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Cynthia Huff, The ‘Galton Family Books’: Visual and Verbal Life Writing, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 52, Issue 2, April 2016, Pages 189–202, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqw002
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Abstract
The two-volume manuscript ‘Galton Family Books’ (1883), arranged by Elizabeth Galton Wheler, the sister of eugenicist Francis Galton, with assistance from her son and other family members, visually and verbally pictures the hybridity of autobiographical acts, and the collaboration that produces these, within specifically Victorian ideological contexts. Using the techniques of Victorian album culture, which were commonly practised by women from the aristocracy and gentry, Wheler employs visual rhetoric to underscore the overt ideologies of the ‘Books’: deeply felt religious belief, a commitment to the burgeoning interest in science, the evocation of the past, and the social status granted by property. The ‘Galton Family Books’ manifest the Victorians’ obsession with material culture as supplementary to the written text in order to historicize, contest and realize three levels of Galton family life inscription: collective Galton family history, the Galtons’ place within social, political and scientific national and international contexts, and Galton family members’ individual biographies.