Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Jenny DiPlacidi · Karl Leydecker
Editors
After Marriage in
the Long Eighteenth
Century
Literature, Law and Society
Editors
Jenny DiPlacidi Karl Leydecker
School of English University of Dundee
University of Kent Dundee, UK
Canterbury, UK
This book has its origins in the workshop series ‘After Marriage in the
Long Eighteenth Century’ held at the University of Kent. We thank
all of the participants who made the events so successful and stimulat-
ing, and the School of English, the School of European Culture and
Languages, Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
(KIASH) and the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century at
the University of Kent, which generously funded the workshops. We are
indebted to the contributors to After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth
Century: Literature, Law and Society for offering such rich and diverse
treatments of the topic and for making this volume possible. The guid-
ance and encouragement from Camille Davies and Ben Doyle at
Palgrave Macmillan was instrumental throughout the publication pro-
cess. We thank the National Galleries of Scotland and the Trustees of the
Goodwood Collection, which have allowed us to reproduce the images
in this book. Finally, we offer our sincere gratitude to our respective
partners, whose constant support throughout the writing and editing of
the book has been invaluable.
v
Contents
vii
viii Contents
Index 205
Editors and Contributors
ix
x Editors and Contributors
Contributors
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Jenny DiPlacidi
As his hero and heroine pass the matrimonial barrier, the novelist generally
drops the curtain, as if the drama were over then; the doubts and struggles of
life ended: as if, once landed in the marriage country, all were green and pleas-
ant there: and wife and husband had nothing to do but link each other’s arms
together, and wander gently downwards towards old age in happy fruition.
Sir Charles is very dangerously wounded – a friend of my lord’s hurries him away
to France, and he leaves his wife thoroughly convinced of her delinquency.—
The widow follows him, but he will not have any farther connection with her.—
She is so much hurt by his indifference, and the loss of her character, that she is
seized with a violent fever, which puts an end to her life […] The moral of this
history cannot be too much attended to by the married of both sexes.
J. DiPlacidi (*)
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: j.diplacidi@kent.ac.uk
own choice, he privileges the courtship plot as the dominant mode of fic-
tion in England.7 While Watt accounts for the ascendency of the court-
ship plot by pointing to the contemporary social, cultural and legal shifts
regarding choice and marriage, his analysis tend to overlook the numer-
ous narratives that focus on the marital experience. Examining Samuel
Richardson’s immensely popular and influential Pamela; or Virtue
Rewarded (1740), Watt admits that the novel ‘departs from the usual
pattern in one important respect: […] the narrative does not end with
the marriage, but continues for some two hundred pages’, but fails fully
to address the implications of the narrative that he calls Richardson’s
‘model of conduct’ for a new type of marriage.8
Conduct literature, prevalent in the eighteenth century, took many
forms not limited to the novel but also including short tales for children
and adolescents, advice columns in periodicals, anecdotes, essays, poems
and ballads, and frequently made its subject the period after the mar-
riage ceremony. Yet representations of and plots driven by post-marital
incidents were far from unique to texts that were intended to model
appropriate conduct for their readers. When Ruth Yeazell argues that
eighteenth-century society focused on female modesty that ‘centred on
questions of middle-class marriage; and novels of the period take their
most typical form as narratives of courtship’ she draws upon Watt’s
premise that eighteenth-century novels primarily narrated the period
before marriage, linking the courtship plot to the increase in the mid-
dling classes.9 The privileging of the courtship plot has caused much
criticism to overlook the presence of adultery in the eighteenth-century
novel, locating that thematic as part of a French, rather than British
tradition.10 Bill Overton argues, for example, that while ‘the theme of
adultery’ was part of the British literary tradition until the late eight-
eenth century, it was then ‘squeezed out’, appearing in European nov-
els but absent from British narratives until the end of the nineteenth
century.11 Yet as several of the essays in this volume will demonstrate,
rather than being departures from a standard paradigm, narratives of life
after marriage, including plots featuring adultery, are ubiquitous in nov-
els of the long eighteenth century as well as in its various other cultural
productions.
The ascendency of the courtship plot in literary scholarship can par-
tially be traced to the teleological understanding of marriage and fam-
ily as evolving throughout the eighteenth century towards companionate
unions and the nuclear family. Most firmly and methodically established
6 J. DiPlacidi
bonds to the conjugal tie is too simplistic. Rather, in the long eighteenth
century, conjugal, affinal, and consanguineal relatives were all considered
kin and integral to the family structure, which was, Bailey points out,
much more adaptable than traditional evolutionary models suggest.20
The familial bond existed regardless of actual kinship status to include, as
Tadmor argues, other social ties such as friends and neighbours. Tadmor
notes the importance in tracing how those in the eighteenth century
described their relationships themselves and that paying attention to lin-
guistic terms enables us ‘to be able to re-locate historical family forms
within rich webs of kinship, friendship, patronage, economic ties, neigh-
bourhood ties, and, not least, political ties’.21 Marital experience took
place amongst these complex ties and varying socioeconomic statuses,
and as Bailey argues, these experiences defy simplistic models of both
marriage and sex: ‘both the marital power balance and the sexual double
standard were far more nuanced in practice than stereotypes might sug-
gest’.22 Such new understandings allow for broader definitions of family
than previously asserted and in turn open up new and richer readings of
representations of marriage and family in the eighteenth century.
A number of the most innovative interdisciplinary studies in
the British context such as Eve Bannet’s The Domestic Revolution:
Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel, Ellen Pollak’s Incest and
the English Novel, 1684–1814, Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations: The
Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818
and, most recently, Katherine Binhammer’s The Seduction Narrative
in Britain, 1747–1800 have drawn on historical, anthropological, and
legal sources in addition to literary analysis.23 In focusing on marriage
and courtship to tease out the relationship between social, cultural and
literary histories, scholars have seen literature as a way of reflecting,
endorsing, contesting, compensating for, or otherwise negotiating the
complexities of changes in the law, the social structure and the domes-
tic household in the period, particularly in the wake of Hardwicke’s
1753 Marriage Act. In her book Marriage Law and Practice in the Long
Eighteenth Century, A Reassessment Rebecca Probert draws together
legal history and literature, analysing the language of laws, parish regis-
ters, and contemporary fiction to argue compellingly for a radical reas-
sessment of the traditional scholarly view of the Marriage Act as cruel
and ineffective.24 Meanwhile Pollak’s work examines the philosophical,
political, sexual, legal, religious and social discourses surrounding kin-
ship and marriage to demonstrate that eighteenth-century ‘stories about
8 J. DiPlacidi
the distinct historical contexts of the countries’ literature and their social
and cultural differences regarding marriage, influences from romances,
satires, and dramas crossed the channel. As the collection of essays in
British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century (2007) demonstrates,
philosophical, artistic, literary, epistolary and social exchanges between
the British and French proliferated in the period.31 Such cross-channel
influences are thus discernible not only in the development of the novel
but across a range of texts and media such as engravings, portraiture, and
satirical illustrations, all of which provided spaces in which marital experi-
ences were depicted.32
marriages were very much a part of the late seventeenth- and early eight-
eenth-century ancien regime (Fowler, p. 68). The movement between class
boundaries popularised in Pamela (1740) that is achieved through one’s
virtue rather than one’s birth has, Fowler reveals, an important French
precedent in Perrault’s tales in which the author ‘mingles the culture of
the “élite by birth” with that of the “élite by worth”’ (Fowler, p. 83).
The fraught relationship between one’s desire and one’s duty, traditionally
viewed as an eighteenth-century British marital concern, is anticipated in
Perrault’s tales. As Fowler argues, the tales envision a melding of the two
seemingly distinct models of pragmatic or romantic marriage in which ‘an
inescapably dynastic marriage [can] turn out to be, in addition and without
contradiction, a mariage d’amour’ (Fowler, p. 86).
The complicated negotiation between one’s duty to family and society
and one’s individual desires and experiences regarding marriage under-
lies the histories of the women in Sarah Scott’s 1762 novel Millenium
Hall. Robin Runia’s chapter offers a comparative analysis of the work,
often viewed in light of its author’s role as a Bluestocking reformer and
most recently examined as a feminist model of dystopian/utopian com-
munity, through a religious and moral framework. The chapter’s focus
on the social, economic, and personal experiences that influence the nov-
el’s women in light of their invocation of the discourse of religious duty
provides important insights into Scott’s treatment of gender and class.
Runia argues that ‘the women of Millenium Hall testify to the growing
corruption of marriage as an institution among both elites and the lower
orders’ and that the women draw upon their faith in order to escape
from the institution ‘as well as to justify their sacrifice of other women to
it. While the law of the land requires their submission to the institution,
Christian law allows them to “be excused by sending deputies to supply
their places” (163)’ (Runia, p. 104).
While the women of Scott’s novel escape their failed marriages, it is
the mediation of marital conflict within fiction and other genres in the
periodical medium with which Jennie Batchelor’s chapter is concerned.
Her essay on The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) analyses the genres in
which marriage enters eighteenth-century women’s magazines in order
to argue that ‘[t]he magazine’s uniquely interactive format […] has pro-
found implications for how meaning is produced within it and, conse-
quently, such publications paint a picture of married life that is richer and
more complex than that found in any other textual form in the period’
(Batchelor, p. 112). The essay details the range of the periodical’s
AFTER MARRIAGE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: INTRODUCTION 13
Similarly interested in the struggles and conflicts that occur after mar-
riage in a genre often neglected by scholarship, Jenny DiPlacidi’s chap-
ter focuses on representations of family and marriage distinguished by
incestuous relationships in the Gothic. DiPlacidi suggests that broader
literary surveys most frequently either leave the Gothic out of analyses
of marriage and kinship or rely upon the traditional narrative of familial
and marital development in the long eighteenth century that position the
Gothic’s portrayals of marriage, family and incest as exhibiting anxieties
about the father’s position of power and the potential for female victimi-
sation. DiPlacidi draws upon legal, social, literary, feminist and anthropo-
logical scholarship in her analyses of Gothic plays, novels and novellas to
demonstrate that incestuous relationships in the Gothic offer alternative
paradigms of marriage and sexuality to the dominant cultural model of
the conjugal state famously described by eighteenth-century legal scholar
William Blackstone as causing ‘the very being or legal existence of the
woman [to be] suspended during the marriage’.35 The chapter argues that
the Gothic convention of marriage as terminating in the death or impris-
onment of the wife is rearticulated through depictions of transgressive
sexualities that allow for female agency, sexuality and life after marriage.
Further investigating representations of sexuality and marriage that
defy heteronormative conventions, Chris Roulston provides a thorough
analysis of the diaries of Anne Lister, a Yorkshire landowner and diarist
who chronicled her lesbian relationships in coded journals. Roulston’s
chapter points out that while the literature of the long eighteenth cen-
tury relies upon an ‘assumption of heteronormativity’ that ‘underlies
both idealized and negative representations of married life’ (Roulston,
p. 183), in fact, in society and culture ‘female marriage formed part of
an available discourse of domestic companionship’ (Roulston, p. 183).
Examining the Lister diaries in light of Barthes’ idea of a utopian alterna-
tive to institutional structures and notions of exclusion, public and pri-
vate, bourgeois domesticity and the performance of marriage, Roulston
argues that Lister simultaneously makes use of and performs mar-
riage whilst rejecting its heterosexual framework. Incorporating satires
and lampoons of Lister’s marriage to Miss Ann Walker in her analyses,
Roulston demonstrates that the play between parody, original and copy
allows for the seeming inauthenticity of the union to be made public,
legible and authenticated. Roulston convincingly argues that ‘while the
AFTER MARRIAGE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: INTRODUCTION 15
social and legal contexts engage closely with the intersections between
lived experiences of marriage and its representations as well as the social
practices concerning after marriage in distinct ways—in terms of medium,
genre, and gender as well as nationality, sexuality and class. The analyses
that follow offer alternative narratives of marriage and family that resist
the traditional teleological accounts and challenge the established dis-
course. In so doing, they reveal highly nuanced and fluctuating eight-
eenth-century understandings and representations of the conjugal state
and provide new and rich amplifications of and corrections to the extant
scholarship on the topic of after marriage. Central to the following essays
are occurrences of conflict, whether found in the struggles that occur
after marriage or located in the divergences between advice and life, rep-
resentation and reality, ideal and experience or whether apparent in the
breakdown of marriages or in the nonconformity of desire to the socially
prescribed models. In exploring this rich ground the volume reveals the
complexities of negotiating between legitimate and illegitimate forms of
marriage, desire and sexuality; rejecting the system of sexual and social
economics; the destructive consequences of forcing women to marry; the
anxieties over intergenerational marital conflict, and ultimately lays bare
and undoes a range of conventional narratives of after marriage in the
long eighteenth century.
Notes
1. Review of The Masquerade, or the History of Lord Avon and Miss Tameworth,
in a Series of Letters. 2 vols (London: Robinson and Roberts, 1769).
2. Chris Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and
France (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), Rebecca
Probert’s Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A
Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Joanne
Bailey’s Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England
1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
3. Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Ann Lewis and
Markman Ellis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011).
4. Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed.
Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
5. British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kathleen Hardesty Doig
and Dorothy Medlin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
6. Roulston, 12.
AFTER MARRIAGE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: INTRODUCTION 17
7. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 2nd edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 2001 [London: Chatto and Windus,
1957]), 138.
8. Watt, 149.
9. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the
English Novel (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1991), ix.
10. Watt, 137.
11. Bill Overton, Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684–1890 (London: Palgrave,
2002), vii. See also Bill Overton, The Novel of Female Adultery: Love
and Gender in Continental European Fiction, 1830–1900 (London:
Macmillan, 1996).
12. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977).
13. Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic
Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (London
and New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1978), 3.
14. Watt, 138–139.
15. Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship Novel, 1740–1820: A Feminized
Genre (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1991), 1–2.
16. Laura E. Thomason, The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women
Writers Redefine Marriage (Lanham, BD and Plymouth: Bucknell
University Press with Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 3–4.
17. Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in
Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3. See
also: J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-
Century English Fiction (New York and London: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1990), and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English
Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987).
18. I refer particularly to the narrative advanced in Stone’s The Family, Sex
and Marriage in England, 1500–1800.
19. Bailey’s Unquiet Lives and Naomi Tadmor’s Family and Friends in
Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001) are particularly useful studies of family and marriage in the long
eighteenth century. Tadmor’s introduction includes a thorough synthesis
of the scholarly debates surrounding conceptions of family and kinship
and the history of the field. See particularly Tadmor, 21–43 and Bailey,
1–11; 12–29. Further analyses of the 1753 Act can be found in Erica
Harth’s ‘The Virtue of Love: Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act’, Cultural
Critique 9 (1988): 123–154.
18 J. DiPlacidi
35.
Commentaries on the laws of England. Book the first. By William Blackstone,
Esq. vinerian professor of law, and solicitor general to her majesty, 4 vols
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765), vol. 1, 430.
36. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice in The Cambridge Edition of the Works
of Jane Austen, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 25.
37. Austen, 25.
Undoing the Marriage:
The Resort to Annulment
Rebecca Probert
that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully
joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it. For be ye well assured,
that so many as are coupled together otherwise than God’s Word doth
allow are not joined together by God; neither is their Matrimony lawful.
This injunction reflects the way in which the Established Church united
both spiritual and legal considerations. As one eighteenth-century cler-
gyman argued, ‘God cannot be said to join two Persons in Marriage,
but when this is done by certain legal means’.1 The lawfulness of the
marriage depended not merely on the parties being free to marry but
on compliance with certain forms. The argument that God could join
a couple in marriage without the formalities being observed met with
the response that ‘[i]f God descends Miraculously, to Marry any Man or
Woman, he Supersedes the Laws […] but if not, then God has Ordain’d
R. Probert (*)
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
e-mail: R.J.Probert@exeter.ac.uk
chuse rather from the humanity of their tempers, and the modesty of their
dispositions, to submit to an uncomfortable life in misery all their days,
than bring themselves or their partners to lasting shame, and be recorded
with disgrace, by having the matter litigated before a public court.8
Most couples, indeed, seem to have been entirely law abiding. Despite
the claims of certain scholars that couples regularly ignored the 1753 Act
and lived together unwed, cohort studies of a variety of different types of
communities across England and Wales confirm that the vast majority of
couples married in church, as they were required to do.24
Of course, ascertaining whether couples complied with all of the
requirements of the Act is more difficult. There were certainly occa-
sions where a couple realised shortly after the marriage that they had not
observed the exact requirements, and had their marriage resolemnised.
One such was recorded in the register of the Hampshire parish of Oakley
in 1768: it was noted that ‘thro’ a mistaken conformity to the Rubrick
in the Common Prayer Book’25 the banns of marriage between Thomas
Small and Jenny Benman had been published on Easter day, Easter
Monday, and Easter Tuesday (3, 4 and 5 April), with the marriage taking
place two days later on 7 April. It went on to explain that ‘upon perus-
ing the Marriage Act … which orders the banns to be published on three
Sundays, it was thought proper to publish the banns afresh on the 1st
and 2nd Sundays after Easter’ and the marriage was again solemnised. In
this case any lawlessness was of short duration: the banns were called for
the second time on 10 and 17 April and the marriage was re-solemnised
on 18 April.
For some contemporaries, however, any marriage that did not com-
ply with the strict requirements of the Act was regarded as lawless. Thus
we find one William Garnett annotating the marriage register of the
Westmorland parish of Middleton-in-Lonsdale with the complaint that
Robert Whittington and Mary Greenall had first of all married without
banns being published in Middleton Chapel and—upon being threat-
ened by the incumbent—had then married again in Middleton after
being resident in Lancashire for a couple of months—‘which marriage,
considering their absence out of ye Parish so long, could not be lawful by
ye said Act’.26 Yet, while the second marriage had not been conducted
according to the strict letter of the law either, it would nonetheless have
been impossible to challenge it on the basis of non-residence.
As these examples show, where there was cause for concern about the
validity of the marriage, a further ceremony might well be held. When
John Page married Ann Dunkley in West Haddon in 1816—by licence,
and with her father’s consent—it was noted that ‘[t]his couple had
eloped and said to have been married in London, but the father of the
woman wished to have them remarried’.27
UNDOING THE MARRIAGE: THE RESORT TO ANNULMENT 27
reported cases reveals that it was not usually aggrieved parents who were
responsible for bringing the suit to have the marriage annulled. Of the
37 reported cases heard between 1795 and 1825,33 only 8 were brought
by a parent, while 13 were brought by the husband and 14 by the wife.
Nor was there always a sharp distinction between the two; in Cockburn v
Garnault (1792),34 the suit was instituted by the wife’s father and con-
tinued by her when she came of age.
As one would expect, parents tended to bring suits to annul the mar-
riage fairly soon after it had taken place. In Bridgwater v Crutchley,35 for
example, the marriage had been very short lived. The facts of the case
reveal a romantic elopement: in the early hours of 23 March 1822, her
eighteenth birthday, Charlotte Hayward had climbed out of her window
and travelled to Merthyr, arriving at seven in the morning. Since by law
the marriage could not take place until eight, there was time for the party
to enjoy breakfast before making their way to the church. This also gave
the groom, Joseph Crutchley, the chance to speak to the local curate,
one Mr. Jones, who agreed to perform the ceremony. Joseph produced
the licence that he had already procured—which misleadingly swore
both that Charlotte was of age and so did not need parental consent,
and that she was resident in the parish of Merthyr itself. The marriage
accordingly took place and the new Mr. and Mrs. Crutchley, together
with Charlotte’s faithful Webb, who had accompanied her, set off in the
chaise for Hereford. In the meantime, Charlotte’s flight had been dis-
covered and her brother Augustus, together with a Mr. Bridgewater,
immediately set out in pursuit—but in the wrong direction. The cun-
ning couple had planted a note which told the Haywards that Charlotte
and Joseph were to be married at Carmarthen—around fifty miles away
to the west. But the ruse was swiftly discovered and the men followed
the real route of the couple, arriving in Hereford later in the evening.
Despite the bridal pair decamping from their first hotel to another when
they suspected that they had been followed, their pursuers arrived at
their new location ‘so close after them, that the coffee, which […] they
had ordered upon their arrival, had not yet at that time been served up’.
Charlotte was persuaded to return to her mother’s home, and found her-
self back there little more than 24 hours after setting out. As the judge
noted, ‘she has since resided there with her mother, without any sug-
gested intercourse or communication with Crutchley’.36 Her mother
almost instantly instigated a suit to have the marriage annulled. Within a
year, the Arches Court had confirmed the marriage to be void.
UNDOING THE MARRIAGE: THE RESORT TO ANNULMENT 29
sentence of annulment on 29 May 1805.48 In this case the court was less
explicit as to the fraud that had been practised on the husband, merely
alluding elliptically to her conduct, condition and situation, and imply-
ing that prior knowledge of it might well have dissuaded Frankland from
marrying her.
More usually though, where the suit was brought by either the hus-
band or wife, some considerable time had elapsed since the marriage
took place. In 1815 Sir William Scott felt that the fact that the marriage
under challenge had lasted sixteen years was ‘startling’49 but in the years
that followed some still longer unions were brought before the court. In
Hayes v Watts (1819),50 for example, the marriage had lasted 18 years
before the wife brought a suit to annul it, citing the fact that her mother’s
consent to her marriage had not been valid: her mother was not, as it had
been assumed, a widow as her father was still alive. Since, as long as he
was still alive—even if, as in this case, he was in America—it was his con-
sent alone that could validate the marriage, the court had no option but
to annul it, noting that either of the parties had a right to a declaratory
sentence stating that their marriage had been void and that it was ‘a duty
this Court owes to the public to declare the situation of the parties’.51
Husbands too might suddenly reveal that they were not of full age
at the time of the marriage. In Johnston v Parker 52 the couple had mar-
ried in 1796. Nanette Parker was under sixteen at the time but her father
was present at the marriage and consented to the union. After 22 years
of marriage and the birth of 7 children, the husband instituted a suit to
annul the marriage on the basis that he had been underage at the time.
