Pets and family relationships in twentieth-century British diaries

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the twentieth-century British family life was transformed through changes in family size, relationships and the development of new expectations about emotions and behaviour. But in this important social transformation one factor has gone almost entirely unremarked by family historians – the role of animals in family life. Sociologists and psychologists have demonstrated that pets played an important and complex role in British family life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However our investigation of the interactions between household members and their pets up to 1960 shows that the personal and familial relationships of pet-keeping could be just as charged and multi-valent. We use three long-run diaries from 1925 to 1960 to investigate the place and role of pets in the family. In spite of some methodological problems, diaries remain a crucial source for investigating pet-keeping in family life. Although, in these cases, the entries were sometimes perfunctory they were also at times rich in expressions of emotions and affinities in relation to animals, allowing us to explore the role that animals played in family dynamics. The long chronological coverage of each diary has provided the opportunity of examining the role that pets played at different stages in the lives of the writers, and how animals became more or less important for the families at different times. All three diaries demonstrate the emotional attachment that individuals had with their pets but also, crucially, how bringing animals into family narratives adds to our understanding of the relationships and interactions in modern family life.