The history of the family has become the source of lively controversy and Ralph Houlbrooke's study has made a major contribution to the debate. Thorough investigations reveal the attitudes and aspirations of all levels of society set within economic, political and religious contexts and developments within the period.

Mr Richard Whitestone is English and a successful businessman based for many years in Oporto. Despite his many years’ residence in Portugal, he remains resolutely English in his tastes and in his accent. His favourite reading is Tristram Shandy, which he reads and re-reads constantly. A widower for many years, he lives with his children Jenny and Carlos. Jenny is the angel of the house and wise beyond her 21 years. Carlos is 18 and much given to carousing with his friends and to falling – very briefly – in love with whichever pretty girl he sees. He is the despair of his father, but his sister believes in him despite all, because she knows he has a good heart. One day, during Carnival, Carlos meets a young woman at a masked ball and falls in love. As ever, the path of true love runs very erratically indeed. Júlio Dinis is sometimes referred to as the Portuguese Trollope, and this, the first novel he wrote is a keen-eyed evocation of the narrow world of nineteenth-century bourgeois Oporto, but also, and more importantly, it is a brilliant account of family life, in all its flawed beauty.

"First published in 2014 by the Penguin Group"--Title page verso.

A history and analysis of a mysterious dissenting fellowship in early modern England.

Ann Alston focuses on the ideological construction of the family in children's literature. She suggests that despite the tales of family woe portrayed in children's literature, the desire for the happy, contended nuclear family remains inherent within the ideological subtexts of children's literature.

r s1mily Ties provides a vivid and accessible introduction to the dynamics of life in English families of all ranks from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of World War I. Sections on methods, approaches and sources allow readers new to the study of the past to explore some of the historian's fundamental concerns: cause and effect; continuity and change and the nature and reliability of evidence. The chronological and thematic organization of the book enables readers to examine a number of sub-themes such as the history of childhood or of marriage. Combining extensive contemporary quotations and an unusual variety of illustrations with a wide range of written and material sources, the book provides a fascinating insight into the history of the family and encourages the reader to become a sceptical and imaginative investigator, prepared to venture beyond the historian's traditional documentary sources.

This book 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. Thus this book shows that long before the building of a modern welfare state, English homes had become targets of regulation: the Englishman's castle possessed neither moat nor drawbridge. It also reveals the extent to which working-class parents participated in a cultural "policing" process; the Victorian poor were never the inert lump of humanity that many contemporaries, and some modern scholars, have supposed. Nor did the weight of schemes to regulate and elevate family conduct fall exclusively on the poor. The book demonstrates that middle-class reformers were not shy about dictating the terms of good parenting to their own class. Charting the origins, elaborations, and limitations of the concept of theideal home is no antiquarian exercise, for the social policy implications bound up with the myth of family privacy persist today. Intellectual critics of the "therapeutic state" such as Christopher Lasch and Michel Foucault hold that the rise of tutelary "experts" -- from social workers to public health inspectors and juvenile court judges -- has subverted parental autonomy. Similarly, populist conservative politicians in both England and the United States attack "welfarist" social programs because they appear to undercut the sense of individual responsibility that allegedly once flourished during a golden age of family strength.

Uses excerpts from private diaries to depict seventeenth century life in England, and covers infancy, adolescence, courtship, marriage, old age, and death

In the early years of the last century, two brothers, Charles and Edward Greene, settled in Berkhamsted, a small country town thirty miles from London. There they were to found a remarkable dynasty - fathering twelve children between then - each of whom were to lead varied, well-documented and extraordinary lives. This book explores for the first time this generation of the Greene family in colourful detail - their relationships and shared history, and their lives - as explorers, writers, doctors, spies, politicians and much more. There is Graham, one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century; Hugh, the Daily Telegraph's Berlin corespondent in the years leading up to WW2, and later Director-General of the BBC; Raymond, a brilliant mountaineer and medical man who took part in the 1933 Everest expedition; their sister Elisabeth, MI6 agent, enlisting family and friends into the secret service; cousin Ben, a pacifist and Labour Party activist who was interned in 1940 at the same time as Oswald Mosley; his sister, Barbara, who spent the war in Germany; and their younger brother Felix, a pioneer of radio journalism and apologist for Communist China, who moved to a commune in California with his cousin Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley; and Herbert, the black sheep of the family, fantasist and amateur spy. Interlacing biography, history, high adventure and scenes from literary life, Shades of Greene provides a riveting insight into the self-confident, enterprising, upper middle-class English world that flourished between the 1920s and the 1970s: and into a truly remarkable tribe.

Family Fortunes has become a seminal text in class and gender history. Published to wide critical acclaim in 1987, its influence in the field continues to be extensive. It has cast new light on the perception of middle-class society and gender relations between 1780 and 1850. This revised edition contains a substantial new introduction, placing the original survey in its historiographical context. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall evaluate the readings their text has received and broaden their study by taking into account recent developments and shifts in the field. They apply current perceptions of history to their original project, and see new motives and meanings emerge that reinforce their argument.