I

Using the Autobiography of the Working Class and other resources, I first identified 662 writers born between 1840 and 1905, who therefore described childhoods that spanned the Victorian and Edwardian eras.Footnote ²⁸ I consulted each account and interrogated the nature of the father's breadwinning. Of course, as mortality was high in Victorian Britain, not all writers had a living father. Around 12 percent had lost their father before the age of sixteen, and I removed all these from the sample, reducing the collection of autobiographies to 577. I then read through all the life histories to categorize their fathers according to how well they provided for their children. Although a few writers were unclear about this element of their family life or provided accounts that were inconsistent or otherwise difficult to interpret, most of them clearly described this aspect of their family life. Indeed, it was no doubt owing to the huge importance of a father's wage-earning to the well-being of a working-class family that the quality of the father's breadwinning was relatively straightforward to establish in the majority of autobiographies.

The autobiographies indicate that provision was the cornerstone of working-class conceptions of fatherhood, and writers repeatedly used this as the benchmark for evaluating their fathers.Footnote ²⁹ And of course, many of the autobiographers recalled fathers who had successfully provided for their families. Edward Robinson's father, for example, was not a high earner, but he was a good provider. Although his earnings as a cabdriver were uncertain and sometimes small, on a daily basis he handed every penny he earned over to his wife, who set about transforming the money into food. On a bad day, Edward's meal might consist of nothing more than a half-penny bloater with bread and butter, but anything more provided the family with “a good dinner.” It helped that Edward's father did not drink or smoke—his life “was just work and sleep.”Footnote ³⁰ Mr. Robinson's behavior did not provide his family with fine living; his earnings were simply too low for that. But it did ensure that young Edward enjoyed a degree of comfort and security throughout his early years.

Mr. Robinson was certainly not alone in performing his breadwinning effectively and with good grace. Gratitude to hardworking fathers—to men like John Blake's father for their years of “self-denial, devotion and constant effort”Footnote ³¹—runs throughout the autobiographical literature. Harry Gosling considered that his father had been “a model father” who had done “everything in his power for all of us.”Footnote ³² A steady wage formed the bedrock of a family's well-being, and the father who had labored hard to earn it was fondly remembered. John Clyne's father was a “fine worker.” He took no holidays and used his earnings to ensure his children got the schooling that he had missed.Footnote ³³ Henry Turner's father had regular work as a lamplighter and also earned a little extra by spending his spare time cleaning windows.Footnote ³⁴ Like Edward Robinson's father, he hardly drank, and his one indulgence was the occasional smoke: roll-ups as thin as matchsticks.Footnote ³⁵ James Brady's father worked a series of second jobs around his main occupation as a clog-iron maker and spent what he earned on holidays for his family.Footnote ³⁶

Although the breadwinner model worked well in some families, it is important to ask how common such outcomes were. Of 577 autobiographies, just over 211 writers—or 37 percent—provided evidence that their father had been a reliable wage earner who dutifully shared his earnings with his family. Good breadwinners were not necessarily those who earned the most: actual earnings could be, and often were, small. Instead, good providers (in the eyes of the autobiographers) were those who worked steadily and shared their earnings generously with their families. No matter the size of the pay packet, most of the autobiographers believed that a steadily working father had done enough to provide his children with a reasonably comfortable and stable start in life. Yet these 211 writers constitute less than half of all the autobiographers, so the account of fatherhood cannot be closed on the comforting image of men working second jobs in order to purchase little luxuries for their families. Although some fathers both worked hard and shared their earnings with their families, a great many apparently did not. What other models of paternity are described in the autobiographies?

Breadwinning and provision were highly valued among working-class writers, yet time and time again writers make clear that this was not something that their own fathers had been able to achieve. To start with, there was the perennial problem of unemployment. Margaret Powell's father was a painter and decorator—a “sort of general odd-job man.” But, as she explained, most people did not want the bother of home improvements during the coldest months, so every winter he struggled to find work.Footnote ³⁷ In his daughter's eyes, his struggle to provide for his family did not diminish his worth as a father. He delighted in buying the children a comic and a bag of sweets on Sundays, and his family knew “he did the best he could.” But his unemployment did, of course, have a very significant effect on his family's quality of life. Among Powell's earliest recollections was the realization that “other children seemed to be better off than we were.” That poverty of her upbringing, she later concluded, might be sociologically interesting, but experiencing it “was just plain foul.”Footnote ³⁸

More occasionally, men were afflicted with such bad health they were unable to work at all. Arthur Collinson's father, for example, had worked as a coach-builder until Arthur was five. At that point he lost his sight, and his family lost its position among the “great mass of poor” and joined the “under privileged.”Footnote ³⁹ Cases such as these exposed the weakness of the breadwinner model. When breadwinners were out of work, whether through unemployment or ill-health, men were left with nothing beyond what little insurance they may have been able to take out against such calamities. Inevitably, insurance was the preserve of the more skilled workers: the great mass of the workforce were never in a position to insure themselves against unemployment. And even for these privileged few, insurance was quickly exhausted, leaving not just them but their entire families facing destitution.

