ABSTRACT
Mid-Victorian Britain has long been known as a period peculiarly dominated by the ideal of domesticity. If the conduct of women was more subject to criticism by the standards of domesticity, so too was the conduct of men, both within and outside the family. Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population paid great attention, as Mary Poovey recently noted, to the importance of encouraging domesticity as a way of 'civilizing' the labouring class, in particular working-class men, dangerously prone to drink, vagrancy, riot and violence generally. Feminism's dictum that 'the personal is political' brought the history of the family and relations between men and women from the margins to the centre of historical enquiry. W. L. Burn's brilliant insights into the expanding role of legal disciplines in the nineteenth century were for some years largely ignored, but in recent years this situation has changed.
