Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907

During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father?s authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well as from novels. Arguing that Victorian novelists reinvent patriarchy by recourse to conduct books, biography, religious manuals, political speeches, and professional writing in the fields of history and science, Jenkins offers interdisciplinary case studies of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Hardy. Jenkins?s book contributes to our understanding of the part played by fathers in the Victorian cultural imagination, and sheds new light on the structures underlying the Victorian novel.

Introduction; Part I Traditional Authority; Chapter 1 Elizabeth Gaskell Writes a Father’s Life; Chapter 2 A Father’s Conduct: George Meredith and the Book-within-a-Book; Part II Charismatic Authority; Chapter 3 “An Attitude of Decent Reverence”: Thackeray and the Father at Prayer; Chapter 4 “Lay Hold of Them by Their Fatherhood”: George Eliot, Persuasion, and Abstraction; Part III Legal-Rational Authority; Chapter 5 Samuel Butler at the Museum; Chapter 6 “Preserve the Shadow of the Form”: Hardy’s Palimpsests; conclusion The Father as “Type”;

Melissa Shields Jenkins is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA.