‘We weren’t happy, but we were a family’

Abstract

This chapter takes a look at how the life story sometimes takes the form of a renegotiation, a reassessment — and not always an entirely coherent one — of a Victorian childhood through twentieth-century eyes, rather than a straightforward narration of earlier life events. For those born in the late Victorian or Edwardian eras, their life story might be created in the 1960s, 1970s, or even the 1980s — a period of rising affluence and rapidly changing family values. Although Victorian families were not necessarily demonstrative and affectionate in ways that are recognisable to modern readers, these relationships mattered. Writers may not have consistently reflected upon how they felt about their parents, but many nonetheless wrote enough about their experiences of family life for us to attempt to explore the emotional fabric of family life. Of familial relationships, it was those between parents and children that the autobiographers returned to most regularly, and of these, relationships with fathers are in many ways the most straightforward to comprehend.