The court scrutinised the evidence very closely, noting that the length of
the relationship ‘forms a strong call on the circumspection of the court
to see that the evidence is complete’.53 It proved to be irrefutable and
the marriage was pronounced to be void, the presiding judge noting that
it was ‘better to stop at any time, lest the continuance of the marriage
should involve the interest of a greater number of persons, for there is no
time in which it will not affect the interests of parties’.54
in 1808, when the wife instituted a suit for nullity twelve years after the
wedding, it was ‘not the intent of the Act to annul a marriage of this
kind, the object of it was to prevent minors from being drawn in without
the consent of their parents’.55 The importance of upholding the law-
fulness of the marriage wherever possible was emphasised by Sir John
Nicholl in Smith v Huson (1811):
Where a marriage has been solemnized, the law strongly presumes that all
the legal requisites have been complied with. This presumption is not less
favourable where there is no particular disparity in the age or situation of
the parties—where the marriage has not been hastily entered into—where
there is no appearance of either of the parties having been surprised or
inveigled into the contract, and consequently where the object and policy
of the statute cannot have been violated.56
evidence. The judge, Sir John Nicholl, pointed out that the usual way
of proving the age of one of the parties would be to rely on the pub-
lic record made in the parish’s baptismal register and held that the onus
was on John to prove that no such entry existed (waving aside the evi-
dence of the father that his daughter had been privately baptised at home
and had never been received into the Church of England). It was also
objected that the entry of Jane’s birth in the bible had not been made
contemporaneously: it had instead been copied by Jane’s father from
an entry made in another, smaller Bible by a neighbour. And not only
had this Bible been lost, but the neighbour who had made the origi-
nal entry had died. The fact that a later mistake had been erased and
corrected was seized on as showing ‘how little reliance is to be placed
on a transcript made by ignorant persons of this kind’,58 the judge not-
ing, for good measure, that the father ‘was of a low condition in life,
the mate of a coasting vessel; seamen are not accurate’.59 And, not con-
tent with disparaging the accuracy of an entire profession—and one that
involved making precise calculations in order to navigate—the judge was
even willing to cast aspersions on the virtue of Jane’s mother. He hinted
that she might have had good reason to make out that Jane—her eldest
daughter—was in fact younger than she really was. But there was no evi-
dence that the marriage of Jane’s parents had taken place less than nine
months before her birth or that her conception might correspond with a
period when John Davies had been at sea. And so, concluded the judge,
‘I am left in doubt – there is not that precise and satisfactory proof which
convinces the Court that the minority of the woman is established’.60
Just for good measure, however, he went on to consider whether
Jane’s father had in fact given his consent to the marriage—in which case
it would not matter whether or not she had been underage at the time
of the marriage. The evidence given by Jane’s father John suggests that
both sides were keen to end the marriage. Once again, he had been at sea
at the time that the crucial events had taken place. But he told the court
in unequivocal terms that the marriage had taken place without his con-
sent. Not only had he not consented, he had informed John Agg that he
would not give his consent the very night before he set out on his voy-
age. And upon his return he had never stated explicitly that the marriage
met with his approbation. He did, however, acknowledge to the court
that his refusal of consent was motivated by the fact that John Agg’s own
father disapproved of the match, and ‘not from any dislike of the man’.61
This proved crucial. Instead of holding that this evidence established that
UNDOING THE MARRIAGE: THE RESORT TO ANNULMENT 33
It is quite consistent with this evidence that he might have told Agg if he
could get the consent of his friends, he would not object; or he might have
left authority to this effect with his wife; and I think such a conditional
consent would have been sufficient.62
Equally unconvincing were the judge’s reasons for supposing that this
had actually happened. He laid great stress on the fact that the father had
omitted to take certain steps—he had not, for example, ordered John to
break off the connexion, nor had he left instructions with his wife to pre-
vent the marriage. And it was even suggested that the circumstances of
the marriage itself justified the inference that consent had been given,
on the basis that it was celebrated in the parties’ own parish church, and
not clandestinely. One might have thought, however, that a more salient
point was that it was only celebrated once the father was safely seaborne.
One final justification for assuming that the father had consented
was that he had failed to evince the customary surprise and regret of a
deceived father on learning that the marriage had taken place. Had John
Davies wished to take steps to annul the marriage when he returned to
Swansea in the spring of 1806, there is little doubt that the court would
have interpreted the facts in the case very differently.
So in this case we seem to have the parties to a marriage doing their
best to free themselves from it by the only legal means available to them,
and a judge equally determined that they should not misuse the law of
nullity for this purpose. Whether John and Jane made the best of it and
remained together or lived separately we do not know: a 66-year-old
Jane Agg from Swansea was living alone in the 1851 census,63 but the
years between remain tantalisingly unreconstructable.
In other cases, however, we can follow the parties beyond the sen-
tence of the court. The case of Sullivan v Sullivan (1819),64 provides a
fascinating case study of what might happen after a marriage was declared
to be valid despite legal challenge—and how a declaration of a marriage’s
lawfulness might be the precursor to a new type of lawlessness.
34 R. Probert
The suit for nullity was brought by the father of the groom,
seventeen-year-old John Augustus Sullivan. The marriage had taken
place by banns in a parish to which neither party belonged. The elder
Mr. Sullivan had thus had no advance notice of the wedding and had
been unable to forbid the calling of the banns. Under the terms of
the Act, he could not challenge it on the basis that the groom was
underage, nor on the fact of the banns having been called in the
wrong parish, and so had to resort to the argument that the banns
had not been properly published, and so by inference had not been
called at all. In this case, however, the claim that the banns had not
been properly published was based on the fact that an additional mid-
dle name had been added to the bride’s name: although she was usu-
ally known as Maria Oldacre, the banns had been published in the
name of Maria Holmes Oldacre. Scott rejected the suggestion that this
had been a deliberate fraud to conceal her identity, since her parents
approved the match, noting that ‘[t]hey must have been bunglers
indeed if they placed the fraud not in the name which required to be
concealed, but in that which needed no concealment’.65
The judgment reveals the differences in age, rank and condition
that had motivated John’s father to try to have the marriage set aside.
Maria was a little older than her husband, by three years in fact,
which as the judge observed was ‘no very revolting disproportion’,66
although it would have been preferable had this been the other way
round. The disparity in rank was greater: John had been educated at
Eton and was preparing to go on to university, while Maria’s father
managed a pack of hounds, albeit a well-known one. And Maria was,
in addition, illegitimate, her parents only having married four months
after her birth. In the eyes of the judge, these differences might well
pose a risk to the success of the marriage, ‘for […] it is not to be
denied that two persons coming together with very different educa-
tions and systems of manners and habits are not likely to have that
correspondence and harmony of mind, without which the comfort of
a married life cannot exist’.67 But, he concluded, in a flight of roman-
tic rhetoric, ‘the passion which leads to marriage is apt to overleap
these distinctions, and that marriage levels them all, both in legal and
moral consideration’.68 Moreover, Maria was still young enough to be
‘susceptible of better impressions’.69
John’s father, however, was clearly not convinced that Maria was a
suitable wife for his son. He appealed to the Court of Arches—which
UNDOING THE MARRIAGE: THE RESORT TO ANNULMENT 35
deprive the husband […] of that remedy to which the wife’s infidelity
plainly intitles a husband under ordinary circumstances?’.71
Maria had two answers to this: first, her husband’s desertion, and
second, the terms of the separation agreement. But neither argument
was accepted by the court. It was pointed out that in the eyes of the
law neither party could have deserted the other while the litigation about
the validity of the marriage was ongoing, for the simple reason that they
should not cohabit while the validity of their marriage was uncertain.
Rather than seeking the company of another man during this period of
uncertainty, she should have used it ‘to qualify herself… by mental and
moral improvement, for the husband’s future society’.72 And although
the deed of separation had declared that Maria would be free of John’s
control, and might choose where she lived, as if she was sole and
unmarried, it was held that this did not constitute a licence for her to
live with whom she chose. Indeed, Sir John pointed out that the cloak
of clandestinity with which she had surrounded her relationship with
Mr. Gouldney rather suggested that she knew perfectly well that she was
not at liberty to act as she chose.
The court thus pronounced the decree of divorce. But a divorce a
mensâ et thoro did not bring the marriage to an end; it simply allowed the
parties to live separately. It was, however, an essential precondition to a
private Act of Parliament dissolving the marriage, and in 1825 the mar-
riage of John Augustus Sullivan and Maria Oldacre was finally brought to
an end.73
Whether or not John went on to make a more suitable match we do
not know, but at least the divorce freed Maria to make her union with
Henry Goldney lawful, which she speedily proceeded to do, marrying
him in July of that year.74
Conclusion
There were undoubtedly some couples who flouted the law, who lived
together in a union that was, in legal terms, no different from concubi-
nage, or who adopted a strategic rather than purposive approach to legal
requirements. Yet it should of course be borne in mind that the num-
ber of marriages that were challenged before the courts was tiny when
compared to the thousands celebrated each year without incident. While
UNDOING THE MARRIAGE: THE RESORT TO ANNULMENT 37
Notes
1. Henry Gally, Some Considerations upon Clandestine Marriages (London,
1750), 124.
2. Ralph Lambert, An answer to a late pamphlet, entitl’d A Vindication of
marriage, as solemnized by Presbyterians in the north of Ireland (Dublin,
1704), 10.
3. The lady’s law; or, a treatise of feme coverts (London, 1737), 25.
4. See e.g. Fanny Burney, Cecilia (Oxford: Oxford World Classics 1999; first
published 1782), in which the ceremony of marriage between the titu-
lar heroine and Mortimer Delville is interrupted by an objection and the
clergyman refuses to proceed.
5. See e.g. The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765, ed. David Vaisey
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), in which a Sussex church-
warden, Thomas Turner, recorded how on 23 October 1757 Anne
Stevenson forbade the banns of marriage between Richard Parker and
Mary Vinal, claiming that he had promised to marry her. In this case
though, the objection may actually have hastened the marriage: Mary
told the churchwardens that she was with child by Richard and within
three days they had facilitated the marriage by procuring a licence.
6. The lady’s law, 26–27.
7. See e.g. Rebecca Probert, The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation:
From Fornicators to Family, 1600–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), Chap. 2.
8. Peter Annet, Social bliss considered: in marriage and divorce; cohabiting
unmarried and public whoring (London, 1749), 46–47.
9. Rebecca Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth
Century: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), Chap. 2.
10. For a detailed account see further Probert, Marriage Law and Practice,
Chap. 6.
11. Section 8.
12. Section 11.
13. Section 1.
14. As required by Section 24.
38 R. Probert
15. Donald John Steel, National Index of Parish Registers: Vol. I Sources
of Births, Marriages and Deaths Before 1837 (London: Society of
Genealogists, 1968), 34; Edward Anthony Wrigley and Roger S.
Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A reconstruction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 30.
16. James Lucas, An impartial inquiry into the present state of parochial regis-
ters; charitable funds; taxation and parish rates (Leeds, 1791), 13–14.
17. For examples of non-compliance, see The Parish Registers and Parochial
Documents in the Archdeaconry of Winchester, ed. William Andrew Fearon
and John Foster Williams (Winchester: Warren & Son, 1909), 10.
18. See Roger Lee Brown, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Fleet Marriage’, in
R.B. Outhwaite, Marriage and Society (London: Europa, 1981), 117–136;
William Reginald Ward, Parson and Parish in Eighteenth-Century Surrey:
Replies to Bishops’ Visitations (Guilford: Surrey Record Society, 1994), 6, in
which the incumbent of Battersea commented that ‘[t]he reason why our
marriages are so few is because of the evil practice of marrying at the Fleet
in a clandestine and scandalous manner’.
19. Lambeth Palace Library, Fulham Papers, Terrick 6, fol. 2.
20. Ibid., fol. 3. See further Rebecca Probert and Liam D’Arcy Brown, ‘The
Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 in action: investigating a contempo-
rary complaint’ Local Population Studies, 83 (2009): 66–69.
21. Keith Snell, ‘English rural societies and geographical marital endogamy,
1700–1837’ Economic History Review 55: 2 (2002): 262–298 (274).
22. William Reginald Ward (ed.), Parson and Parish in Eighteenth-Century
Hampshire: Replies to Bishops’ Visitations (Winchester: Hampshire County
Council, 1995), 193.
23. See further Probert and D’Arcy Brown, ‘The Clandestine Marriages Act
of 1753 in action’.
24. See e.g. Probert, Marriage Law and Practice, Chap. 7; Rebecca Probert
and Liam D’Arcy-Brown, ‘Westmorland Weddings: A Study of the 1787
Census’, Family and Community History 16: 1 (2013): 32–44; R. Probert
and L. D’Arcy-Brown ‘Catholics and the Clandestine Marriages Act of
1753’, Local Population Studies 83 (2008): 78–82.
25. Quoted in The Parish Registers and Parochial Documents in the
Archdeaconry of Winchester, ed. William Andrews Fearon and John Foster
Williams (Winchester: Warren & Son, 1909), 27.
26. The Registers of Middleton-in-Lonsdale, ed. Col. J.F. Haswell (Penrith:
Cumberland and Westmorland Parish Registers Society, 1925), 50.
27. Quoted in Steel, National Index of Parish Registers: Vol. 1, 66.
UNDOING THE MARRIAGE: THE RESORT TO ANNULMENT 39
48. Frankland v Nicholson (1805) 105 English Reports 607; 3 M. & S. 259n.
49. Jones, falsely called Robinson, v Robinson (1815) 161 English Reports 1146;
2 Phill. Ecc. 285.
50. Hayes, falsely called Watts, v Watts (1819) 161 English Reports 1252; 3
Phill. Ecc. 43.
51. Ibid., 44.
52. Johnston v Parker, falsely called Johnston (1819) 161 English Reports 1251;
3 Phill. Ecc. 39
53. Ibid., 41.
54. Ibid.
55. Osborn v Goldham, Arches Court of Canterbury, Dec. 12, 1808, reported
in 161 English Reports 990; 1 Phill. Ecc. 298n.
56. Smith v Huson, falsely called Smith (1811) 161 English Reports
987; 1 Phill. Ecc. 287, 294.
57. Agg v Davies, falsely calling herself Agg (1816) 161 English Reports 1164;
2 Phill. Ecc. 341.
58. Ibid., 347.
59. Ibid., 346.
60. Ibid., 348.
61. Ibid., 343.
62. Ibid., 348–349.
63. Census Returns of England and Wales, 1851, TNA, HO107/1500; fol 33,
7.
64. Sullivan v Sullivan, falsely called Oldacre (1819) 161 English Reports 728;
2 Hag. Con. 238.
65. Ibid., 261.
66. Ibid., 244.
67. Ibid., 245.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 245.
70. Sullivan v Oldacre, falsely called Sullivan (1819) 161 English Reports
1253; 3 Phill. Ecc. 45.
71. (1824) 162 English Reports 303; 2 Add 299, 301.
72. Ibid., 305.
73. 6 Geo 4 c. 80.
74. London Metropolitan Archives, Saint George, Bloomsbury, Register of
marriages, P82/GEO1, Item 023, recording the marriage of Henry
Gabriel Goldney to Maria Holmes Oldaker on 23 July 1825.
Bearing Grudges: Marital Conflict
and the Intergenerational Family
Joanne Begiato
The author of this chapter previously published under the name Joanne Bailey.
J. Begiato (*)
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
e-mail: JBegiato@brookes.ac.uk
or cruelty and the intervention of the law and local authorities. We still
know less about the other end of the spectrum where marriage difficul-
ties did not end in scandal, violence, separation or divorce.4
An especially obscure element of marital conflict is how it fits into
wider family relationships. Recent work such as Naomi Tadmor’s over-
view of kinship, stresses that the marital unit was not isolated from other
family members.5 So far, historians of marriage have dealt patchily with
this. There is excellent work on the role of family across several social
ranks in the making of marriage, from organising unions and marriage
settlements, to approving prospective spouses, to acting as third par-
ties and facilitators.6 For instance the Duke and Duchess of Chandos,
a wealthy, powerful, childless couple, with a mansion and estate in
Middlesex, took great pains to manage the portions of their young
female relations, prepare the women for marriage, and locate the right
husband.7 Histories of the family and illness also show that various fam-
ily members, including grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, and siblings
played vital roles in managing life-course events within marriage such
as the birth of children, childcare, nursing ill or indisposed spouses, or
assisting them in financial, physical, and emotional crises.8 As Rosemary
O’Day observes in her study of the Chandos’ marriage, ‘It is imperative
that we set the marital economy, already acknowledged by historians to
be important to individuals and the co-resident nuclear family, within the
context of the wider family economy’.9 The same can be said for other
routine aspects of marital and family life and this chapter places more
‘mundane’ marital disputes within the context of the wider intergenera-
tional family.
This chapter focuses on three case studies assembled from first-per-
son accounts including memoirs and letters written in the period 1750–
1830, which contain detail of conflict. Although such sources often
provide evidence, it is usually simply to note the parting of spouses or to
hint at dispute.10 For example, the letter that J.H. Hayward wrote from
Portsmouth to Fawley Parish Vestry in May 1834 to request poor relief
for his children, comments about their mother ‘we are rather at variance
I dont [sic] wish to see her’.11 The survival of both sides of spouses’ cor-
respondence is the most rich, but rare, evidence. Katie Barclay’s study
of the marital disputes of Anna Potts and her husband Sir Archibald
Grant, of Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, 1731–1744, for instance, reveals
in superb detail the causes of their quarrels and their negotiation of patri-
archal conventions of marital roles.12 Journals can also give considerable
BEARING GRUDGES: MARITAL CONFLICT AND THE INTERGENERATIONAL … 43
Nonetheless, both types of source are valuable in two key ways. They
indicate the themes that were considered to lead to quarrels and they
name who was involved in them. As such they offer insights into conflict
which was not mediated through legal structures and shaped by the law’s
demands of evidence. Their discussions of marital conflict confirm that
economic issues and lack of marital respect undermined relationships,
as the scholarship demonstrates, but they also reveal the significance of
religious differences, temperamental clashes, and the role of other family
members in marriage disputes. Strikingly these informal records of dis-
pute also show that it impacted upon the intergenerational family as well
as spouses, and could endure across generations for as long as people’s
capacities to bear grudges.
she is not blest with the best of Tempers; she is a very genteel, well
behav’d Woman to every one but her Husband; she is certainly a notable,
clean, industrious Woman; and was her Temper agreeable to her Person,
she would make a Husband compleatly happy; and if after thirty-one Years,
she should alter and behave in a mild affectionate Manner, nothing could
be more pleasing, but I have hop’d for this so long, that I have but little
Hope left.21
George and Ruth Courtauld did not seem to have found each other easy
to live with either. They married in 1789 in America, and returned to
England in 1794 following the birth of their two eldest children. They
settled in Braintree, Essex, and had another six children; the last born
BEARING GRUDGES: MARITAL CONFLICT AND THE INTERGENERATIONAL … 45
in 1807. By 1809, and eighteen years into their union, Ruth was taking
a lengthy sojourn at her family home in Ireland. It is unclear when the
marriage ran into difficulties, although their marital conflict was being
discussed in correspondence after this date and offers some insights into
the causes of the dispute. In his letter to his son in 1813, George offered
his view of his failing marriage which suggests a fairly early development
of problems. Perhaps countering an accusation, he declared that he had
married for affection:
Economic Disputes
Disagreement over financial investment or outlay was a major trigger of
conflict and distrust, regardless of level of wealth. The elite Anna Potts
and Archibald Grant quarrelled over household finances; typically her
ability to run the household economy on his provision. In 1740 Anna
wrote defensively to Archibald: ‘it is no ill management in me I cant [sic]
work miracles and must tell you plainly I am vain enough to think my
self as capable of governing a house as any of those that finds fault wit
[sic] me’.23 Securing economic security could be divisive. Thus, although
the family correspondence relating to George and Ruth Courtauld’s
unhappy marriage does not dwell on the causes of their discontent,
Ruth’s letters responding to George’s desire to emigrate to America for a
second time in the 1820s imply that one of her dissatisfactions with him
was his uncontrolled expenditure and unreliable provision. In 1822 she
wrote to her daughter Sophia, who had accompanied her father to Ohio,
insisting,
I cannot go to America under the dread of being set adrift when your
father spends all his money, which experience teaches us would be soon. I
would rather trust to his parish in England for a support, but if he will give
me the last £500 my father left me which I only lent him, I will then go
next spring if I can be of any use or comfort to him or you.24
46 J. Begiato
It would seem that the couple had a long history of disagreements over
financial outgoings with Ruth taking the view that George was a spend-
thrift. They also had different understandings about Ruth’s inheritance.
She saw it as a loan, while George saw it as a family contribution. Unless
Ruth’s father had set aside the money solely for Ruth’s use, George may
well have been in the right. What is quite clear is that Ruth did not feel
financially secure under George’s economic direction.
Hardship drove even sharper wedges between couples. Usually this
kind of extremity is mainly visible in the form of desertion recorded by
the poor law or quarter sessions authorities.25 It is rare to see a detailed
account of financial need eroding a relationship as it did for that of
Simon Mason and his wife. Simon was an apothecary who enjoyed little
success in following his trade. After several forced separations as Simon
attempted to get established, he again left his family in Cambridge to
seek work, belatedly discovering that his ‘poor unhappy temper’d Wife’
immediately sent two of his children, aged seven and five, to Simon’s
sister, their aunt, who kept them over winter despite her own financial
difficulties. Simon only realised this when his sister wrote to him request-
ing money for their upkeep or that their parents take them back. Indeed,
said Simon, ‘My good Lady’s journey to London was as much a secret
to me as her sending my Children to my Sister’s’.26 Simon’s ineptitude
and their poverty destroyed the Masons’ ability to live with each other.
As Samuel astutely reflected: couples ought to seek mutual happiness in
order to alleviate their distressed circumstances, ‘and not as some do,
vilify, and reproach, insult, and tyrannise, ever uneasy, ever dissatisfied,
perpetually destroying each other’s Distress’.27
The Masons also experienced another financial challenge to their
relationship, which is only hinted at in separation court records, namely
quarrels over the portion that a wife brought to her marriage from her
natal family. Simon envied those men who received ‘great Favours and
helps from their Wife’s Relations, who do not only relieve them when
distress’d, but will forward and promote their Interest’. Instead he
claimed to have got neither ‘fortune’ with his Wife nor ‘affectionate
Friendship’ from her relations.28 He had married her, the daughter of
a Southwark dyer, after finishing his apprenticeship in 1722. Following
the wedding Simon learnt that his wife was due £40 from her mother.
He promptly informed his parents-in-law that he expected to be paid this
sum and they handed it over on the understanding that he would invest
BEARING GRUDGES: MARITAL CONFLICT AND THE INTERGENERATIONAL … 47
Thomas Wright faced a similar situation. Having foregone his wife’s por-
tion by running away with her, he nonetheless asked her to ‘solicit for
her fortune’ to put out at interest to increase their annual income, when
facing financial difficulties a few years into marriage due to his inadequa-
cies at farming.34 His parents-in-law refused and he railed against their
tight purses; yet he also recorded their assistance at various points in his
memoir: gifts of furniture; an interest-free loan of £50 in the late 1760s;
an interest-free loan of £50 in 1773; a home and board for at least three
of his children; a £20 premium for the eldest boy’s apprenticeship, and
a loan to Thomas Junior of around £140 to buy a shop and its stock.
Again, one wonders if it was his failures to earn a decent living that made
his parents-in-law cautious. Perhaps tellingly, he reported his resentment
that his parents-in-law publicly explained the cause of Lydia’s excessive
consumption of alcohol as due to Thomas’s failure to follow a trade.35
Marital Disrespect
The descriptive sections of Libels (the plaintiff’s statement of the defend-
ant’s marital faults) in marriage separation cases list the primary com-
plaints, but also often refer to the defendant’s poor spousal behaviour;
defendants issued similar counter-accusations against the plaintiff. In
addition to listing verbal abuse and gendered inadequacies, these second-
ary allegations often centred on spouses’ lack of respect for each other.36
The accounts can be fairly formulaic and precede the main accusations
of cruelty or adultery, and thus historians can assume them to be more
indicative of social and legal prescription than individualised problems.
