Introduction

Abstract

Among the most important productions of an astonishingly productive era was the Victorian ideal of domesticity. Relentlessly, those writing for Victorian mass audiences depicted the home as the source of all comfort, the best evidence of (or substitute for) divine love at a time when the existence of God was increasingly coming into question. And if the home was the heart of the nation, the mother was the heart of the home. In John Ruskin’s famous image, she was the queen of the garden, ruler and creator of her miniature Eden, possessor of ‘a power, if she would wield it, over [her child], and over its father, purer than the air of heaven, and stronger than the seas of earth’ (Ruskin, 1865, p. 93). As the century progressed, more and more Victorian texts — from housekeeping manuals to magazine stories, from paintings to Parliamentary debates — asserted the mother’s primacy as parent and as moral force.