ABSTRACT
Domestic units bonded through neither blood nor marriage are so numerous in Dickens’s work, they outweigh depictions of what we have come to describe as the ‘nuclear’ family of married parents and offspring. The alternative presentations of kinship that proliferate in Victorian fiction displace the biological family as a natural given and demand a further debunking of the fantasy that the Victorian era enshrined a narrowly conceived form of family. In an important correc tive to the belief in a monolithic Victorian family model, George Behlmer has argued that ‘this reputed golden age of domesticity saw intense if inconclusive combat over the meaning of family and home’; Leonore Davidoff et aL suggest similarly that ‘the meanings and values attached to family even within the same group could be varied and often contradictory. The model of family harmony was in tension with more radical ideas about familial relations such as the beliefs of Owenite socialists’; while John Gillis posits that ‘the early nineteenth century saw the most sustained period of experimenting with family and mar riage prior to the 1960s and 70s’.1 As these theorists have recognized, in periods of rapid social change an imagined domestic space of stability and continuity becomes particularly appealing, so that - both then and now - there is some cultural investment in the idea of a contented grouping of parents and children. This kind of imaginative thinking
Reconfiguring the Domestic: Bachelor Dads 23
informs the 1871 census definition: ‘The natural family is founded by marriage and consists, in its complete state, of husband, wife, and children.’2 There was, as Behlmer observes, a major disparity between this statement and the census’s earlier findings: ‘A household [. .. ] frequently sheltered individuals beyond the nuclear family core - servants, apprentices and lodgers, not to mention distant kin. In 1831 just thirty-six percent of households contained a married couple, at least one child, and no one else.’3 This gap between the definition of the family and the lived experience immediately calls into question the use of the term ‘natural family’, and points to the incoherence of conceptions of a ‘complete’ family as neither a statistical majority nor an unchallenged ideal.