Interestingly nonetheless, spouses make somewhat similar complaints in
the informal records of memoirs and letters examined here, especially
noting anger and lack of respect. Archibald Grant complained to his
mother-in-law in 1739 about Anna using ‘unbecomeing [sic] language
and conduct towards me both in private and publick’ [sic].37 Simon Mason
complained that his wife behaved insolently, noisily and tyrannically
towards him. On one occasion he grumbled:
and what a shocking Folly and Madness is it, when a Wife, to gratify a vile
Spirit, will stick at nothing, be it ever so base and false, to vilify and [sic]
destroy the reputation of her Husband, tho’s she knows his, her own and
Childrens Bread depend upon it?38
BEARING GRUDGES: MARITAL CONFLICT AND THE INTERGENERATIONAL … 49
Thomas Wright accused his wife of bad temper too; he records her fall-
ing into a ‘furious passion’ and their exchange of ‘warm words’.39 Like
Simon, he felt that a wife’s disrespectful words were dangerous:
Hence I advise all my children of both sexes that may happen to enter into
the matrimonial connection, to be doubly careful how they make use of
such imprudent and disrespectful expressions to their partners, for though
they may be uttered in passion, and perhaps afterwards retracted, yet are
they apt to make such unfavourable impressions, and create such aversions
in delicate minds, as perhaps they may never afterwards be able to sur-
mount as long as they live.40
At another point in his memoir, Thomas stated that he beat two of his
older children to bring them back into line and respect for him, so it is
not unreasonable to speculate that the severe method he threatened was
physical correction. Not unlike some legal and popular culture accounts
of marital conflict then, husbands’ blows and wives’ words were given
rough equivalence in their ability to ‘hurt’ the recipient. Even when
Lydia was dying of an unidentified complaint of the lungs at the age of
30, in 1777, spousal respect was still something Thomas demanded. Her
physician suggested she stay at her parents’ home since it had a southerly
aspect. Thomas accepted this situation for some time until again insisting
upon his wife’s return home, at which point Lydia, probably too ill to
respond with her former anger, adopted what he felt was more appro-
priate demeanour: ‘tears and a good deal of respectful submission’. This
changed his mind and he let her stay; she died at her parental home
shortly afterwards.44
Religious Disagreement
Studies of eighteenth-century marriage have until recently rarely
focused on religion. Steve King has proposed that it needs integrat-
ing into the scholarship on courtship since it was a factor influencing
spousal choice.45 Religion was certainly a factor of acute interest during
John Shaw’s courtship of Elizabeth Wilkinson, as their correspondence
reveals. In his letters to her in 1810–1811, John explained that he was
not a Calvinist as her Methodist family suspected, but in fact was more
a Presbyterian. Thus he insisted that they were compatible in terms of
religion and that this would determine their future happiness. This was,
he said, one reason for selecting her as a partner. On New Year’s Eve
1810 he wrote explaining that her religious education and religion made
him look forward to their future intimacy. Indeed, their shared religious
values were ‘the one thing needfull’ and would provide hope and expec-
tations of happiness in the difficulties and trials of life; it was the passport
to future happiness and never-ending joy.46 His not attending Methodist
meetings remained a hurdle, but John sought compromise and pro-
posed she attend once a day with him and he would attend the other
part of the day with her. The phrasing and serious intensity of these
BEARING GRUDGES: MARITAL CONFLICT AND THE INTERGENERATIONAL … 51
his Methodism with his wife and family’s Calvinism; on one occasion he
explained that he ‘espoused the doctrine of Free-agency and Universal
Redemption’ in contrast with their strict Calvinism.49 The Arminian-
Calvinist split in Methodism was still rumbling at the end of the
eighteenth century, so Thomas probably viewed these distinctions as sig-
nificant. Thomas also believed the denominational differences led to his
wife’s inferior upbringing, their incompatibility, and his parents-in-law’s
many wrongs. These tensions were variously expressed, but usually
linked the religious division with the personal problem. For example,
he blamed his wife’s excessive drinking of rum on her bearing a sickly
infant and having to stay in bed for three months after the birth. He
reported that during that time ‘Mr. James Scott, the minister of the
Calvinistic Chapel at Heckmondwike, of which her parents were mem-
bers, paid her a visit, to pray with her and administer “ghostly comfort
and consolation”’. The term ‘ghostly’ refers to a clergyman reading the
bible and offering comfort through counselling from biblical sources.
Lydia responded to the clergyman by citing scripture ‘in the cant strain
of the party’, according to Thomas. In other words, Mr. Scott was fooled
by Lydia’s [familial] ability to use the gospels to persuade him that she
was well and distract him from warning her against drunkenness. In
Thomas’s view, the ‘minister was imposed upon, and departed without
ever discovering (that ever I could perceive) anything at all of her real
situation’.50 For Thomas, Lydia’s Calvinism was a stain on her character
and behaviour which undermined their relationship.
brothers and fathers warned husbands against violence, though they also
persuaded wives to return to husbands. Generally they had the women’s
interests at heart as the marital unit was the only one that could finan-
cially support women with children. In wealthy, titled families there were
considerable vested interests in getting couples to agree. As O’Day com-
ments, establishing patronage links was a contributing factor for indi-
viduals promoting and organising relatives’ unions; thus the prospect of
those marriages ending in separation or divorce inferred the termination
of the patronage network too.53
Familial intervention is also apparent in first-hand accounts discussed
here, though it is somewhat different from its more formalised represen-
tation in legal records. It might be as simple as providing a sympathetic
ear, as Archibald Grant’s letter to his mother-in-law cited above suggests.
Here he complained of his wife’s conduct towards him and worried that
Anna misguidedly thought he did not love her. It is clear that he trusted
Anna’s mother to listen and offer guidance and help.54 The case studies
also show its less welcome aspects. Neither Simon Mason nor Thomas
Wright framed their in-laws’ actions as mediating between them and
their spouses. Both men blamed their in-laws for instigating and main-
taining conflict between them and their daughters. As well as complain-
ing that their wives’ parents disliked them and refused to support them
financially as they saw fit, both men claimed that their in-laws were
spiteful and malicious. Thomas Wright even labelled his parents-in-law
as ‘malevolent’.55 Strikingly, both often rhetorically linked their wives’
faults to their wives’ families’ faults.
Neither the Masons nor Wrights kept their tensions and arguments to
themselves. Both couples were firmly embedded within their intergenera-
tional families. Initially Simon Mason’s mother helped him until she died,
and thereafter his in-laws were prominent. He and his wife separated
whenever he could no longer support her and his children. She would
return to her family until he could establish himself again. When he
sought her out in 1746 after yet another separation, however, he noted
that: ‘I was oblig’d to take a Lodging for myself, not being permitted to
be with her, for fear of disobliging her pious Relations’.56 The situation
worsened. His brother-in-law, Mr. Cheshire, tried to help him get work,
but the ill nature and malice of my good Father-in-law, and his Consort
&c, knowing I was pretty often at his Son Cheshire’s, and finding I
pick’d up a small, tho’ an uncomfortable living, insisted that his Son
54 J. Begiato
Mother and I go on better than for a long time past. My last conversa-
tion upon my late proposals stated my conviction of the desirableness of
separation for the comfort of both parties – and those proposals were such
as appeared to fall in exactly with the favourite plan of both mother and
Lou; yet there rather appears, I think, to be an intention of remaining at
Braintree, which if at all tolerable I shall most certainly not oppose.64
I could make her happy’.65 Though these reflections might seem the
conversations of friends rather than father/child, in this period par-
ents were encouraged to be their children’s confidantes and friends.66
George’s attempt to discuss his marital tensions with his adult son,
however, illuminates a facet of such relationships not revealed by the
advice literature, which ended its guidance for parents before the child
reached adulthood. George was a man who prided himself on being a
good father, caring, companionate, and devoted, as ideals recommended.
Perhaps the letters he exchanged with his adult son Samuel show the
reciprocal aspect of such ideals, when parents themselves turned to their
children as confidantes at times of crisis.
Given the large size of families, however, including one child as confi-
dante could exclude another. In her letter dated August 1813, the eldest
child Louisa complained to Sam about her father’s assumptions:
My father thinks that I defend my mother, viz. her opinions, whether good
or bad, because they are her’s; this I am sure I do not. It is true I do not
always declare my sentiments when they run counter to her’s, and I do
mostly support her’s when they coincide with my own in opposition to my
father’s.
Louisa explained that she could not lie or ‘guard my expressions’ when
discussing her mother with her father. She may have been defending
herself to Sam too, for she commented: ‘You do not know what it was
that influenced me “to take” as Papa says “My mother’s part”’. This sug-
gests that Sam was not fully informed of the issues, perhaps because he
only had his father’s side of the situation. While she admitted to Sam
that her mother was ‘often much to blame’, she distinguished between
her parents through their discussion of each other in front of their chil-
dren. She approved of her mother because she praised her husband’s
abilities as a father, regardless of what she felt that he was like as a hus-
band, but disapproved of her father because he attacked her mother’s
maternal abilities.67 In a further letter Louisa updated Sam about ‘the
mutual domestic comfort of our parents’. She reported that ‘an increase
of apparent kind attention on the one side is accepted by an increased
willingness to be pleased’. She attributed the alteration to having invol-
untarily declared her plan to assist her mother: ‘while Cath, Eliza and I
were in the room’ her father ‘began a conversation or rather a mono-
logue on the desirableness of a separation; he then read a letter on the
BEARING GRUDGES: MARITAL CONFLICT AND THE INTERGENERATIONAL … 57
subject which he had written to you’. Louisa reported that her failure to
reply to this ‘displeased him, which displeasure he shewed by comparing
my conduct in this instance to my mother’s “infamous abominable” &c
&c behaviour; this forced me to a perhaps sharp defence of Mo[ther]’.
This included informing him that she was determined to take a small
school where she would live with her mother.68
Children’s involvement in parental marital breakdown shows its dia-
chronic form far more powerfully in letters and memoirs than in court
records, where at best a static picture is glimpsed. The offspring of cou-
ples who experienced sustained marital conflict often encountered it in
childhood and it could influence their actions in adulthood. Ruth and
George’s inability to live happily together had impinged upon their chil-
dren’s lives throughout childhood. Ruth had spent several years in her
natal home in Ireland with some of her younger daughters, leaving her
younger sons and two eldest children in Essex with George. Louisa used
these memories to support a second more permanent separation of her
parents in 1813. She informed Sam: ‘As to a separation, I am convinced
my mother’s happiness would be increased, I should therefore second
such an arrangement; but I could not then remain at home: I never can
forget the many wretched dreadful hours I passed during my mother’s
absence’.69 There is also evidence that marriage conflict could alter the
nature of the relationship between parent and children. In 1815 follow-
ing an undisclosed dispute with several of his adult offspring, George
wrote an open letter to them observing that they were his sole comfort
in life:
The only troubles worthy of the name which have hitherto been allotted
to me (and of these indeed I have, I believe and hope, had a larger por-
tion than falls to the lot of most men) have arisen from the relations of
Husband and Father. When, (and long after) I had given up all expecta-
tion of being happy with my Wife – (tho’ upon the hope of conjugal bliss
no man I assuredly believe ever more fondly indulged himself and assidu-
ously cherished for years, with but slight expectation of realising it) – when
this fond hope proved but an illusion and all that I could look forward to
in this connection was a bearable uncomfortableness – and even this has
scarcely been attained. When this view of earthly comfort was gone, I con-
soled myself for many years that by making friends of my children I should
secure a parent’s best enjoyments.70
58 J. Begiato
other marriages they were also blamed for exacerbating or even causing
arguments. Furthermore, the sources investigated in this chapter dem-
onstrate that marital conflict could have (admittedly in the eyes of
those remembering many years later) a very long genesis, occurring in
some instances even before the wedding itself. Indeed what is strikingly
evoked by correspondence and autobiographies is the extensive nature
of familial involvement in spouses’ marital problems. Even though this
may be a feature of hindsight and memory in autobiographies, some of
the husbands in the sample cited their parents-in-law as protagonists in
the marriage going wrong from the start. It also could outlive the trou-
bled marriage. Although Thomas Wright married a second time (at 45
to a 15 year old) four years after his first wife’s death, his memoir still
returned repeatedly to his first wife’s parents to recount their continued
personal animosity to him after Lydia’s death, and their role in giving
a home and work to several of his children into their own adulthood
and marriage. His mother-in-law died in 1796 and his father-in-law in
1797 and by then two of Thomas’s daughters had married two brothers
who were themselves feuding over their Birkhead inheritances. Indeed,
Thomas saw the taint of this continuing through the generations. He
warned his intended readers—his and his parents-in-law’s descendants—
that his mother-in-law’s conduct had ‘done the greatest injury to some
of her own offspring, and given occasion for the most implacable ani-
mosity to arise between the parties, who were near relations, immediately
sprung from her own family, and which malice and animosity will proba-
bly be transmitted to future generations’.72 Perhaps the view that marital
conflict could taint the lives of more people than the couple concerned
was an additional factor impelling society to encourage spouses to resolve
disputes.
Notes
1. Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown
1660–1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003); Katie
Barclay, Love Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland,
1650–1850 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011).
2. Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 137–139; Katie Barclay, ‘“And Four Years Space
they Loveingly Agreed”: Balladry and Early Modern Understandings of
Marriage’, in Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland,
ed. Elizabeth Ewan and Janey Nugent (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008),
60 J. Begiato
James Fowler
J. Fowler (*)
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: J.E.Fowler@kent.ac.uk
The evidence which Hardwick provides certainly suggests that the com-
panionate marriage was on the rise in the eighteenth century, ‘at least
rhetorically’. But if Perrault’s tales are read carefully, they suggest that
Hardwick’s thesis requires considerable adaptation to fit the evidence
provided by some examples of seventeenth-century French literature.
For tales such as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ show that already in Perrault’s time it
HANDSOME, GALLANT, GENTLE, RICH: BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE … 67
When Perrault writes above that fairy stories are ‘unbelievable’, he surely
means, simply enough, that adult readers generally do not believe in fair-
ies. But he proceeds to suggest that they become ‘vraisemblable[s]’ if
we read them allegorically, whilst bearing Élisabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans
in mind.14 For in the real world it seems ‘Nature’ has at least equalled
fictional fairies in endowing this real-life princess with the numerous,
exquisite ‘gifts’ which she displays. And so the dedication offers a blue-
print for reading the tales as allegories: if we substitute ‘Nature’ for the
fairies, the tales will supposedly reveal their relevance to the real world of
seventeenth-century France.
In recent decades, scholars have read these tales as allegories, but not
according to Perrault’s blueprint. In his brilliant and influential study
The Great Cat Massacre, Darnton interprets them as historical docu-
ments bearing traces of the hardships suffered by peasants in ancien
régime France; he further argues that the peasants developed an ethos
or practical philosophy which he terms ‘tricksterism’. To strengthen his
case, Darnton compares Perrault’s tales with those precedents that cir-
culated amongst the poor: ‘whenever one looks behind Perrault to the
peasant versions of Mother Goose, one finds elements of realism […] a
picture that corresponds to everything that social historians have been
able to piece together from the archives’.15 But how was it possible for
such elements to enter Perrault’s tales, fashioned for a court readership,
yet continue to provide evidence of the authentic experience of the poor?
Darnton’s answer is that the children of nobility were often cared for
by wet nurses and other women of the people, who told them Mother
Goose stories. This, for him, explains how, in Perrault, we can find a
linking of two cultures, ‘even at the height of the Grand siècle, when
they would seem to have least in common; for the audiences of Racine
and Lully had imbibed folklore with their milk’.16 The end of the seven-
teenth century would seem to mark a unique moment in French history,
HANDSOME, GALLANT, GENTLE, RICH: BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE … 69
‘Sleeping Beauty’
This, the first tale in the collection, most closely corresponds to the verse
with which the dedication closes: ‘Surely I could offer these tales to no
one better suited to lend plausibility / To the unbelievable parts of fairy
HANDSOME, GALLANT, GENTLE, RICH: BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE … 71
dangers that face a girl or young woman who is careless of her virginity.
These are the first lines:
So much for untutored peasant girls, who face the dangers of seduc-
tion without any kind of chaperone. But the continuation of the moral
(introduced in the editions of 1697) raises the social status of the wolf’s
victim:
Perrault writes ‘the wolf’ as opposed to ‘the wolves’ to make his allegory
absolutely explicit: the wolf, here, is the would-be seducer of unmar-
ried virgins. But his polished manners suggest a certain distinction, in
an age when galanterie and honnêteté were in the process of being rein-
vented or refined in aristocratic circles.37 Moreover, the worldly wolf’s
victims are ‘[de] jeunes demoiselles’, meaning high-born young ladies;
‘Mademoiselle’ might even hear an echo of her title in ‘[ma] demoi-
selle’. Incidentally, this eleventh-hour extension of this tale’s caution-
ary moral from peasantry to the high-born may not have involved an
imaginative leap for Perrault or his readers; for as Hardwick remarks:
‘Demography and law provided powerful common gender axes across
region, whether province to province or rural to urban, and even across
rank to a degree’.38 The marriage market of the poor as well as the rich
placed value on virginity—or, failing that, the avoidance of births outside
marriage.39
And so, in this moral, young ladies of rank are warned that if they
allow themselves to be (sexually) consumed they will ‘die’; effectively,
this means that they will lose their value for the marriage market. This
recalls the moral of ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Impatience for marriage, enforced
delay, and dreams of an ideal suitor spell danger for a young woman’s
virginity. In the opening tale of the collection, this danger was warded
off by the enchanted forest around the castle in which the princess slept,
but if we replace the fairies by Nature, that forest can only stand for
sexual continence, exercised by the suitor or his potential bride. Not
dissimilarly, ‘Red Riding Hood’ warns young women of all ranks that
they will pay a high price if they allow their pre-marital virginity to be
imperilled by their ‘female’ (and therefore child-like) susceptibility to
seduction.
‘Bluebeard’
By contrast with ‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘Bluebeard’ directly represents the
world of the aristocracy towards the end of the seventeenth century. It
engages with the problem of mésalliance, in the form of marriage ties
between families of unequal wealth and rank. As Hardwick emphasises,
primogeniture helped to avoid the dispersion of family wealth and led to
a situation where younger sons became officers (or entered the church),
and daughters might be encouraged into convents (a cheaper solution
than finding a suitable dowry).40 An aristocratic family whose name
76 J. Fowler
carried prestige, but whose fortune was depleted, faced choices which
must often have seemed difficult. In such a context, it was tempting to
contemplate marrying ‘down’, into the strata of the noblesse de robe, or
even families with no claim to nobility but sufficient wealth to support an
aristocratic lifestyle—ideas of which had become expensively inflated by
the example of Versailles.
The opening of this tale presents Bluebeard offering to marry either
daughter of a ‘dame de qualité’ (a woman born to aristocratic parents).
There is a hint that this marriage will be an alliance of new money with
an old name: Bluebeard is introduced as ‘un homme qui avait de belles
maisons à la ville et à la campagne, de la vaisselle d’or et d’argent, des
meubles en broderie et des carrosses tout dorés, mais qui par malheur
avait la barbe bleue’ [a man who had beautiful houses in the town and
in the country, vessels of gold and silver, embroidered pieces and car-
riages covered in gilt, but who, unfortunately, had a blue beard].41 The
label ‘gentilhomme’ is conspicuously withheld from him—unlike the
elder sister Anne’s future husband, introduced at the close of the tale.42
This omission is tantamount to indicating that Bluebeard’s origins are (at
best) bourgeois. To make matters worse, his strangely coloured beard is
presented as particularly repellent to prospective brides. This is the tale’s
second sentence: ‘Cela le rendait si laid et si terrible que filles et femmes
s’enfuyaient dès qu’il paraissait’ [This rendered him so ugly and terrify-
ing that girls and women fled as soon as he appeared].43 Intrinsically and
objectively repellent, the beard functions as an external sign to warn and
protect against the purely pragmatic marriage, devoid of the kind of love
(true love?) that excludes physical disgust. We saw that according to the
verse moral of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, unmarried daughters yearn for a hus-
band who is ‘riche, vaillant, aimable et doux’ (rich, valorous, charming
and gentle), or (in 1697) ‘riche bien fait, galant et doux’ [rich, hand-
some, gallant and gentle], with ‘rich’ heading each list. But they may be
obliged by their own impatience and/or a limited choice of suitors to
compromise. The sisters in ‘Bluebeard’ are caught in such a situation.
They do not oppose the idea of marriage per se (both are happily mar-
ried by the end). They are, however, reluctant to compromise when they
are faced with a suitor as far from ideal as Bluebeard; indeed, ‘elles se le
renvoyèrent l’une à l’autre, ne se pouvant résoudre à prendre un homme
qui eût la barbe bleue’ [they alternately pushed for the other to marry
him as they were unable to resolve themselves to marry anyone who had
a blue beard] (326).
HANDSOME, GALLANT, GENTLE, RICH: BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE … 77
dont elle était aimée depuis longtemps’ [a young noble [by birth] who
had loved her for a long time already]; the second, her own to ‘un fort
honnête homme qui lui fit oublier le mauvais temps qu’elle avait passé
avec la Barbe bleue’ [a very well-bred man who caused her to forget the
bad times she had spent with Bluebeard]. These two mariages d’amour
are the opposite of mésalliances. But they could not happen until rank
and wealth came together in one noble family without the contamination
of Bluebeard’s decidedly non-blue blood.
Darnton uses four tales, including ‘The Master Cat’, to suggest that we
can, in Perrault, find reliable traces of ‘tricksterism’, which he sees as
the response of ancien régime peasants to their experience of life as, in
Hobbes’ phrase, ‘nasty, brutish, and short’:50
In ‘Puss ’n Boots’, a poor miller dies, leaving the mill to his eldest son, an
ass to the second, and only a cat to the third. […] We are clearly in France,
although other versions of this theme exist in Asia, Africa, and South
America. The inheritance customs of French peasants, as well as noblemen,
often prevented the fragmentation of the patrimony by favoring the eldest
son. Everywhere around him this Cartesian cat sees vanity, stupidity, and
unsatisfied appetite; and he exploits it all by a series of tricks, which lead to
a rich marriage for his master and a fine estate for himself.51
This verse speaks of social ascension in general, rather than a fantasy born
of peasants’ hardships. Bearing Perrault’s origins in mind, one might
detect the meeting of two currents here. Where Darnton emphasises
the merging, in Perrault, of élite with popular currents, this particular
moral mingles the culture of the ‘élite by birth’ with that of the ‘élite by
worth’, to which Perrault himself precariously belonged. Families such as
his, moving at the fringes of court and salon society, might surely dream
of a world where merit brought greater rewards than inherited privilege.
82 J. Fowler
Here, the verse is divided at its mid-point: the ‘if’ clause of the first
three lines affords a plot summary of ‘The Master Cat’, and the moral
is spelled out in the last three lines. The transition from narrative to
interpretation, from particular to universal, and from fantasy to ‘real-
ity’, is clearly marked by ‘C’est que’ [It is because]. All that precedes is
story: all that follows is the ‘way things are’. And if ‘The Master Cat’
might be thought at first to express a peasant’s fantasy of social ascent,
such an idea does not survive this transition to the real world (where,
obviously, peasants do not wear fine clothes). Instead we are sim-
ply told in the moral ‘proper’ that ‘dress, good looks and youth’ play
their role in arousing love: of these, ‘dress’ is a marker of status. And so
Mademoiselle, perhaps, can have it both ways: a man sufficiently high
born (and therefore magnificently dressed) to be approved of by one’s
father may also be chosen by one’s heart. Mariage d’amour and dynastic
marriage may happily converge.
The 1695 version of ‘The Fairies’ opens with a family situation very
close to that of ‘Cinderella’: a widower with a kind and well-mannered
daughter marries a widow with a daughter of opposite character.