Yet gesturing to unemployment and ill-health scarcely scratches the surface of the weaknesses of the breadwinner model. Alongside the relatively small number of men who were unable to earn a living for their families, a much larger number of men were able to provide, yet made choices that left their families with less than they might have had. Although fathers were supposed to be hardworking breadwinners, not all undertook this role with much relish. Joseph Wright's father simply did not enjoy hard, manual labor. He could earn a decent rate in the iron mines, but he much preferred leisure to work. If he worked steadily “for perhaps a fortnight he would take a holiday and spend what he had earned.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Jean Rennie also lamented that her father, “although a good workman, was not a steady one.”Footnote ⁴¹ Arthur Harding thought that the presence of his father had done very little to add to the well-being of his family. According to Harding, he was “a loafer” and “too lazy to earn a living.”Footnote ⁴² A small number of men simply refused to work, and the consequences for their families were serious. Mr. Wright's “happy-go-lucky temperament” reduced his family to destitution. Joseph, with his mother and his three siblings, spent his early childhood in the workhouse while his “happy-go-lucky” father followed his own inclinations on the outside.Footnote ⁴³

Unemployment, ill-health, or a simple disinclination to work could all leave families without a male wage for their sustenance. Yet among the autobiographers, the number of fathers who did not bring home a steady weekly wage was comparatively small. The autobiographers were far more likely to recall a father who earned a steady wage but failed to share it with their families than a father who did not work steadily. It was of course customary for men to keep a part of their wages as “pocket money,” or to claim a greater share of the family's food owing to their central role in procuring it. It is difficult to get a sense of exactly what amount of pocket money was deemed reasonable, and it is worth pointing out that when earnings were low, even a small sum creamed off by the male head of household was to the detriment of everybody else's nutrition.Footnote ⁴⁴ But let us accept that a small amount of pocket money or dietary privilege was a widely accepted perquisite for a male wage earner. The problem nonetheless remained that wages were paid into the hands of the male worker, not his wife. The allocation of wages between male pocket money and female housekeeping money was thus a matter that could be decided by the male wage-earner alone, and the outcome of this imbalance for family finances is as predictable as it is obvious.

In the eyes of some autobiographers, their fathers had reserved for themselves more “pocket money” than seemed acceptable from the family perspective. Muriel Box's father earned a respectable two pounds a week but refused to hand it over to his wife for housekeeping, declaring “You can't draw blood out of a stone!”Footnote ⁴⁵ The result was “daily bickerings over money which erupted into savage rows and, on very rare occasions, blows.”Footnote ⁴⁶ George Williams's father had a similar attitude toward his earnings. According to his Williams, his father “cherished one fixed idea about wages . . . he would never disclose the amount of his weekly pay-packet, not under duress or caress, not by wheedle or needle. Every week a certain sum was handed over, the rest a private matter.”Footnote ⁴⁷ There was a ritual in Leily Broomhill's household when her mother's housekeeping money ran low: “She used to say to us children, ‘I'm going in the other room. Don't come in. I'm going to ask him if he'll let me have any money.’” The outcome of these attempts was always the same. She would return to the children and “shake her head. He never hit her, and they never quarreled, but he never gave her any money.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Albert Jasper's father was so determined to keep a chunk of his income for himself that he always slipped “his money bag under his side of the mattress” before falling asleep. To make certain that his wife could not put his money toward housekeeping, he occasionally slept with it in his sock.Footnote ⁴⁹

Men had a variety of motives for withholding part of their wages for themselves. A few were involved in worthy social or political enterprises. Robert Oakley, for example, fell in with the Methodists. He was not wasting his earnings in the pub, but he was still diverting money away from his family, and what was good for Oakley's spiritual needs was much less beneficial for his children's nutrition. His wife lamented his “going so much to chapel and taking the money away to give there that my children and I so badly wanted at home.”Footnote ⁵⁰ As Mrs. Oakley was attempting to raise a family during the “hungry forties,” the basis for her complaint was real indeed. John Allaway's father was a respectable supervisor for a metal-working business and involved in a number of mutual societies—grand master for the Order of Buffaloes and “chairman of this club and that.” His son believed that his personal spending on these causes forced his mother to “pinch and scrape more than she need have done.”Footnote ⁵¹ Kate Taylor's father's hobbyhorse was the village Salvation Army band. Despite the family's “poverty-stricken condition,” he would invite his fellow bandsmen to dine on the Sunday meal his wife had prepared, leaving his hungry children to “scavenge for any crumbs they may have left.”Footnote ⁵²

In reality, though, most men who diverted their earnings away from their families were not putting it toward religious, political, or other worthy interests. They just liked to spend it on themselves. Vere Garratt could only marvel at his father's abiding passion for gambling on the horses. The sums he wasted were “incredible” for a man “with a large family and slender resources.”Footnote ⁵³ Joseph Sharpe's father was a miner and a “connoisseur of whippets and greyhounds.” He had income sufficient to buy meat for his dogs, but not, unfortunately, for his children—his son recalled a scanty, vegetarian diet of “tea sops, oatmeal porridge and flour porridge.” He ran “barefooted and barelegged” too.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nellie Hoare's father believed in “sharing” his wages with his wife. This meant keeping half of his earnings to himself and giving her the other half: “He used to spend his fifteen shillings on beer and tobacco and I remember he used to smoke a clay pipe.” Mother's fifteen shillings went on rent, food, and clothing for a family of ten.Footnote ⁵⁵

