For Victorian acceptance of emotion was in principle quite wholehearted. Natural emotions were basically good, though they must be controlled and properly targeted. Even less fortunate emotions, like anger or even fear, whether natural or not, could be put to good use. “No person should be afraid of his finer feelings,” wrote one Pittsburgh minister in 1880, capping a long evolution away from early nineteenthcentury sermons in which a more traditionally Calvinist gloom about this world and its works had prevailed. Victorianism was born, after all, in an atmosphere shaped by romanticism and its appreciation of emotion, or at least of sentimentality. To be sure, Victorianism was also shaped by the Enlightenment emphasis on the importance of reason. However, the driest kind of rationalism was modified at the level of practicing intellectuals, and it had never caught on widely among the reading public.7 In contrast to sexuality, then, emotion was not regarded with anxiety and suspicion. Management and appropriate use, not systematic limitation, were the guiding principles.
The Victorian emotional style began to take shape in the 1820s, building on many of the emotionological principles that had developed in the previous century, including a strong emphasis on family emotionality.8 For about two decades, a new genre of family advice literature, partially secular though heavily informed by Protestantism, suggested a sentimental tone that, beginning in childhood, could maintain family harmony. Prescriptive writers, like Catharine Sedgwick, writing from a Protestant perspective but generally without emphasis on religious goals, emphasized several emotional criteria for an appropriate family life, some of which they explicitly contrasted with more traditional standards.9 Loving relationships were essential.10 The 1830s saw the genesis of an unprecedented fascination with motherlove. The Reverend John Todd told the readers of Mother’s Magazine in 1839 that “God planted this deep, this unquenchable love for her offspring, in the mother’s heart.” From this love, in turn, would come the inculcation of appropriate affection in the children themselves, male and female alike. “It is the province of the mother, to cultivate the affections, to form and guard the moral habits of the child, for the first ten years of life, and to all intents and purposes the character of the man or woman is substantially laid as early as that period of life.”11 The equation of love and morality was virtually a commonplace in prescriptive literature from the 1830s onward, though in fact it was a substantial innovation in a culture that had traditionally doubted that human affection could be compatible with an appropriate focus on things divine.
The emphasis on love spilled over to other family relationships. Portrayals of siblings emphasized their deep affection. A staple of popular middle-class fiction involved sisters so deeply loving that the introduction of an outsider in their midst, in the form of a successful suitor for one of the sisters constituted a great crisis of emotion. Deep affection was also routinely portrayed in discussions of brother and sister, though here qualified by the different strengths each gender could bring to a relationship. The Rollo series for boys involves many an episode in which Rollo saves his sister from some disaster, demonstrating courage and affection simultaneously.12
Love between spouses also received high praise as one of the chief benefits of family life. “Men find so little sincere friendship abroad, so little true sympathy in the selfish world, that they gladly yield themselves to the influence of a gentle spirit at home.” Love and serenity were closely linked in this image, providing the essential emotional underpinning for a growing commitment to hearth and family. Emphasis on the special emotional qualities of women was linked to the other durable image being generated at this point—the idea that women had special domestic qualities, including appropriate emotional warmth as wives and mothers.13
The focus on loving families prompted other emotional standards as well. Most obviously, emotions that might jeopardize affectionate family life were now discredited, and a good-bad dichotomy based on family impact was developed. Here, too, trends in the prescriptive literature built on the earlier shift in emotional culture toward family centeredness and self-control, but with new fervor deriving from the heightened emphasis on family intensity.
Fear was reassessed. A standard argument from the 1830s onward held that children would have no reason to develop fear “unless it was put into their heads.” Fearful adults, or even worse, reprobate adults who used fear as part of discipline, were seen as disrupting children’s emotional tranquillity. The obvious solution was to urge adults, particularly mothers, to swallow their own fears lest they induce them in their children, “embittering the whole existence of her offspring.” And all adults must be prevented from deliberately scaring their children: “She who can tell a frightful story to her child or allow one to be told, ought to have a guardian appointed over herself.” No obedience was worth the poison of fear when affectionate, gentle guidance could win even better results without negative emotional side effects. Even safety was no excuse for inducing fear. A child made afraid of spider bites might get bitten just as easily as a child who had not been terrified, and bites are preferable to a “fear that troubles one all life long.” Servants who delighted in scaring children came in for particular criticism, as the middle class and popular culture began to diverge. “It is utterly impossible to calculate the evil” that imposing fears could wreak on sensitive souls. Instances of actual death resulting from children’s fears were cited in warnings about a host of traditional disciplinary measures that must be rejected as an “undefined species of horror.” Loving motherhood, not corroding terror, provided the emotional lodestar for parents. As the God-fearing qualities of religious virtue began to decline in mainstream American Protestantism, a fearful individual was no longer considered appropriately pious. Rather, he or she was emotionally crippled, incapable of taking the kinds of initiatives or displaying the kinds of confidence desirable in middle-class life. Most obviously, if fear became an emotional link between parent and child, long-term affection would be excluded even if short-term discipline was served. Fear, quite simply, became an emotional abuse of parental authority, a theme that continued through the twentieth century in virtually all the prescriptive literature.14
A key facet of the new campaign against fear in childrearing involved the presentation of death. American Calvinists had long emphasized death images as a means of inculcating religious obedience in children. Elements of this theme persisted into the nineteenth century, with authors like James Janeway writing that unrepentant children were “not too little to die,” “not too little to go to hell.”15 But middle-class opinion was shifting rapidly, and the idea of sinful children who deserved to be frightened by terrifying images of death became increasingly distasteful. By the 1820s, clergymen who refused to accept the growing, romantic belief in childish innocence were frequently confronted with rebellious congregations, so that many changed their tune or at least sought refuge in silence. Lyman Beecher and others helped steer Protestantism away from emphasis on original sin and its corollaries infant damnation and legitimate fear of death. Avoidance of fear again related to the larger emotional package being developed by the early Victorians. In 1847 Horace Bushnell ventured a synthesis: “A proper nurture could counteract mere ‘tendencies’ to depravity if nurture began while wickedness was weakest—that is, in infancy. … Kindness, love and tender care by a mother who exemplified all the virtues would adequately prepare the child for salvation and a life of moral responsibility.” Lydia Child anticipated the sentiment in her Mother’s Book in 1831: “They [infants] come to us from heaven, with their little souls full of innocence and peace; and, as far as possible, a mother’s influence should not interfere with the influence of angels.” The lessons obviously applied to the presentation of death. “Great care is required that children