ABSTRACT
The family is the first community we know, and it takes the shape of Mother. The government of the mother over her family is an uncomfortable reality that has been exalted to celestial proportions, denounced as the source of all psychic ill, and explained away. In “The Paterfamilias of the Victorian Governing Classes,” David Roberts dilutes the administrative power of so many Victorian mothers by locating its true source in the absent, omnipotent father, whose maternal delegate is merely provisional and thus easily removed. But Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management assures its enormous Victorian audience that the rule of “the mistress” is absolute and her presence more insistently pervasive than God’s:
Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment … She ought always to remember that she is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment; and that it is by her conduct that its whole internal policy is regulated. She is, therefore, a person of far more importance in a community than she usually thinks she is. On her pattern her daughters model themselves; by her counsels they are directed; through her virtues all are honoured;—“Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.” 1
