While unmarried couples were censured, single unmarried women like Nelly Weeton were pitied, because with their limited options in life they most likely faced penury unless they had a private income. They had long been referred to as ‘old maids’, a disparaging term for spinsters unlikely ever to marry.34 The poet and biographer William Hayley wrote a substantial work on old maids. For an unmarried woman from a good family, he said,
it is probable, that after having passed the sprightly years of youth in the comfortable mansion of an opulent father, she is reduced to the shelter of some contracted lodging in a country town, attended by a single female servant, and with difficulty living on the interest of two or three thousand pounds, reluctantly, and perhaps irregularly, paid to her by an avaricious or extravagant brother, who considers such payment as a heavy incumbrance on his paternal estate. Such is the condition in which the unmarried daughters of English gentlemen are too frequently found.35
After her father died in 1805 such was the condition of Jane Austen herself, and she would remain single for the rest of her life. In her novel Emma, published a decade later, she has Harriet express her horror that her friend Emma might never marry:
‘But still, you will be an old maid! And that’s so dreadful!’
‘Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! The proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable.’
This was fiction, but Jane Austen said something similar when writing to her niece Fanny Knight in March 1817: ‘Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.’36
The same point was made by Nelly Weeton to her brother Tom a few years earlier, in 1809, after he accused her of having the ideas of an old maid. She hinted that she might soon be married, but only ‘to avoid the finger of contempt, the smile of ridicule. If it were not for that, I am too happy to wish for any change.’37 She added: ‘An old maid is a stock for everyone to laugh at. Every article of dress, every word, every movement is satirized. Boys play tricks upon them, and are applauded. Girls sneer at them, and are unreproved. Upon my word, I think I will write an essay upon the pitiable state of old maids for some Magazine or Paper.’38 Her hints at marriage were not then realised, but in 1814 she wed the Wigan widower Aaron Stock, a cotton manufacturer. The following year a daughter Mary was born, but it turned out to be a desperately unhappy and violent marriage that ended in a deed of separation in 1822.39
It was not easy to end unhappy marriages – and just about impossible for women, short of deserting the husband, murdering him or waiting for him to die. There was no divorce law before 1857. Instead, couples could obtain an annulment or separation through the ecclesiastical courts, which was costly. A divorce could then be sought by private Act of Parliament, which ensured that inheritance and legal heirs were safeguarded. Such a process was prohibitively expensive, and between 1700 and 1857 only around three hundred such Acts were passed, almost always undertaken by the husband, virtually never by the wife, who usually had no wealth to bequeath and no funds to secure an Act of Parliament. It was customary that the mother lost custody of (and usually all contact with) her children.40
General William Dyott’s wife, when an invalid in Bath in 1814, asked him for a separation, having fallen in love with someone else. Two years later, when he was fifty-five, his bill was passed, as he described:
The second reading of the bill for the divorce in Parliament was fixed for the 7th of the month, when it was necessary for me to attend. Nothing was more kind than the exertion of Lord Lauderdale in carrying the bill through the House of Lords; the third reading having taken place in the House of Commons on the 2nd July and was passed in the House of Lords the next day previous to Parliament being prorogued. Thus ended the most melancholy event, which deprived my children of a mother and me of a wife.41
Dyott never remarried, and he and his children never saw or heard of his wife again until she died in 1841, six years before his own death.42
Most people could not afford to involve lawyers, and so many suffered terrible marriages instead. Women could not even divorce on the grounds of cruelty, since a man was allowed to beat his wife and ill-treat her, unless his behaviour was judged as life-threatening. Because this was difficult to prove, the law usually sided with the husband, sometimes showing a surprising leniency towards the guilty party. At Winchester in 1796 William Gamon received a mild sentence after being found guilty ‘for ill-treating, and threatening to murder Hannah Gamon, his wife, and for refusing to…appear at the next General Quarter Sessions’.43 As punishment, he was bound over to keep the peace for three years. Many, probably most, cases of husbands abusing their wives never even came before the courts.
One way of ending a wretched marriage was for a husband to sell his wife – regarded as the poor man’s divorce. Some sales were by consent of the wife, but at other times they were carried out against her will. Leading a wife to a public place with a rope tied round her neck and then selling her, like an animal at a market, was thought – wrongly – to be a legal and binding transaction, transferring the marriage to somebody else. Commentators considered wife-selling a barbaric practice, but it persisted to the late nineteenth century, and John Brand noted: ‘A remarkable superstition still prevails among the lowest of our Vulgar, that a man may lawfully sell his wife to another, provided he deliver her over with a halter about her neck. It is painful to observe, that instances of this occur frequently in our newspapers.’44
Many such sales were to pre-arranged buyers, but they still needed to be carried out in a public place, as one newspaper reported in January 1790: ‘Another Bargain and Sale of a Wife.—A Man in the Neighbourhood of Thame, in Oxfordshire, two or three Years ago, sold his Wife for Half a Guinea; and his Neighbours telling him that the Bargain would not stand good, as she was not sold in public Market, he last Tuesday led her seven Miles in a String to Thame Market, and there sold her for Two Shillings and Six-pence, and paid Four-Pence Toll.’45
The Morning Post newspaper described another incident in January 1815 at Maidstone in Kent, after one man, John Osborne, realised it was not market day:
the auction was removed to the sign of the coal-barge, in Earl street, where she was actually sold to a man named William Serjeant, with her child for the sum of one pound: the business was transacted in a very regular manner, a deed and covenant being given by the seller, of which the following is a literal copy:—
‘I, John Osborne, doth agree to part with my wife, Mary Osborne, and child, to William Sergeant, for the sum of one pound, in consideration of giving up all claim whatever: wherunto I have made my mark as an acknowledgement.
