Editors:
Expands our understanding of the pillars of family history in Britain from the sixteenth to twentieth century
Utilises an inter-disciplinary approach to explore the ways that families were formed and responded to challenges they faced
Argues that families and households had porous boundaries and were essentially fluid and able to reconstitute themselves
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Economies of the Family
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Front Matter
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Family Processes
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This book explores the ways that families were formed and re-formed, and held together and fractured, in Britain from the sixteenth to twentieth century. The chapters build upon the argument, developed in the 1990s and 2000s, that the nuclear family form, the bedrock of understandings of the structure and function of family and kinship units, provides a wholly inadequate lens through which to view the British family. Instead the volume's contributors point to families and households with porous boundaries, an endless capacity to reconstitute themselves, and an essential fluidity to both the form of families, and the family and kinship relationships that stood in the background. This book offers a re-reading, and reconsideration of the existing pillars of family history in Britain. It examines areas such as: Scottish kinship patterns, work patterns of kin in Post Office families, stepfamily relations, the role of family in managing lunatic patients, and the fluidity associated with a range of professional families in the nineteenth century.
Chapter 8 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com
Reviews
“This is an illuminating, valuable, and important work for researchers and students alike.” (Joanne Begiato, Family & Community History, Vol. 23 (1), 2020)
Editors and Affiliations
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Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Carol Beardmore
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School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Cara Dobbing
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School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Steven King
About the editors
Carol Beardmore holds a Part-Time Lectureship at De Montfort University, an Associate Lectureship with the Open University, and a Research Fellowship at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research interests include the role of the land agent in rural communities and the history of the family as it relates to working relationships within general practice.
Cara Dobbing is based at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research examines the patients who circulated in and out of the Garlands Lunatic Asylum from its establishment in 1862 until the beginning of the First World War. Central to her work is recounting the pauper experience of insanity.
Steven King is Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Leicester, UK. He has wide ranging interests in historical demography and the history of the family, particularly in relation to the English and Welsh poor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His most recent work in this area is Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s to 1830s (2018).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910
Editors: Carol Beardmore, Cara Dobbing, Steven King
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04855-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-04854-9Published: 16 April 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-04855-6Published: 03 April 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 292
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Social History, History of Britain and Ireland, History of Modern Europe, Sociology of Family, Youth and Aging