sparks of joy and vitality in what was all too often a life of toil and anxiety. The emotional costs were high as well. When Denison caught scarlet fever at school in 1874, Cornelius feared the worst (as well he might): To, see him thrown so far out of my own and his dear mother's reach and to have become so complete a burden to his friends shook my manhood. Tears would rush up from the fountain of grief within me. I still feel myself in a fix.' For good or ill, fatherhood was integral to Cornelius's sense of his divinely ordered place in the world, and inseparable from his masculine self.38
It is sometimes tempting to think of Methodism,, like Evangelical Anglicanism, as a 'badge' of class identity. Joshua Pritchard should give us pause. For him the raising of children had little to do with social status and everything to do with his account with God. Domestic life was not a subsidiary interest; it was the very centre of Joshua's emotional and spiritual existence. It was a vital part of that 'recognizable spirituality ... refined into a recognized culture' which Clyde Binfield has identified as the hallmark of the Wesleyan middle class in Leeds at this time.39 Of course the cult of the home in Victorian England was a consequence of work being removed from the domestic environment, and of a profound sense of alienation from the city. But in the long run the convergence between the spiritual and the social was crucial. Evangelicalism ennobled work as a struggle carried on in an ungodly world, while at the same time showing how domestic life could comfort and elevate the worker. The home might no longer he the site of production, but its deeper, more moral purpose now became clear.
In drawing religion into the home at the same time as work was being taken out of it, the Methodists greatly intensified the hold of domesticity over the middle class and produced much of its characteristic tone and atmosphere. Methodism, like other forms of Evangelicalism, had its own theological rationale for locating so much religious observance in the home, It was a 'religion of the heart' which valued the spiritual feelings of the individual. The relative intimacy of the small domestic gathering made space for an atmosphere of spiritual fellowship, in which the soul was bared, guidance sought and reproof administered. This new dispensation, it has often been pointed out, enhanced the status of women, since it implied a new spiritual dimension to their traditional role as guardians of the hearth.40 But there were vital implications for men as well. What bound men to the home, in the early Victorian period especially, was not just the popular ethic of companionate marriage, or the emotional and material needs of the breadwinner, but the conviction that home was the proper place to cultivate one's spiritual well-being. The godly household was a corner of heaven on earth.
When Methodism became more routinized, it retained its domestic bent by making the class the focus of pastoral care and discipline. The class habitually met in private households for the practical reason that, in the early days, there had been nowhere else for it to convene. But the special spiritual intimacy which was possible in a domestic setting soon became its hallmark. In the homely metaphor of one of Wesley's preachers, 'when live coals are put together, the fire burns vehemently; but, when the coals are scattered, the fire dies away'.41 Even in the Victorian period the leader of the class was often the master or mistress of the house, with the rest of the family (including servants) furnishing the core of the membership. The class which Sarah Sugden had led before her marriage was of this type. In the mid-nineteenth century the chapel tended to become more important than the class - indeed the distinction between them became blurred as class meetings were increasingly held in chapel (as in Stovin's case).42 But Methodism continued to be, in part at least, a 'felt' religion, with a pronounced emphasis on domestic religious disciplines.43
The implications for marriage were far from straightforward. A shared religion was no guarantee of marital harmony. Church teaching on marriage was shot through with contradictions. It could of course be read as a charter for sexual inequality. The Methodists looked back to the unyielding prescription of John Wesley: 'Whoever, therefore, would be a good wife, let this sink into her inmost soul, "My husband is my superior, my better: he has the right to rule over me. God has given it him, and I will not strive against God".'44 In the theology of most Evangelicals, the ideal was an earthly father who revealed to his children something of the love and mercy of the Almighty himself. But against this old-style patriarchy must be set the commitment of all the Evangelical churches to the power of the moral mother as the foundation of family life. Once home was recognized as the prime site of 'the religion of the heart', the religious standing of the wife was bound to rise. If the husband reflected the authority of the Father in Heaven (often unseen but ever present), the wife stood for Christian love and spiritual intuition. It was an open question, for example, whether the bed-time prayer of mother and child was not more efficacious than the daily family prayers led by the father.45
