ABSTRACT
This chapter examines education as a middle-class family value by analysing the life choices of a widow and her aspirational son in nineteenth-century Finland. The chapter discusses the ways in which these two individuals used education and other middle-class values as a means of social differentiation and the methods by which they sought to secure their social status by networking with ‘the right kind of people’. Building on unique source material, such as the surviving diaries of the young man in question, the chapter reveals how shared family values can support the aspirations of individual family members on the one hand and restrict their choices on the other. On a broader level, the chapter sheds light on the subtle mechanisms of the formation of a heterogeneous middle class in a modernising society.
