Prison of Expectations by Steven Mintz

Prison of Expectations by Steven Mintz

The stereotypical Victorian family, although represented in innumerable daguerrotypes, is as much fantasy as reality. The Victorian family took many forms, and in this ambitious and highly original book, Steven Mintz enters five different homes in order to shed light on critical aspects of middle-class character and family during the era.
By investigating the private lives of five of the most famous and influential novelists--Robert Louis Stevenson, George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Sedgwick, and Samuel Butler--Mintz traces patterns of intersection between family dynamics and larger cultural problems of authority, legitimacy, and discipline in nineteenth-century Britain and America. More specifically, he explores the struggles to achieve a personal independence within a Victorian home and the larger historical struggle to adapt the older traditions of deference, authority, and responsibility to the emerging realities of a democratic age.

Steven Mintz is a history professor at the University of Houston and the director of the American Cultures Program. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (1988; co-authored with Susan Kellogg); and Moralists & Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers (1995), a major interpretation of antebellum reform. Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, his most recent book, won the Association of American Publishers R.R. The Organization of American Historians' 2004 Merle Curti Prize for the greatest work in social history; and the Texas Institute of Letters' Carr P. Hawkins Award for the Best Scholarly Publication of 2004. The finest non-fiction book of 2004 won the Collins Award.