The history of images of the family in the Georgian period. A presentation based on my book Parenting in England 1760-1830: emotions, identity, generations, OUP, 2013.

1. Visualising parents in Georgian
England:‘In the bosom of the family’
Dr Joanne Bailey, Oxford Brookes University
This presentation explores the intense emotions Georgian parents and
children provoked in each other and the ways in which systems of
feeling were shaped by the family and within familial relationships.
It is based on the meanings of the emotions associated with
parenthood found in autobiographies, correspondence, and visual and
textual culture.
This opens up emotions associated with parenthood beyond love to
incorporate anger, anxiety, grief and such historically specific forms of
‘feeling’ as tenderness, distress, and benevolence.

2. EMBODIED PARENTHOOD
Sensibility and feelings
My presentation uses an embodied approach to parenting
to undermine assumptions about gendered parenthood
and parenting.
The gendered stereotypes of mothers providing physical
care and fathers offering material care and government
become far more multi-layered and complex from this
perspective.
Loving arms and nurturing bosoms were also paternal, and
the labouring bodies praised for providing for children
were maternal as well as paternal.

3. The Lady’s Magazine,
1780s
EMBODIED PARENTHOOD: SENSIBILITY AND
FEELINGS
 The embodied, demonstrative nature of parents'
love for their children, was driven by the cultural
force of sensibility. It praised feelings – like
sympathy, affection, distress - and people were
encouraged to express them in actions and
behaviours.
 The tender parent was visualised experiencing
his or her feelings of parental love in the body,
through tears and nervous and physical
sensations: quiverings, blushing, swooning - all
typical expressions of refined sensibility
 So images of tender parental love were also
sentimentally corporeal.

4. A scrap (1815) aimed at entertaining and educating children –depicts maternal
loving arms feeding the infant and rocking it to sleep.

5. The father's body was also the medium of his love through tears, hugs and
clasping, clinging arms during sensibility’s reign. (1819 scrap)

6. Francis Wheatley,The
Fisherman’s Return, 1795
The best loved was in this well-known stanza
fromThomas Gray, ElegyWritten in a Country
Churchyard, 1752:
For them no more the blazing Hearth shall burn,
Or busy Houswife ply her Evening Care:
No Children run to lisp their Sire's Return,
Or climb his Knees the envied Kiss to share.
Illustration: 1862
The popularity of the demonstrative father is
revealed in descriptions of children at their
father's knees.
In visual and literary versions this was typically
a father returning home after labour.

7. William Redmore Bigg, Saturday Evening, 1795
It was these father-child embraces at meeting that artists portrayed.
InWilliam Redmore Bigg’s The Husbandman’s Return from Labour, the
father delightedly lofts his infant in the air to kiss.

8. CULTURAL FUNCTION OF IMAGINED RURAL
LABOURING PARENTS
 Images stimulated ‘feeling’ in readers and viewers - the purpose of the
project of sensibility. The rural, devoted, hard-working father, the
waiting, domestic mother, and the loving happy children symbolised the
truly feeling family of sensibility.
 For a ‘polite’ audience rural labouring parents embodied the ideal
qualities of the sensible family without the tensions inherent in
wealthier lifestyles - where it was necessary to be in the ‘world’ to be
successful but also to protect oneself from its risks by a domestic
retirement devoted to children and altruistic acts of benevolence.
 Evidence that people enacted with the image:
◦ Genteel women stitched cheerful rural labourers enjoying domestic idylls
into their embroidery in the later eighteenth century, following pastoral
trends of painting.
◦ The Irish gentlewoman Dorothea Herbert evoked the delights of her family
life through the imagery. She headed chapter 40 of her memoir, describing
1785:‘Rural felicity,’ rhapsodising that ‘We Now sat down quietly in the
DomesticWay’ with no company, spending time singing, reading poetry,
novels, sermons, and history, Embroidering, drawing, laughing and idling.’

9. CULTURAL FUNCTION OF IMAGINED
RURAL LABOURING PARENTS
 Images of rural labouring parents and children symbolised a stable
social and gender order - this was what the higher social ranks
wanted them to be: industrious, cheerful, modest, quiet, neat, sober
and unthreatening.
 When the labouring man cheerfully arrived home he did not just
illustrate that work was intrinsically fulfilling,or that its pains were
compensated by his familial pleasures, he indicated that he willingly
engaged in the existing social hierarchy, upon which successful
society rested.
 Thus this orderly vision was co-opted by several groups and
important conceptual site for writers on political economy,
philanthropy, and poor law.
 The image was politicised in England in the 1790s in reaction to
revolution abroad and its threat at home.
 For loyalists the idealised rural family was a vehicle of patriotism
displaying the virtues of the labouring classes and illustrating their
superior conditions to their counterparts in France.

