Parenting in England 1760-1830

Parenting in England 1760-1830
Author: Joanne Bailey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2012-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191623717

Parenting in England is the first study of the world of parenting in late Georgian England. The author, Joanne Bailey, traces ideas about parenthood in a Christian society that was responding to new cultural trends of sensibility, romanticism and domesticity, along with Enlightenment ideas about childhood and self. All these shaped how people, from the poor to the genteel, thought about themselves as parents, and remembered their own parents. With meticulous attention to detail, Bailey illuminates the range of intense emotions provoked by parenthood by investigating a rich array of sources from memoirs and correspondence, to advice literature, fiction, and court records, to prints, engravings, and ballads. Parenting was also a profoundly embodied experience, and the book captures the effort, labour, and hard work it entailed. Such parental investment meant that the experience was fundamental to the forging of national, familial, and personal identities. It also needed more than two parents and this book uncovers the hitherto hidden world of shared parenting. At all levels of society, household and kinship ties were drawn upon to lighten the labours of parenting. By revealing these emotional and material parental worlds, what emerges is the centrality of parenthood to mental and physical well-being, reputation, public and personal identities, and to transmitting prized values across generations. Yet being a parent was a contingent experience adapting from hour to hour, year to year, and child to child. It was at once precarious, as children and parents succumbed to fatal diseases and accidents, yet it was also enduring because parent-child relationships were not ended by death: lost children and parents lived on in memory.

Evangelicals and Culture

Evangelicals and Culture
Author: Doreen Rosman
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725246511

Nineteenth-century evangelicals have often been dismissed as anti-intellectual and philistine. This book draws on periodicals, memoirs, and letters to discover how far this was true of British evangelicals between 1790 and 1833. It examines their leisure pursuits along with their enjoyment of art, music, literature, and study, and concludes that they shared the thought and taste of their contemporaries to a far greater extent than is usually acknowledged. What is more, their theology encouraged such activities. Evangelicals regarded recreations which engaged the mind or which could be pursued within the safety of the home as more concordant with spirituality than "sensual" or "worldly" pleasures. Nevertheless, their faith did militate against culture and learning. Some evangelicals dismissed all non-religious pursuits as "vanity," since their deep-rooted otherworldliness made them suspicious of anything that did not contribute to eternal well-being. A new generation adopted a more rigid attitude to the Bible, which made them unwilling to examine new ideas. In the last resort, even the most cultured evangelicals were unable to reconcile their delight in the arts with their world-denying theology.

Evangelicals and Culture

Evangelicals and Culture
Author: Doreen M Rosman
Publisher: James Clarke & Company
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2012-07-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0227900987

Nineteenth-century evangelicals have often been dismissed as antiintellectual and philistine. This book draws on periodicals, memoirs and letters to discover how far this was true of British evangelicals between 1790 and 1833. It examines their leisure pursuits along with their enjoyment of art, music, literature, and study, and concludes that they shared the thought and taste of their contemporaries to a far greater extent than is always acknowledged. What is more, their theology encouraged such activities. Evangelicals regarded recreations which engaged the mind, or which could be pursued within the safety of the home, as more concordant with spirituality than 'sensual' or 'worldly' pleasures. Nevertheless, their faith did militate against culture and learning. Some evangelicals dismissed all nonreligious pursuits as 'vanity', since their deep rooted otherworldliness made them suspicious of anything which did not contribute to eternal well-being. A new generation adopted a more rigid attitude to the Bible, which made them unwilling to examine new ideas. In the last resort, even the most cultured evangelicals were unable to reconcile their delight in the arts with their world-denying theology.