‘Speechless with Grief’: Bereavement and the Working-Class Father, c. 1880–1914

Abstract

Many working-class families from the middle of the nineteenth century were typified by a sexual division of labour. It is unsurprising, then, that the historiography of working-class family life has tended to privilege the relationship between mothers and their children.1 Within this framework, the working-class father has featured primarily as a wage-earner whose livelihood defined the status of his dependants. For instance, Karl Ittman’s Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England (1995) approached the working-class father and husband through the lens of his occupational status, examining how the identity of the ‘provider’ shaped and interrelated with a political and trade-union consciousness. Ittman does not remove fathers entirely from a domestic sphere, noting that the working-class family cannot be reduced to an economic unit when so little is known about how work and family interact. None the less, fathers feature little in his analysis of the interpersonal dynamics of working-class life beyond a conception of paternal duty: discipline and breadwinning.2