10. This cottage scene also symbolised what needed to be protected from political
upheaval.A particularly well-known example is James Gillray’s The Blessings of
Peace,The Curses ofWar, 1795.

11. CULTURAL FUNCTION OF IMAGINED
RURAL LABOURING PARENTS
 The motif was not only an ideological tool to keep the poor in
their place. Loving families’ appeal spanned several social ranks,
disseminated more broadly through cheap print by the early 1790s.
 Memoirists from humble origins took up this language to idealise
their families. John Bailey began his memoir [1810] explaining that
after his parents were married his mother left service ‘and retired
to her mother’s rural cot, in the village of Slinfold’ where he was
born in 1778.
 In 1804 in Ipswich Workhouse, the poet Ann Candler wrote: ‘My
daughter Lucy is married, and lives at Copdock in this county, and
is, I believe, in the true sense of the words, the contented happy
Cottager! Her husband is a very sober industrious man’.
 In 19c such ‘Cottage-door’ images became politicised for urban and
rural labouring ranks - showing humble cottagers achieving
domestic happiness in the face of gruelling labour.

13. CULTURAL FUNCTION OF IMAGINED
‘FEELING’ PARENTS
 Emotive images of parents deployed
to promote patriotism or political and
social stability.
 Although men in the regular forces
were preferably bachelors, military
men were ‘domesticated’ in such
representations to stir patriotic
hearts.They were in the service of
the eighteenth-century nation -
symbolic defenders of home and
family.
 Husbands’ reluctance to part from
loving families was often portrayed. In
the Lady’s Magazine The Patriotic
Parting (1782), the man turns to wave
at his wife, their son sorrowfully
buries his head in his mother’s skirts.

14. EMOTIONAL POWER OF IMAGES OF PARENTS:
 Visualisations of parents held immense power for individuals,
influencing how these generations thought about their parents :
◦ In 1778 8-year old Eliza Fletcher’s father was a commissioner for enclosure and
away from home. Decades later she observed ‘I well remember the joy which my
father’s return, especially, diffused through all his little household’.
◦ Dorothea Herbert headed the chapter describing the aftermath of her father’s
death (a landed clergyman) with ‘For them no more the blazing Hearth shall burn | Or
Busy Huswife ply her Evening Care | No Children run to lisp their Sires return | Or climb
his knees the envied kiss to share. [From Thomas Gray’s Elegy]
◦ In old age the Irish novelist Sydney Morgan recalled: 'The songs taught me on my
father’s knee, have lost nothing of their power even to the present day’.
 It could structure parental self-identity. In the 1790sThomasWright
reconfigured Gray’s lines to refer to his deceased son who: “No more
shalt run to lisp thy sires return, | Or climb his knees the envied kiss
to share”. In doing so, he made himself the rural loving father.

15. NURTURING BOSOMS
Maternal and Paternal
My presentation now examines a specific phrase that was
often used in the period,– ‘nurturing bosoms’ to think more
specifically about the way that descriptions of parenting
drew on both feelings and bodies.
Not an innovative term, it nevertheless took on specific
meanings in Georgian culture.

16. MATERNAL BOSOMS - AFFECTION
 In fiction, infants burrowed in maternal bosoms. Juliet Grenville in the
eponymous novel by Henry Brooke, 1774,‘comes to the door, with her
children on either side, and one little babe looking and chuckling at her from
her bosom’.
 Memoirists identified with it. Ann Candler’s poem on the loss of her baby
son, invoked her feelings on first seeing him:‘Hope’s dawning beam my bosom
fill’d, |With fairy visions bright’.
Mary Robinson, actress turned author, evoked the
phrase three times in her memoir when describing her
response to her own daughter:At length the expected,
though, to me, most perilous moment arrived, which
awoke a new and tender interest in my bosom, which
presented to my fondly beating heart my child, - my
Maria. I cannot describe the sensations of my soul at the
moment when I presented the little darling to my bosom,
my maternal bosom; when I kissed its hands, its cheeks,
its forehead, as it nestled closely to my heart, and
seemed to claim that affection which has never failed to
warm it.

