Behlmer, George. Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
An Englishman's home may well be his castle, but even before the development of the modern welfare state, plenty of outsiders held the castle keys. Victorian reformers poked their way into the homes of the poor--and, later, the middle classes--hoping to regulate everything from child welfare and marital discord to public health and education. George K. Behlmer's Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940 examines the history of these reforms and regulations and the philanthropy behind them.