‘Maidstone, Jan. 3, 1815. X’
This document was witnessed in due form, and the woman and child turned over to the buyer, to the apparent satisfaction of all parties; the husband expressing his willingness to take his spouse again at any future period.46
A woman being widowed could result in her sinking into poverty, because property and wealth usually passed to male descendants or relatives. Remarriage was therefore desirable, and in December 1808 Jane Austen wrote to Cassandra from Southampton: ‘Lady Sondes’ match surprises me, but does not offend me; had her first marriage been of affection, or had there been a grown-up single daughter, I should not have forgiven her; but I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can, and provided she will now leave off having bad headaches and being pathetic, I can allow her, I can wish her to be happy.’47 Mary Elizabeth Milles had entered into an arranged marriage in 1785, becoming Lady Sondes, but Lord Sondes died in 1806, and she was now remarrying for love.
Forty-nine-year-old Welshman William Jones was vicar at Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, then a peaceful country village a few miles north of London. He n
oted in his diary: ‘Many mothers have I heard warn their dear daughters against “hateful matrimony,” yet few, very few daughters have I known inclined to listen to the warning.’48 He believed that daughters were in part encouraged by widows who remarried time and again: ‘They will…try the experiment for themselves!—&, with the less apprehension, when they observe widows, (even their own Mothers…) adventure a second, & perhaps a third, time.’49
For many, whether in happy or unhappy relationships, marriage was an end to childhood and the start of adulthood and running a household. For young women it most likely meant years of child-bearing, which was considered to be the very purpose of a Christian marriage. Jane Austen, in almost her last letter to her niece Fanny, warned her not to worry about getting married too soon, because ‘by not beginning the business of Mothering quite so early in life, you will be young in Constitution, spirits, figure and countenance’.50 Given the likelihood of at least one partner succumbing to an early death through disease, accident or childbirth, many marriages did not survive for long.
TWO
BREEDING
If tenderness could ever be supposed wanting, good sense and good breeding supplied its place.
Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen
Some years before her daughter Jane was born, Mrs Cassandra Austen wrote to her sister-in-law: ‘My sister Cooper has made us a visit…Her boy and girl are well, the youngest almost two years old, and she has not been breeding since, so perhaps she has done.’1 The word ‘breeding’ had two meanings – on the one hand, education, manners and respectability; on the other, the reproduction of children, which may sound strange today when applied to humans rather than birds or animals. In an era without effective contraception, breeding could be never-ending. In February 1798 the newspapers announced one mother’s latest birth: ‘On the 21st ult. Mrs Banting, of Little-Rissington, near Stow-on-the Wold, Gloucestershire, was safely delivered of a daughter, being the thirty-second child by the same husband.’2
A few months later, Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra: ‘I believe I never told you that Mrs. Coulthard and Anne, late of Manydown, are both dead, and both died in childbed. We have not regaled Mary with this news.’3 Mary, the wife of their brother James, was due to give birth, but the family shielded her from these tragedies, a reminder of the dangers of childbirth. The next day Jane had pleasing news: ‘I have just received a note from James to say that Mary was brought to bed last night, at eleven o’clock, of a fine little boy, and that everything is going on very well.’4
A good marriage was measured by a couple’s ability to produce children, which for many women meant a succession of pregnancies unless they were unfortunate enough to die in the process. Maybe this influenced Jane Austen to remain single, preferring not to face the constant possibility of death and referring instead to at least one of her books as ‘my own darling child’.5 For the upper classes and royalty a male heir (or more than one, as a spare, in case of death) was essential, given that property and the family name descended via the male line. In 1809, on a visit to her former home village of Upholland in Lancashire, Nelly Weeton heard about the scale of preparations for the birth of the first child of Mr and Mrs Bankes at nearby Winstanley Hall,6 a Tudor mansion on the edge of Wigan:
She [Mrs Bankes] had been married eleven or twelve years, I think, and had never been in the family way before…When her pregnancy was announced, it occasioned great joy at Winstanley, and great preparations were made. It was determined upon that the child should positively be a son. Malt was procured for brewing ale, to be drank when he came of age. The caps and other garments were all ordered, and made in the boyish forms; not so much as a single one for a girl. For the child and for Mrs. B. upon the occasion, between 5 and £600 worth of linen were purchased, £400 worth of which came from London. Alterations were made in the house, partitions taken down, and rebuilt for the accommodation of a couple of nurses…She had scarcely been allowed to stir during the whole time of her pregnancy, not so much as to reach a chair nor shut a door; nor to remove from one room to another without one or two assistants, for fear of a miscarriage.7
During pregnancy, there was a superstitious dread of omens that might affect the fate of the baby. The physician Hugh Smith was scathing about such beliefs and related the story of when one pregnant woman, ‘a lady of quality’, suffered convulsions:
When her ladyship came a little to herself, she cried out, ‘The black cat! the black cat!’…the servants diligently searched for the object; when in a tub, placed to receive the rain water, near her ladyship’s dressing-room window, poor puss was discovered. This sight so terribly affected the lady, that her fears were ever uppermost, and she was miserable until the time of her delivery…she was fully persuaded that her child’s face would be like this black cat’s.8
Her fears were unfounded, and she was ‘brought to bed of a lovely boy without either mark or blemish’.9
Women due to give birth were treated like invalids and confined to the house. During this period of ‘confinement’ or ‘lying-in’, they were expected to stay indoors, preferably in bed, for up to six weeks after the birth. The same terms were also used for the entire pregnancy, as was the expression ‘in for it’, which Jane Austen put in a letter to Cassandra in January 1801: ‘So Lady Bridges, in the delicate language of Coulson Wallop [MP for Andover], is in for it!’10 This was her first child, a son born five months later, called Brook-William Bridges.