17. MATERNAL BOSOMS - NURSING
 Effusions about bosoms evoked
maternal breastfeeding
 Medical discourse promised that
maternal nursing would benefit
society by securing the better
health of children and mothers,
and would keep women usefully
occupied with their proper
function.
 It was naturalised as an inescapable
duty and thus 'wet nursing' was
criticised for rupturing the natural
bonds of motherhood because the
infant might love a wet-nurse more
than its mother, as well as for
endangering its health.

18. Yet the celebration of maternal nursing was part of the broader landscape
of maternity, not just a medical demand.
Its imagery was even invoked by mothers who did not breastfeed. In the
late 1760s Arabella Heatley wrote some agonised letters to her estranged
husband who had separated from her due to her infidelity, painfully
longing for her infant son to be returned to her bosom.
Here the personal merged with the public when her letters were
transformed into commodities, printed in volume seven of the Trials for
Adultery in 1779.The church court transcript of the couple’s separation
case [he sued her for adultery] was published In an earlier volume – and
it shows that she had not breast-fed her baby. For her the maternal
‘bosom’ was independent of the act of breastfeeding.

19. PATERNAL BOSOMS
 Parental bosoms were not just female , fathers frequently clasped
children to their paternal bosoms.
◦ When Reverend Primrose, Goldsmith’sVicar of Wakefield, recovered his
errant daughter he welcomed ‘my dearest lost one, my treasure, to your
poor old father’s bosom’.
 This demonstrates the second contemporary meaning of bosom. In its
modern usage, we use ‘bosom’ only as a polite euphemism for women’s
breasts.Yet in the period studied,‘bosom’ also had a more gender
neutral form, which described the human breast (chest) and the
enclosure formed by the breast and arms.
 Their ultimate role model - God was depicted as a father with 'arms of
love.' John Bailey [Baptist preacher] for example compared the solace
he found in God's bosom to that which the child found in its parent’s.
 The meaning of bosom as enclosure between breast and arms
originated in scriptural phrasing, as both ‘nurse’ and ‘nursing’ fathers
and mothers indicate. Indeed the nursing father was its most striking
invocation.

20. PATERNAL BOSOMS
 At its core was an image of nurturing fatherhood originating in The
Book of Numbers 11:12, where Moses complained about the burden
of leading his people through the desert:‘Have I conceived all this
people? Have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me,
Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking
child, unto the land which thou swarest unto their fathers’.
 The nursing father analogy served several purposes, both political
and religious.
◦ It had a long tradition of being deployed to invoke the legitimacy of patriarchal
power. In early-modern royal iconography and political ideology it explained why
subjects should acquiesce to a monarch’s rule. Both James I and Charles I, for
example, declared themselves ‘nursing’ fathers and Anglican sermons described
Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs thus.
◦ Handel - My Heart is Inditing, HWV 261 (Coronation Anthem #4) written for 1727
coronation of George II ends verse: Kings shall be thy nursing fathers/and queens
thy nursing mothers.
◦ It continued to be useful at the end of the 18th century for loyalists. In a sermon
published in 1792, Cornelius Bayley defended George III’s divine right to rule as ‘a
nursing father given’ by God.

21. PATERNAL BOSOMS (NURSING FATHERS)
 The metaphor also had religious functions.
◦ The monarch or magistrate as nursing father protected the true church and
suppressed false religions.
 Eighteenth-century commentators used it as a particularly corporeal
metaphor.
◦ In his sermon on the duties of Baptist ministers (1797), which related the duties of
ministers to the qualities of nursing fathers, John Ryland reminded ministers that the
nursing father undertook ‘long fatiguing marches’ during which he relieved his
tenderer partner ‘of the burden of her sucking infant’, by carrying ‘it in his bosom ...
for a very considerable period, till the child had acquired a degree of strength
proportioned to the toils of the difficult journey’.
 The culture of sensibility gave the term bosom further power ‘as the
seat of thoughts and feelings’.
 ThomasWright combined the archaic and the new in his declaration
that no real Christian would promote division ‘betwixt a father – a
tender and affectionate father – and the offspring of his own bowels.’