Religion might therefore inform and justify sharply differing interpretations of the marital relationship, even within the same denomination. The enhanced prestige of women, and above all of mothers, gave them potentially great leverage within the home. But, in what seems a strange paradox, even Nonconformists, who took a rigorously non-sacerdotal interpretation of the ministry, referred to the household head as 'priest'.46 Patriarchal values certainly seem to have had some bearing on the cases discussed here. Each of the husbands possessed acknowledged spiritual authority - Isaac Holden as a possible candidate for the ministry, Cornelius Stovin as a local preacher and Joshua Pritchaid as a man who wore his intense spirituality on his sleeve. Consequently the balance of domestic authority was uncertain. Sarah Holden lacked the status of mother, but she had formal religious standing as an experienced class leader. She was also forty-five when she married Isaac. For all these reasons she was able to act independently and force a compromise over where and how they should live. Elizabeth Stovin, on the other hand, received from her husband all the praise and respect due to the mother of seven healthy children. She was less devout than he and had no formal position in chapel, but her views on domestic matters carried weight. Her ill-health and depression were real enough, but they also served to reinforce her case for the radical improvements to the farmhouse which she had set her heart on. Mary Pritchard is an altogether more Shadowy figure. Her few surviving letters are short, devout and practical. She appears to have identified completely with Joshua's spiritual regime for the children, borne along by his passionate enthusiasm. In none of these cases do we find that rivalry and tension between mother and father which was so characteristic of Victorian parenting.47 The essential precondition was a deeply shared religious outlook, which left something to be desired only in the case of the Stovins.
That same religious understanding should have led to a deep disquiet on the subject of sex. John Wesley had rated purity so highly that he never fully endorsed sex within marriage and was very reluctant to perform marriage ceremonies. Something of the founder's doubts is to be seen in Joshua Pritchard's agonizing about the spiritual threat which his exuberance posed to his wife. But there is no trace of this ambivalence in the other two cases, Cornelius Stovin made no bones about hating his empty bed when Elizabeth was away. Isaac and Sarah Holden both employed relatively explicit language to keep their connection alive through repeated separations. There was no sign of sexual guilt. Peter Gay does not make the point in his two-volume study of bourgeois sexuality, but it is worth bearing in mind that a belief in the sacred nature of marriage was not inherently hostile to the enjoyment of sex.48
The differences to be found in the three families examined here with regard to child-rearing were even more marked. The nineteenth century is associated primarily with the Romantic idea that childhood is a state which should be enjoyed for itself, and with which adults need to remain in touch if they are to realize their full humanity. From this perspective the Evangelicals have usually had a bad press. They were above all concerned to bring up children to lead disciplined lives and be receptive to God's grace. Unlike the Romantics they attended to the adult in the making, rather than the child in the present. So far from possessing celestial natures, children were born in original sin. The parent's task, as Wesley and countless others asserted, was to break the child's will by enforcing absolute obedience. Moderate Evangelicals emphasized instead the need for nurture based on gradual principles, rather than conversion with its implied damning of all that went before. They preferred the image of bending and shaping, rather than breaking the child's will, and this perspective led them to attend more carefully to the child's feelings. But each strategy exposed the child to intrusive control, of the kind practised by Joshua and Mary Pritchard.49 Isaac Holden, like many a Methodist father., anxiously awaited news that each child had given his or her heart to God, thus signalling that his main spiritual duty as a parent had been accomplished.50
The contrast with the teaching of Rousseau or Wordsworth is obvious enough. But the two systems had something in common all the same. Protective seclusion was vital to both: to the Romantics because children needed a playground beyond the reach of the adult world; to the Evangelicals because children's delicate spiritual state was so vulnerable to corruption. The Congregationalist minister John Angell James captured this dual tradition when he included among the 'blissful associations of home' both 'the nursery of virtue' and 'the playground of childhood'. The logic of Evangelical doctrines about man and salvation was to place children near the centre of domestic attention., just as the Romantic sensibility did for quite different reasons. Infant wills could be neither broken nor shaped without a great deal of time and patience. The child in an Evangelical household faced a constant stream of prayers, readings, catechisms and homilies.51