In readiness for the birth, one tradition required the husband to provide a cake and a large cheese, which John Brand described:
It is customary at Oxford to cut the cheese (called in the North of England, in allusion to the mother’s complaints at her delivery, ‘the Groaning Cheese’) in the middle when the child is born, and so by degrees form it into a large kind of ring, through which the child must be passed on the day of the christening. In other places the first cut of the sick Wife’s cheese (so also they call the Groaning Cheese) is to be divided into little pieces, and tossed in the midwife’s smock, to cause young women to dream of their lovers. Slices of the first cut of the Groaning Cheese are in the North of England laid under the pillows of young persons for the above purpose.11
Most women gave birth at home; only the poorest went to a hospital or the workhouse. Poor married women in London had access to charitable lying-in hospitals that had been established from the mid-eighteenth century. Other towns and cities were slow to follow, though at Newcastle-upon-Tyne one was founded in 1760, while at Manchester a lying-in charity was established in 1790 by Charles White.12 Working-class women rarely had the luxury of preparing for a birth, but worked as long as possible. Those with access to a hospital were admitted during the last month of pregnancy and remained there for a while after the birth.
Around 5–7 per cent of children were illegitimate, a figure that had been rising steadily since the early eighteenth century and would reach a peak of about 7 per cent by the early Victorian period, before falling again in the late nineteenth century. However, the numbers of illegitimate children were probably under-reported, and so the percentage may be a little higher. Describing Upholland during her visit in 1809, Nelly Weeton complained: ‘[it] is, if possible, more licentious and more scandalous than when I lived in it; such numbers of unmarried women have children, many of whom one would have thought had years, discretion, sense, and virtue to have guarded them’.13
Unmarried mothers-to-be were not well treated. In Norfolk in November 1794 Parson Woodforde was unhappy to learn about his servant: ‘My maid Molly has declared herself with child, more than half gone. Molly is with child by one Sam. Cudble, a carpenter of the parish of Coulton, and he says that he will marry her. The man bears a fair character. However, in her situation, it is necessary for me to part with her as soon as possible. To morrow therefore I intend at present to dismiss her. She is a very poor, weak girl, but I believe honest.’14 Being unmarried himself, Woodforde was obliged to dismiss Molly to avoid scandal and so sent
her away the next day:
After breakfast, I talked with Molly, paid her three quarters of a year and one months wages, which amounted in the whole to 4.7.0 and after packing up her things, about one o’clock she left my house, and walked off for Coulton [Colton] where she is to be at Cudble’s father’s, till such time that they are married. She says that Cudble made not the least objection to marrying her, she foolishly denied being with child till the middle of last week, and then obliged to, the work becoming too much for her present situation. I don’t think that she is far from lying-in by her appearance. For my own part, I have long thought her breeding.15
Molly, who was actually called Mary Woods, did marry Samuel Cudble, and their daughter Elizabeth was born on Christmas Eve 1794. Sadly, Elizabeth died on Christmas Day 1810, just sixteen years old.
Stillbirths and premature births were feared by all classes, and in October 1798 Jane Austen wrote to Cassandra from Steventon: ‘Mrs. Hall, of Sherbourn, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’16 Parson Woodforde noted when the squire’s wife went unexpectedly into labour one summer afternoon in 1783:
Nancy [his niece] and myself dined and spent part of the afternoon at Weston House with Mr and Mrs Custance…Whilst we were at dinner Mrs Custance was obliged to go from table about 4 o’clock, labour pains coming on fast upon her. We went home soon after dinner on the occasion…After supper we went up to Mr. Custances to enquire after Mrs Custance who was brought to bed of a fine girl about 7 o’clock and as well as could be expected.17
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