Gheeraert argues that therefore, to ensure variety within the expanded
collection, in 1697 Perrault is obliged to modify this opening. Either
way, the stepsisters become sisters, one of whom resembles the virtuous
father, the other the vicious mother. Rewards and punishments then are
HANDSOME, GALLANT, GENTLE, RICH: BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE … 83
Notes
1. The only prose tales that do not include the marriage of a prince or prin-
cess, presented as the basis of a happy ending, are: ‘Red Riding Hood’;
‘Bluebeard’; and ‘Tom Thumb’. Of these, ‘Bluebeard’ ends with the
happy marriages of two sisters of noble descent. Important discussions
of fairy-tales include: Jacques Barchilon, Le Conte merveilleux français
de 1690 à 1790 (Paris: Champion, 1975); Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of
Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York:
Knopf, 1976); Marc Soriano, Les Contes de Perrault, culture savante
et traditions populaires, rev. edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); Marina
Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: on Fairy-Tales and their Tellers
(London: Vintage, 1995).
2. Court protocol conferred this title on ‘the daughter, or sometimes eldest
daughter, of Monsieur’, the latter being ‘the title conferred on the king’s
brother, or the most senior if there were several’; Vincent J. Pitts, La
Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France: 1627–1693 (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 4.
HANDSOME, GALLANT, GENTLE, RICH: BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE … 85
3. Ibid., 2.
4. See Charles Perrault, Contes, ed. Tony Gheeraert (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2012), 175 (n. 2).
5. See Charles Perrault, The Complete Fairy Tales, ed. and trans. Christopher
Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xiv–xv.
6. The tales that were added in 1697 to create the published, eight-tale
collection on which most modern editions are based are: ‘Cinderella’;
‘Tom Thumb’ and ‘Riquet with the Tuft’. I have used the well-known
English titles of the five tales to be discussed here, which are in any case
very close to the French titles. The latter are: ‘La Belle au bois dormant’;
‘Le Petit Chaperon rouge’; ‘La Barbe bleue’; ‘Le Maître chat ou le chat
botté’; ‘Les Fées’; ‘Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre’; ‘Riquet à
la Houppe’; and ‘Le Petit Poucet’. For observations on the translation of
these into English, see The Complete Fairy Tales, xxxix.
7. Julie Hardwick, ‘Gender’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime,
ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 183–200.
8. Ibid., 187.
9. See Perrault, Contes, 23–24.
10. Gheeraert resumes the case for and against Pierre Darmancour as author
of the tales in Perrault, Contes, 26–35.
11. Perrault, Contes, 313. All translations from the French are my own.
12. Ibid., 313–314. A series of changes are made to these lines in the 1697
version, the most significant of which is doubtless the correction of ‘ceux
qui les écoutent’ [those who listen to them] to ‘ceux qui les lisent’ [those
who read them], which marks the entry of the tales into the medium of
print and their availability to a wider audience. See Perrault, Contes, 175.
13. Ibid., 314.
14. ‘Vraisemblable’ covers a complex range of meanings overlapping with ‘plau-
sible’, ‘true to life’ and ‘verisimilitudinous’, but also connected with the
Neo-Classical ethos that became prevalent in seventeenth-century theatre.
15. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French
Cultural History, 2nd edition (Philadelphia, PA: Basic Books, 1984), 38.
16. Ibid., 63.
17. Ibid., 63.
18. Perrault, Contes, 158–159.
19. Ibid., 159–160 ‘Grisettes’ is an archaic word that referred at first to girls
or women whose clothes were made of inexpensive, grey fabric, before
being extended to poor women in general; in both senses, it may imply a
measure of derision. See Perrault, Contes, 160 (n. 1).
20. Ibid., 160. I have translated ‘fretin’ as ‘dregs’; literally, it means ‘petit
poisson jusques à deux ans’ [small fish, up to two years old]—or fish not
86 J. Fowler
worth keeping once caught (cf. ‘small fry’); but is used figuratively ‘Des
choses de rebut, & qui sont de nulle valeur, de nulle considération’ [Of
things that are repellent, and are of no value, no worth] (Dictionnaire
de l’Académie française, 1694). All references to the Dictionnaire were
obtained via http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/dictionnaires-
dautrefois. Date of access: 12–20 December 2013.
21. I have translated the insulting ‘pattes’ as ‘paws’; properly used for ani-
mals, ‘Il se dit fig. Des hommes, mais presque tousjours [sic] en mauvaise
part’ [It is used figuratively of humans, but almost always in a pejorative
manner]; see the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française
(1694). ‘Dindonnières’ could mean ‘keepers of turkeys’ but also (mock-
ingly) ‘Demoiselle de campagne’ [young lady of the countryside]; see the
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694).
22. Perrault’s tales re-enter popular culture via the ‘bibliothèque bleue’; see
Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 63; this certainly reinforces Darnton’s
case for finding a mingling of currents in the tales, but within limits; for it
is reasonable to suggest that the literate among the French poor discov-
ered something only half-familiar in these stories.
23. For instance, of seventeenth-century fairy tales by Perrault and other,
female writers (Mme d’Aulnoy, Mlle l’Héritier and Mlle Bernard), Annie
Collognat and Marie-Charlotte Delmas remark: ‘De l’oral, le conte passe
à l’écrit pour devenir “littéraire”, mais garde la marque originelle du con-
tage’. [Having begun as an oral tradition, [around this time] the tale is
written down and becomes ‘literary’, but the trace of its folk-tale ori-
gins remains.] See Les Contes de Perrault dans tous leurs états, ed. Annie
Collognat and Marie-Charlotte Delmas (Paris: Omnibus, 2007), vi.
Soriano, Les Contes de Perrault also frequently highlights the aforemen-
tioned tension in the tales.
24. Perrault, Contes, 315.
25. See Antonia Fraser, Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun
King (London: Phoenix, 2006), 1–3, and Perrault, Contes, 177–178 (n. 1).
26. In his preface to the verse tales, Perrault classifies ‘Grisélidis’ as belonging
in the category of ‘nouvelles’, which he defines as ‘des récits de choses
qui peuvent être arrivées, et qui n’ont rien qui blesse absolument la
vraisemblance’ [tales of things that can have happened, and which con-
tain nothing that might deprive them of all plausibility].
27. Perrault, Contes, 315–316.
28. Perrault, Contes, 324.
29. ‘Aimable’ is literally ‘worthy of being loved’, and ‘doux’ has a wide range
of meanings, including ‘well-mannered’. The 1697 version of the second
HANDSOME, GALLANT, GENTLE, RICH: BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE … 87
line of the moral is: ‘Riche, bien fait, galant et doux’ [rich, handsome,
gallant and gentle], from which the title of the present discussion is
adapted. Perrault, Contes, 193.
30. Perrault, Contes, 193.
31. Perrault, Contes, 314.
32. The ‘chevillette’ and the ‘bobinette’, both made of wood, form a rudi-
mentary locking mechanism. Gheeraert suggests the famous phrase may
in fact be Perrault’s faux-medieval invention since neither diminutive
(‘chevillette’ or ‘bobinette’) can be found in any text predating his ver-
sion of ‘Red Riding Hood’. See Perrault, Contes, 65; 198 (n. 2).
33. Evelyne Lever evokes the ‘simple’ life which Marie-Antoinette instituted
at the Petit Trianon; she also notes that once the theatre was built in the
Trianon gardens, the Queen staged Le roi et le fermier [The King and the
Farmer], ‘a comedy with ariettas about a king who gets lost while hunt-
ing and is taken in by a farmer who satirizes the court for him’. As for
the casting, ‘Comte d’Adhémar played the king and Marie Antoinette a
shepherdess who is in love with the farmer Vaudreuil’. See Evelyne Lever,
Marie-Antoinette: The Last Queen of France (London: Judy Piatkus Ltd,
2007), 135–136 (136).
34. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 166–182. Some twenty
years later, Marina Warner remarks: ‘Red Riding Hood or Snow White
have become rich symbols for psychoanalysts to gloss’; see From the Beast
to the Blonde, xviii.
35. Perrault, Contes, 326.
36. Ibid., 200; Gheeraert cites Furetière’s dictionary to show that ‘ruelle’ (lit-
erally, ‘little street’) could refer to the space between a bed and a wall, or
even an alcove with seating, in which ladies might receive visitors.
37. See Alain Viala, La France galante (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2008). The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694) defines ‘galant’
as follows: ‘honneste, civil, sociable, de bonne compagnie, de conversa-
tion agreable’ [well-mannered, civil, sociable, of good company and con-
versation]; and the many connotations of ‘honneste’ include noble birth,
manners and probity.
38. See Hardwick, ‘Gender’, 186.
39. See Hardwick, ‘Gender’ (passim).
40. Ibid. (passim).
41. Perrault, Contes, 326.
42. We are told that this suitor loved the elder daughter; this marriage,
whilst a mariage d’amour, was pragmatically delayed until it was fea-
sible (a point to which we will return). The temptation of mésalliance
88 J. Fowler
is confirmed by the fact that once Bluebeard is dead, his young widow
is able to buy companies in the army for her brothers (younger sons
of noble families often choosing between church and army); this obvi-
ously suggests that the family was insufficiently wealthy to do so before.
Another instance of the rank gentilhomme being explicitly mentioned by
Perrault is the incipit of ‘Cinderella’: ‘Il était une fois un gentilhomme
qui épousa en secondes noces une femme, la plus hautaine et la plus fière
qu’on eut jamais vue’ [Once upon a time there was a nobleman who
[once he had lost his first wife] made a second marriage with the haughti-
est, proudest woman ever seen]; see Perrault, Contes, 223.
43. Ibid., 326.
44. Marina Warner, incidentally, offers fascinating comments on the blue
beard of Perrault’s tale, including the following: ‘Well out of fashion in
the court of the Sun King, the beard of Perrault’s villain betokened an
outsider, a libertine, and a ruffian’. See From the Beast to the Blonde, 242.
45. Warner writes: ‘“Bluebeard” is a version of the Fall in which Eve is
allowed to get away with it’; see From the Beast to the Blonde, 244.
46. Perrault, Contes, 331.
47. Dedicating his verse nouvelle to an anonymous young lady, Perrault
writes that such a long-suffering wife as the eponymous Grisélidis would
be ‘un prodige à Paris./Les femmes y sont souveraines,/Tout s’y règle
selon leurs vœux/Enfin c’est un climat heureux/Qui n’est habité que de
reines’ [a prodigy in Paris./Women are sovereign there,/Everything is
done according to their wishes/Indeed, it is a happy clime/Where every
woman is a queen]; see Perrault, Contes, 97.
48. Ibid., 425–426.
49. ‘Gender’, 184–185.
50. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 65.
51. Ibid., 29.
52. Perrault, Contes, 429.
53. Ibid., 335.
54. Ibid., 218.
55. Perrault, Contes, 337–338.
56. Jansenism was a particularly stern predestinarian tendency that had con-
siderable influence in France in the seventeenth century. According to
John Cruickshank, ‘Jansenism influenced some of the outstanding lit-
erary figures of the 17th century, including Racine, Pascal, Boileau, La
Rochefoucauld, and La Fayette’. See the New Oxford Companion to
Literature in French, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),
HANDSOME, GALLANT, GENTLE, RICH: BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE … 89
Robin Runia
He told me, ‘he was convinced by the conduct of the ladies of this house,
that their religion must be the true one. When he had before considered
the lives of Christians, their doctrine seemed to have so little influence on
their actions, that he imagined there was no sufficient effect produced by
Christianity to warrant belief […] but he now saw what that religion in
reality was’.1
R. Runia (*)
Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA, USA
e-mail: Rrunia@xula.edu
Miss Mancel
Miss Mancel’s history is the first to engage in a critique of marriage
grounded in the unnecessary suffering and sacrifice of women. When the
‘distress of ruined fortune, and the too fatal success of a duel, in which
her father is unwillingly engaged’ force Mr. Mancel and his wife to flee
to the American colonies, Miss Mancel is left to grow up like an orphan
(163). Mr. Mancel’s inability to control his appetites and emotions sub-
jects his wife to exile in America. In stark contrast to the intrepid entre-
preneurship of Daniel Defoe’s earlier eighteenth-century heroines in
Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), Mrs. Mancel’s silent and
tearful acquiescence signals Millenium Hall’s solid position within the
development of the sentimental novel at mid-century. Once in America,
Mrs. Mancel’s husband dies of fever and she is left ‘entirely destitute, at
a loss how to hazard the tedious passage home, without the protection
94 R. Runia
Miss Melvyn
In the next of the novel’s inset histories, the reader learns of Miss
Melvyn, who became acquainted with Miss Mancel in boarding school.
Miss Melvyn’s history begins with that of her mother, Lady Melvyn, and
her suffering from a flawed marriage that sets the stage for her daugh-
ter’s own future marital suffering. Of Lady Melvyn, we read that ‘con-
trary to her inclination’ and despite the difficulty she anticipates obeying
‘one who, though she knows not half her own excellence, she must be
sensible was her inferior’, she spends her life sacrificing herself to her
husband’s reputation (83). She ‘contrived to make all her actions appear
the result of his choice, and whatever he did by her instigation, seemed
even to himself to have been his own thought’ (84). Such sacrifice proves
essential to the maintenance of the family and the reader is told that
‘human nature cannot feel a deeper affliction than now overwhelmed
‘KNIGHTS OF MATRIMONY’, CHRISTIAN DUTY AND MILLENIUM HALL 95
Miss Melvyn; wherein Sir Charles bore as great a share, as the easiness
of his nature was capable’ (85). Lady Melvyn’s sacrifice of her own supe-
rior intellect appears necessary to maintain family harmony, but when his
daughter observes the necessity of her mother’s selflessness and its per-
petuation of her father’s shallow feeling, the beginnings of an emotional
rift form and these beginnings are subsequently exacerbated by the mer-
cenary jealousy of his young, fortune-hunting second wife.
When the new Lady Melvyn, in a plotline reminiscent of Camilla’s
step-mother in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), banishes her step-
daughter, Miss Melvyn becomes the second generation in the family to
suffer from an unwanted husband’s immoderate sexual desire and defi-
cient powers of reason. This ‘very afflicting change’, we learn, ‘came
from a hand she too much respected to make any resistance, though she
easily perceived that it was entirely at her mother’s instigation; and knew
her father too well, to believe he could be peremptory on any occasion’
(87). Laura Thomason’s reading of the women of Millenium Hall as free
and autonomous agents is complicated by Miss Melvyn being forced by
her father to accept the attentions of a man ‘in whom age had not gained
a victory over passion’ (106). Millenium Hall is thus also involved in the
critique of ‘parental suppression of young women’s individuality’ within
marriage.8 This critique combines the aforementioned jealousy of her
stepmother with Miss Melvyn’s own commitment to filial duty, detailing
the painful coercion necessary to enter into a loveless marriage with an
alcoholic tyrant. She concludes: ‘I must either add to the contamination
of a very profligate world, or, in the face of Heaven, enter into the most
solemn vows to love a man, whom the most I can do, is not hate. This is
wilful perjury. In such an alternative duty cannot direct me’ (125). Like
her mother, Miss Melvyn has learned that the public integrity of mar-
riage as an institution requires her private sacrifice. Accordingly, she is
constrained by her duty to not ‘make [her] distresses, known [… and]
not then expose the faults of him whose slightest failings [she] ought to
conceal’ (125). Imprisoned in unreciprocated duty, Miss Melvyn suffers
to perform simultaneous duty to home and world.
Lady Mary
The novel’s thorough critique of male inadequacy within marriage con-
tinues with Lady Mary’s history:
96 R. Runia
Lady Mary was daughter to the Earl of Brumpton by his second wife, who
survived the birth of her child but a few hours. The earl died when his daugh-
ter was about ten years old, and having before his second marriage mort-
gaged to its full value all of his estate which was not settled on a son born of
his first lady, his daughter was left entirely destitute of provision (172).
Miss Selvyn
Miss Selvyn’s history further connects unrestrained male passion to
women’s marital sacrifice. While we are told that she was ‘bred up gen-
teely’ (199) by her father, educated by him in the best way, was level-
headed and able to befriend and reform the most unlikely of characters,
she later discovers that she is the illegitimate daughter of Lady Emilia.
This older woman’s deathbed confession (199) relates that her own
father’s obsession with the marriage settlements unnecessarily tested her
own and her lover’s self-control: ‘No security appeared to him equivalent
to settlements; and many trifling circumstances requisite to the splendour
of our first appearance were not ready; which to him seemed almost as
important, as the execution of the marriage writings’ (212). In stark con-
trast to the mercenary machinations of Eliza Haywood’s Syrena Tricksy
in Anti-Pamela (1741), Lady Emilia’s principled punctilios punish both
herself and her lover by leading her to reject marriage:
insistence that her pre-marital impropriety renders her unfit for mar-
riage again follows the pattern of women’s private sacrifice in service of
the public institution. Lady Emilia’s insistence upon the impossibility of
her marriage leads to Miss Selvyn’s fortunate adoption, but it also draws
attention to her loss. Mrs. Selvyn, Miss Selvyn’s adopted mother and
aunt, we are told, dies when Miss Selvyn is only three years old, the pain
of which becomes apparent in Miss Selvyn’s response to her birth moth-
er’s story. In tears, she cries, ‘Is it possible, then […] that I have thus long
been ignorant of the best of parents? And must I lose you when so lately
found? Oh! My dear mother, how much pleasure have I lost by not know-
ing that I might call you by that endearing name!’ (217). Once again, the
consequences of marriages improperly conceived and contracted plague
future generations.
However, Miss Selvyn herself finally offers an alternative narrative of
marriage. After having seen her only serious suitor manipulate her friend,
Lady Mary, Miss Selvyn refuses to yoke herself to one whose principles
appear so changeable. Having her own fortune, she concludes ‘it could
not be advisable for her to marry; for enjoying perfect content, she had
no benefit to expect from change; and happiness was so scare a commod-
ity in this life, that whoever let it once slip, had little reason to expect to
catch it again. For what reason then should she alter her state?’ (206).
Miss Selvyn refuses to submit to the male passion rendering marriage
so uncertain a state. Her economic independence secures her from its
vagaries.
Miss Trentham
The last history does not explicitly discuss the complication and cor-
ruptions leading to and shaping marriage, but nonetheless continues to
focus on its legacies. The story of Miss Trentham begins by describing
an institution burdened by human frailty. Mrs. Alworth, ‘having out-
lived all her children’ (224), assumes guardianship of her six grandchil-
dren, the product of multiple first and second marriages. All in all, this
complex family tree outlines the inability of marriage to protect children
from their father’s desires for fresh, young, pretty, and capricious second
wives. The primogeniture governing the estate of Mrs. Alworth’s first
son leaves only this child well provided for, while the two offspring pro-
duced from the son of Mrs. Alworth’s second marriage find their future
marriage prospects plagued by limited capital. Perhaps most disturbing
‘KNIGHTS OF MATRIMONY’, CHRISTIAN DUTY AND MILLENIUM HALL 99
He saw too late the difference between sensible vivacity and animal spirits,
and found Mrs. Alworth a giddy coquet, too volatile to think, too vain to
love; pleased with admiration, insensible to affection, fond of flattery, but
indifferent to true praise; imprudently vivacious in mixed companies, life-
less when alone with him; and desirous of charming all mankind except her
husband, who of his whole sex seemed the only person of no consequence
to her (236).
sexual passion has faded and the new Mrs. Alworth’s undeveloped prin-
ciples contaminate her behaviour both at home and abroad. Significantly,
the failure of parents to care for their children, combined with the pres-
sures of social standing, uncontrollable male desire, and neglected female
education all contribute to a cycle of suffering for those touched by the
institution of marriage.
Mrs. Alworth’s multiple marriages and those of her children leave
Miss Trentham to grow up in a marriage market fraught with the pres-
sures of financial incentive and the connective tissue of inheritance.
When she finally manifests the affection for Mr. Alworth so much culti-
vated by all, he is already embroiled in his own failed union. As such, her
history explicitly links the corruption of marriage by past generations to
its compromised status in the present.
After Marriage
Despite these repeated indictments of uncontrollable male passion and
their rendering of marriage as an institution completely dependent upon
women’s individual sacrifice, the founders of Millenium Hall eventu-
ally find respite to cultivate their faith on their estate. Hitherto, only a
few critics have acknowledged the real significance of religion for Scott’s
novel, and in this area as well, the criticism has been conflicted. Gary
Kelly carefully accounts for the novel’s Biblical and political allusions
only to conclude that the novel’s religious ideology reflects a ‘lottery
mentality […] of the oppressed, or those who lack agency and power’
that justifies resignation to suffering for the characters.11 Similarly,
Vincent Carretta recognises the religious values of the novel but sees
them as reinforcing women’s subordination.12 However, as I argue
below, the founders of Millenium Hall use religious duty to refuse mar-
riage and the subjection of women to the institution of marriage.
Scott’s connection to religion has been explored in more detail by
scholars such as Eve Tavor Bannet and Emma Major. Bannet connects
Scott’s biography, and her need to heal from her estrangement from
her husband, to her philanthropic efforts in life and fiction, arguing
that Scott’s engagement with the sermons of Bishop Thomas Sherlock
inspired her ‘rather practical than speculative divinity’.13 This, com-
bined with Major’s emphasis on the opportunity for public and politi-
cal engagement through the moral example that religion offered women,
is significant for providing a firm starting point from which to explore
‘KNIGHTS OF MATRIMONY’, CHRISTIAN DUTY AND MILLENIUM HALL 101
the relationship between rank, marriage, and religion within the novel.
Specifically, it encourages us to reconsider the relationship between
women’s duty to faith and their duty to marriage and family. By return-
ing to each of its histories of failed marriage, we may see how Millenium
Hall authorises its members to insist on a dichotomy between religion
and some social institutions. In particular, Mancel perceives her associa-
tion with the other founders of Millenium Hall as a divine preservation
from the sufferings of marriage. She declares
that she plainly sees the merciful hand of providence bringing good out of
evil, in an event, which she, at the time it happened, thought her greatest
misfortune; for had she married Sir Edward Lambton, her sincere affection
for him would have led her to conform implicitly to all his inclinations, her
views would have been confined to this earth, and too strongly attached to
human objects, to have properly obeyed the giver of the blessings she so
much valued […] Her age, her fortune, and compliant temper, might have
seduced her into dissipation, and have made her lose all the heartfelt joys
she now daily experiences (161).
Miss Mancel believes her ‘sincere affection’ would have led directly to
‘dissipation’, but instead her faith saves her from sacrificing her own
principles to marriage. Her connection to the women of Millenium Hall
provides a refuge in which she is joyfully at liberty.
Miss Mancel’s example is repeated faithfully in the histories of the
other founding members. Accordingly, Lady Mary’s escape from seduc-
tion leads her to embrace her faith more firmly. She concludes that ‘she
felt a gratitude to him who, she imagined, might possibly be more care-
ful over his creatures than she had ever yet supposed’ (179). In addition,
Miss Trentham finds in faith an antidote to the poison of Mr. Alworth:
‘Reason and piety, when united are extremely prevalent, and with their
assistance she restrained her affection once more within its ancient
bounds of friendship’ (185). Faith allows her once again to feel happy
and her friends allow her to feel the joys of affection.
