The use of the term “siblinghood” in Amy Harris's title shows a conviction that it is a category ripe for historical analysis. Indeed, siblings have become a hot interdisciplinary topic. Lenore Davidoff and others have made recent contributions, but Harris looks to Georgian England to discover why they were so important. The eighteenth century, she claims, witnessed tensions between a tradition of sibling equality and a patriarchy that privileged male, married, and elder siblings. This struggle was linked to a parallel clash between egalitarian and hierarchical ideas of authority in the wider world. Harris adds a vibrant horizontal layer to the usual vertical family history that stresses parenthood, marriage, and primogeniture. She also offers a correction to the stress on individualism and the development of the “self” by describing how “siblings formed the bridge into adulthood for one another” (28).
Harris's strength lies in her creative integration of different kinds of sources, which allows her to expand coverage to nonelite social groups. Quotations introducing chapters (unified by Samuel Johnson's nuggets) show a carefully constructed book. Seven families with copious correspondences, wills, diaries, account books, memorabilia, and portraits over several generations form the study's core. As their members introduce each chapter's theme, we get to know people like the orphaned spinster Anne Travell, whose appearance in vertical studies would be unlikely. Core family patterns are validated by twenty-five families with smaller archives, whose experience cumulatively builds up each chapter's arguments. Institutional sources—Consistory Court and probate records, Poor Law accounts, Old Bailey transcripts, and Ordinary accounts—broaden the sample and expose conflict. Gloucestershire, Cheshire, and London records predominate, but not exclusively. Lived experience is also contrasted with prescriptive literature. Surprisingly, the cursory 2.5-page index and lack of references to family trees limit the ability of readers to trace and link interests.
Chapter 1 argues that impacts of children on each other have been underestimated. Siblings grew up in homes where birth order was in constant flux and parental treatment often clashed with norms. Together they tested, taught, reinforced, and resisted social conventions. Family rituals and power patterns learned in childhood were then carried forward in later life. Chapters 2 and 3 compare the ties that both “bound” and “cut” sibling relationships. Love, affection, and friendship are revealed in letters that enshrined the ideal, easy, natural relationship between lifelong peers. But court and probate records expose conflict arising from ill treatment of each other and differences in social and legal positions. In fact, “acrimony among siblings ran the gamut from short-lived frustrations to vicious and lasting resentments, and to murderous rages” (83).
In chapters 4 and 5, Harris most satisfyingly uses personal and legal sources to delve deeply into aspects of economic and political power. Material support from siblings—both wealthy and very poor—extended over generations and households, even when kin did not live together. Analysis of over three thousand West Country will extracts shows men and women testators used siblings as beneficiaries or executors. Commonplace and account books reveal the embeddedness of everyday economic actions—not only small thoughtful expenditures, constant child care, daily errands, marital, occupational, legal, and financial aid but also the “small, even fleeting, tensions and resentments that . . . affected how services and support flowed between households” (121). In each of these areas, Harris highlights the effects of age, birth order, and marital status.
These three factors are even more strongly emphasized and nuanced in the chapter on political power. Families often apportioned resources where need was greatest, depending upon their own shifting internal dynamics, not merely on the basis of age and gender. Harris uses sibling probate disputes of farmers, yeomen, and artisans in the Gloucestershire Consistory Court (1700–1842) to make this point (175–76). These cases dealt with personal, not landed, property, and 59.2 percent of conflicts were between (not within) the genders. Sisters understood inheritance laws and were ready to use the courts to obtain a more equal share of personal property. Brothers also pushed against parents’ efforts to equalize or privilege their sisters. Remarkably, there was a slight prevalence of cases in which older siblings argued against younger ones. Married sisters also instigated more disputes than did widowed or single sisters.
Though the number of cases is small, they clearly reveal the tensions between normative expectations of gender, birth order, and marital status, and real-life experience. Personal letters and diaries flesh out these court records and confirm their findings. Contemporary novels and sermons notwithstanding, primogeniture only explained property relations for landed families. Beyond that, maintains Harris, “siblings expected fair and equal treatment in matters of inheritance.” When this did not occur, they could go to court “to enforce a system that, while not strictly equal, encouraged brothers and sisters to share and share alike” (160).
Harris achieves her goal of uncovering the dynamic, complex, interactive world of sibling relationships. The equally complex historical and legal contexts are downplayed in the interest of a clear, accessible text. Though the uniqueness of sibling experience—disappointments, rivalries, and inequalities—is in some places overstated, the applicability of Harris's accounts of daily life to friends and other kin makes her thesis even more credible. She has achieved her goal of offering new ways to understand the early modern family, the development of gender, and the role of social relationships in domestic power.
