ABSTRACT
The Victorian cult of the home tends to evoke largely female associations. Indeed the popular image of Victorian domesticity is so focused on women and children that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that their needs were its governing rationale. The presiding image of a Victorian family Christmas was the Virgin and Child. Farming, artisanal production and professional life were all carried out from the home, and many middle-class Victorian men could recall a childhood spent in a working atmosphere, in a mill-house or over a shop, the basis for their family's livelihood was plain to see, and as children they had materially contributed to it. The Victorian father is often taken to have been an unsmiling patriarch lording it over submissive wife and cowed children. Domesticity, like other features of Victorian-ism, became more rigid and formulaic with every decade.
