While British periodicals between 1850 and 1910 typically expressed anxiety about fatherhood in the abstract, often portraying fathers as cold, detached, sexually irresponsible, or brutal, periodical fiction and “life writing” took a different tack by presenting their readership with portraits of ideal individual fathers. This article explores the ways in which this ideal inverts the usual stereotype of the Victorian paterfamilias by investing the father with the selflessness, sexual purity, and commitment to domesticity that were also crucial to the ideal of the good Victorian mother.
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