The Fond and the Feckless: Paternity, Sentiment and Poverty in late Victorian and Edwardian Culture

This study achieves two inter-related aims to provide an innovative and unique approach to understanding of paternity among the working classes and the poor in late Victorian and Edwardian culture. First, it examines the ideological underpinning of the 'father' identity and the extent to which conceptions of paternity were inextricable from understandings of manliness and men's rights and responsibilities. Secondly, the research examines fathers within the inter-personal context of domestic family life. Crucially, the research establishes a relationship between these two threads of fatherhood to demonstrate that whilst the duties of fatherhood were instrumental in claims for citizenship and welfare, fathers also used their role as providers and protectors to articulate attachment to their families. Overwhelmingly, the historiography of working-class family life has tended to privilege the relationship between mothers and their children. Within this framework, the working-class father has featured primarily as a wage earner whose livelihood defined the status of his dependents. This research questions the supposedly peripheral role of fathers within the emotional and domestic life of the working-class family. In particular, it challenges the tendency to examine working-class childhoods through the lens of maternal relations with offspring.
The research identifies fathers' space, material and imagined, within the gendered dynamics of the working-class home. By pursuing fathers' engagement with family life, the home as a maternal domain became less clear. Nonetheless, men's (and children's) perceptions of the domestic interior as a feminised space enabled fathers and children to indulge in horseplay, coddling and, sometimes, weeping without compromising men's masculine status. Similarly, the everyday routine of domesticity and childhood pivoted around father time: when men got up for and returned from work, when they ate, washed and had time away from paid employment. Conceptions of masculinity rooted in domestic absence (because of work) were renegotiated when old age forced men to adapt or resign their working selves. Likewise, welfare records suggest that (especially widowed) grandfathers were pivotal in some family formations as providers of childcare and advocates for the family in encounters with official or charitable organisations.
Crucially, welfare and institutional records suggested that, beyond breadwinning, fathers were not deemed particularly necessary or even desirable to family life. The status of a breadwinning father could act as guarantor for a family's respectability but, where breadwinning faltered, the presence of the father actually became a potential obstacle to welfare; women could negotiate charitable networks more easily without having to account for an unemployed man. Conversely, when agencies sought donations towards schemes for sheltering and feeding homeless men, the only way to constitute the adult homeless male as a sympathetic subject was, first, to depict him as a helpless child and, secondly, to disassociate him from any possible dependents. Furthermore, the sheer extent to which fathers were presumed to be absent at the bottom of the social scale meant that welfare agencies focused on these families adopted a language of paternalism that shaped philanthropic rationale and their engagement with families. The research also locates the absent or abusive father in relation to dominant narratives of paternity. Even where the presumption of absentee fathers does not resonate with records of charities' recipients, welfare agencies tended to categorise 'fathers' as breadwinners whilst men who failed to provide lost their legitimacy as fathers. Absence in this sense could operate in both a literal and imagined context.
Since an ESRC funded pilot project on the Northwest of England on breadwinning, further research was completed. The application seeks support for writing up the extended project.

The main beneficiaries for this research fall into the following groups:
1) Policy makers and NGOs. Social workers and fathers' campaigners currently working with 'attachment' theories explore the necessity of children forming bonds with fathers at early stages of life. Indeed, the government Surestart initiative and the Fatherhood Institute's support for attachment suggests a conception that unless bonds are formed early in a child's life, fathers are more likely to 'fail'. This research unpicks the representation of the 'problem family' to ask why state and welfare agencies constructed poorer families thus, to what purpose such representations were used, how far recorded contact with such families perpetuated or challenged negative stereotypes and, where possible, how members of such families responded to agencies and how they articulated an identity both in relation to a 'problem' status and outside it. In light of media reports surrounding the death of 'Baby P' and the almost imperceptible slip among broadsheet commentators from the particular to a general white underclass, investigating the historical context for social and cultural meanings attached to 'the problem family' would seem particularly pertinent.
2) Homeless policy. Analysis of the homeless during this project raised significant questions concerning how social and welfare responses to homelessness are heavily gendered and highlights continuities in the ways agencies depict men and homelessness: first, men operate to determine the un/deserving status of their dependents and, secondly, they are overwhelmingly depicted as agents of familial decline.
3) Fathers' rights campaigners. Overall, the project results have broader application pertaining to fathers' rights, roles and responsibilities. The significance of understandings of paternity rooted in maintenance suggests that elite late Victorians and Edwardians valued working-class fatherhood primarily as a financial commitment rather than a moral or biological responsibility, although these components clearly interlinked. This perception was, however, rooted in a skewed vision of working and lower-class inter-personal dynamics. The implications of this for legal and family justice systems that are perceived to privilege maternal contact and prioritise fathers' financial roles are obvious.
The strategy for ensuring communication and engagement is in place. I have established with Dr. Helen Nicholson, MMU, a network of academics (from multiple disciplines in Humanities, Arts, Law and Social Sciences) and practitioners (social work, medical and legal profession, fathers' rights activists, a film maker and a school literacy programme) who have expressed interest in participating in a series of four seminars over the course of a year, culminating in a one day conference.
I have made contact with the Fatherhood Institute and intend to submit a short paper to the website History and Policy focusing on the homeless research will also give media and policy makers access to the research. Since beginning this research, I have sought to disseminate initial findings through the media (participation in a BBC4 documentary; 2 page feature in The Times; interview on BBC regional television and radio). As this represents only a fraction of the research, I have established good contacts for further dissemination as and when appropriate. Notably, a press release is planned for the screening of the first 'A Century of Fatherhood' episode and the director of Testimony Films is currently negotiating with The Guardian for a short comment piece by myself on the Victorian origins of our conceptions of father's rights, responsibilities and sentimental lives. Evidently, I need the Fellowship to facilitate writing the overall research material into a monograph for academic credibility.