While scholars such as Julie McGonegal compellingly expose the tyr-
anny of the obligation the gentry founders of Millenium Hall impose
on women of the lower ranks, the role religion plays in justifying this
remains to be explored.14 Specifically, the escape from marriage by
Millenium Hall members stands in stark contrast to their support of mar-
riage for other women, and this contrast depends upon the founders’
102 R. Runia
Such reasoning allows for their ‘furnishing a house for every young
couple that married in their neighbourhood, and providing them with
some sort of stock, which by industry would prove very conducive
towards their living in a comfortable degree of plenty’, yet this reason-
ing also contradicts their own histories (159). In addition, the first of the
founders’ tasks—the establishment of schools—further contributes to the
institution of marriage by making sure:
that the young women bred up at the schools these ladies support, are so
much esteemed for many miles round, that it is not uncommon for young
farmers, who want sober good wives, to obtain them from thence, and
prefer them to girls of much better fortunes (168).
Notes
1. Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough: Broadview
Press, 1995), 248. Subsequent references to the novel are given by page
number in the text.
2. Betty Rizzo, Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-
Century British Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994),
295–319.
3. Jennie Batchelor, Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830
(New York: Manchester University Press, 2010). Batchelor also acknowl-
edges the importance of labouring-class women to the novel, arguing
that in Millenium Hall female work provides the foundation of the nov-
el’s moral economy.
4. Nicole Pohl, ‘“Sweet place, where virtue then did rest”: The
Appropriation of the Country-house Ethos in Sarah Scott’s Millenium
Hall’, Utopian Studies 7: 1 (1996): 49–59 (49).
‘KNIGHTS OF MATRIMONY’, CHRISTIAN DUTY AND MILLENIUM HALL 105
5. J. David Macey, Jr., ‘Eden Revisited: Re-visions of the Garden in Astell’s
Serious Proposal, Scott’s Millenium Hall, and Graffigny’s Lettres d’une
Peruvienne’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9: 2 (January 1997): 161–182 (169).
6. Julie McGonegal, ‘The Tyranny of Gift Giving: The Politics of Generosity
in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Sir George Ellison’, Eighteenth-
Century Fiction 19: 3 (Spring 2007): 291–306 (292–293).
7. Judith Broome, Fictive Domains: Body, Landscape, and Nostalgia, 1717–
1770 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 136–177 (143).
8. Laura Thomason, ‘“A Consolation Under Every Affliction”: Marriage,
Duty, and Sentiment in Sarah Scott’s The Test of Filial Duty’, Papers on
Language and Literature 46: 4 (Fall 2010): 385–413 (385).
9. Ann Van Sant, ‘Historicizing Domestic Relations: Sarah Scott’s Use of
the “Household Family”’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17: 3 (April 2005):
373–390.
10. Chris Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and
France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 7.
11. Gary Kelly, ‘Introduction: Sarah Scott, Bluestocking Feminism, and
Millenium Hall’, in Kelly ed., Millenium Hall, 11–43 (33).
12. Vincent Carretta, ‘Utopia Limited: Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and The
History of Sir George Ellison’, The Age of Johnson 5 (1992): 303–325 (312).
13. Sarah Scott to Elizabeth Montagu, [c. 1762], in the Montagu Collection,
The Huntington Library, MO 5923. See also Robin Runia, ‘“Joint
Tenants of the Shade”: Collective Piety in Millenium Hall’, in Reasoning
Beasts: Evolution, Cognition, and Culture, 1720–1820, ed. Kathryn Stasio
and Michael Austin (New York: AMS Press, Forthcoming).
14. McGonegal, 291–306.
15. Deborah Weiss, ‘Sarah Scott’s “Attick School”: Moral Philosophy, Ethical
Agency, and Millenium Hall’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24: 3 (Spring
2012): 459–486.
‘Be but a Little Deaf and Blind …
and Happiness You’ll Surely Find’:
Marriage in Eighteenth-Century
Magazines for Women
Jennie Batchelor
J. Batchelor (*)
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: J.E.Batchelor@kent.ac.uk
There are many practical reasons why magazines have not been mined
for their insights into married life in the period. Serial publications are
notoriously difficult to work with. The eighteenth-century periodical mar-
ketplace was competitive and overpopulated. Although many titles ran
for just a few months, some ran for decades leaving a dauntingly broad,
deep and heterogeneous archive of material. To complicate matters fur-
ther, no single research library holds complete runs of titles such as The
Lady’s Magazine, The New Lady’s Magazine (1786–1795) or The Lady’s
Monthly Museum (1798–1828), and since periodicals occupy the digital
no-man’s land between Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online and
the Burney Collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers,
few electronic archives exist. The recent publication of Adam Matthew
Digital’s Eighteenth-Century Journals V, which contains a complete run
of The Lady’s Magazine, goes some way to addressing this problem, but
there is a good deal of work to be done if periodical studies is to become
as firmly established for the eighteenth century as it is for the nineteenth.
Important though these practical impediments are, however, the
reluctance of scholars working on marriage to use magazines as source
material is, I would contend, as much ideological as it is methodologi-
cal in origin. Patrick Brontë’s extreme rejection of The Lady’s Magazine
and its ilk as fuelling female readers’ romantic fantasies has a corollary in
modern-day scholarship on eighteenth-century periodicals by the likes of
Shawn Lisa Maurer and Kathryn Shevelow, which argues that the demise
of essay-periodicals as well as earlier, pedagogically ambitious miscellanies
such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Lady’s Museum (1760–1761), coupled
with the rise of the multi-authored magazine miscellany, entailed a net
loss for women writers and readers.8 Post-1770 serial publications, the
argument goes, focused increasingly upon training women’s bodies in
the ‘arts of femininity’ rather than upon cultivating their minds.9 As a
consequence, the radical potential of previous women’s efforts to use the
serial form to nurture women’s intellectual lives gave way to a single-
mindedly conservative and disciplinary gender politics which coalesced
around the sentimental marital ideal. Buying (and buying into) these
magazines, according to these influential accounts, rendered its read-
ers passive ‘consumers’ of domesticity ideology.10 The conduct book, in
other words, had been reborn in a different guise.
The distortions produced by reading marriage through the prism of
prescriptive literature, especially conduct books, have been outlined
eloquently by historians including Joanne Bailey, Laura Gowing and
110 J. Batchelor
Marital Genres
Broadly speaking, marriage enters eighteenth-century women’s maga-
zines in six principal forms, although there is a considerable slippage
between these genres. First, there are articles appearing under such titles
as ‘Observations on the Manners and Customs of …’ that treat matters
such as the traditions surrounding dowries, polygamy and divorce in var-
ious countries and across different periods as sources of anthropological,
historical and sometimes lubricious interest. Second, there are essays that
treat marriage as a vehicle for other socioeconomic and moral debates,
particularly female education and employment. Often, as in the case of
a much-contested series of exchanges prompted by a letter by regular
New Lady’s Magazine contributor Harriott M—on celibacy, such essays
‘BE BUT A LITTLE DEAF AND BLIND … AND HAPPINESS … 111
deceased Duke’s nephew (171). Public interest and private gain neatly
dovetailed in such cases, and as the accompanying engraving of the
Duchess in her ‘black polenesse’ and ‘ganze cap’ suggests, the magazine
was as keenly focused on the marketing opportunities such a story pre-
sented as it was upon moralising on the state of modern marriage (172).
Satisfying an altogether different kind of reader curiosity are the brutal
and affecting cases of marital disorder among society’s lower ranks that
magazines usually consigned to their back pages. The Home News sec-
tion of the April 1788 New Lady’s Magazine, for example, opened with
a disturbing account of a man arrested for killing his newborn child.
The appalling ‘discovery’ was made by neighbours who heard the ‘cries’
of his wife, who had given birth ‘but a few days’ before, while being
‘beaten’ by her spouse. The husband and wife refused to answer any
questions about the baby’s death, but evidence was given by the daugh-
ter of these poor ‘wretches’, a ‘little girl of two years old’, who was an
eyewitness to the brutal attacks.16
Studies of criminal biography provide us with models for reading texts
like this.17 Collectively these approaches suggest that readers encoun-
tered such articles with vicarious pleasure (whether of moral superiority,
horror, sympathy or titillation), which was legitimised by the reassuringly
moral framework provided by legal intervention and verdict with which
such narratives concluded. However, when these texts interact with oth-
ers in the multi-genre format of the magazine miscellany, their collective
meaning becomes even less predictable and stable than the meaning we
might derive from reading each of these articles in isolation. I will return
later to the question of how the juxtaposition of articles written in dif-
ferent genres and registers causes meaning to proliferate and affects the
magazine’s presentation of marriage. For now it is sufficient to note that
even the interaction between various real-life accounts of marital disorder
creates a common ground of marital dysfunction that is a characteristic
of women’s magazines of the period and that unsettlingly cuts across the
social hierarchy.
This discomforting closure of the gap between duchesses and the
poor via their experiences of marital breakdown is consolidated by the
magazines’ representation of marriage among their targeted middling
sort readership. Advice to readers on courtship and marital difficulty
regularly appeared in magazines in the form of original or already pub-
lished advice literature. New works such as ‘Mrs. T—SS’s Advice to her
Daughter’, published in thirteen instalments between 1775 and 1776 in
‘BE BUT A LITTLE DEAF AND BLIND … AND HAPPINESS … 113
The story concludes by noting that Melanthus’s mind was ‘very dis-
turbed’ by his ordeal. Clarissa, meanwhile, ‘though the instrument of
inflicting it, almost pities his [Melanthus’s] condition, and confesses the
consequences of her stratagem are more severe than she either wished or
intended’ (475). The ‘almost’, here, is crucial, reminding the reader as it
does of the utter lack of pity the story’s author extended to such ‘com-
plete villain[s]’ in her accompanying letter (475).
Such fantastic fictions seem highly improbable to modern readers,
even to those well-versed in the chance encounters and serendipitous
turns of event that characterise eighteenth-century fiction. Their recur-
rence suggests that such tales addressed a deep-seated reader desire for
redress for (principally male) marital transgression. In this sense, such
short stories seem likely to have been compensatory for their readers, but
not in the same way that Perry uses the term when she argues that the
eighteenth-century novel provided a space in which writers could work
through, and textually make amends for, the losses women incurred as
kinship structures changed and the conjugal domestic unit superseded
the consanguineal family.33 On the one hand, magazines are far less sen-
timental in their approach to the subject of marriage than many eight-
eenth-century novels, and rarely are they nostalgic. On the other, I am
reluctant to read magazines as reflective of specific historical phenomena,
even in the complex and nuanced ways in which Perry reads eighteenth-
century novels. First, magazines in the eighteenth century, as now, had a
vested interest in presenting marriage as a new and pernicious problem
that they could simultaneously promise to solve. Second, the magazines’
habit of reprinting material, sometimes first published many decades ear-
lier, problematises any straightforward correlation between periodicals
and the precise period in which they were published. Rather, my pri-
mary interest here is in the dominant discourses of marriage that maga-
zines circulated and contested, and how understanding these popular
discourses on marriage might recalibrate our understanding of cultural
attitudes to wedlock in the period.
Attempting to recover how historical readers might have internalised
these discourses is a tempting but impossible project since these individ-
uals are, for the most part, unknown to us today, and where we have
been able to discover the identities of some of the people who subscribed
to such periodicals, as Jan Fergus has done, the archives rarely docu-
ment how these people read.34 Instead, we are forced to focus instead
on the hypothetical rather than the historical reader, who is potentially a
‘BE BUT A LITTLE DEAF AND BLIND … AND HAPPINESS … 119
very different animal.35 Real people, for example, can fail to see or refuse
to acquiesce to authors’ encouragements to read in particular ways.
Nowhere is this perhaps more true, as Jacqueline Pearson and Edward
Copeland have noted, than in the case of magazines, whose readers can
read in much more unconventional—that is, non-linear and more mag-
pie-like ways—than when reading other genres.36
Rather than focus on different readers’ potentially divergent responses
to individual pieces of magazine content, it is arguably more productive,
as I have attempted to do here, to focus on the unstable and complex
meanings cumulatively produced by the strategic or haphazard place-
ment of articles within individual issues. The import of stories such as
‘The Retaliation’, the account of the Duchess of Kingston’s trial and the
murder of an unnamed infant, or Cornelia’s letter to the Matron, derives
as much from the context in which they are read as from their content.
While scholarship on the novel, scandalous memoirs, criminal biog-
raphies and conduct literature offer insights into ways of reading these
texts in isolation, none can account fully for how they operate in the
broader textual dialogue of magazines. No account of marriage in eight-
eenth-century serial publications for women can be complete, therefore,
without taking into account how the various matrimonial genres this
essay has outlined blend and clash within the dynamic miscellany format
to produce an ongoing debate about marriage in which nothing was cer-
tain but that matrimony was a cause of, as much as a solution to, social
and economic problems. Marriage was the beginning (not the end) of a
series of negotiations that women had to navigate with great care, and at
potentially great cost.
ambition when seeking a prospective partner. Like ‘the first fond pair’
before the fall, young women are enjoined to be ‘innocent and kind’ and
to stand transparently before their husbands. The earthly and spiritual
rewards occasioned by the pursuit of conjugal felicity are felt, Cole con-
cludes, only by those who pour ‘fourth the[ir] mind’ and when ‘not one
movement is conceal’d’.37
The ode’s attempt to sever mercenary and other forms of self-interest
from the affective disinterestedness the poem presents as vital to mari-
tal success is also the subject of the issue’s short story (an unacknowl-
edged reprinting of a story from the September 1772 Lady’s Magazine).
‘The Rape of the Marriage-Contract’, by Florio, relates the tale of an
unnamed young woman who is ‘intimidated’ and ‘threaten[ed]’ by her
avaricious mother into signing a marriage contract with an ‘exceedingly
rich’ octogenarian.38 Distraught at the price she has to pay for respect-
ing her mother’s wishes, unappeased by the latter’s assurances that the
prospective husband ‘could not live long’ after the marriage ceremony,
and concerned that in becoming a wife to the old man she will defraud
a favourite friend (the suitor’s niece and sole heiress) of her inheritance,
the heroine determines to adopt male dress, poses as a highwayman and,
a confident huntswoman, holds up her suitor’s carriage at gunpoint. She
orders her would-be lover to strip and steals a watch and purse for her
friend and the marriage contract for herself. She burns the document,
thereby extricating herself from a marriage to her embarrassed, superan-
nuated lover. The story concludes by observing that although the ‘char-
acter [the heroine] assumed in the wood is extraordinary for a girl; […]
how nauseous to such a one is the husband of four-score years, and what
will she not attempt, in order to get rid of him’ (31).
Despite its more obviously sensational rendering, ‘The Rape of the
Marriage-Contract’ reads as companion piece to the more sober and mor-
ally conventional ‘Happy Marriage’, but it goes still further in its searing
criticism of the unfeeling economics that underpin modern marriage and
force parents to sacrifice their children’s will and happiness to the family’s
financial and social interest. Simultaneously, ‘The Rape of the Marriage-
Contract’ exerts pressure on the notions of prudence and duty that under-
pin Cole’s conception of virtue by showing how easily such characteristics
can be tainted when they are called upon to serve the corrupt motives
of their families. Moreover, the violence such pressures occasion (albeit
comically mitigated in the robbery scene) points to the psychic price paid
by women forced to sacrifice their desires not only to the demand that
‘BE BUT A LITTLE DEAF AND BLIND … AND HAPPINESS … 121
they be married well, but also the demand that they be married at all. The
unnamed heroine of the story has no other prospective and more suitable
lover waiting behind the scenes. She doesn’t reject a mercenary marriage
for the prospect of conjugal felicity, as Cole enjoins in the ode. Rather her
behaviour is a rejection of the cultural dictate that women’s lives could
only be navigated around the Scylla and Charybdis of mercenary ver-
sus companionate marriage. The young woman, in fact, has no interest
in marrying anyone; the only emotionally significant relationship she has
with anyone else in the story is with her female friend.39
That the destructive consequences that follow from the cultural insist-
ence and financial imperative that women marry at all is the central con-
cern of ‘The Rape of the Marriage-Contract’ becomes more apparent
when the story is read alongside the still more extreme case of matrimo-
nial violence presented just a few pages later in the unsigned ‘Original of
the Coroner’s Jury’. This piece, much reprinted in eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century periodicals, relates the story of a London ‘Gentlewoman’
who, after being widowed for the sixth time, finds ‘a gentleman hardy
enough to make her a wife once more’.40 For ‘several months’, we are
told, the couple’s happiness was mutual, but the new husband soon
proves to be as guilty of ‘sottishness and infidelity’ as his predecessors,
and takes to staying out very late at night and returning ‘intoxicated’.
Returning home one night apparently ‘dead drunk’, the ‘disgust[ed]’
wife melts a lead weight from a gown sleeve and attempts to kill him by
pouring the liquid down her husband’s ear through a pipe (40). The hus-
band wakes just in time and the wife is arrested. Her former husbands’
corpses are exhumed and when ‘considerable violence’ is found on each
of their decayed bodies, she is ‘condemned and executed’, to which cir-
cumstance, ‘is England indebted for that useful regulation, by which no
corpse can be interred in the kingdom without a legal inspection’ (41).
If the woman is condemned by the law, it is by no means certain given
the context in which the article appears, that she would necessarily have
been condemned by all of the magazine’s readers. After all, these were the
identical readers who were asked in the same issue to sympathise with the
plight of a woman driven to violence by the unreasonable cruelty exacted
upon her by the institution of marriage. Of course, the crime and motive
are different in ‘Original of the Coroner’s Jury’ and ‘The Rape of the
Marriage-Contract’. Indeed, one of the striking things about the former is
that no psychological motive is given for the wife’s crimes beyond the fact
that every husband she marries is unworthy of the name. Nor is she shown
122 J. Batchelor
magazines from such studies in favour of other textual sources is, how-
ever, difficult to justify. Magazines have the potential to nuance our sense
of popular cultural discourses about marriage in fascinating ways, while
additionally focusing on the magazines’ representation of marriage helps
to dispel some of the deep-seated myths about serial publications for
women in this period. The identification of magazines as conduct books
by another name does not bear scrutiny. Marital advice is frequently
meted out by women’s periodicals, and often in predictable terms. Yet as
we have seen, the validity of the advice and the authority of the advice-
giver are always open to question. Furthermore, the space given over to
the thoughts and feelings of the recipient of the advice (often unnamed,
passive or voiceless in advice literature) makes for a very different reading
experience than reading conduct books. Letters like Cornelia’s—regard-
less of their possible fictionality—reveal the painful compromises that
translating advice into action could necessitate. As importantly, the form
in which advice is given invites deliberation or even dissent. The time-
lag that often existed between solicitations for advice and the magazine’s
official response invested readers with agency as they contemplated their
own response to the marital quandaries presented and, in some cases,
took up the magazine’s offer of a right of reply, as Theodosia did. If
then, as Shevelow suggests, the goal of the eighteenth-century women’s
magazine was to render women readers passive consumers of a bourgeois
domestic ideal, then its orchestrators chose a singularly ineffective genre
through which to achieve these ends.
The eighteenth-century women’s magazine has been likened by
Markman Ellis to a female club or coffeehouse, while magazine read-
ers toyed with other models for theorising its textual community such
as the debating house or literary coterie.41 What these various analogies
have in common is their recognition of the magazine’s importance as a
site where private concerns (and their wider cultural implications) could
receive a public airing. This is as true of the essay-periodical as it is of its
successor and competitor the magazine, but the magazine’s interactive
character (interactive both in the sense that it invited readers to engage
with content as contributors and also in the sense that the import of
individual articles was derived from their interaction with others in the
same issue) means that its concerns are not easily reducible to particular
agendas. This is especially true in the case of the conservative domes-
tic ideology and sentimental marital ideal with which the magazine has
become erroneously associated.
124 J. Batchelor
As Ruth Perry has argued, literary texts do not simply hold up a mir-
ror to reality. Magazines, like novels, are cultural symptoms, but they also
perform valuable cultural work: they reflect, refract and reconstitute real-
ity. In its variously humorous or searing cynicism of marriage the maga-
zine deserves much more scholarly attention as a forum (albeit a messy
and problematic one) in which popular perceptions of marriage were
articulated and debated. Surely few genres can do more to highlight
what Christopher Flint has referred to as the ‘indeterminate exchange
between official familial discourse and cultural practice’ more dynamically
than the late eighteenth-century magazine.42 Within its pages marriage
was presented as a goal for many, but a Pandora’s Box of problems for
everyone who entered into it. In their reflections on the difficult negotia-
tions marriage asked of women, magazine contributors responded with
pragmatism and imagination, desperation and wit. They could be roman-
tic, as Patrick Brontë declared, but they were rarely foolish.
Notes
1. [M.], ‘Thoughts on Marriage’, The Lady’s Monthly Museum, or Polite
Repository of Amusement and Instruction, 1 (October 1798): 298. Edward
W. R. Pitcher in The Lady’s Monthly Museum First Series: 1798–1806: An
Annotated Index of Signatures and Ascriptions (Lewiston: The Edwin
Mellen Press, 2000) tentatively attributes this essay to one Ann Masters.
The evidence for this attribution is self-confessedly circumstantial (150).
2. Charlotte Brontë to Hartley Coleridge, 10 Dec 1840, in The Selected
Letters of Charlotte Brontë: Vol. I, 1829–1847, ed. Margaret Smith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 240.
3. [M.], ‘Thoughts on Marriage’: 298.
4. On marriage and the novel, see Chris Roulston’s Narrating Marriage in
Eighteenth-Century England and France (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
5. Christopher Flint’s Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in
Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) is
primarily about marriage, family and the novel, but is also interested in
genres with which the novel was ‘in dialogue’ including ‘sermons, con-
duct books, legal discourse, medical tracts, philosophical treatises, and
demographic and economic works’ (24). Ruth Perry’s indispensible
Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and
Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) is
also concerned with fiction, particularly the novel’s ‘psychological’ work-
ing out of the socioeconomic shifts the period witnessed. Roulston’s
Narrating Marriage also takes the novel (English and French) as its focal
point, but situates it in relation to advice literature.
‘BE BUT A LITTLE DEAF AND BLIND … AND HAPPINESS … 125
37. [R. Cole], ‘The Happy Marriage. An Ode’, The New Lady’s Magazine 2
(Jan 1787): 48.
38. Florio, ‘The Rape of the Marriage Contract’, The New Lady’s Magazine 2
(Jan 1787): 30, 29.
39. This is not to suggest that the story presents the relationship between the
women as erotic. Nonetheless, the possibility that two women might live
together in a pseudo-marital (although not explicitly sexual) relation-
ship was entertained by the magazine at various points such as the much
reprinted true story, ‘Remarkable Connection of two Women’ which
appeared in The New Lady’s Magazine in June 1788: 300–301.
40. [Anon.], ‘Original on the Coroner’s Jury’, The New Lady’s Magazine 2
(Jan 1787): 40. The article had previously been published, for example,
in The London Magazine for May 1773.
41.
The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental
Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 42. Alternative
theorisations of the magazine’s community (as debating house and coterie,
for example) are examined in my ‘“Connections, which are of service”’.
42. Flint, Family Fictions, 25. Periodical literature is not analysed in Flint’s
study.