Most commonly of all, male wages were used to fund a drinking habit that had escalated out of control. Running like a thread through accounts of working-class family life is the father who earned a good wage but drank away most of what he earned. Alfred Coppard summed up the situation for many: his father, he wrote, was “something of a drinker, and so we were always shockingly poor.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Drinking was also the reason that Albert Jasper's father stuffed his money under the mattress or into his sock while he slept. Although Mr. Jasper “always had money,” his son complained that his mother never had a full week's wages from him because “his main object in life was to be continually drunk.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In Bolton, Alice Foley's father worked only in “fits and starts” as his life was punctuated with bouts of heavy drinking that incapacitated him for work. Occasionally, “he disappeared for weeks, leaving his whereabouts unknown, then just as suddenly he turned up penniless and unkempt.” During such interludes, his wife took on the role of breadwinner, though her meager earnings from the washtub were obviously no substitute for her husband's wage. And the loss of earnings was not the least of it. Sid Foley's drinking sprees not only impoverished his family but also put it at risk of unpredictable eruptions of violence. When recovering from a boozing bout, “his temper was most vicious and unpredictable,” and Alice Foley had a large stock of memories about the outbursts she witnessed as a child.Footnote ⁵⁸

Clearly, the presence of a father, even one who was in work, provided no guarantee that his children would see much of his wages. But for some families, unreliable provision was the prelude to something worse: desertion. The fathers of Joseph Wright, Jean Rennie, and Arthur Harding all eventually tired of working in order to maintain their families. After years of inconsistent wage-earning or heavy drinking, they skipped out on their families altogether. A few men had never fulfilled their family obligations at all. Almost all of the illegitimate children among the autobiographers received no support of any kind from their fathers. Many of them had been placed with grandparents or in institutions shortly after their birth.Footnote ⁵⁹ The few that remained with (or later returned to) their mothers were raised without any contact with their fathers or financial support from them.Footnote ⁶⁰

Others had no more than a hazy recollection of fathers who had drifted away in the early years of their life. Guy Aldred's father, for example, had never “discharged his family responsibilities” and “took no interest,” either in Guy's mother's welfare or his son's. His parents had only just managed to legitimize his birth—they tied the knot seven and a half weeks before he was born. But they had never set up home together, and Mr. Aldred had wandered completely out of Guy's life before he was six.Footnote ⁶¹ Edward Brown's parents had separated so early in his life that he had no real recollection of his father.Footnote ⁶² James Royce's father was “just a shadow sort of father.” Royce could remember two brief interludes when his father had lived with them, one when he was about seven and another when he was about twelve. On the second occasion, Mr. Royce stole a pair of secondhand boots for his son and spent a few days wandering north London with him in an attempt to raise some money selling watercress before he took off again, never to return. Looking back, Royce dismissed the man's significance: “He didn't count.”Footnote ⁶³ Paternal desertion was certainly less common than fathers unable or unwilling to provide for their families, but it was not exactly rare. In all, forty-eight or 10 percent of the autobiographers reported a living but absent father. A number of points are worth underlining: in the fluid and anonymous society of the Victorian city, it was extremely easy for a man to leave his family; separations were decided by men, not women; and a father's desertion always signaled the end of his breadwinning for the family.

As must already be clear, the ineffective male breadwinner is not a negligible historical figure. The collection includes men who were unable to find steady work or too ill to perform it, as well as a large cast of characters who chose leisure over labor, who spent their earnings on their own private pleasures, who drank away their wages, and who, if it all became too much, walked away from their family altogether. But it is not simply because the stories are colorful that they belong to these accounts. It is also because they are so numerous. Indeed, ineffective fathers are only a little less numerous among the autobiographers than those who were hardworking and steadfast. As noted above, 37 percent of the fathers described in the autobiographies were good providers. Many others who were not, whether through ill-health, unemployment, desertion, laziness, drunkenness, or any other cause—in all, a further 215, a number very close to the 211 who were described as good providers by their children.

It is striking how clearly the contours of male provision for their families emerge in the majority of autobiographies once the question has been identified. The manner in which a man provided for his family was of critical importance to a writer's early experiences, and it was very difficult for a father to be both a good provider and a bad provider at the same time. Thus the majority of accounts slip easily into one category or the other. Around a quarter of them, however, do not. Most of these autobiographers either did not write about their fathers or skirted the issue of how effective their provision had been; the remaining few wrote about their fathers in inconsistent or contradictory terms, making simple categorizations impossible. Even if we were to conclude that all of this group of writers in fact had fathers who were good breadwinners—and there are no real grounds for this assumption, given that autobiographers had a clear and accessible vocabulary with which to write about fathers who were good providers—we are still left with a substantial proportion, 37 percent of all writers, raised in a home without the benefit of a full breadwinner's income. Indeed, the limitations of the breadwinning model go considerably further than this. My discussion has been confined to those autobiographers who had living fathers, but of course this was an era of high mortality. Around 12 percent of all writers were removed from the sample at the outset, as they had lost their father before reaching the age of sixteen. Consequently, the absolute numbers of those living without an effective breadwinner during at least some part of their childhood was considerably higher. Taking the entire collection of 662 autobiographers, almost half had spent some part of their childhood living either with a father who was unable to provide effectively or with no father at all; the other half included those who experienced fathers who were good providers (32 percent of the total), and those who did not indicate either way (22 percent of the total).

