Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940.(Review)

Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940, by George Behlmer; pp. x + 455. Stanford, GA: Stanford University Press, 1998, $55.00.

Perhaps the most attractive and novel quality of George Behlmer's scholarship is his ability to perceive and reveal the paradoxical quality of social phenomena. Carefully accumulating his evidence, he has argued that efforts to improve character in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England were not a calculated attempt by the rich to control the poor, but involved instead the active compliance of the poor, especially the "respectable" poor, who recognized and accepted a need for help. Since his study, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870-1908(1982), Behlmer has extended his range to look at the varying relationships between ambiguous communities and those who romanticized or attempted to reform them. For Behlmer, social history gives meaning to those people traditionally dismissed as marginal, dispossessed, and despised. While conceding the need to also study elites, he finds intriguing the neglected relation …