Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780-1920. By Leonore Davidoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 416 pp.)

Abstract

Siblings loom large in our collective consciousness and in fiction: think Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, or Tom and Maggie Tulliver. Yet, as Leonore Davidoff demonstrates, siblings have been neglected in the academic disciplines (anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis and history) that might have been expected to pay attention to them. It has been the relationship between parents and children that has attracted scholars. For psychoanalysis this has been central, and so has it also for historians who have endlessly debated whether parents in the past loved their children. A study of siblings is therefore extremely welcome and necessarily pioneering. Davidoff concentrates on English bourgeois families in a long nineteenth century, using their diaries, letters and other biographical material and, as she nears the twentieth century, oral history, to reveal the nature and changing character of sibling relationships. She also analyses the 1881 census to identify the characteristics of middle-class families. A typical couple in this social stratum before the later nineteenth century had a large family with a considerable age span between the oldest and the youngest. The mother might be pregnant with her youngest at the same time as her eldest daughter was with her first-born. When Jane Strachey gave birth to her youngest, James, in 1887 her eldest daughter, aged twenty-eight, already had two children. James became their “Uncle Baby”. Davidoff brilliantly evokes the domestic life of these large families, space and privacy at a premium, the siblings splitting up into groups by age and gender, elder children mothering or fathering and often teaching their younger sisters and brothers—for Edward Lear his sister Ann, twenty-two years his senior, was “my mother”. This world of what Davidoff calls “long” families began to wane away quite rapidly in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as middle-class families, for reasons which are still puzzling, began to limit family size.