Of course, this takes us some way from the discussion of fatherhood. Despite the very real consequences of male mortality for women and children, we cannot usefully interrogate the history of fatherhood through fathers who were dead. Yet the point serves to underscore the fact that some families were hit by forces beyond their control, raising the question of how significant such external forces were in causing the poor providing that I describe. There are, after all, two very different contexts for non-providing fathers: those unable to work through unemployment or ill-health, and those who could and usually did work, but who made decisions that effectively deprived children of the resources they needed. The evidence is bleak. The autobiographies illustrate that neither ill-health nor unavoidable unemployment was a significant cause of families lacking a viable breadwinner. Of the fathers who did not provide for their families for one reason or another, fewer than 10 percent did so because they were unable to find work or because they were physically incapable of undertaking it. Personal failings emerge as a vastly more significant factor: drunkenness, desertion, irregular working patterns, and a refusal to share earnings explains the other 90 percent. I return to this observation below and query whether it is accurate to categorize these as “personal failings.” For the present, however, it is worth underscoring that the lapses in breadwinning uncovered go far beyond impersonal forces such as ill-health and unemployment and extend deeply into the social, cultural, and familial.

Dividing fathers into “good” and “bad” providers imposes a degree of simplification upon family lives that were often anything but simple. The ways in which men fathered varied widely, not only between the good and bad providers but also within each of these groups. No less importantly, overlying all questions of provision and family relationships is a multifaceted web of emotions with the potential to muddy an adult writer's later assessment. Poor providers could be still be companionate and loving. Following an accident, Amy Rose's father was unable to earn much, but he was the only one in a large family who treated her with kindness, and in her memory that counted for a lot.Footnote ⁶⁴ On the other hand, fathers who worked hard for their families were occasionally arrogant, overbearing, or violent. Albert Goodwin's father was a skilled pottery worker on a good wage and took on two additional part-time jobs to provide a decent home for his family, but he was “obnoxious” and “boastful” and never tired of reminding his children of all that he did for them.Footnote ⁶⁵ More occasionally, fathers could be both violent and poor providers and yet still be loved by their children. Septimus O'Reilly's father was as drunken, violent, and abusive as they come. His last attack on his wife was so brutal that when the children crept downstairs to investigate, they feared she was dead. But even this violent assault did little to dent O”Reilly's love for his father. In the family breakup that followed, Reilly departed with his father, later refusing to comment on the “rights and wrongs of the case” and declaring “a real love for my father.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Using life writing to decipher family relationships is complex, as the interplay of provision and emotions can unfold in unpredictable ways. Yet for all this, there was also clear and significant overlap between provision and emotion, with writers generally providing warm and positive assessments of fathers who had provided to the best of their ability for their families, and an unmistakable strand of hostility toward those who had not.

Furthermore, clearly something is to be gained by asking what men's behavior meant for the women and children they lived with as opposed to what it meant for men themselves. When Mr. Jasper stuffed his money into his sock, his behavior presumably had some meaning to him, and this raises the prospect of exploring the codes that may have been guiding him. But if we are to avoid descending into an ever more intricate account of the meaning of male behavior, we must surely do more with the feckless Mr. Jasper than seek to understand how his actions made sense to him. His story is important as it captures one version of the struggle for resources that was played out to various degrees in many, many households. Breadwinning mattered because it mediated a child's experience of the world in profound ways. Diet, schooling, housing, health, and life opportunities were all powerfully influenced by family income, and it is for this reason the extent to which men provided for their families merits investigation as a research question in its own right.

II

In working systematically through a large collection of autobiographies, I established that failures of fatherhood were a depressing and burdensome reality in the lives of a substantial number of women and children. Before accepting this conclusion, however, it is worth thinking more carefully about the reliability of the witnesses—the autobiographical writers. The careful reading strategies that scholars have developed over the past four decades have taught us that autobiographies are not a straightforward window into the past; they have counseled against drawing simple links between unique experiences described in the autobiographies and the lives of the population at large. Those caveats lead to the heart of the historian's craft—our endeavor to reconstruct past realities on the basis of documentary evidence that is always partial and incomplete—and the problem is certainly pertinent to my study, given that I am extrapolating from a small number of autobiographies to the population at large. The key problem is one of distortion. We can all agree that some fathers failed their families. The critical question is, how many? Is it possible that children with a father who failed to provide effectively for them were more likely to write their life story as adults than those who did not, thus leading to an overinflation of such experiences in the autobiographical literature? It is not immediately obvious why this might have been the case, but it is something that deserves to be considered.

On looking closely at the ways in which writers wrote about their fathers, this suggestion seems unlikely. The autobiographies considered here were emphatically not books about fathers or families. Our writers had a range of different motivations—to tell of success in the arts or in business, to describe a life devoted to service to politics or the church, or to share the details of an “ordinary” life with family members or a community history project. But no matter what the motivation, recollections of early family life usually formed a small element of a narrative constructed for a different purpose. Most writers told the story of their family and childhood in a few opening pages, at most an opening chapter or two. Some dispatched their early years in a matter of lines, and some wrote nothing at all. These autobiographies were written long before the rise of the so-called misery literature of the 1990s, with its penchant for exposing childhood trauma. The writers considered here had a range of different motivations for telling their stories, but sensationalism was not one of them. There is no reason to think that they systematically lied about their fathers, exaggerated their flaws, or made up stories that were not true. For most writers, fathers were an interesting, yet ultimately incidental, detail.