The Making and Breaking of Wedlock:
Visualising Jane, Duchess of Gordon
After Marriage
Heather Carroll
looks as fierce as a dragon, and contents herself with spending her breath
upon politics, and ringing a daily peal in the ears of her poor husband,
with whom […] she squabbles more than ever.1
H. Carroll (*)
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
e-mail: Carroll.heather@gmail.com
the dialogues and nuances connecting portraiture and prints, can one
achieve a closer understanding of the complexities of image-making asso-
ciated with the brokering and termination of elite eighteenth-century
marital unions: the making and breaking of marriage. Both a sitter in
familial portraiture and a target of satirical prints in the late eighteenth
century, Jane, Duchess of Gordon remains a rather understudied figure,
unlike her political ‘rival’, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Despite
being a celebrated member of society who featured prominently in news-
papers and memoirs in her lifetime, recent scholarship has been preoc-
cupied with fashionable English Whigs, leaving the study of Tory and
Scottish women sorely neglected.8 However, Jane’s varied visual represen-
tations offer a rich case study of the marriage cycle. A chronological analy-
sis of her representations can provide a lens through which to engage with
Jane’s reputation and the perception of her marriage and her married life.
Pendant Perceptions
Jane has been described as ‘something of a problematic figure in
London society’, a legacy due in part to her unconventional back-
ground.9 Born around 1748 to Sir William Maxwell, 3rd Baronet of
Monreith (c. 1715–1771) and his wife Magdalene Blair, and raised in a
second-floor tenement in the Old Town of Edinburgh, Jane had a hum-
ble upbringing. As a child, she and her sisters were known to join the
local children in riding pigs down the High Street. It was due to another
reckless act of jumping between moving carts that Jane lost the fore-
finger on her right hand.10 Her parents separated when she was young,
leaving her mother to raise Jane and her sisters in Edinburgh while her
father had a separate household in rural Galloway, where her elder broth-
ers were brought up.11 The gendered severance of the Maxwell house-
hold meant that Jane was raised in a home with a female head. Although
this division of the nuclear family may appear non-traditional, moth-
ers were commonly responsible for their daughters’ upbringing, and
marital separation was not a wholly uncommon arrangement in eight-
eenth-century Scotland. Marriage laws differed considerably between
England and Scotland, with divorce in England only being deliverable
through an act of Parliament. Scottish couples seeking divorce could do
so through Commissary Courts or, alternatively, seek a legal separation.
In contrast to England where only men had legal rights to seek a divorce,
Scottish law saw adultery as equal grounds for divorce regardless of
gender, making divorces and separations more common and culturally
132 H. Carroll
I have Just Received the Honour of your Grace’s favour, and I Shall look
on It as I think It Deserves, with the highest Gratitude for Such ane [sic]
honour done me, and my Family. And It Shall be my constant Wish that
Jeanny may by a constant Attendence [sic] to her Duty[,] Act that Part
She ought In the Spire your Grace’s example and Advice, to Gain even
the Good Opinion of the most malitious [sic] of the Female world. […] I
wish your Grace and Jeany all the Blessings and Happiness this world can
Afford, and that I may soon be a Grandfather.14
Fig. 3 Matthew
Darly, The Breeches in
the Fiera Maschereta,
1775, etching, M.
Darly, 17.4 × 12.6 cm.
Courtesy of the Lewis
Walpole Library, Yale
University
invested in her role as wife and mother. The family’s archive contains a
receipt from 1773 addressed to her from a bookseller in Edinburgh
which lists Hugh Smith’s Principles of Conjugal Happiness and Letters
to Married Women (1767) amongst the duchess’ purchases.26 As schol-
ars such as Amanda Vickery and Joanne Bailey have demonstrated, there
were clear expectations for the roles of the husband and wife in the mar-
riage union. Men were responsible for the family’s domestic economy
and women were responsible for household management. A fundamental
expectation of their conjugal duties was that women demonstrate a good
‘temper’ and ‘disposition’, and yield to the patriarchal requirements.27
Within this domestic setting the pendant portraits disseminated the myth
of a successful married life, propagating the image of a perfect union.
Within a few years of the completion of the pendant portraits, their
message of gendered normativity in the marriage union was challenged
by a different mode of visual representation. Matthew Darly’s 1775 The
Breeches in the Fiera Maschereta (Fig. 3) depicts Jane as a reverse of the
THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF WEDLOCK: VISUALISING … 137
Fig. 4 Matthew
Darly, The Petticoat at
the Fieri Maschareta,
1775, etching, M.
Darly, 17.5 × 12.5 cm.
Courtesy of the Lewis
Walpole Library, Yale
University
constructed image of the marriage, these pendant prints reveal the public
perception of their marriage, in which Alexander’s gender role has been
usurped due to Jane’s boisterous and overbearing nature. This conten-
tious attribute of her character was acknowledged by Nathaniel Wraxall
(1751–1831) when he later described Jane in his memoirs as overstepping
gender boundaries in her socially acceptable role as a political hostess:
The Scottish duchess reserved all the energies of her character for minis-
terial purposes. Desirous of participating in the blessings which the treasury
alone can dispense, and of enrolling the name of Gordon, with those of
Pitt and of Dundas; if not in the rolls of fame, at least in the substantial list
of court favour and benefaction; the administration did not possess a more
active or determined partizan.30
Wraxall’s excerpt portrays Jane as doing all in her power to assume the
role of an elected government official, a position which was prohibited
to her on the basis of her sex. Similarly, in titling the print, The Breeches
in the Fiera Maschereta, which roughly translates to ‘proud masquerade’,
Darly satirised Jane’s seemingly shameless adoption of masculine gender
roles, while simultaneously making a libellous statement as to how her
visible personality translated into her private marriage. Like the major-
ity of British aristocrats, the Gordons split their living arrangements
between their seat in Aberdeenshire and their home in London during
the season. Jane initially indicated her difficulty in navigating London
society, complaining to her brother, William Maxwell in 1771 that, ‘the
Men have not the same ideas they have in Scotland a Woman of fashion
is no more respected then [sic] a Chambermaid if she has any Levity’,
revealing her consternation over the austere societal codes for elite
women in the metropolis.31
Jane’s difficulty in adhering to social codes opened a public discus-
sion, in the form of a satirical rendering, which questioned the couple’s
private relationship and thus the formal painted representations which
displayed a message of marital harmony. Representing an inversion on
multiple levels, the Darly prints may be seen as a rebuttal of Kauffman’s
display of successful married life. Jane is represented as transgressing
the constructed gender boundaries delineated in pendant portraiture
through her adoption of the male role. Kauffman’s display of wifely loy-
alty through a portrait-object has been subverted by Darly who replaces
it with an object inscribed with masculinity: her husband’s breeches.32
THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF WEDLOCK: VISUALISING … 139
Fig. 5 W.A. Smith, Alexander 4th Duke of Gordon with his Family, c. 1787,
oil on panel, 88 × 136 cm. By permission of the Trustees of the Goodwood
Collection
140 H. Carroll
While she has such weight in the fashionable world, she was strictly atten-
tive to domestic duties. On the education of her daughters, five in number,
she bestowed great pains, directed by the soundest judgement; taking a
comprehensive view of the relation in society in which they stood and were
destined to stand; her object was to make them amiable, accomplished,
and worthy, a task not difficult, as they were beautiful, lovely, and intel-
ligent, but which, without skill and wisdom, even with these natural advan-
tages, might not have been performed.36
which, though resting on a branch, guides the viewer’s eyes to his prog-
eny, a nod to his genealogy, his estate, and his virility.37 Jane’s subor-
dination to her husband is articulated through her seated position. She
is surrounded by her children; her proximity to her sons, the Gordon
heirs, asserts her critical role in the successful endurance of the family
line. Unlike her mother, who was separated from her sons, Jane empha-
sises her connection with them.
Smith’s portrait asserts the adherence of the Gordon family to societal
codes of gender roles and the preservation of genealogy. It is an ideal-
ised image of the family created in the same timeframe as the opposing
accounts related by Lady Louisa Stuart and Wraxall. Jane’s representa-
tion in the Smith portrait negotiates her dual role as wife and mother,
projecting her as successfully fulfilling her gender role to secure the
family dynasty. Alexander 4th Duke of Gordon with his Family sets out
to evince the Gordons as an operational patriarchal family, one which
demonstrates the social, moral, and national importance of the family
and thus the success of their union.38 However, within a few years of
the painting’s completion, while Jane was making marriage unions for
her daughters, her own unravelled. The duke and duchess separated early
into the early 1790s and by the end of the decade were virtually stran-
gers to one another.39 An affair between Alexander and the housekeeper
produced five children between 1791 and 1810, all of whom were
raised in Gordon Castle.40 Despite the existence of an illegitimate child
living in Gordon Castle when Jane entered into the marriage in 1767,
Alexander’s resolute affair with a high-ranking domestic servant living in
their home ostensibly caused their separation.
labelled ‘Scotch Pint’ and a glass sit within reach, alluding to her nation-
ality, drinking habits, and her inclination to remain stationary while her
daughter and son-in-law consummate the marriage.
Despite the satirical and xenophobic nature of the print, its under-
lining narrative is accurate. The couple were married in Jane’s dress-
ing room and the ceremony was only witnessed by her and two serving
women; the duke was not even in residence at the time. Jane was reputed
to have a strong role in the swiftness of the wedding, which allegedly
took place to avoid the usual fanfare of wedding festivities.45 Charlotte is
represented as a model of youthful feminine beauty; she is festooned in
ruffles, plumes, and curled tresses. She looks demurely at her husband as
she motions toward the marital bed, above which a ducal seal is inscribed
on the headboard. Lennox enthusiastically leaps over the broom toward
the bed while Charlotte gracefully skips over it, further implying the
licentious urges that may have hurried the marriage. Published approxi-
mately two years after Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon, with his Family was
painted, this print sees Jane in a slightly incestuous role, again placed in
144 H. Carroll
Fig. 8 Charles Williams, The Gord-ian Knot still untied or the Disapointed Dido
still in Despair, 9 May 1802, hand-coloured etching, SW Fores, 26.9 × 33.3 cm,
British Museum, London
[Woburn Abbey, the Duke of Bedford’s seat] and try again’, implying that
in her eyes, marriage is merely a contractual arrangement. While there is
no doubting the artist’s interpretation on how Georgina viewed her beau,
the print poses the question of whether the young woman is seeking a
beloved husband or a lucrative economic arrangement. In doing so, the
print accuses Jane’s young unmarried daughter of inheriting her mother’s
purported personality flaws.
Following the death of the Duke of Bedford in 1802, Jane and
Georgina went to Paris, where they were entertained by Napoleon
Bonaparte (1769–1821). The duchess promptly began to pursue a mar-
ital union between Empress Josephine’s son, Eugène Beauharnais, and
Georgina. Bonaparte, however, would not allow the marriage. He, like
Jane, was an astute administrator of domestic diplomacy and aimed for
a more advantageous political union for his stepson.61 Regardless, Jane
had managed to establish herself in the new French court and returned
THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF WEDLOCK: VISUALISING … 149
Notes
1. The Letters of Lady Louisa Stuart, ed. R.B. Johnson (London: John Lane
The Bodley Head, 1926), 77. It should be noted that like the Duchess of
Gordon, Lady Louisa was also a female member of Scottish aristocracy.
2. Bombay Courier, 5 January 1793.
3. Shearer West, ‘The Public Nature of Private Life: The conversation piece
and the fragmented family’, Journal for Eighteenth–Century Studies 18
(1995): 153–172 (158).
152 H. Carroll
15. NAS GD44/43/18.
16. Retford, The Art of Domestic Life, 19–47.
17. Ibid., 34. For more on Van Dyck dress in portraits see David A. Brenneman,
‘Thomas Gainsborough and the “Thin Brilliant Style of Pencilling of
Vandyke”’, Huntington Library Quarterly 66: 1 (2003): 80–95.
18. Retford, The Art of Domestic Life, 20. For example, in Benjamin West’s con-
temporaneous pendants of the king and queen (1779, Royal Collection)
King George is represented in a military uniform, making preparations to
defend Britain against a French invasion whilst Queen Charlotte is repre-
sented at home, with her children visible through a window.
19. For an overview of Kauffman’s female sitters see Angela Rosenthal,
Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006).
20. SNPG Curatorial File PG 2786.
21. Pointon, Hanging the Head, 164 and Retford, ‘Sensibility and
Genealogy’, 535. I have adapted West’s definition of public and private
relating to the social and household, respectively, but having porous
boundaries. See West, ‘The Public Nature of Private Life’.
22. I have adopted Pointon’s phrasing, ‘portrait-object’ which compromises
the multiple forms of miniature portraiture, two of which are repre-
sented within the artworks discussed, see Marcia Pointon, ‘“Surrounded
with Brilliants”: Miniature portraits in eighteenth-century England’, Art
Bulletin 83: 1 (2001): 48.
23. SNPG Curatorial File PG 2786.
24. Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”’, 59.
25. Ibid., 51–53.
26. NAS GD44/43/82.
27. Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in
England 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
61–81; Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in
Georgian England (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 1998) 40.
28. Since Diana Donald’s publication The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints
in the Reign of George III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996),
scholars such as Cindy McCreery, Vic Gatrell, and Amelia Rauser have
been demonstrating the usefulness of satirical prints in reassessing eight-
eenth-century cultural studies. See also, Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects:
A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery. (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), 196–197.
29. McCreery, The Satirical Gaze, 30–38.
30. Nathaniel Wraxall, The Historic & Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel
William Wraxall, 1772–84 (London: Henry B. Wheatley, 1836),
154 H. Carroll
54. At this point in time the Duke of Bedford was not courting both girls
given that Lady Georgiana Cavendish had accepted the marriage proposal
of Lord Morpeth, however the duke’s attention still stirred up intrigue.
55. Amanda Foreman, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (London: Harper
Collins, 1998), 354.
56. Thomas Short, Discourse Concerning the Causes and Effects of Corpulency
(London: J. Roberts, 1727), 9.
57. Madelina tended to be ignored in print media due to her brothers-in-law
socially outranking her husband.
58. Like her parents, Susan and her husband separated from one another.
59. I would like to thank Dr. Catriona Murray for indicating that the dialogue
in the print can be pinpointed as a dialect heard in Aberdeenshire.
60. Bedford’s entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography claims he
and Georgina were engaged whereas Baird states that they were ‘almost’
engaged (Baird, Mistress of the House, 222). A third source is perhaps the
most accurate since it is a combination of the two; according to Amanda
Foreman, Jane insisted the two were engaged, ‘in a flat contradiction of
Bedford’s brother […] who claimed that his brother had never expressed
any intention of marrying’ Georgina (Foreman, Georgiana, 354).
61. Baird, Mistress of the House, 222.
62. George 1947, NPG website.
63. John, 6th Duke of Bedford had been married previously and had issue.
64. Baird, Mistress of the House, 222.
65. Ibid., 230.
66. Rosemary Baird, Goodwood: Art and architecture, sport and family
(London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2007), 159.
67. Grant, Memoirs of a Highland Lady, 158.
68. Baird, Mistress of the House, 228. Jane furnished her with the high stand-
ard of education she had insisted upon for her daughters.
69. F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Russell, John, sixth duke of Bedford (1766–1839)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; at
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24322 [accessed 9 July 2014].
THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF WEDLOCK: VISUALISING … 157
Jenny DiPlacidi
J. DiPlacidi (*)
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: j.diplacidi@kent.ac.uk
a desire to usurp her son’s sexual rights, but to reassert her own via the
closest physical substitute for her husband. The play suggests that the
aberrant repression of female sexual desire outside of and beyond wed-
lock will culminate in incestuous acts that disrupt not only the family
structure but also the systems of inheritance and exogamy.
In Walpole’s drama the commission and confession of parental incest,
as in Shelley’s story Mathilda, is aligned with a collapse of exchange.
Raising questions of natural and unnatural desires alongside breakdowns
in exogamy and inheritance within both Walpole’s and Shelley’s works
challenges the social order by making possible female desire and exist-
ence after marriage. E.J. Clery finds in the Countess ‘hints that female
desire […] might be impervious to the social desiderata of sexual repro-
duction and the patriarchal family, that it might even be at war with
them’.15 The disruption that female desire presents to the patriarchal
family is manifested in the disordering of patrilineal inheritance caused
by what other characters in the play refer to as the Count’s excessive love
for his wife. This extreme love, resulting perhaps from the Countess’s
strong sexual desire for her husband, puts her in the unusual position
of power in her role as mother and wife.16 Anolik writes: ‘Gothic rep-
resentations of marriage as dangerous and confining to the wife, and
of motherhood as resulting in the disappearance of the mother, work
to literalize and thereby reveal the horror implicit in two legal princi-
ples that governed the lives of women in England through the middle
of the nineteenth century: coverture and primogeniture’.17 Because the
Countess defies this disappearance through the inheritance disruption,
she becomes a highly dangerous figure: this rearticulation of the power
structure has successfully destroyed the tradition of primogeniture.18
The mother’s sexual desires after marriage that disrupt the transmis-
sion of property and wealth eventually lead to her instigation of incest
whilst she mourns the death of her husband. A conversation between
monks establishes their belief that a sexual transgression lies behind
the Countess’s self-imposed penance for a secret sin and Benedict says
of her: ‘this woman was not cast in human mould’.19 The monk unwit-
tingly voices the church’s perception of the incest that prompts her devo-
tion as monstrously unnatural. Yet it is precisely her ‘human mould’
or physicality that Edmund focuses on when seeking his mother’s for-
giveness for his own sexual sin: ‘she herself was woman then, a sensual
woman. Nor satiety, sickness and age, and virtue’s frowardness, had so
obliterated pleasure’s relish—she might have pardoned what she felt so
166 J. DiPlacidi
well’ (II.i.18–19). Edmund believes that his mother, a ‘real’ woman with
desires, would have forgiven his misdemeanor with the maid, compar-
ing his active male sexuality to his mother’s. That the Countess desires
her son based on his ‘wondrous’ physical similarities to his father draws
attention to her sexual desires that endured long after the marriage cer-
emony. Jeffrey N. Cox points to the Countess as a sexual being with
passion for her husband and argues that: ‘It was this passion that hurled
her into the arms of her son’.20 While Cox ignores the mother’s agency,
implying that she was mindlessly propelled by passion rather than cun-
ningly disguising herself to deceive her son into sex, the play suggests
her incestuous agency from the start. Peter, the porter of the castle, says
of the Countess regarding her deceased husband: ‘I marvel not my lady
cherishes his remembrance, for he was comely to fight, and wondrous
goodly built. They say his son Count Edmund’s mainly like him’ (I.ii.4).
Peter’s description counters Cox’s tendency to overlook the Countess’s
action; comparisons between the physical appearances of family mem-
bers, particularly cross-generation, often cause sexual desires.21
The consequences of the Countess’s sexuality and sexual agency,
which have already proved inimical to patrilineal inheritance, continue
to derange the social structures. Clery writes: ‘the incest which is a con-
sequence of female desire must blow the family apart’.22 After Edmund
has fought in wars for sixteen years he grows weary of his mother’s
banishment: ‘to stain my sword with random blood’ no longer pleases
him; he wants to return home (II.i.21). Walpole uses the Gothic meta-
phor of sword for penis in a typically bloody image, uniting it to incest
via Edmund’s desire no longer to stain his sword with foreign blood
but to return it to his native soil: into the sheath, as it were, of fam-
ily. Edmund’s return will reunite him not only with his mother, but also
with Adeliza, with whom he falls in love and enters wedlock—an initial
tightening of the familial structure before its ultimate dissolution. Marcie
Frank perceives the link between Walpole’s treatment of property and
desire: ‘the very means by which Edmund seeks to secure his patrimony
invalidate it; his desire to marry Adeliza, his own daughter, reveals that
in place of his father’s estate, he has inherited his mother’s perversion’.23
Frank’s argument, however, locates the incestuous union as an inherited
perversion rather than an inheritance of desires incompatible with lawful
wedlock and sexuality.
When the Countess, who believes Edmund is dead, faints upon
seeing him alive, Edmund says: ‘stand off, and let me clasp her in my
arms! The flame of filial fondness shall revive the lamp of life, repay the
REARTICULATING THE ECONOMICS OF EXCHANGE: INCEST … 167
breath she gave, and waken all the mother in her soul’ (III.iv.45). Of
course, Edmund’s ‘filial flame’ is the precise ‘fondness’ that has led to
his banishment and the loss of his mother. On reviving, the Countess
repeatedly asks if Edmund is Narbonne, a confusion of husband and
son that confirms the idea that this conflation has happened before. The
Countess asks Edmund: ‘art thou my husband wing’d from other orbs
to taunt my soul? What is this dubious form, impress’d with ev’ry feature
I adore, and every lineament I dread to look on! Art though my dead
or living son?’ (III.iv.45–47). The Countess calls herself a monster and
describes her sins as unheard of, as ‘horrors’, and asks Edmund: ‘has
not a mother’s hand afflicted you enough?’ (III.i.36). Acknowledging
her own agency by her reference to her hands as the cause of Edmund’s
miseries and cast as the aggressor, the Countess inverts traditional para-
digms of sexuality. The confusion underscores the physical likeness and
desirability of both father and son. Edmund says: ‘to thy eyes I seem’d
my father, at least for that resemblance-sake embrace me’, to which his
mother replies: ‘horror on horror!’ (III.iv.47). Edmund’s attempt to use
his physical likeness to his father as the means of receiving forgiveness
and physical affection from his mother recalls the Countess’s memory of
her sexual transgression with him. Likewise, his naïve hope that a mar-
riage to Adeliza might reconcile his mother with him gestures ironically
towards this genealogy of past and future incestuous acts: a multigenera-
tional destruction caused by uncontrollable desires.
Edmund’s disclosure of his marriage to his sister/daughter prompts
the Countess to reveal her incestuous actions in order to prevent the
consummation of the marriage, but her speech also serves to disrupt her
son’s ownership of their daughter in marriage. Her confession: ‘my fancy
saw thee thy father’s image […] while thy arms twin’d, to thy think-
ing, round another’s waist, hear, hell, and tremble!—thou didst clasp
thy mother!’ unveils the female desire that positioned Edmund as the
dupe, victim, and prey. Edmund’s reply underscores his impotence to
act against his mother: ‘my dagger must repay a tale like this! Blood so
distemper’d—no—I must not strike—I dare not punish what you dar’d
commit’. The Countess orders him: ‘Give me the steel—my arm will not
recoil!’, further troubling convention in her use of the knife/metaphoric
penis of Gothic fiction usually found in the hands of violent male aggres-
sors (V.vi.80–81). She is tempted to wield the knife against her daugh-
ter out of pity, but does not. Rather than simply invert the paradigm of
male aggression and violence, Walpole implicitly acknowledges the limits
of such inversions. Instead, the Countess mirrors the incest act by taking
168 J. DiPlacidi
Edmund’s sword and stabbing herself with it, taking agency, again, away
from her son in a final act of suicidal, metaphorical rape. The play con-
cludes with Edmund rushing off to war as he commands the clergy to
take Adeliza to become a nun.24 He says: ‘to th’ embattl’d foe I will pre-
sent this hated form—and welcome be the sabre that leaves no atom of it
undefac’d’ (V.vii.83). Edmund’s attempt at suicide is a final performance
of submission to the sword of an other that concretises his inability to
execute the act himself. Rendered impotent to consummate the nup-
tials unmasked as incestuous due to his mother’s sexual desires, the male
experience of after marriage for Edmund is a disempowered disappear-
ance akin to that suffered by Gothic women.
safe if Weimar were her uncle but that the lack of kinship jeopardises her
virginity while it correspondingly frees her from his legal control over
her and her presence on the marriage market. Weimar abducts Matilda,
intending to imprison her as his sex slave until or unless she marries him,
but her repeated refusals demonstrate that she understands the positions
he offers—that of wife or imprisoned rape victim—as synonymous.
