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Daddy's Come Home: Evangelicalism, Fatherhood and Lessons for Boys in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain

2007; Men's Studies Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3149/fth.0503.174

1933-026X

Stephanie Olsen,

Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

Fears in fin-de-siecle Britain that fathers were absenting themselves from the home prompted a reaction from the evangelical periodical press, orchestrated by the Religious Tract Society, in an attempt to preserve “traditional” domestic ideals of fatherly men. These journals creatively deployed narratives, both fictional and non, that re-emphasised the centrality of male influence in the home, importantly within the idiom of Evangelicalism. Not only was the message— a refashioning of the Holy Trinity: the heavenly Father, the earthly father and the surrogate father (as replacement for the absent father)—critical in upholding the virtues of domesticated men, but the media themselves became crucial “surrogates,” guiding boys in fatherly ways to compensate for the perceived absence of real fathers. The preponderance of literature on the subject of domesticated, moral and religious fathers ought to make us question the “flight from domesticity” to suggest, perhaps at least rhetorically, that “Daddy’s Come Home.”