This is true even among those with a more exceptional story of neglect or abuse to tell. There are miserable childhoods in the autobiographical literature to rival the most dismal misery literature on today's bestseller lists,Footnote ⁶⁷ yet they were retold and packaged in very different ways. Jack Martin, for instance, had a tale of horrific violence and abuse that he and his family had suffered at the hands of his father, but that was not where his story began. Before writing about his childhood, he filled the first thirty pages of his book with the reminiscences of a local doctor. His section on childhood—“My fight for existence in a family of 19 children”—was just one of nineteen chapters. The other eighteen made virtually no reference to his desperate childhood or its legacy in the rest of his life. Others spoke in guarded terms or broached the topic of their father relatively late in their narrative. Flora Thompson wrote her autobiography in the third person and changed all her family's names, yet despite these precautions she still hesitated to describe “Laura's” father, his drinking, and the impact that he had on her family—just a very brief note in the second volume of her trilogy.Footnote ⁶⁸ It was only in private correspondence discovered by her biographer, Margaret Lane, that Thompson revealed that her father was reserving a large chunk of his wages for himself and sometimes failed to bring home any wages.Footnote ⁶⁹

Some autobiographers did not write about their fathers at all. Usually, of course, we have no way of knowing what lay behind this silence, though occasionally other parts of the historical record contain some clues. Mary Luty was one of those who wrote nothing about her father. Her early memories, as she told them, were of living with her mother on her father's farm. Her father's absence from the scene was never noted or explained—it would be natural to assume he had died.Footnote ⁷⁰ But checking the census indicates that he was not dead. Luty's parents, John Luty and Martha Ramsbottom, married in 1884, but had separated by the census of 1891. John Luty was employed as a cotton weaver and was still living in Calderdale, west Yorkshire, whereas his wife had returned to her father's farm with the two children, just as Mary Luty described in her autobiography. In the same year, John Luty spent two weeks in prison for being drunk and disorderly,Footnote ⁷¹ which hints at why the relationship had broken down.

The chance survival of two versions of one man's story also hints at the struggle that some writers had to put their childhood experiences down in writing. Arthur Harding wrote his autobiography, “My Apprenticeship to Crime,” in the late 1960s. In 1970, he sent a copy to his member of Parliament, Stan Newens, who two years later passed it on to the historian Raphael Samuel. It was eventually deposited at the Bishopsgate Institute in 1998, where it remains.Footnote ⁷² Samuel was so fascinated by Harding's extraordinary account of life in the East End of London at the turn of the century that he made contact with Harding and spent several years interviewing him, publishing the interviews in 1981 as East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding. As a result, there are two versions of Harding's life: “My Apprenticeship,” the written story that Harding conceived and created himself, and East End Underworld, the oral account that emerged thorough his dialogue with Samuel.

As was often the case, Harding could not write about his childhood without discussing how his father had performed as the breadwinning male head of household. Unfortunately for the young Harding, his father was among those who had been unable to provide for their family, with the inevitable consequence that Harding spent his early years living in abject poverty. However, although Mr. Harding's breadwinning failings were revealed, Harding was quick to locate the blame for these failings away from his father.Footnote ⁷³ In the autobiography, Harding's father was a pitiful victim suffering from bad eyesight, and it was only “through failing sight [that he] could not keep us.”Footnote ⁷⁴ His inadequate provision for his family was either because he was “unemployed”Footnote ⁷⁵ or because of his “failing sight.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In Harding's first attempt at his life story, he thus attributes his father's failure to provide to unfortunate circumstances beyond his control rather than any personal faults.

In discussion with Samuel, however, Harding took a very different stance toward his father. He told Raphael Samuel that his father “used to knock my mother about,” that he was “ignorant and brutal” and “a bully.”Footnote ⁷⁷ At times he neither provided for nor lived with his family, and this was not because of the unemployment or bad eyesight mentioned in the autobiography: it was because he was a selfish man who “only lived for himself.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Long before his sight began to fail, he was “a loafer,” “too lazy to earn a living,” “just an encumbrance really.”Footnote ⁷⁹ On reflection, Harding declared that his father “wasn't really an invalid” at all.Footnote ⁸⁰ Clearly, although he was willing to voice his criticisms of his father to Raphael Samuel in the 1970s, a decade earlier he had not viewed his autobiography as a place to air such thoughts. He had simply left any unflattering details out. In a collection of over five hundred autobiographies, it is unlikely that Harding was the only author to make that choice.

Some writers concealed family problems, but as must be clear from the numerous examples presented, many did not. Yet even where writers did tell freely of their father's failings, it was not uncommon to find them simultaneously trying to excuse or exonerate their fathers, or at least chastise themselves for having raised the matter at all. “I don't want to blacken his character,” wrote John Bennett, after sharing the details of his father's heavy drinking and “poor treatment” of his mother.Footnote ⁸¹ “I hope I haven't given too biased an account,” apologized Daisy Cowper after confessing that she had felt glad when she learned of her father's death.Footnote ⁸² “It's a wrong thing for me to be telling you stories like this about my father . . . he had his kind moments I suppose,” admitted Evan Rogers, before going on to say that those moments had been “very few, very few,” and in fact he couldn't remember any.Footnote ⁸³ Writers frequently aired the unsavory details of their father's bad behavior, but they were not doing so in order to regale their reader with sensationalist and sordid tales. Bennett, Cowper, Rogers, and the many others looked at here wrote about their fathers because there was no way of providing an account of their early years without reference to this vital family member. And once they started writing, their father's failings took shape. They could not do otherwise, as the consequences of these failings had been so severe.

