( Mark Helprin's legions of devoted readers cherish his timeless novels and short stories, which are uplifting in their conviction of the goodness and resilience of the human spirit. Freddy and Fredericka?a brilliantly refashioned fairy tale and a magnificently funny farce?only seems like a radical departure of form, for behind the laughter, Helprin speaks of leaps of faith and second chances, courage and the primacy of love. Helprin's latest work, an extraordinarily funny allegory about a most peculiar British royal family, is immensely mocking of contemporary monarchy and yet deeply sympathetic to the individuals caught in its lonely absurdities.

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.

Although many historians (notably Ferdinand Mount) see in these reforms the machinations of an overintrusive state, Behlmer's six linked essays provide insight into the reformers' varied goals and reveal that this policing of the Victorian family was in fact "not a social discipline designed to penetrate private life and subvert parental authority." Nor does Behlmer believe, � la Gertrude Himmelfarb, that Victorians both rich and poor embraced and practiced "Victorian values" such as respectability, cleanliness, obedience, and self-sufficiency. Indeed, Behlmer argues that the reformers were "trying to make people more responsible, and not principally by shaming them." Behlmer stands out as a voice of reason amidst the recent moral panic about decaying family values, arguing that this golden age of domestic bliss never happened, and that the family "has never been able to meet the expectations placed upon it." Refreshingly low on jargon, exhaustively researched, and filled with illustrative examples, Friends of the Family is a well-written contribution to the ongoing debate on domestic morality. --C.B. Delaney

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