In the last decade or so, literary scholars have increasingly explored the significant historical distance between the ways we currently name, plot, and characterize sibling relations, and the quite different ways that pre- twentiethcentury writers and readers might have done so. Yet, as Mary Jean Corbett and Naomi Tadmor have separately argued, efforts to historicize our understanding of English families over the crucial transitional period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been weakened by scholars’ reliance on terms and ideas that assume stable, universally human familial structures and relations. When we focus on the sibling relation, this reliance proves particularly limiting: even Corbett and Tadmor, who are consciously working against such assumptions, demonstrate continuing tendencies to define “brother” and “sister” in terms of sexual, specifically conjugal, relations that reinscribe these stabilizing, universalizing terms, or to subsume the sibling relation into other categories, eliding its potential primacy in “family.”

Sisters and the English Household works to escape these lingering critical limitations through two innovations: a reframing of efforts to historicize “family” as a further historicizing of “domesticity” that renders it multiple and fluid, rather than monolithic; and a turn toward the unmarried adult sister as a figure of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labor in the domestic space. I argue for the recognition of at least two distinct ideals of domesticity, both functional throughout the nineteenth century, one of which understood sibling fortunes as fruitfully intertwined through the full extent of the siblings’ lives (corporate domesticity), and one of which expected the domestic, material, and to some extent emotional separation of adult siblings from their birth homes and from each other (industrial domesticity). The second configuration, though long counterbalanced by persistent idealizations of the first, siblinganchored model, was gradually and unevenly ascendant through the period. As households came to be primarily defined by the relations between spouses, and between parents and children, the mutual householding and devotion of siblings, once generally expected features of family life, began to seem extraordinary. More specifically, as a domestic space defined by the apparent exclusion of productive labor was increasingly idealized, the adult unmarried sister in the house became an object of intense cultural scrutiny, her troubling autonomy rendering her the crucial figure in the English nineteenth century's protracted cultural negotiation of familial, household, and domestic ideals.

At the end of Austen's Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram finds that his personal happiness and his family's fortunes are embodied in a most unexpected person: the poor niece he fostered from her childhood, Fanny Price, who will marry his second son, Edmund, and so secure the family's future. With both of his blood daughters compromised, one by scandal and divorce, the other by a less than salubrious marriage, and his elder son weakened by a gambling habit and physical illness, Sir Thomas learns that “Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted”:

Fanny's domestic services to the family as constant companion to Lady Bertram and general household assistant will now be supplied by Fanny's sister Susan, who becomes “the stationary niece” and in a short time “could never be spared” by their aunt (546). With three Price nieces and nephews provided for (though William's commission can only indirectly be attributed to Sir Thomas), and one of them married to his second son, Sir Thomas finds happiness in “[Susan's] usefulness, in Fanny's excellence, in William's continued good conduct, and rising fame, and in the general well- doing and success of the other members of the family, all assisting to advance each other, and doing credit to his countenance and aid” (547).

We recognize here the outlines of a corporate household partially restored: despite the elder Ward sisters’ initial hostility and later inattention to their poorer sister, sibling ties reestablish themselves through the uncle- bymarriage's provision of material and, eventually, emotional care to his niece.

In October 1796, just ten days after Mary Lamb killed their mother in a violent episode of derangement, her brother Charles wrote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge about his family's troubles. Faced with the support of Mary, for whom he intended to care at home, and his remaining family on the slender means of his post at the East India Company, Charles wrote out the motto and dedication— to Mary— of his one book of poetry, and then renounced poetry in favor of more profitable journalistic writing:

Charles's rhetorical equation of marriage and sibling love has claimed the full attention of scholarly readers, who stop short at the words “my sister”: the last words of Charles's phrase, “and my poor old father,” are not quoted in critical accounts of Charles and Mary's relationship. Even Jane Aaron, whose thoughtful examination of gender in the Lambs’ writings places them in important historical contexts, quotes only that troublesome verb “wedded” at the beginning of her study, implicitly (and unintentionally) attributing it to Mary: “ ‘wedded’ in an intense sibling bond, they lived together, wrote together, ‘writing on one table,’ according to Mary, ‘like an old literary Darby and Joan,’ and were rarely seen apart” (1–2). Aaron even more pointedly excludes the passage's final words in her concluding chapter: “Charles made the crucial decision to ‘wed’ himself, in his own phrase, ‘to the fortunes of my sister’ ” (170).