The match between the autobiographies of the few and lived experience of the many is of course ultimately unknowable, but there are no good grounds for suggesting that negative experiences are unduly exaggerated in the autobiographical literature. Learning that many, many children in Victorian Britain went without hot food and warm clothes not owing to the faceless force of poverty but because their fathers did not make the effort or sacrifice necessary to provide them makes for uncomfortable reading. Yet this message is clearly communicated in one autobiography after another, and when one considers the autobiographies collectively, it is clear that these are not unfortunate but isolated examples. They were part of the fabric of family life, part of the fabric of British society. And more generally, this evidence suggests a different agenda for research on life writing. If the families described in the autobiographies are neither atypical nor unrepresentative of the working classes more broadly, there are no grounds for maintaining that these records contain particular but not general truths. Quite the contrary: instead there is the possibility of a powerful new research agenda that seeks to use this material to better understand the changing social world.

III

The evidence from the autobiographies is clear: although the breadwinning family model worked well in some households, it manifested serious failings in others. Why might this have been? Why was the breadwinning family so prone to failure? Were there particular contexts, occupations, or regions in which it functioned well and others in which it did not? The detailed accounts of family life that autobiographers tend to provide are useful for delving into such questions.

Breadwinning failures were common among autobiographers’ families, yet there was one small subset of writers for whom the breadwinning family model worked consistently well: those living on the land. Among the 577 writers with living fathers, nearly 140 individuals were raised in families living in agricultural villages, and of these, just fourteen had fathers who were unreliable providers. As noted above, 37 percent of writers reported a father who failed to provide effectively, but the figure for those raised in the countryside was much lower—just 10 percent. (The corollary of this, of course, was that the breadwinner model also functioned less well among urban communities than the average figure suggests: more than 45 percent of the writers raised in towns and cities offered evidence that their father had not provided effectively for the family.) Furthermore, within the rural context, agricultural laborers were the most reliable providers, while fathers pursing a more urban or skilled occupation were the least. Ten of the rural men who did not provide adequately for their families were agricultural laborers, but on considering these cases, it becomes clear that most of the men were in this position through reasons beyond their control. Three were invalids, which compromised their ability to work.Footnote ⁸⁴ A further three, all raising their families in the early part of the Victorian period, were suffering from adverse economic forces beyond their control—chronically low wages, short stints of unemployment, or high food prices.Footnote ⁸⁵ This leaves just four farmworkers who were able to provide for their family but did not do so reliably; three were spending money on drink, and the fourth was withholding money from his wife as a form of control.Footnote ⁸⁶ The other four poor providers were not in fact involved in agricultural labor. One was a higler (peddler),Footnote ⁸⁷ one ran a basket-weaving business,Footnote ⁸⁸ one was a stonemason,Footnote ⁸⁹ and the other was a journeyman bricklayer.Footnote ⁹⁰ All four were effectively self-employed tradesmen who happened to live in a village rather than a town.

There were, then, very few cases of fathers failing to provide for their families among those living in small, rural villages and dependent upon farming for their livelihood. As such, these families form a distinct social group whose experiences followed a markedly different trajectory from those living in urban and industrial areas, who were bound much more closely to the forces of social and economic modernization. This finding is highly suggestive and merits further analysis.

One can pursue this thread further by looking at writers who were born in the pre-1840 period. In addition to the 662 autobiographies that cover the Victorian period, there are more than 250 written by authors born before 1840, which raises the prospect of exploring the extent to which the quality of paternal provision was changing over time. Although comparisons become less secure as one moves back chronologically, it is clear that the same pattern holds for the pre-1840 period. Over sixty of the autobiographers born before 1840 were raised in agricultural communities, and of these, thirty-five had living fathers employed in agriculture. Here again, the number of those failing to provide for their families was small: just three. One was an elderly father unable to work owing to ill-health.Footnote ⁹¹ The other two men were affected by low wages and unemployment.Footnote ⁹² A further five rural households lacked a reliable breadwinner, but in each of these cases the father worked in a trade rather than agriculture.Footnote ⁹³

It is important to underscore the significance of this finding. Agricultural wages were low, so many of the families in rural areas were, in absolute terms, poor. But throughout the eighteenth century and right down to the eve of 1914, so long as a father who worked in agriculture remained in good health, he was highly likely to both work regularly and turn over the great majority of his earnings to his wife. Time and again, the autobiographies reveal that the equilibrium in their families was destroyed by fathers who failed to provide adequately for them, yet one occupational group appears to be almost unaffected by this problem. It is therefore important to ask what was distinctive about rural life that served to funnel male earnings so effectively into the common family fund.

Several different forces, of course, were at work. For example, the choice to trade labor for leisure was simply not available to men who worked on the land. Most agricultural laborers were tied into yearlong contracts, and work was in any case too scarce to risk losing a job for failing to turn up when expected, which encouraged men to toil dutifully for their employers. But it was not simply that farmworkers worked regularly. It is also highly significant that they shared their wages with their wives, and part of the reason they did so was precisely because wages were so low. Several rural autobiographers noted that their family's limited means had deprived fathers of the freedom to spend money on themselves. As one autobiographer raised in a poor agricultural family in rural Scotland explained, his father “could not afford to be other than an abstainer.” A few pennies worth of snuff was his only occasional luxury.Footnote ⁹⁴ William Arnold's father, a poor village shoemaker, hardly drank at all: he was “too poor” to do so.Footnote ⁹⁵ Waged work might earn a farmworker an entitlement to a bigger share of the household's resources, but there was nothing left over for personal spending outside the home.

