Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning among the Victorian Middle Classes

First Published in 1954, Prosperity and Parenthood is a study of Victorian middle-class ideas about the standard of living, marriage, and the responsibilities of family life. The book begins by tracing the fall in fertility in the 1870s to a change in the middle-class conception of parenthood and goes on to show that the standard of living considerably expanded during the period of great prosperity, roughly 1850 to 1870.

The author also gives a detailed study of what the middle classes consi...