The legally sanctioned male authority over female relatives that
Matilda recognises was noted by seventeenth-century English theo-
logian and clergyman Jeremy Taylor, who believed that only marriages
between parents and children or children-in-law were against the prime
laws of nature. Taylor’s views that unions between uncles and nieces
did not constitute a violation of the natural law are, as literary historian
Ellen Pollak argues, grounded in the conviction that such relationships
did not overturn ‘the proper order of familial authority’ as the unnat-
ural union between parent and child would.35 Gothic representations
of kinship engaged with and troubled these earlier understandings of
incest and marriage. Taylor’s argument locates Weimar’s usurped posi-
tion as Matilda’s familial head as causing their potential marriage to be
unnatural, not the fact of their consanguineal relationship as uncle and
niece. These views suggest that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
society would be appalled at the disruption of authority resulting from
Weimar’s marriage to Matilda as his ward rather than at the violation of
the incest taboo by his marriage to her as his niece. This indicates that
such interruptions of power are unnatural and positions them (rather than
transgressions of the blood tie) as violations of the natural law. Parsons’
use of uncle-niece incest resists understandings of ‘proper’ authority
as grounded in the specific kinship configuration of parent/child. As
Weimar’s actions demonstrate, any familial relationship between men and
women in a cultural economy of exchange is invested with the ability to
maintain the male authority (read: power) that is demonstrably in need
of disruption.
Weimar exploits the eighteenth-century notion of obligation in order
to persuade Matilda to marry him as a repayment for his investment in
her upbringing. Matilda replies that she cannot refuse him if he is not her
uncle because of this debt, but that she will never love him:
The conversation […] is ever present to my mind, and could I forget that,
then my reverence for my uncle would return, and I should shudder at the
idea of a nearer connexion. [… A]n unaccountable repugnance makes the
172 J. DiPlacidi
idea horrible to me; yet after all, if you persist in wishing me to become
your wife, I do not think myself at liberty absolutely to refuse, but I tell
you candidly, I never can love you; that though I will obey you and do my
duty, I know I shall be miserable (67–68).
desire. Alert to the ways in which the female body figured into the
exchange of money and property necessary to preserve patriarchy, Mary
Shelley takes up this cultural demand in order to explode it in the rep-
resentation of father-daughter incest in Mathilda. Shelley prefigures the
challenge to Levi-Strauss’s theories on culture and exogamy posed by
Irigaray: ‘the exchanges upon which patriarchal societies are based take
place exclusively among men. Women, signs, commodities, currency
all pass from one man to another; if it were otherwise, we are told, the
social order would fall back upon incestuous and exclusively endogamous
ties that would paralyze all commerce’.36 The incestuous love between
Shelley’s eponymous heroine and her unnamed father, although never
actualised, is made overt through the father’s verbal declaration and
written confession and Mathilda’s later revelation of her own desires.
Mathilda is raised by an aunt until she is reunited with her father who
has been travelling throughout the East since the death of his wife in
childbirth sixteen years earlier. Mathilda, who physically resembles her
dead mother, has spent her life gazing on a portrait of her father and
fantasising about the moment of their reunion—which, when it occurs, is
an erotic and romantic moment that establishes mutual desires between
father and daughter. The two live happily together for some time,
delighting in each other’s society until the intrusion of a suitor.
The father’s incestuous desires are exposed partially through a depic-
tion of his anxiety regarding the suitor’s interest in his daughter and her
manipulation of his fears, although Mathilda claims to be unaware of
the cause of her father’s unease: ‘I now remember that my father was
restless and uneasy whenever this person visited us, and when we talked
together watched us with the greatest apparent anxiety’.37 In spite of
her feigned ignorance, Mathilda recognises her father’s discomfort and
uses the suitor to exhibit her desirability in order to elicit a response
from her father. The presence of a third party creates tensions between
Mathilda and her father that reveal his emotions as too excessively jealous
to belong purely to paternal love and demonstrates Mathilda’s appeal,
prompting the father to remove her completely from the economy of
exchange in London to a remote estate. Mathilda’s ‘value’ as a commod-
ity is not shown in reference to another, which Irigaray argues is the only
way for worth to be assigned to an object: ‘in order to have a relative
value, a commodity has to be confronted with another commodity […]
its value is never found to lie within itself’.38 Instead, Mathilda estab-
lishes her own importance and desirability in a way that Irigaray posits
174 J. DiPlacidi
Notes
1. Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in
Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3.
2. Frances Burney, diary entry for 28 November 1786. Diary and Letters of
Madame D’Arblay, Author of “Evelina,” “Cecilia,” &c. Edited by Her Niece,
ed. Charlotte Barrett, 7 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1842), vol. 3, 235.
3. Anon., The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, vol. 10 (1794): 50.
4. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977). Stone’s understanding of the
emergence of the nuclear family in the long eighteenth century contrib-
utes to readings of the father as an all-powerful and sexually dangerous
threat within the domestic space.
5. Tania Modleski, Loving With A Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies
for Women (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982; repr. New York and
Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 11.
6. Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English
Literature and Culture 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 377.
7. Perry, Novel Relations, 375–376. Novels that belie Perry’s claim about
brothers viewing sisters as possessions or sex objects include, for example,
Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian
Romance (1790) and the anonymous Adeline or the Orphan (1790).
8. See particularly Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage
Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003) and Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) which are par-
ticularly useful studies of family and marriage in the long eighteenth century.
9. Blackstone wrote: ‘by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in
law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended
during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that
of the husband’, Commentaries on the laws of England. Book the first. By
William Blackstone, Esq. vinerian professor of law, and solicitor general to
her majesty, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765), vol. 1, 430.
10. Ruth Bienstock Anolik, ‘The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal
Absence in the Gothic Mode’, Modern Language Studies, 33: 1/2
(Autumn 2003): 25–43. Anolik argues that Gothic writers literalise mar-
ried women’s status in society through their textual erasure (27). See also
Diana Wallace, ‘“The Haunting Idea”: Female Gothic Metaphors and
Feminist Theory’, in The Female Gothic: New Directions, ed. Diana Wallace
and Andrew Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 26–41.
REARTICULATING THE ECONOMICS OF EXCHANGE: INCEST … 177
11. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion
of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 1989); Eugenia
C. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-
Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
12. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (London:
Taylor & Francis, 1969), 24.
13. Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters
(London: Routledge, 1989), 197–198.
14. David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004), 278–279.
15. E.J. Clery, ‘Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility
of Female Desire’, in The Gothic: Essays and Studies, ed. Fred Botting
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 23–46 (36).
16. Clery, ‘Impossibility of Female Desire’, 36, cites ‘conjugal passion’ as
responsible for the Countess’s replacement of Edmund as his father’s heir.
17. Anolik, ‘The Missing Mother’, 26.
18. Marcie Frank notes that ‘incest blocks inheritance’ in ‘Horace Walpole’s
Family Romances’, Modern Philology, 100: 3 (2003): 417–435 (417).
19. Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy. (London: 1791),
I.ii.7. Subsequent references will be given in the text. The play does not
include line numbers. References cite act, scene, and page number.
20. Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘First Gothics: Walpole, Evans, Frank’, Papers on
Language and Literature, 46: 2 (2010): 119–135 (133).
21. Shelley’s Mathilda also employs the convention of similar physical char-
acteristics between mother and daughter to presage the father’s incestu-
ous desires for his daughter as does Sheriffe’s Correlia, or the Mystic Tomb
(1802) while Emily Brontë uses cross-generational doppelgangers in
Wuthering Heights (1847) partially to explain sexual attraction.
22. Clery, ‘The Impossibility of Female Desire’, 37.
23. Frank, ‘Horace Walpole’s Family Romances’, 420.
24. This is similar to Mary Robinson’s Gothic novel Vancenza; or, The
Dangers of Credulity (1792), in which the lovers discover they are siblings
prior to their wedding; the sister dies of a fever and the brother joins the
army, the implication being that he hopes to die in battle.
25. Recently, chapters in Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds.), The Female
Gothic: New Directions by Wallace, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, and Lauren
Fitzgerald have focused on William Blackstone’s 1765 legal text and its
applicability to the intricacies of Gothic themes such as women’s owner-
ship of property, estates and legal rights within marriage.
26. Gothic novels in which fratricide and sister-in-law rape are part of the plot
include Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), The Italian
178 J. DiPlacidi
(1797), and The Romance of the Forest (1791), Eleanor Sleath’s The
Orphan of the Rhine (1798), and Parsons’ The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793).
27. Tadmor, Probert and Bailey have examined important shifts in kinship,
sexuality, marriage and the law in the period and their works provide an
important social context for the sometimes elusive nature of family bonds
underpinning Gothic representations of incest.
28. Parsons’ representation of the parent/guardian as would-be sexual edu-
cator is located within a tradition of texts that link the pedagogical and
erotic such as the pornographic work L’Escole des Filles (The School for
Girls, 1665) that explicitly points to the overlap of sexuality and educa-
tion. James Turner notes the connection between pedagogy and por-
nography from the sixteenth century onwards and its influence on
eighteenth-century texts in Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic
Education in Italy, France and England 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
29. Eliza Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach (London: The Folio Press, 1968),
12. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
30. Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship; see also Margaret
Mead, Male and Female (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) and Marcel
Mauss, The Gift (London: Routledge, 1990).
31. The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth Century England, ed. Cynthia Klekar
and Linda Zionkowski (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009).
Although their work does not specifically address the Gothic, Klekar and
Zionowski’s points about gift exchange and notions of obligation provide
important context for reading their deployment in the genre.
32. Juliet Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing
and Women (1974; repr. as Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical
Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 2000))
argues that incest is decreasingly taboo in capitalist society, 380.
33. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and
Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 84. Irigaray
challenges Levi-Strauss’s acceptance of the exchange of women as a nat-
ural requirement in the creation of culture, 171. Gayle Rubin similarly
questions Levi-Strauss’s assertion that society would not exist without the
incest taboo and exchange of women in ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on
the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women,
ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210.
34. Judith Lewis Herman and Lisa Herman in Father-Daughter Incest
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) analyse fathers who
react to their daughters’ adolescence by attempting to establish control
over their emerging sexuality (117).
REARTICULATING THE ECONOMICS OF EXCHANGE: INCEST … 179
35. Ellen Pollak, Incest and The English Novel, 1684–1814 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2003), 37. Pollak locates Taylor’s arguments
within the tradition of seventeenth-century thinkers Hugo Grotius and
Samuel Pufendorf.
36. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 192.
37. Mary Shelley, Mathilda & Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Classics,
2013), 17–18. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
38. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 176.
39. Kate Ferguson Ellis, ‘Can You Forgive Her? The Gothic Heroine and
Her Critics’, in Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), 257–68 (264–265).
40. The Nicene Creed, Book of Common Prayer.
41. Jenny DiPlacidi, ‘Introduction’ to Mary Shelley, Mathilda & Other Stories
(Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2013), vii–xxxv; xxiv.
42. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 189.
Marriage and its Queer Identifications
in the Anne Lister Diaries
Chris Roulston
C. Roulston (*)
University of Western Ontario, Ontario, Canada
e-mail: Croulsto@uwo.ca
Edwards the bookseller ‘said the giant and the giantess had been married
in the morning’.13 While Lister makes no further comment, this anec-
dote arguably functions as a meta-discourse on Lister’s own being-in-
the-world; how she moves through the world as a kind of spectacle, an
anomaly, a freak, but also how she behaves like a giant, larger than life,
refusing the constraints the world seeks to impose. Ultimately, however,
the giant and the giantess have access to a kind of normalcy through
their marriage, a fact hinted at in Lister’s use of ellipses. The giant and
the giantess in fact exist in the seam between the normal and the abnor-
mal, between their right to a legitimate union and their monstrous size.
Yet the characteristic mark of the monster is to exist in isolation, and to
long for, in the words of Frankenstein’s creature, ‘a fit companion to
dote on to beguile the tedious hours’.14 Lister’s ongoing desire for legit-
imate companionship reflects a kind of monstrous isolation that causes
her to fetishise the importance of marriage. At the same time, unlike
the giants and the monster, Lister has class status, economic security, a
respectable family lineage, and an endless stream of lovers. Lister belongs
to her world in a way neither the giants nor the monster ever can, but it
is around the thorny issue of marriage and of her exclusion from it that
Lister constructs much of her identity. The question then becomes, what
does Lister ‘do’ with marriage, and what does it ‘do’ with her? While
so much of today’s queer identity is being organised around privileging
marriage as the ultimate form of belonging and legitimacy, Lister’s dia-
ries expose both the benefits and the dangers of using marriage as the
lynchpin for coherent identity formation.
Lister is writing at a time when marriage for women was not only the
norm but also virtually an imperative, particularly in her socioeconomic
bracket, where strategic family alliances still ensured economic stability
and social status. Marriage was also bound up with notions of feminin-
ity, so that an unmarried woman or spinster tended to be caricatured—
although less virulently than in the seventeenth century—as ‘an object of
polite pity, slight admiration, and temperate ridicule’.15 Lister herself was
keenly aware of the reputation of single women as asexual, noting with
sarcasm in her diary that ‘I have always found that neatness, modesty,
economy, & humanity, are the never-failing characteristics of that terri-
ble creature, an “old maid”’.16 Lister’s defence of ‘old maids’ offers a
critique of how marriage imposes a particular kind of normative feminin-
ity, outside of which the female gender loses its legitimacy. Femininity’s
intelligibility therefore remains intimately bound to heterosexuality.
186 C. Roulston
I smiled to read, that it would not now surprise you ‘so much’, even if
I should marry. Be prepared for all things; for I am persuaded ‘joy flies
monopolists’; and, if you are ‘one’, and I am not another ‘made to live
alone’. I could be happy in a garret, or a cellar with the object of my
regard; but, in solitude, a prison or a palace would be all alike to me […] I
have ventured to urge, that the rational union of two amiable persons must
be productive of comfort […] There is no pleasure like that of thought
meeting thought ‘ere from the lips it part’. Give me a mind in unison with
my own, and I’ll find the way of happiness – without it, I should feel alone
among multitudes; and all the world would seem to me a desert.19
according to which Lister judges her social worth, one that over time
will increase rather than decrease in importance. Lister’s refusal of het-
erosexual marriage is therefore in no way an attempt to ‘dismantle the
master’s house’.24 Lister critiques marriage, she is obsessed with it, and
she feels repeatedly betrayed by it. However successful she is as a seducer
of women, more often than not she loses them on their wedding day.
Lister talks of the recently engaged Miss Browne, who had been one of
her love interests, as being now ‘out of [her] reach’.25 While in the case
of Miss Browne, it is a welcome relief, Lister is nevertheless repeatedly
thwarted by the legitimacy conferred by marriage.
It is with the love of her life, Mariana Belcombe, that Lister is con-
fronted with marriage’s full capacity to delegitimise her own desire. In
the midst of a passionate affair begun in 1812, Mariana unexpectedly
announces her engagement to the wealthy Charles Lawton in 1816. It is
during the honeymoon period that Helena Whitbread begins her Virago
edition of the Lister diaries, recognising this as a turning point in Lister’s
life. During the honeymoon, Lister promptly seduces Nantz, Mariana’s
sister, which exposes above all Lister’s disempowerment in the face of an
institution that she cannot challenge. Although Mariana’s is a marriage
of convenience in that as a doctor’s daughter, she has no independent
means, and Lister’s and Mariana’s relationship will in fact continue, this
event forces Lister to meditate seriously on the meaning of relationships
and of modes of belonging. Can a relationship have value outside of
marriage, or does marriage reduce relationships to a utilitarian model?
Lister’s reading of marriage oscillates between the sentimental and the
instrumental, reflecting her own investment in and understanding of the
position of women as objects to be bartered. Although Lister never refer-
ences Mary Wollstonecraft, the latter’s statement that women are ‘often
legally prostituted’26 is echoed in Lister’s own claim that Mariana’s
marriage is ‘legal prostitution’.27 Lister’s refusal of the position of the
feminine is also a refusal of the position of object, one she witnesses
repeatedly as she loses her lovers to marriage. To label heterosexual mar-
riage as ‘legal prostitution’ also allows her to situate her own claim to
marriage as existing beyond this system of exchange. Mariana’s prosti-
tuted marriage to Charles Lawton is therefore distinct from Lister’s and
Mariana’s marriage of the soul. Yet marriage-as-prostitution also confers
benefits with which Lister cannot compete, and it interpolates the subject
in particular ways. Lister muses on how Mariana cannot fully disengage
from the institution of which she has become a member:
MARRIAGE AND ITS QUEER IDENTIFICATIONS IN THE ANNE LISTER DIARIES 189
Letter from M- … her letter breathes little of affection & indeed I do not
estimate her feelings towards me very highly […] I suppose she is more
comfortable now than formerly with [Charles]. She has her carriage &
the luxuries of life & thinks proportionately less of me […] M-’s conduct
to me has certainly been as strange a mixture of weakness, selfishness &
worldly-mindedness. Consider her conduct on our first acquaintance;
before her marriage; about her marriage; & ever since. An unfaithful friend
to Isabella, a weak & wavering companion to me.28
Here, Lister notes marriage’s capacity to create new needs and a differ-
ent economy of desire. While Mariana still cares for Lister, she is seduced
by the accessories of marriage, and by its legitimating effects. Marriage
trades uniqueness for social capital.
Yet while Lister unpicks the fabric of marriage, her own desire con-
tinues to be defined by its terms. If anything, the marital language in
the diaries intensifies after Mariana’s wedding. In an echo of the Eliza
Raine letters, marriage occupies two signifying registers; as Catherine
A. Euler argues, after Mariana’s marriage to Lawton, ‘both Anne and
Mariana for many years considered themselves married to each other …
especially when they discovered in 1825 that Charles had still not bro-
ken her hymen’.29 The detail of the unbroken hymen helps to secure
the legitimacy of the ‘other’ marriage, and we can see a split between
Mariana’s worldly marriage to Charles Lawton, and Lister’s reappropria-
tion of marital discourse as a utopian possibility housed in the privacy of
her diaries. Mariana’s wedding enables Lister to resignify marriage within
the conceptual space available to her, with a focus on idealised romantic
love. It is therefore only after Mariana’s heterosexual wedding that Lister
writes in April 1820: ‘I am indeed satisfied of [Mariana’s] regard & I
shall now begin to think & act as if she were indeed my wife’.30 The idea
of ‘begin[ning] to think’ of Mariana as her wife four years after Mariana’s
marriage to Charles generates a queer temporality, what Madhavi Menon
calls ‘the haphazard time of desire’.31 Linear time is disregarded in favour
of a cyclical return to the sustaining refrain of Lister’s desiring subjectiv-
ity; her utopian promise to be as a husband to her lovers.
Marriage for Lister exists outside of institutional parameters; in the
place of an official, intelligible narrative, it inhabits the time and rhythm
of individual desire. Here, marriage temporarily secures Lister’s hold
on Mariana, then slips away again. Mariana participates equally in this
alternative marital bond: ‘I shall not lose you, my husband, shall I? Oh,
190 C. Roulston
no, no. You will not, cannot, forget I am your constant, faithful, your
affectionate wife’.32 In J.L. Austin’s sense, these declarations are pure
performative speech acts, in that they are unsupported by anything exter-
nal to themselves. Mariana and Lister perform their marriage through a
series of declarations that cannot move beyond the private sphere, and
that are unrealisable in a public sense. Yet this very impossibility enables
such declarations to remain anti-utilitarian, reconfiguring the ‘impossibil-
ity of same-sex desire’ as an imaginable event. Paradoxically, the more
consciously theatrical these performed roles are, the more they are expe-
rienced as authentic. Desire here is entirely dependent on the force of
the speech act that brings it into being. Dislocated from the world of
material relations, marriage in Lister’s diaries becomes increasingly liter-
ary, a fictional construct that anchors desire in an idealised parallel space.
The diaries are not fictional, however; they repeatedly enact the jour-
ney between life and text; they record the impact of lived events on
the first-person narrator. In this sense Lister cannot bypass the material
realities of Mariana’s married state. Yet this too becomes strategically
reappropriated as a form of guilty jouissance: ‘I felt that [Mariana] was
another man’s wife. I shuddered at the thought & at the conviction that
no soffistry [sic] could gloss over the criminality of our connection’.33
Lister’s erotic transgressions with Mariana ensure her agency as a com-
petitor in the heterosexual world, and keep her within the circuits of
power. Mariana becomes both Lister’s mistress and her wife, strategically
confusing this traditional heterosexual distinction. Mariana’s adultery
also supports Lister’s masculine subject position as a viable rakish rival to
Charles Lawton. Lister effectively transforms her non-belonging into an
active disruption of the marital bond, ensuring an alternative futurity to
the heterosexual script.
Furthermore, Lister’s strategic idealisation of marriage is never far
removed from the language of economics. While the discourse of roman-
tic love serves as a way of distinguishing her relationship with Mariana
from that of Charles Lawton’s, Lister also conceives of her ‘marriage’ in
terms of cost and expense: ‘M- loves me. Certainly her heart is wholly
mine. If I could have allowed her twenty or thirty pounds a year in addi-
tion to what she had, she certainly would not have married’.34 Regardless
of gender identity, love is translatable into economics, making the obsta-
cle in question not marriage, but money. Following the logic of mar-
riage as prostitution, Lister knows she could have bought Mariana if
the price had been right. While Lister actively refuses the position of the
MARRIAGE AND ITS QUEER IDENTIFICATIONS IN THE ANNE LISTER DIARIES 191
Marriage as Dynasty
Over time, in the diaries the language of cost will supersede that of
romance in relation to marriage. Excluded from the institution proper,
Lister creates a parallel marital economy whose intelligibility will be fil-
tered through a business model. As she gradually comes to acknowledge
the permanence of Mariana’s marriage, Lister begins looking elsewhere
for a wife, and eventually settles on a neighbouring heiress, Ann Walker.
Jill Liddington has made available the key diary extracts from this rela-
tionship in Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority (1998), which
covers the years 1833–1836, during which time Lister is courting and
eventually settling down with Miss Walker. However, alongside moments
of peaceful domesticity, the Ann Walker years are marked by tensions,
frustrations and general unhappiness. Although the difficulties are due in
part to the illegitimate status of the marriage, they are also the result of
how Lister interprets the married state, and her masculinised gendered
role within it. Throughout the long eighteenth century, marriage in
Britain was still based on the governing principles described in William
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1753), in which ‘the
husband and wife are one person in law: that is the very being or legal
existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least
incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband’.36 It was not
until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 that divorce other than by Act
of Parliament became a possibility, and even then it was far less acces-
sible to the wife than to the husband, in that the husband only had to
prove adultery, whereas the wife had also to prove ‘adultery aggravated
by desertion, cruelty, rape, “buggery”, or bestiality’.37 In contrast to cer-
tain other female ‘marriages’ such as those of the Ladies of Llangollen
or of Emily Faithfull,38 Lister’s conception of marriage was deter-
minedly patriarchal. Lanser has also convincingly argued that a number
of ‘gentry sapphists’, including Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen, made
use of their class privilege as a form of ‘compensatory conservatism’ that
worked to counter their non-normative sexual identities.39 However,
192 C. Roulston
the way of it & did not know how she should do without it…. Yet still
she talked of her suffering because she thought it wrong to have this
connection with me …. She will not do for me’.48 Here, in contrast to
heterosexual marriage, sexual connection fails to confirm Miss Walker
in her identity as a wife, producing instead a dissolution of the self and
a kind of moral panic. Eventually, Lister will have Miss Walker consult
Dr. Stephen Belcombe, Mariana’s brother, to treat her depression. This
consolidates the feminisation of Miss Walker and exacerbates the tra-
ditional distinction between passive femininity and active masculinity,
one which Lister appears to support rather than resist. Lister becomes
increasingly identifiable with the husbands later critiqued in Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)—where the doctor-
husband prescribes bed rest for his ‘neurotic’ wife, and Henrik Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House (1879)—in which the husband can only see his wife as a
‘sweet little skylark’.49 Lister deplores Miss Walker’s weakness of spirit,
complaining that there is ‘[n]othing the matter with her but nervous-
ness’,50 yet fails to take Miss Walker’s needs and anxieties into account.
