The feeling which most of us have about the family is direct, spontaneous and often very powerful. It is strong enough, in fact, to sustain a fund of interest in all aspects of family life, including the family life of earlier generations, on the part of people for whom the past history of other things may have little value. Any writer on the subject out of the university, therefore, has both an advantage and a handicap. He can count on his possible readers' wanting to know what he has to say; but he must find it difficult to provide the information which he thinks they ought to have in a form acceptable to them.

‘Acceptable’ here means written in plain, readable prose. It means naming the names of the past people whose familial experience is being described, spelling out the resemblances with what goes on in the home in our own day, and lighting up the contrasts. Leafing over the pages of this book will soon show that a good part of the exposition is not in prose at all, but in figures, frequently in tables of figures and sometimes in graphs. Not much experience is actually described. Not many of those who took part in family life, or fell illicitly in love, have their names and ages written out. Little is said about how different these things were in days gone by or how much the same. The reader may perhaps come to think he has been cheated of what he had a right to expect to be able to read.