Low wages did not simply rule out the possibility of men keeping and spending money on themselves: it also meant that men had no real choice but to hand their wages to their wife for housekeeping. Agricultural wages were never high enough to permit a man to purchase the kind of services that his wife supplied—provision of meals and clothing—on the open market. A man's basic human needs of food, clothing, and warmth could only be fulfilled through the unpaid services of family members. There was thus some equivalence in the value of waged work and unpaid domestic work, creating a high degree of codependency between husband and wife.

In addition, a host of forces outside the home reduced the scope for men to spend their earnings on themselves rather than their families. Small villages offered few opportunities for spending money. Rosina Harrison's father liked a glass of ale, but as there was no pub in the village, getting it meant a three-mile walk.Footnote ⁹⁶ Arthur Rowse's father went to market every Friday night, and that was the only time he was able to buy himself a drink—a “pint of bitter and two-pennorth of rum.” There were no pubs in his village and “no liquor was allowed inside our home by my mother.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Of course, many larger villages had pubs, but powerful social pressures inhibited men from spending too much of their money there. In Arthur Rowse's village, “the farm gave employment to half the village in one capacity or another—hinds, labourers, stable-boys, maidservants.”Footnote ⁹⁸ And a landowning family that spent large sums on male wages did not also expect to see the money it paid into the rates being used to support the wives and children of men in its employ.

There were manifold differences between a small agricultural community and a larger urban or industrial settlement. But the foundation upon which all else rested was higher male wages, which placed hitherto unknown levels of choice and power in the hands of the men who earned them. As male wages moved away from subsistence levels, the absolute necessity for all individuals in the family to pool their resources and labor for the common good broke down, creating a new situation in which men could maintain a reasonable living standard by depositing only a part of their resources with their families, or even living away from them altogether. As male wages increased, the equivalence between a man's waged work and his wife's unpaid domestic work was disrupted, and the codependency between marriage partners was lost.

The precise effects of higher male wages on family dynamics played out in a number of different ways. Some men took advantage of higher earnings in order to trade work for leisure. Pat O'Mara's father was an alcoholic and a domestic abuser—one of a select group of deeply unpleasant fathers described within the autobiographical literature. He was imprisoned on a number of occasions for his brutal attacks on O'Mara's mother—no mean achievement, given that the policemen who were repeatedly called to the scene were entirely “unappreciative of my mother's dilemma [and] had contempt for her.”Footnote ⁹⁹ He was also a Liverpool dock laborer, where the day-rate of five shillings was considerably higher than the wages in agriculture.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This did not translate into a higher standard of living for his family. As O'Mara explained, his father lived “the usual life of a dock laborer, seeking work when he liked and chucking it in when he liked.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ As a rule, he never worked more than a couple of days a week, enough to “ensure the rent and enough to get the barest necessities of living.”Footnote ¹⁰² The rest of the week he spent in the pub. The men who did not work regularly for their families were either concentrated in a small number of trades—mining, quarrying, and dock work—or working as general laborers in the nation's largest cities—London, Liverpool, and Birmingham. In all of these contexts, men were hired and paid by the day, and the ease of obtaining employment and the high wages they could earn permitted them to live a lifestyle of irregular labor unavailable to those working in most other sectors of the labor market. It is also noticeable that most of these men worked just enough to keep their families at subsistence level and out of the workhouse—as O'Mara observed, his father provided “the barest necessities of living.” In some respects, Mr. O'Mara adhered to an older ideal of maintaining a family at the lowest acceptable level, which was all agricultural workers had traditionally been able to manage owing to their low wages. His additional earnings were used to free him from the drudgery of working a seventy-hour week rather than raising his family's living standards.

Some men were more likely to take advantage of better pay in order to earn a higher income than to reduce their hours of work. Yet even when men followed the path of steady labor, clearly not all believed that earnings above the family's subsistence needs belonged to the common family fund rather than to the wage earner. This belief lay at the root of a pattern of behavior repeatedly seen in the autobiographies, in which men deposited a part of their earnings with their wives for the family's upkeep and kept a part for their own private pleasures. As with the fathers who worked irregularly, these fathers provided for their family's basic needs; it was the ownership of the additional income that was contested.

Towns and cities not only provided higher male earnings but were also far more complex societies that enabled men to find substitutes for the things that traditionally were only provided in the home. Foremost among these was hot, cooked food. In the city now it was for sale, and even a humble workman had the means to purchase it. Arthur Harding and his family lived in the London's East End in the 1880s and 1890s, and his autobiography captures the dizzying array of venues selling foodstuffs: fish and chip shops; coffee shops selling tea and bread or a meal of meat, two vegetables and a piece of jam tart; fish shops selling bloaters, smoked haddocks, kippers, herrings, mackerel, and eels; pork butchers where you could buy “very good cooked food at very cheap prices”; cake shops that sold large bags of broken biscuits for a halfpenny; pudding shops selling hot pies, jam roly-poly, and beef soup; and German pork butchers selling faggots that could be eaten hot or cold.Footnote ¹⁰³ Mr. Harding's access to a range of hot, prepared food weakened his dependency upon the home and his wife's cooking.

