This book seeks to explain what a reverence for "family values" meant in practice for the Western world's most family-conscious culture. Victorian England can be credited with inventing the ideal of the home inviolate, an ideal best condensed in the notion that "an Englishman's home is his castle." It was during this period that the family emerged as a subject of continuous discussion by politicians and of intervention by middle-class reformers. Charting the origins, elaborations, and limitations of the concept of the ideal home is no antiquarian exercise, for the social policy implications bound up with the myth of family privacy persist today.

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