Title: Fathers in Victorian fiction /
Authors: McKnight, Natalie.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars,
Year: 2011
Subjects: English fiction History and criticism; Fathers in literature; Fatherhood in literature.
Abstract: This book examines the changing roles of fathers in the nineteenth century as seen in the lives and fiction of Victorian authors. Fatherhood underwent unprecedented change during this period. The Industrial Revolution moved work out of the home for many men, diminishing contact between fathers and their children. Yet fatherhood continued to be seen as the ultimate expression of masculinity, and being involved with the lives of one's children was essential to being a good father. Conflicting and frustrating expectations of fathers and the growing disillusionment with other paternal authorities such as church and state yielded memorable portrayals of fathers from the best novelists of the age.The essays in this volume explore how Victorian authors (the Brontes, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, and Elizabeth Sewall and Mary Augusta Ward) responded to these tensions in their lives and in their fiction. The stern Victorian father cliché persisted, but it was countered by imaginative, involved, albeit faulty fathers and surrogate fathers. This volume poses fathering questions that are still relevant today: What does it mean to be a good father? And, with distrust in patriarchal authorities continuing to increase, are there any sources of authority left that one can trust?
Contents: Introduction : Undermining the Victorian father / Natalie McKnight -- Father of the Brontës : romantic or Victorian? / Christine Alexander -- Dickens's Hard times : the father as tragic clown / Michael Hollington -- Dickens's philosophy of fathering / Natalie McKnight -- Victorian fatherhood and clerical conscience : crises of paternal authority in Gaskell and Trollope / Elizabeth Bridgham -- Bless me, father : religion and the good girl in Elizabeth Sewell's Margaret Percival and Mary Augusta Ward's Helbeck of Bannisdale / Meoghan Cronin -- Buried secrets : lost fathers in Bleak house / Monica M. Young-Zook -- "The rights 'o things by my own fireside" : masculinity and fatherhood in George Eliot's fiction / Natalie B. Cole -- "You are 'father,' you know" : Hardy's palimpsests / Melissa Jenkins -- Victorian fathers on film : Dickens's fathers as the precursor of the modern sensitive dad / Regina Hansen -- Conclusion : Just wait until your father comes home / Natalie McKnight.