It did not help, of course, that one of the most attractive and accessible ways to spend income was on alcohol, a substance with mind-altering and addictive qualities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It would be hard to overemphasize the role that alcohol played in draining resources from working-class homes. Indeed, heavy drinking was the single greatest cause of money hemorrhaging from family budgets. It was mentioned by eighty-eight writers, or 15 percent of the writers with a memory of a living father, and almost half of all the households in which a father was failing to provide adequately for his family. In each of these cases, the father was drinking so heavily that his offspring considered it a drain on the family finances; in some cases the problem was so bad that it was also affecting the man's ability to hold down a job and earn a steady wage.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The culture of heavy drinking in the urban working classes was something that Victorian commentators frequently criticized, and historians have rightly been circumspect about repeating or endorsing those censorious attitudes. Yet much as we might want to distance ourselves from middle-class prejudices about working-class lives, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that drinking was indeed a problem. It was also overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon. Just 5 percent of rural autobiographers described a father who was drinking to excess, whereas more than 25 percent of urban autobiographers did.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ If one adds to this all those who recalled excessive drinking by mothers, stepparents, and other caregivers, around one-third of all the urban writers had firsthand experience of problem drinking. Rather than denying this reality, the question to ask is “Why?”

From the autobiographers’ perspective, drinking was a personal failing, and collectively the writers heaped considerable scorn upon fathers who spent their earnings on drink rather than their families. But looking over hundreds of autobiographies and seeing so many fathers failing in the same ways again and again, I had to question whether drinking was a structural problem with roots outside the family rather than a personal failing. Albert Jasper was characteristically contemptuous of his father for drinking away his earnings and leaving the family trapped in poverty. He did not neglect to mention the time when his father came home drunk and passed out in a pool of his own excrement in the scullery.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ But it is also hard to imagine that Mr. Jasper, in the grip of a serious alcohol addiction and reviled by his family, was living a good life. In truth, alcohol is a harmful substance, and at some point a drinking addiction caused considerable suffering not only for families but also for the drinkers themselves.

Of course, to some degree, the rising level of drinking was a straightforward result of the upward trend in male wages: higher earnings allowed men to purchase greater quantities of alcohol than ever before. But higher incomes do not inevitably lead to more drinking. Drinking can also be a response to a specific situation, and it is possible that changes in the conditions of men's working and home lives also played a part. The elevation of male labor as a marker of masculinity severed men from the comforts of home and thrust them into the masculine, alcohol-drenched world of the pub. We can imagine men turning away from the home as the source of human company and personal identity and searching for these things in the public world of pubs and clubs instead. Joseph Stamper observed that each of the many pubs he used to visit with his father catered to its own clientele. Some were small, cozy, and inward looking. Others looked outwards, providing rooms and facilities for their drinkers—debating clubs, literary societies, libraries, “hot-pot suppers,” sing-songs, and “mass merriment.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A little spare change was the ticket to pursuing such things as male friendships, leisure, and political engagement—all centered on the pub. John Allaway noticed that his father had been able to buy “personal popularity” by spending on beer and cigarettes for men at the public house.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Alehouses promised warmth and friendship to men who might struggle to find these anywhere else. One author wrote that he fell into drinking himself because he enjoyed the alehouse as much as the drink—he “loved the company.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

It is also noticeable that some of the male writers indicated that their own drinking became more problematic during times of crisis. The death of a baby,Footnote ¹¹¹ a cherished son,Footnote ¹¹² a child in a house fire:Footnote ¹¹³ men gave these and similar events as the moment when their once-regulated drinking had begun to spiral out of control. Added to this is the fact that many forms of male labor were extremely demanding physically. One writer recalled how as an apprentice mason, he had attempted to “escape from [his] sense of depression and fatigue” by drinking whiskey. It “gave lightness and energy to both body and mind” and substituted for his usual state of “dullness and gloom, one of exhilaration and enjoyment.” Whiskey, he concluded, was “simply happiness doled out by the glass.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Even in the absence of loss and trauma, men's daily lives could be exhausting and draining, and alcohol provided immediate relief from the day-to-day struggles of life. And seen from this perspective, the rise in heavy drinking appears less the personal failing of individual men and more a response to broader structural forces that served to weaken familial ties and destabilize the family unit.

Heavy drinking was only one response to the rapidly changing world. As long as male wages provided for no more than the meanest subsistence, all members of the family were tightly bound in a nexus of needs and responsibilities; but when men were able to earn something better than a subsistence wage they, and they alone, were freed from that nexus. The fathers who worked in the lowest-waged sectors of the economy may not have had large wages to share with their families, but they were often the most reliable providers. It was when wages were high in the urban and industrial sector that most of the problems of unreliable and heavy-drinking fathers occurred. And as these sectors grew steadily during the nineteenth century, so did the concomitant problems of absent fathers and ineffectual breadwinning.

More generally, the evidence presented here suggests a powerful new agenda for research on life writing. In the four decades since Burnett and his team established working-class autobiography as a major resource for researchers, the dominant mode of enquiry has focused on the meaning of texts and the identity and experience of individual writers. In my making study of autobiographies, I sought to demonstrate that this kind of close reading can be supplemented with strategies to read widely across the collection and to search for connections between the writers as a group and the material world in which they lived. This is not to claim that the experiences of autobiographers—of family, work, political engagement, sex, leisure, or anything else—are always representative of those of the working classes or to argue for a simple equivalence between stories told by autobiographies and the world as at really was. The point rather is that the degree to which working-class writing can be deemed to be representative of working-class life is a historical problem that can and should be pursued. The difficulty in moving from the individual text to the lived world of the text's creator is no greater for autobiographical material than any other historical source, and seeking to better understand how personal narratives intersect with the material world can only enrich our understanding of the past.