ABSTRACT
The exhortations take a tone of earnestness and urgency that is typical of the rhetoric addressed to Victorian girls. Advice literature and novels alike emphasized the practical and spiritual importance of the role of middle-class daughter and sister, who was instructed to be mindful at all times of the good that she might do within the family. As Judith Rowbotham has pointed out, the expansion in the 1880s of understandings of acceptable behaviours for young women of the middle classes often ‘merely made it possible for women to fulfil their duty to their families via the domestic role better and even more professionally’. In a changing world, the possibility that daughters might cease to be committed to being ‘ideal’ seemed to many parents, mothers as well as fathers, a recipe for social chaos. It comes only once and is quickly passed, but the way in which it is spent affects the whole of the after life.