Charles certainly did figure the sibling bond as marriage, not only here but also in his 1797 poem “I am a widowed thing, now thou art gone.” His recasting of his sister Mary as “cousin Bridget” in his “Elia” essays implies a similar figuration, since cousins were not forbidden to marry by canon or civil law, and were not infrequently seen as quite appropriate marriage choices.

In the summer of 1992, I spent my break from teaching in the University of Southern Mississippi's British Studies program in Grasmere, reading in the Wordsworth Library and enjoying once again the evocative beauty of that village and its setting. I happened to be there during the annual Summer Conference, and the Wordsworth Trust (then directed by Robert Woof) extended the courtesy of including me in some of the tours. It was in the sponsored tour of Dove Cottage that I heard the story, told by one of their guides, that the door leading from the staircase directly into the orchard had been built so that William could go straight outside, avoiding the distractions of “domestic chaos” (this is the phrase I noted at the time) when he wanted to walk and compose.

This drew chuckles from the listeners, including me. Later, though, I thought more seriously about what this might mean, and went looking for the story's textual traces. In a letter answering my inquiry, Jeff Cowton, Registrar of the Trust at that time, pointed me toward “correspondence with the Clarksons of 1804 discussing the benefits of the new door,” but went on to suggest that “the issue of ‘domestic chaos’ has been described as ‘oral tradition,’ but that is perhaps giving too much support for what is an interpretative point.” Indeed, the March 25, 1804, letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to Mrs. Thomas Clarkson— the only one I have found that refers to the door— seems to mix, rather than separate, the domestic and the artistic in its brief postscript reference: “We have got the door made at the staircase. It is quite delightful. We often thank you and your sister for the pleasure it gives John [William and Mary's son, less than a year old] and all of us. Whenever John gets a hurt we carry him to it and he is still in a moment, he sees himself in the glass or looks out into the orchard” (Early Years 462). In Dorothy's account, the door affords “pleasure” not just to the baby but to “all,” to the “we” who “have got the door made”: the domestic improvement is clearly practical, and “pleasure” is no doubt intended in its general sense here, but in this household “pleasure” also potentially implies literary purpose, resonating with William's and Dorothy's uses of the word in earlier years.

Readers of nineteenth- century British novels know that writers’ and readers’ interest in sibling relations was not confined to the topical novels embedded in the Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister controversy. Regardless of their explicit thematic foci, novels of this period characteristically engage the wobbling, uncertain development of domestic ideologies at the crux of sibling relations. A particularly revealing variation of this engagement is the replacement of the adult unmarried sister in the house, the figure that carried the weight of public discourse about legal familial identities, with an adult unmarried brother. Characters like Tom Pinch (Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewitt, 1843), Phineas Fletcher (Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman, 1856), and Mordecai Cohen (Eliot's Daniel Deronda, 1876) typify this variation: feminized as gentle and in delicate health, paired with blood or metaphorical siblings, these adult brothers take the place of an unmarried sister in a married sibling's house. Theoretically these male characters should not represent a threat to ideal domesticity of any sort, their rightful autonomy being fully authorized in cultural as well as legal and economic terms. Yet their novelistic trajectories suggest otherwise: rendered incapable of labor, made dependents in their siblings’ homes, and, in more than one case, killed off, the fate of the unmarried adult brothers in these fictions points to no less pressing a need for their expulsion from the ideal household than the need excited by their more obviously “dangerous” sisters.

None of these substitutions of brother for sister is uncomplicated, nor is any of them wholly consistent with one “side” of the field of fluctuating domestic ideals. In the case of Phineas Fletcher, for instance, his relationship with the eponymous hero of Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman is marked by womanly qualities on both sides: Phineas is gentle, invalided, bookish, but John is physically beautiful, and it is John who dies at the novel's end. The idealized love of the two men (compared in the novel to the love of the Biblical Jonathan and David) is further complicated by the death of one metaphorical brother, and with him, the sibling household. As we would expect, then, the replacement of sister with brother, and the brother's subsequent elimination from the household, functions as another template upon which alternative domesticities may be projected, mixed, and explored.