Briefly Noted

Faculty

Alumni/ae

1935—Hugh Gregg and Georgi Hippauf. Conscience of a Northern Man: The Story of Amos Tuck [video and resource guide].Amos Tuck Society, 1998).

1938—James A. Fisher. Talking Correctly for Success: a practical guide to sounding "right" for business, professional, and social success [revised edition]. (Avant Publishing Co., 1999).

1940—George K. Lewis. Growing Up in Wayland: life in a Massachusetts town during the depression (Heritage House, published in association with the Wayland Historical Society, 1997).

1941—John B. Babcock. Farmboy: hard work and good times on a farm that helped change Northeast agriculture (DeWitt Historical Society, 1999).

1941—David G. Hinners. Tong Shao-Yi and his Family: a saga of two countries and three generations (University Press of America, 1999).

1951—Sabin Robbins. A Hundred Summers: an affectionate history of Northport Point (Bayshore Books, 1999).

1956—Peter Brooks. World Elsewhere [a novel]. (Simon & Schuster, 1999).

1956—Gerasimos N. Tsandoulas. Frossini: Excerpts [CD] written under the pseudonym F. DiArta-Angeli. (Capstone Records, 1999).

1959—Jan Schreiber. Bell Buoys (Aliquando Press, 1998).

1961—John Irving. My Movie Business: a memoir. (Random House, 1999).

1966—William A. H. Sammons with Jennifer M. Lewis. Don't Divorce Your Children: children and their parents talk about divorce. (Contemporary Books, 1999).

1968—Edward M. Hallowell. Connect. (Pantheon Books, 1999).

1969—Richard Maurer. The Wild Colorado: the true adventures of Fred Dellenbaugh, age 17, on the second Powell expedition to the Grand Canyon.(Crown Publishers, 1999).

1971—Buck Levin. Environmental Nutrition: understanding the link between environment, food quality, and disease. (HingePin, 1999).

1978—Barney J. Kenet and Patricia Lawler. How to Wash Your Face: America's leading dermatologist reveals the essential secrets for youthful, radiant skin. (Simon & Schuster, 1999).

1980—Hal Katzen. The Logic of Love: finding faith through the heart-mind connection. (Insights Out Publishing, 1999).

1982—Jen Hill, editor. An Exhilaration of Wings: the literature of bird watching. (Viking, 1999).

1983—Adam Guettel and others. Myths and Hymns [CD]. (Nonesuch Records, 1999).

1983—Chang-rae Lee. A Gesture Life [a novel]. (Riverhead Books, 1999).

1992—Jedediah Purdy. For Common Things: irony, trust, and commitment in America today (Knopf, 1999).

Briefly Noted

1952—Charles W. Pratt [several poems]. In Take the Apple: essays, poems, recipes from Apple Annie, by Joan C. Pratt. (Pomme Press, 1999).

1975—Evelyn MacGregor Blewer. "La 'Bataille' des Burgraves et les Deuils de L'Année 1843 sur une Amitié Entre Victor Hugo et Alphonse Karr." In Victor Hugo (no. 4, Lettres Modernes Minard, 1999).

Faculty

Aldo J. Baggia. "In the footsteps of Gottfried Silbermann." In The Diapason: an international monthly devoted to the Organ, the Harpsichord and Church Music, Official Journal of the International Society for Organ History and Preservation (Whole No. 1077, August 1999).

Charles W. Pratt '52. see above.

The story of how middle-class reformers both asserted and undermined this Victorian cult of domesticity is the subject of George K. Behlmer '66's rich and fascinating work, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940. Behlmer, who teaches history at the University of Washington, has written previously about the English campaign against child abuse in the late 19th century. Here he essays a broader canvas. Engels and Marx were not the only writers who catalogued the ills of the English working class during the Victorian era. In the early 1840s, Parliament began to issue reports that expressed the worries of the governing classes about the harm done to home and family by the growth of cities and industry. Thereafter a chorus of writers echoed this concern, producing an immense body of cautionary literature and statistical information, culminating at the turn of the century in Charles Booth's monumental 17 volumes on the Life and Labor of the People in London. All of these sources, including such obscure and intriguing publications as Our Waifs and Strays or The Magdalen's Friend, and Female Homes' Intelligencer, provide the material for Behlmer's comprehensive work.

Although they seemed to hope, in Behlmer's words, "that articulating the home-as-haven ideal might hasten its acceptance by working-class families, middle-class reformers recognized that words were not a sufficient response to the dangers posed by industrialization. Thus they created and led the "vast array of interventionist groups" — home visitors, district nurses, mothers' meetings, truant officers, health professionals, child psychologists, divorce court magistrates, smallpox vaccinators, adoption agencies — that took on the responsibility of guarding the English home. Grounded first in the example of the evangelical ministry, these efforts tended over the course of the 19th century to lose their religious cast, thereby illustrating one of Behlmer's central themes: the secularization of social work. Increasingly agencies of local and national government came to supplement, though not replace, the work of private individuals and groups. Here, too, Friends provides insight from its particular perspective about a larger process — the growth of the welfare state of the 20th-century. Behlmer shows that those who strongly asserted the sanctity of the home also took the lead in breaching the division between the public and the private spheres. Thus Charlotte Mason led her Parents' National Education Union on a campaign to teach parents how to build character, and the Union's journal proclaimed in 1897 that the belief in the English home as castle was " 'a mere relic of .our barbarian days.'" This transition was not without controversy, however, and by elaborating the debate among these reformers about the proper role of government, Behlmer has much to tell us about how the laissez-faire liberalism of the mid-19th century became the interventionist creed that it is today. In addition, he contributes to a more nuanced understanding of several subjects of controversy among historians, insisting throughout on the importance of seeing working-class families, particularly mothers, as actors in the story, who both resisted and took what they wanted from those who tried to save them from themselves.

Though this last aspect of his work is directed more toward scholars familiar with the historiography, Behlmer's connection of his narrative to larger themes will engage a wider audience. Indeed, he concludes the book by addressing the current political discussion of "family values," warning against the pessimism or even hysteria that comes from the invocation of this mantra to bemoan the passing of an era that never existed. But what the reader most savors in Friends is the wealth of its detail. A host of individuals, wonderful in their variety and earnestness, populate Behlmer's pages. People like Ellen Ranyard, whose Bible Mission was devoted to training those whom today we call paramedics, or Claude Mullins, the Judge Judy of his time who sought to double as a marriage counselor, compel our interest. And along the way we learn about such subjects as the origins of kindergarten, Herbert Spencer's fascination with phrenology, and Dr. Spock's position as the author of the second bestseller (after the Bible) of all time. Finally Exonians will note that it was Edward Harkness who, shortly before his gift to the Academy, financed the Commonwealth Fund, which sponsored much of the early work on child psychology in England. Now that's a friend of the family.

—R. Bruce Pruitt

R. Bruce Pruitt is the Cordingley Professor of History and has been an instructor at the Academy since 1973.