But parent-child interaction was never confined to these serious matters. The reputation for joyless and repressive family life is partly due to the subsequent spread of the externals of Evangelical observance, like family prayers and 'the English Sunday', which could weigh very heavily on the young. At the beginning of the century the Romantic view was still fresh and attractive enough to impinge on the practice of Evangelicals like everyone else. Reminiscences of Evangelical childhood in the heyday of the movement strike a comparatively light note. There was no ban on pleasure for its own sake, only on morally dubious diversions. Parents balanced their inflexible religious routines with playfulness; parties were given and holiday trips undertaken. Evangelicalism was serious-minded but not necessarily killjoy. The eminent Methodist minister Adam Clarke frolicked with his children and wrote them long chatty letters. He was 'both paterfamilias and playmate', as Doreen Rosman has aptly put it. This tradition was still alive fifty years later. G.E. Sargent wrote in 1854 that children's wills needed to be broken, but they should nevertheless be able to invite their father to play with some confidence that he would. Plenty of fathers were happy to follow this advice, though with an ever-decreasing resolve to break wills. Cornelius Stovin's relaxed blend of fatherly guidance and participation in play probably represented the outer limit of what was acceptable. Most Methodists could only have followed his example with considerable strain.52
That strain was above all to do with gender, since proper paternal behaviour was an important constituent of manliness. As the ascribed characters of men and women became more polarized in the early nineteenth century, there was less tolerance for paternal behaviour which seemed to encroach on the mother's sphere. The mother's special qualities - her quickness of sympathy, her emotional insight and her moral purity were defined in ways which tended to disqualify men. This increasingly sharp distinction in parental roles was reflected in a revealing change in vocabulary. There was less talk of 'authority' and much greater emphasis on 'influence' - particularly among moderate Evangelicals, who stressed nurture over time rather than the transformative quality of conversion. Because the child's individuality was now more readily recognized, its upbringing had to be carefully adapted to its particular temperament, requiring observation and flexibility from day to day. Once parenting was seen in these processual, developmental terms, fathers were inevitably sidelined. It followed that the father who trespassed in these domains was abandoning masculine for feminine traits. The home was suspect as a feminine sphere - the softening power of children its most beguiling threat to manhood. Cornelius Stovin, as we have seen, does not appear to have been troubled by such doubts, partly because of his spiritual certainty, and partly because of his grounding in Romantic ways of thought - not to mention his relative isolation. The redeeming power of childhood was to him an article of faith, fully borne out by his daily experiences.53
Lastly, mention of an unstable or vulnerable masculinity prompts the question of whether this period saw the appearance of a 'new man'. The phrase was used at the time in two distinct senses. It could mean a man newly risen in the social scale, as when Elizabeth Gaskell described the Congregationalist James Watts in 1855 as 'a new man and a new Mayor' of Manchester.54 Alternatively the term was applied to someone who had undergone an Evangelical conversion, and whose life showed the fruits thereof in piety, domesticity and a sense of social responsibility. To be a new man in both senses was a passport to respectability and reputation. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, who use the term without quotation marks, suggest that middle-class masculinity in this period rested on a new conception of 'calling' and a new relationship with the home.55 At a broad level this was true. But the three case studies examined here suggest that the relation between these elements was a good deal more unstable than is sometimes assumed. For Isaac Holden, the exigencies of his 'calling' confined the claims of home to a vestigial portion of his life. Cornelius Stovin too was constantly drawn away from wife and family by the self-imposed demands of public life. For Joshua Pritchard, on the other hand, work was an undignified burden, while almost everything of significance in his life took place at home. What seems true in all three cases is that the appeal of home was not just mediated through religious idiom; it derived its emotional and spiritual hold from the very distinctive role which Evangelical Christianity accorded to a sanctified domestic sphere. The potential for gender conflict was present here, as it is in any family system. The domesticated religious life both fuelled such conflict and suggested ways in which it might be transcended or repressed.
Reprinted with revisions from R.N. Swanson (ed.), Studies in Church History 14, Ecclesiastical History Society (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 323-45.
1 See for example John Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages since 1600 (New York, 1985), and Rosemary O'Day, The Family and Family Relationships, 1500-1900 (London, 1994).
2 M. Jeanne Peterson, Family, Love and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen (Bloomington, 1989).
3 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hail, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987).
4 A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992).
5 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 126-34.
