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

In analyzing the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, Melissa Shields Jenkins argues that Victorian novelists found new models within non-narrative forms such as conduct books, biography, religious manuals, political speeches and professional writing in the fields of history and science. 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.