22. PATERNAL BOSOMS (NURSING FATHERS)
 Over the course of the eighteenth century the term nursing
fathers and mothers was applied more generally:
 It portrayed the protection offered by new forms of institutional care. A
charity sermon preached for the London Foundling Hospital in 1770
described a relieved mother handing over her infant into ‘the arms of
nursing fathers and nursing mothers more able to protect it than its own!’
 ‘Nursing’ was attenuated to mean support. In 1791, a commentator
explained that the vogue for ‘private plays’ was ‘a fashion which hath kings
and princes for its nursing fathers and queens and princesses for its nursing
mothers’. Here the royal family was condemned for supporting their own
amusement when they should be facilitating piety and national good.
 In a more secular form the qualities of the nursing father served to ennoble
more humble men. In Wordsworth’s Michael the motif signified the dignity
and capacity of feeling of a simple man - demonstrated by Michael’s depth
of love and care for his son ‘while he was a babe in arms, | Had done him
female service, not alone | For dalliance and delight, as is the use | of
Fathers, but with patient mind enforced | to acts of tenderness; and he had
rocked |his cradle with a woman’s gentle hand.’
 The nursing father had always been affectionate, but the phrase seems have
been used more often as an increasingly straightforward description of a
tender, emotionally-charged and practically engaged fatherhood from the
later eighteenth century.

23. PARENTAL IDENTIFICATION WITH
‘FEELING’
 When Elizabeth Shaw heard that her ill son,
travelling from home as a salesman, had
improved, she wrote with relief: ‘to say what
I felt for you is needless, as you never can
know till you are a parent and should you be
like some I know not even then’.
 Those who were educated or familiar with
literary conventions were most expansive in
their use of the rhetoric. Mary Robinson
declared that she was possessed ‘a too acute
sensibility’ from childhood. As such, her
memoirs were shaped by this cultural
identity. So, for instance, she said that the
birth of her first daughter awoke new
sensations in her soul.
 To be a feeling parent was also, therefore, a
mark of superiority and humanity.

24. PARENTAL IDENTIFICATION WITH
‘FEELING’
 Men did not define themselves as tearful fathers of feeling, but they did
profess to be ‘sensible men’.
 This was not specific to class or education. Pauper fathers who wrote to
their settlement parishes seeking relief in the early nineteenth century
talked of their suffering at seeing their children go without, and their
feeling hearts; a rhetorical strategy that was also surely intended to
appeal to higher-ranking parish authorities familiar with sensible and
Christian ideals of benevolence.
 Life-writers described themselves as nursing fathers, shorn of its
political and religious patriarchal meanings, to mean they literally nursed
their children.

25. PARENTAL IDENTIFICATION WITH
‘FEELING’
 Writing in the 1790s,William Hutton recalled the year
1758 with some pride over his achievements, business
and paternal:
 I procured all the intelligence I could relative to the
fabrication of paper; engaged an artist to make me a
model of a mill; attended to business; and nursed my
children; while the year ran round. On the 2nd of July,
Mrs. Hutton brought me another son, so that I had
now three to nurse; all of whom I frequently carried
together in my arms.This I could not do without a
smile; while he who had none, would view the act with
envy.
 Clearly, he felt that his hands-on fathering was
something other men aspired to.

26. William Cobbett [b. 1763,
writing 1820s]
George Courtauld
[b. 1761, writing 1815
George Courtauld saw himself as a ‘solicitous parent’ He
wrote to his eldest adult children early in 1815, in response
to family tensions, reminding them how much he had loved
them throughout their lives by emphasising his bodily
labours on their behalf.:
I have loved you all from the cradle – I have uniformly been
a nursing father to all of you – and I might almost say a
nursing mother too – for at different times when several of
you were quite infants I was left alone with you, and when
not alone how often have I hushed you to sleep walking
about the room with you for hours in the night – to ease
your pains and lull your sorrows.
William Cobbett built his whole persona on this in his
Advice toYoung Men. Though he was constantly occupied
with business he insisted that he made time to assist his
wife with the children ‘in all sorts of things: get up, light
her fire, boil her tea-kettle, carry her up warm water in
cold weather, take the child while she dressed herself and
got the breakfast ready, then breakfast, get her in water
and wood for the day, then dress myself neatly, and sally
forth to my business’.

27. CONCLUSION
 Representations of the corporeality and materiality of parenting
and parenthood extended beyond childbirth, breast feeding, and
nurturing children's bodies to encompass material, physical, and
emotional sustenance into children’s adulthood.
 Investigating parents in this way is thus very revealing.Thinking
about bodies and emotions complicates assumptions about
gender difference, opening up gender identities beyond binary
oppositions.
 It also demonstrates that the material aspects of parental care
were crucial cultural metaphors in discussions of national
concerns, but also retained very personal meanings.
 Thanks to the following institutions for their financial support
for this research project: