Based on the book, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, by J. M. S. Tompkins, this paper gives numerous examples on the submissiveness of sons to fathers in that thirty-year period. Wolf deals largely with the lives and works of J. S. Mill and Edmund Gosse. These two writers turned from initial submissiveness to the father to awareness of self, coupled with revolt against the father, and finally, to some 'different possibility' in fictional and familial relations. The emphasis is on the severe depression of J. S. Mill and the retreat into fantasy of Edmund Gosse, based on murderous hatred of the father. The author's thesis is that changes in society shift family relations which make for new attitudes in life and literature. For those who are interested in the origins of Romantic literature and modern psychology he suggests that there is a link between the collapse of the myth of the autocratic father and the rise of emotionalism.