Lister wants a feminine wife who is not weakened by her femininity, even
as nineteenth-century constructions of femininity relied on a blurring
of boundaries between female submission and female frailty. Coventry
Patmore’s influential poem, The Angel in the House (1854) imagined a
wife ‘too gentle even to force/His penitence by kind replies’,51 offering
up a female subject who is constitutionally unable to show resistance.
The question arises as to how a relationship evolves when it exists in
the interstices of language and social intelligibility. While Liddington
points to the fact that, unlike gay male relationships, women could
slip unnoticed into ‘marriages’ and be read as companions or roman-
tic friends, this sexual invisibility could not but affect the realm of inti-
macy, and the ways in which female couples read each other. The very
fact that, as Liddington argues, ‘there was a lack of public discourse
through which respectable Halifax could express any reservations about
Anne Lister’s sexuality’,52 also had an impact on the sphere of intimacy
for the likes of Miss Walker. While Lister meticulously constructed
her lesbian identity over the years—through a careful reading of the
Classics and Romantics, and through a series of successful seductions—
Miss Walker was without an intellectual, literary or experiential frame-
work; she was functioning in a conceptual void. Although Lister believed
marriage could fill that gap, Miss Walker was continually registering that
theirs was not a marriage, it was only like a marriage. This ambivalent
MARRIAGE AND ITS QUEER IDENTIFICATIONS IN THE ANNE LISTER DIARIES 195
space between being and seeming, between the original and the copy,
offered both the freedom of anonymity, and created unanticipated anxi-
eties. Miss Walker experienced compulsory heterosexuality, as Butler
argues, ‘as the original, the true, the authentic’, and her erotic attach-
ment to Lister as ‘a kind of miming […] which [could] always and only
fail’.53 While Marcus has convincingly shown the extent to which female
partnerships were an acceptable part of the fabric of late eighteenth and
nineteenth-century society, this does not fully address the psychic cost of
having to negotiate a sexual identity that remained largely unacknowl-
edged, and if acknowledged, censured and/or mocked in the public
sphere. Indeed, it is in this uncomfortable space of non-belonging that
the queer, non-normative body emerges, creating a subject who can
only know itself through its alienation. To this extent, female same-sex
desire’s repeated erasure in the social realm could not but affect its con-
struction in the private sphere. Miss Walker became a casualty of female
same-sex desire’s illegibility, in that Lister’s discourse of marriage was
highlighting the performative impossibility of a legible ‘I do’.
This impossibility is re-enacted in the diaries precisely through Lister’s
obsession with the marriage vow. From her early affair with Eliza Raine,
to her intense relationship with Mariana Belcombe, through to her prag-
matic marriage with Miss Walker, the marriage vow, rather than being a
singular, binding act, is instead performed over and over. Each iteration
is therefore also an undoing, an implicit avowal of the unacknowledged
status of lesbian desire. At age fifteen, Lister became betrothed to Eliza
Raine, with an exchange of rings and shared wedding vows.54 As we have
seen, Lister and Mariana referred to each other as husband and wife, and
on 23 July 1821, Lister writes:
In this passage, the sentimental discourse and the marital pledge between
Lister and Mariana are interrupted both by the symbol of the official
wedding ring from Mariana’s marriage to Charles Lawton, and by the
final reference to venereal disease. In other words, the lesbian vows are
literally contaminated by the diseased heterosexual body, which nullifies
196 C. Roulston
the possibility of an original declaration, one that can in any way precede
heterosexual discourse. In its attempt to achieve recognition, the lesbian
marriage vow is always imitative, and therefore endlessly reproducible.
The lack of a recognisably singular binding exchange of vows that is
translatable into the public sphere is highlighted with particular clarity in
the Lister-Walker relationship. Lister writes in December 1832:
Miss W- told me in the hut if she said ‘Yes’ again it should be binding.
It should be the same as a marriage & she would give me no cause to be
jealous – made no objection to what I proposed, that is, her declaring it
on the Bible & taking the sacrament with me at Shibden or Lightcliffe
church.56
Miss Walker of having her own agenda. Neither participant can in fact
trust the discourse of marriage, even as they attempt to reproduce its
official language.
The Lister-Walker marriage also has two separate components: the
private seduction of Miss Walker by Lister, and the public negotiation
of wills and property. In a nineteenth-century heterosexual marriage, the
negotiation of the marriage settlement would form part and parcel of
the courtship ritual. For example, during the highly romantic courtship
of Anthony Trollope’s parents, Thomas and Frances Trollope, Thomas
made sure to explain to his future wife that his annual income was about
900 pounds.59 In the case of Lister and Miss Walker, the financial nego-
tiations formed the most covert aspect of the courtship, even as they
necessarily took place in the public sphere, among relatives and lawyers.
Lister had to play an intricate game of diplomacy and subterfuge, con-
vincing both Miss Walker and her relatives that the former should move
to Shibden Hall, and that they should bequeath to each other a life-
tenancy on each of their properties. All this needed to take place within
the discourse of female companionship rather than marriage, so that no
sexual taint was attached to the proceedings. On 2 October 1834, Lister
writes: ‘all the town talking of A’s coming here – so cruel to leave her
aunt […] with her fortune so strange to give up her [home] and come
and live so out of the world’.60 Indeed, it is precisely because Lister’s
and Miss Walker’s relationship so closely resembles a marriage that it
becomes subject to rumour and speculation. Lister’s search for marital
legitimacy is paradoxically the very thing that will make the social world
begin to read the Lister-Walker relationship as an illegitimate sexual
union.
In the early 1830s, Lister became increasingly focused on improve-
ments to her Shibden estate, which included plans to open her own coal
mine. However, this also put her in direct competition with the region’s
lead suppliers of coal, the Rawson clan. The rivalry between Lister and
the Rawsons would extend to political in-fighting, which would in turn
lead to an increased exposure of Lister’s private life. In the critical years
of 1834–1835, a time of growing radical political activity on the part of
the working class, just prior to the rise of Chartism, Lister became closely
involved in Tory politics to protect her land-owning interests. Not coin-
cidentally, it is also during this period that the Lister-Walker relationship
became public property. On 10 January 1835, the Leeds Mercury pub-
lished the following ‘wedding’ announcement: ‘Same day, at the Parish
198 C. Roulston
Church H-x, Captain Tom Lister of Shibden Hall to Miss Ann Walker,
late of Lidget, near the same place’.61 The announcement was then
reprinted in the Halifax Guardian a month later. As Liddington points
out, the choice of the first name, Tom, alludes to the term ‘tommy’,
often used in the eighteenth century to describe masculine women in
same-sex relationships, as well as lesbians of lower socioeconomic sta-
tus, in contrast to the more genteel term of ‘sapphist’. Public lampoon-
ing was not uncommon during election periods, and as Liddington
argues, in this case it is more likely that politics rather than sexuality was
its driving force.62 However, it also reveals the open secret of Lister’s
and Miss Walker’s relationship, and it is telling that what could not be
named in polite Halifax society is rendered explicit in the local newspa-
pers. Ironically, this lampooning expresses exactly what Lister wants to
achieve, namely a recognisable marital bond. The fact that this can only
be done in the form of parody brings us back to the original and the
copy, and to how Lister’s search for legitimacy is repeatedly blocked by
hegemonic heterosexuality.
Yet this inauthenticity is also reversible, in that if the aim of the Leeds
Mercury lampoon is to reveal Lister as a mimic: in her gender, in her
marriage and crucially, in her politics, it also reveals her as compellingly
unique. In her appropriation of masculinity, which is reinscribed in the
wedding notice as a parody, Lister’s gender has entered a field of play
that reveals the performative nature of all genders, one that ultimately
places, as Butler argues, ‘heterosexuality […] at risk’.63 Furthermore,
parodies can only work if the original has made enough of an imprint on
the social map—as in Henry Fielding’s parody of Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela (1740)—so that the very fact of being lampooned in this way
signals, particularly in the case of Lister, a profound originality.
Lister herself appears relatively unfazed by the parody, taking it
‘with mere amusement’.64 She will experience other jibes, as when she
is invited to an all-male dinner for the ‘blues’ or Tories by her oppo-
nents in May 1835.65 Then in March 1836, she hears rumours of
Mr. Christopher Rawson, her main rival in the coal-mining industry, hav-
ing ‘set the people on, & treated them to the rum-tea-drinking. The tea-
drinking last monday […] & the people burnt A- & me in effigy […]
Strange piece of business on the part of Mr. Rawson’.66 As with the mar-
riage notice, being burnt in effigy is a political attack, yet once again it
is these politicised gestures that make the marriage legible, for all to see.
They are a kind of striptease or laying bare of what polite society refuses
MARRIAGE AND ITS QUEER IDENTIFICATIONS IN THE ANNE LISTER DIARIES 199
body home, and within two years she would succumb to her bouts of
mental instability and be committed to an asylum run by Dr. Belcombe.
It remains ironic that Lister’s ongoing attempts to create a marriage that
was as official as possible—from the symbolic exchange of rings to the
signing of the will—contributed significantly to her wife’s mental break-
down. Shibden Hall became Miss Walker’s closet upon her return from
Russia, a home/prison where she locked herself in, alongside Lister’s
volumes of diaries, which were hidden behind a set of panels, keeping
the secret of the ‘real’ marriage. Eventually, according to Liddington:
‘Assisted by the local constable, who had to take one locked door off its
hinges, Ann was taken to Dr. Belcombe’s private asylum near York’.71 In
1845, Ann Walker was returned to Shibden Hall, and later transferred to
Cliff-Hill, her original estate.72 She died ‘much impoverished’73 in 1854.
While the ending of this marriage verges on the Gothic, it also high-
lights the complexity of negotiating the space between the legitimate
and the illegitimate. The Lister-Walker marriage shows how hegemonic
discourses perform the work of exclusion in multiple and overlapping
ways. Its fascination lies in its permanent incompleteness and its constant
struggle to balance the visible and the hidden, and the legible and the
closet. Lister repeatedly occupies both positions in a manner that ensures
a kind of non-resolution to the marital narrative. Yet marriage continues
to be the defining model for the articulation of both desire and gender.
Lister cannot imagine herself, and more specifically, articulate her differ-
ence, without it. In contrast, Miss Walker fails to mimic it enough; she
remains trapped in a realm of psychic incoherence. While the analysis of
heterosexual marriage in the long eighteenth century reveals the pow-
erful workings of separate spheres and fixed gender roles, a considera-
tion of ex-centric marital relations—of marriages that both are and are
not marriages—helps to show the hegemonic effects of the institution
beyond its normative heterosexual boundaries.
Notes
1. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in
Victorian England (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2007), 21.
2. Susan Lanser, ‘Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts’,
Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.2 (1998–1999): 181.
3. Marcus, Between Women, 27.
MARRIAGE AND ITS QUEER IDENTIFICATIONS IN THE ANNE LISTER DIARIES 201
4. Ibid., 27.
5. Although Sharon Marcus bases her theory of elasticity on Barthes, this
also resonates with Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘cultural hegemony’,
where civil society works to regulate and incorporate normative values
through ‘hegemony and consent as the necessary form of the concrete
historical bloc’. Antonio Gramsci, A Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings
1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988),
195.
6. Anne Lister Papers, West Yorkshire Archive Service, SH:7/ML/E/8
Journal volume from 20 June 1824 to 31 July 1825, 143.
7. Anne Lister Papers, SH:7/ML/A/14, 17 August 1810.
8. Eliza Raine, Halifax, to Anne Lister, York, 5 July 1812, CDA. SH:7/
ML/A/42. Quoted in Catherine A. Euler, ‘Moving Between Worlds:
Gender, Class, Politics, Sexuality and Women’s Networks in the Diaries
of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax, Yorkshire, 1830–1840’, D.Phil,
University of York, UK (May 1995).
9. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New
York and London: Routledge, 1993), 224.
10. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 232.
11. Ibid., 226.
12. The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, ed. Helena Whitbread (London:
Virago Press, 2010), 29 June 1819, 106.
13. Secret Diaries, 29 June 1819, 106.
14. Ibid., 26 September 1819, 106.
15. Susan Lanser, ‘Singular Politics: The Rise of the British Nation and the
Production of the Old Maid’, in Singlewomen in the European Past,
1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 304.
16. Secret Diaries, 15 December 1822, 251.
17. Ibid., 2 June 1818, 56.
18. Ibid., 2 June 1818, 56.
19. Miss Lister of Shibden Hall: Selected Letters 1800–1840, ed. Muriel M.
Green (Lewes: The Book Guild Ltd., 1992), 87.
20. Ibid., 87.
21. Secret Diaries, 15 August 1816, 2.
22. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.
23. Love, Feeling Backward, 4.
24. See Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the
Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984),
110–113.
25. Secret Diaries, 27 July 1819, 109.
202 C. Roulston
F
Failed-marriage, 8, 18 G
Fairies, The, 68, 71, 75, 82, 83 Gender, 9, 12–15, 17, 41, 75, 78,
Fairy tales, 11, 65, 84–86 85, 87, 88, 92, 104, 109, 127,
Faithfull, Emily, 191, 202 129, 131, 135, 138, 141, 154,
Family, 2–8, 10–12, 14, 16, 17, 31, 160, 161, 182–187, 190–193,
35, 37, 38, 41–46, 50–54, 58–63, 198–203
66, 71, 75, 80, 82, 88, 94, 95, Gender normativity, 13
97–99, 101, 103, 105, 108, 114, Genres, 12, 13, 15, 108, 110–112,
115, 118, 120, 124, 127, 130, 119, 124
131, 134–136, 139–142, 144, George, Marquis of Huntly, later 5th
150–152, 154–156, 159, 161, Duke of Gordon (1770–1836),
162, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 140, 151
174, 176–178, 184–186
Index 209
New Lady’s Magazine, 109–114, 116, Perrault, Charles, 11, 12, 65–71, 75,
117, 119, 122, 125–127 77–88
Nicene Creed, 175, 179 Perry, Ruth, 2, 7, 8, 18, 108, 118,
Nonconformity, 16 124, 126, 161, 176
Normative, 14, 15, 110, 184, 185, Persuasion, 142
187, 191, 192, 195, 200, 201 Petticoat at the Fieri Maschereta, The,
Novel, 5–9, 12, 15, 17, 18, 91–95, 137
99–101, 104, 108, 119, 124, 126, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, 11, 65
159–164, 168, 176, 177, 179 Pitt, William, the Younger, 138, 142,
Novelists, 1, 2 154
Novel of adultery, 8 Pitts, Vincent J., 65, 84
Nuclear families, 6 Poems, 5, 13, 111, 119, 120, 126,
194
Pohl, Nicole, 92, 104
O Pointon, Marcia, 130, 135, 152–155
O’Day, Rosemary, 42, 53, 60, 62 Pollak, Ellen, 2, 7, 18, 171, 179
Osborn v Goldham, 30, 40 Ponsonby, Sarah, 202
Overton, Bill, 5, 17 Pornography, 169, 178
Portraiture, 9, 13, 130, 131, 134,
135, 138, 151–153
P Potts, Anna, 42, 45, 60
Painted portraiture, 13, 130, 151 Pouget v Tomkins, 29, 39
Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, 5, 10, Power, 7, 14, 27, 43, 49, 55, 58–60,
12, 198 62, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 103, 104,
Paradigms of marriage, 14, 15 117, 122, 138, 155, 160, 161,
Parenting, 4, 60, 62, 152 163–165, 171, 175, 190, 192, 199
Parody, 14, 174, 198 Pride and prejudice, 15, 19, 141, 155
Parsons, Eliza, 160, 163, 168, 171, Prince of Wales (later, George IV,
172, 178 1762–1830), 149
Patmore, Coventry, 194, 202 Probert, Rebecca, 3, 7, 10, 11, 16, 18,
Patriarchal family, 6, 41, 42, 49, 136, 21–40, 178
140, 141, 161, 165, 170, 173, Public and private, 14, 153
174, 191 Punter, David, 164, 177, 179
Pattison, Kate, 202
Pearson, Jacqueline, 119, 126
Peau d’Âne, 69 Q
Pedagogy, 169, 178 Queen Charlotte, 153
Pendant portraits, 13, 134, 136–138
Perform, 9, 14, 28, 95, 124, 140,
182–184, 190, 195, 200 R
Performance, 9, 14, 168, 184 Radcliffe, Ann, 161, 176
Periodicals, 5, 10, 12, 107–109, 111, Radical reassessment, 7, 178
113, 115, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127 Raine, Eliza, 183, 189, 195, 201
Index 213
Rawson, Christopher, 198 Scotland, 13, 59, 131, 133, 135, 138,
Real-life marital scandals, 13, 111 151, 154, 155
Red Riding Hood, 73–75, 78, 81, 83, Scottish law, 131
84, 87 Scott, Sarah, 12, 91, 92, 102, 104, 105
Religious, 7, 12, 44, 50–52, 58, 71, Sentimental marital ideal, 13, 109, 123
100, 175 Sentimental novel, 15, 93, 127
Religious duty, 12, 100, 102 Separation, 4, 11, 36, 42, 46, 48, 49,
Representations, 1–5, 7–11, 13–16, 51–58, 60, 131, 141, 145, 152
53, 55, 93, 112, 123, 130, 131, 1753 Act, 17, 23–27
135, 136, 138, 141, 142, 149, Sexuality, 3, 6, 10, 14, 16, 93,
151, 155, 159, 161–165, 169, 160–164, 166, 167, 174, 175,
171, 173, 175, 178, 181 178, 182, 184, 187, 194, 198,
Retford, Kate, 130, 152 201, 203
Review, 1, 2, 16–18, 38, 60, 176, 178 Sexual passion, 100
Richardson, Samuel, 5, 198 Sexual threats, 168
‘Riquet à la Houppe’, 85 Shackleton, Elizabeth, 43
Riquet with the Tuft, 85 Shaw, John, 50, 62
Rise of the novel, 4, 8, 17, 159 Shelley, Mary, 163, 173, 177, 179
Robinson, Charlotte, 202 Shevelow, Kathryn, 109, 123, 125
Romance, 9, 15, 176–178, 182, 191, Short, Thomas, 146, 156
192 Simple, David, 95
Romantic marriage, 12 Sinclair, Robert (Sir), 141
Roulston, Chris, 3, 8, 14–16, 18, Sleeping Beauty (tale), 66, 70–73,
99, 105, 108, 110, 124, 125, 75–77, 81
181–203 Smith v Huson, 31, 40
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 172 Smith, W.A., 139, 154
Rowlandson, Thomas, 145 Social historians, 2, 6, 68, 161, 162, 168
Roxana, 93 Social histories, 10, 11
Rubin, Gayle, 170, 178 Social practices, 3, 15, 16
Runia, Robin, 12, 91–105 Social reproduction, 10
Sophocles, 174
Spousal abuse, 4, 111
S Stone, Lawrence, 6, 17, 39, 130, 152,
Sacrifice, 12, 92–98, 100, 102, 103, 161, 176
120, 144 Stuart, Lady Louisa, 129, 141, 151
Same-sex partnerships, 10 Sullivan v Oldacre, 40
Same-sex unions, 111 Sullivan v Sullivan, 33, 40
Satires, 9, 13, 14, 111, 154, 155 Sun King, 65, 79, 86, 88
Satirical prints, 13, 130, 131, 137,
149, 153
Scholarship, 2, 4, 5, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16, T
41, 44, 50, 58, 63, 92, 108–110, Tadmor, Naomi, 6, 17, 42, 60, 161, 176
115, 119, 131, 152, 161, 164 Tanner, Tony, 8, 18
Taylor, Jeremy, 171
214 Index
Texts, 5, 6, 8, 9, 18, 110, 112, 113, 155, 175, 177, 188, 189, 193,
119, 124, 159, 163, 178 195–198
Thackeray, William, 1, 2, 10 Wedlock, 13, 102, 108, 118, 125,
Thomason, Laura E., 6, 17, 95, 105 151, 165, 166, 175
Tom Thumb (tale), 84, 85 Weiss, Deborah, 104, 105
Transgressive sexualities, 14, 175 West, Benjamin, 153
Trollope, Anthony, 197 West, Shearer, 130, 151
Trollope, Frances, 197 Whitbread, Helena, 188, 201
Trollope, Thomas, 197 Widowhood, 4
Troubled unions, 11, 43 Wife, 1, 9, 14, 27–31, 33–36, 43, 44,
Trumbach, Randolph, 6, 17 46–55, 57, 59, 72, 77–79, 88,
93–97, 99, 103, 112–114, 117,
120, 121, 130, 131, 134–137,
U 141, 150, 151, 161, 163–165,
Unions, 2, 5, 9–11, 13, 14, 23, 30, 168, 171–173, 175, 176, 182,
36, 41–45, 51, 53, 58, 100, 103, 184, 189–191, 194, 195, 197,
111, 131, 135, 136, 141, 142, 199, 200, 202, 203
145, 148, 166, 171–175, 185, Wigstead, Henry, 155
186, 196, 197 Wilkinson, Elizabeth, 50, 62
Usurpation, 79, 115, 159, 168, 169 William Blackstone’s Commentaries
Utopianism, 92 on the Laws of England, 191
Williams, Charles, 147–149
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 18, 125–126,
V 188, 202
Vanity Fair, 1, 4 Wraxall, Nathaniel, 138, 141, 144,
Vickery, Amanda, 60, 108, 136, 153 153, 155
Victorian period, 8 Wright, Thomas, 43, 47–49, 51, 53,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 54, 59, 61–63
126, 202
Violence, 10, 11, 41, 42, 51, 53, 55,
60–62, 120, 121, 164, 167 Y
Virginity, 9, 74, 75, 171 Yeazell, Ruth, 5, 17
Virtue, 12, 15, 17, 32, 79, 89, 104, Yellow Wallpaper, The, 194
117, 120, 165 Yorkshire, 14, 43, 51, 182, 201
W Z
Walker, Ann (Miss), 14, 191, 193, Zachary, 51, 62
198, 200, 202 Zionkowski, Linda, 169, 178
Wallace, Diana, 162, 176, 177
Walpole, Horace, 160, 163, 177
Watt, Ian, 4, 17
Weddings, 2, 23, 27, 29, 31, 34, 38,
46, 51, 59, 117, 134, 142–144,