6 Ibid., pp. 180-5, 340-2; Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, pp. 75-8, 88-90.
7 John Tosh, 'What should historians do with masculinity? Reflections on nineteenth-century Britain', History Workshop Journal 38 (1994), pp. 179-202 (see above, Chapter 2); Michael Roper and John Tosh, 'Historians and the politics of masculinity', in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991), pp. 1-24.
8 Manchester Central Reference Library (hereafter MCRL), Pritchard papers, M375/I/4: Joshua Pritchard to Mary Pritchard, 31 Aug. 1835.
9 MCRL, M375/I/4: Joshua Pritchard to Mary Pritchard, various letters 1835-7, passim.
10 MCRL, M375/I/4: Joshua Pritchard to Mary Pritchard, 15 Aug. 1835.
11 MCRL, M375/1/4: Joshua Pritchard to Mary Pritchard, 26 June 1836.
12 MCRL, M375/I/3: Joshua Pritchard, diary for 10 May 1821.
13 MCRL, M375/I/3: Joshua Pritchard, 'Observations on the deportment of Mary Ann' (1820-4).
14 A moving Victorian example is the family of Edward, and Mary Benson. See David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London, 1961), ch. 3.
15 MCRL, M3 75/I/4: Joshua Pritchard to Mary Pritchard, 15 Aug. 1835, 18 Sept. 1836.
16 Henry Abelove, The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (Stanford, 1990), pp. 99, 108.
17 Elizabeth Jennings, 'Sir Isaac Holden (1807-1897)' (PhD thesis, Bradford University, 1982); John Tosh, 'From Keighley to St-Denis: separation and intimacy in Victorian bourgeois marriage', History Workshop Journal 40 (1995), pp. 193-206.
18 Tosh, 'From Keighley to St-Denis'.
19 R.S. Hardy, Commerce and Christianity. Memorials of Jonas Sugden of Oakworth House (London, 1857), pp. 15, 20.
20 Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 253, 255.
21 Elizabeth Jennings, 'Sir Isaac Holden, Bart (1807-97); his place in the Wesleyan Connexion', Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 43 (1982), pp. 117-26, 150-9.
22 Wesleyan Conference Office, A Class Book (London, n.d.), p. 5.
23 Bradford University Library [hereafter BUL], Holden/21: Isaac Holden to Sarah Holden, 20 Dec. 1850; BUL, Holden/23: same to same, 13 June 1852.
24 BUL, Holden/21: Isaac Holden to Sarah Holden, 20 Dec. 1850; BUL, Hoiden/23: same to same, 13 June 1852; BUL, Hoiden/44: Sarah Holden to Isaac Holden, undated (early Nov. 18.51); Tosh. 'From Keighley to St-Denis'; Abelove, Evangelist of Desire, pp. 49-58.
25 A Class-Rook Containing Directions for Class-leaders (London, n.d.); BUL, Holden/21: Sarah Holden to Isaac Holden, 4 Dec. 1850; BUL, Hoiden/52: Sarah Sugden to Isaac Holden, 6 Oct. 1849.
26 John Hodgson, Textile Manufacture and Other Industries in Keighley (Keighley, 1879), p. 116.
27 BUL, Holden/32: Isaac Holden to Sarah Holden, 23 April 1861; BUL, Holden/22: same to same, 10 Jan. 1851; BUL, Holden/21: Isaac Holden to Sarah Holden, 20 Dec. 1850.
28 BUL, Holden/22: Isaac Holden to Sarah Holden, 10 Jan. 1851.
29 Theodore Koditschek, 'The triumph of domesticity and the making of middle-class culture', Contemporary Sociology 18 (1989), pp. 178-81.
30 Cornelius Stovin, journal entries for 9 Sept. 1871, 12 July 1872, 22 Aug, 1871. in Jean Stovin (ed.), Journals of a Methodist Farmer 1871-1875 (London, 1982), pp. 33, 73-4, 26.
31 Cornelius Stovin, journal, 27 Nov. 1874 and 28 April 1875, ibid., pp. 159, 219; Stovin Papers (private collection): Cornelius Stovin to Elizabeth Stovin, 7 and 9 Nov. 1876 (transcripts).
