‘From Your Ever Anxious and Loving Father’: Faith, Fatherhood, and Masculinity in One Man’s Letters to His Son during the First World War

Genealogy

卷:4

Martin Robb¹ 

[1] Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK;

关键词: fatherhood;    war;    masculinity;    family history;    religion;   

DOI  :  10.3390/genealogy4010032

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In the early months of 1916, Charles Robb a retired shipping clerk in the East End of London, England, wrote a series of letters to his 19-year-old son Arthur, an army private awaiting embarkation to the Western Front. Charles Robb was my great grandfather and Arthur Robb was my grandfather. The letters offer an intriguing glimpse of one man ‘doing’ fatherhood under conditions of traumatic separation and extreme anxiety. This paper presents an analysis of the letters from a psychosocial perspective, exploring the ways in which the writer exhorts his son to live up to the ideals of Christian manhood, while managing the anxiety of separation by presenting a reconstruction in language of the familiar world of home and church.

【 授权许可】

Unknown