The Victorian was a time of intense social and political change. Because of the anxiety, the family came to be seen as the only certainty, a source of security in a world of upheaval. Of course, in real life, families in the Victorian period were just as complicated and fraught with problems as they are now. Hence, it’s no surprise that Victorian literature not only obsessively explores the family but also reflects the tension between the ideal and the real. Depictions of domesticity range from affirmations of the Victorian domestic ideal to nervous acknowledgments of its failure and sometimes even explicit challenges to its assumptions and values.
One of the hallmarks of Dickens's fiction is the centrality of the domestic ideal. Cozy, contented, cheerful, and sheltering homes are presented as social and moral panacea from his early writings onwards. The domestic fantasy is epitomized in the Christmas books, where the essential ingredients of the domestic ideal are fully realized. Cleanliness, domestic order, efficiency, and the domestic angel along with well-behaved children are at the center of the domestic dream. The wedding scene in Pickwick Papers (shown in the video below), where the reader is shown a happy, stable home in the mist of a wedding celebration is one of the more popular examples of a Dickens family; while Agnus Wickfield in David Copperfield epitomizes the Victorian ideal of the domestic angel.
The rise in the Domestic ideology coincided with the Industrial Revolution and Industrialization and resulted in a separation between home and work, public and private. Even though such ideas began to develop in the eighteenth century, the full separation did not occur till the mid nineteenth century. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most industry was home based, so that women, working from home, would not have to experience the conflict between the working world and the domestic sphere. Following the Industrial Revolution, "work" and "home" slowly became distinct, and this herald the birth of that famous Victorian formulation of the "public" and "private" sphere.