32 Alan Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent the Nineteenth Century (Leicester, 1972), p. 48.
33 Journal for 5 Sept. 1872 and 12 Jan. 1875, in Stovin, Journals, pp. 96, 178.
34 Stovin Papers: Journal, 18 March 1890.
35 Journal, 13 Sept. 1871, in Stovin, Journals, p. 36.
36 Journal, 22 Jan, 1875 and 1 Oct. 1872, in Stovin, Journals, pp. 181, 104.
37 Cornelius Stovin, journal entries for 20 Dec. 1874 (Stovin Papers), 1.2 Jan. 1875, 11 Feb. 1875, 14 Nov. 1874, 12 Jan. 1875 (Stovin, Journals, pp. 178, 190, 152, 177). Abelove, Evangelist of Desire, pp. 97-8, 101-2; Doreen Rosman, The Evangelicals and Culture (London, 1984), p. 107; Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore, 1998).
38 Cornelius Stovin to Elizabeth Stovin, 14 Nov. 1874, in Stovin, Journals, p. 152; Cornelius Stovin, diary, 19 Nov. 1874, ibid., p. 155.
39 Clyde Binfield, '"An optimism of grace": the spirituality of some Wesleyan kinswomen', in Clyde Binfield (ed.), Saints Revisioned (Sheffield, 1995), p. 68.
40 Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the US, 1780-1860 (London, 1985), ch. 3; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 155-92; Gail Malmgreen, 'Domestic discords: women and the family in East Cheshire Methodism, 1750-1830', in J. Obelkevich, L. Roper and R. Samuel (eds), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (London, 1987).
41 William W. Dean, 'The Methodist class meeting: the significance of its decline", Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 43 (1981), p. 43.
42 See, for example, Stovin, Journals, pp. 28, 119.
43 Leslie F. Church, The Early Methodist People, 2nd edn (London, 1949), pp. 153-81; Thomas Shaw, A History of Cornish Methodism (Truro, 3967), pp. 21-4; David L. Watson, The Early Methodist Class Meeting (Nashville, 1985), chs 4-5. For an instructive American parallel, see Gregory A. Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: the Domestication of American. Methodism (Bloomington, 1993).
44 John Wesley, quoted in Philip J. Greven, The Protestant Temperament (New York, 1977), p. 127.
45 Cf. Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington, 1986), pp. 109, 127, 130-5.
46 John Angell James, The Family Monitor, Or a Help to Domestic Happiness (Birmingham, 1828), p. 17; Brewin Grant, The Dissenting World: an Autobiography, 2nd edn (London, 1869), p. 12.
47 Claudia Nelson, Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850-1910 (Athens, 1995); John Tosh, 'Authority and nurture in middle-class fatherhood'. Gender & History 8 (1996), pp. 48-64 (see above, Chapter 6).
48 Abelove, Evangelist of Desire, pp. 49-58; Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, vols 1-2 (New York, 1984-6).
49 Paul Sangster,. Pity My Simplicity: the Evangelical Revival and the Religious Education of Children, 1738-1800 (London, 1963); Greven, Protestant Temperament, pp. 32-43, 156-7; Kathtyn Kish Skiar, Catharine Seacher: a Study in American Domesticity (New York, 1976), pp. 153, 260.
50 Isaac Holden to Margaret Holden, 26 Nov. 1856, 10 June 1858 and 14 April 1859, in E.H. Illingworth (ed.), The Holden-Illingworth Letters (Bradford, 1927).
51 John Angell James, Female Piety (1856), quoted in; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 115.
52 David Newsome, The Parting of Friends (London, 1966), pp. 32-6; Standish Meacham,.Henry Thornton of Clapham (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 49-53; J.B.B. Clarke (ed.), An Account of the Infancy, Religious and Literary Life of Adam Clarke, 3 vols (London, 1833)2, p. 38; Rosman, The Evangelicals and Culture, p, 107; G.E. Sargent, Home Education (London, 1854), pp. 16, 26.
53 Sarah Ellis, The Mothers of England (London, 1843), pp. 27, 160, 366. See also Nelson, Invisible Men, pp. 14-16; Steven Mintz, A Prison of Expectations: the Family in Victorian Culture (New York, 1983), pp. 27-39.
54 Quoted in V.A.C. Gatrell, 'The commercial middle class in Manchester, c. 1820-1857' ( PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1971), pp. 44-5.
55 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 113.