Fathers at Home: Life Writing and Late-Victorian and Edwardian Plebeian Domestic Masculinities

Drawing on working-class autobiographies, this article unpacks working-class authors’ subtle use of
domestic spaces in life story narrative to suggest that even small homes could be made of multiple spaces
that held specific but also fluid gender-, age- and affect-related meanings. In drawing out the gendered
complexities of working-class homes, the essay focuses particularly on men’s relationships to domestic
space as fathers. Approaching life writing as text, the article suggests that the bifurcated model of women,
home and family vs men, absence and public space falters to expose extra layers of meaning to seemingly
straightforward stories of gendered worlds and spaces. This not only expands the scope for interpreting
working-class interiorities in life writing but also highlights the plasticity of gendered roles and spaces in
experiential contexts.