Family Prayers

This chapter takes up the Victorian fashion for family prayers and a host of devotional manuals—guides that were widely referred to as “forms”—whose purpose was to instrumentalize this practice for families as a regular, household routine. Although family prayers could do the work of maintaining normative gender and class boundaries in the increasingly time-scheduled middle-class home, the recommendation of these books to conduct devotions with efficiency betrays an anxiety over the disruptive prospect of the household audience’s boredom. Along with these manuals, novelistic treatments of family prayers show that domestic devotions were equally an everyday duration in which daydream and reverie might offer household members a provisional reprieve from the labours of attention that family prayers demanded.