by Daniel Pool
The most expensive procedure was to get a special license that enabled you to get married any place at any time. This could only be obtained from the archbishop of Canterbury and cost a whacking great sum—twenty-eight guineas in the middle of the century—and would probably only be available to the well connected, since it was granted at the archbishop’s discretion. “A special license,” exclaims Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice when she discovers that at long last Elizabeth is to marry the great and wealthy Mr. Darcy. “You must and shall be married by a special license.”
Finally, there was the civil license, which could be obtained after 1836 from the superintendent-registrar, a sort of clerk of records. This was the marriage license you got if you were Catholic, Jewish, or a Dissenter. It permitted you to be married either in a church ceremony or in the registrar’s office. Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead, as befits their ultramodern approach to marriage, seriously consider going this route in Jude the Obscure.
In the early years of the century, people who wanted to evade these requirements skipped across the border into Scotland to a little town called Gretna Green—as the wicked Wickham and Elizabeth Bennet’s sister Lydia are presumed to have done in Pride and Prejudice when they elope. Here you could be married under the looser regulations of the Scotch Presbyterian church. You simply showed up in town and pledged yourself to your partner in the presence of another person—often the local blacksmith—until a twenty-one-day residency requirement imposed in 1856 slowed things down a bit.
Weddings were required by law to be morning affairs until the late 1880s, when permissible hours were extended to 3 P.M. This is why marriages were customarily celebrated with a “wedding breakfast” and, of course, accounts for the peculiar hour and minute in Great Expectations in Miss Havisham’s house “at which she afterwards stopped all the clocks.” As Herbert Pocket tells Pip, she received a letter breaking off her marriage the day of her wedding. “When she was dressing for her marriage?” Pip asks. “At twenty minutes to nine,” Herbert assents.
The wedding ceremony itself invariably saw both the clergyman and the parish clerk in attendance. When it was over, the couple had to sign their names—the bride her maiden name—in the parish register in the vestry. Then they returned—or went out—for the traditional wedding breakfast followed by departure on their honeymoon. It was the custom to throw shoes after the departing couple, and, at least in the early part of the century, the bride sometimes took a female companion along on her honeymoon. “I still regret your sister is not to accompany us,” Casaubon says to Dorothea Brooke sorrowfully in Middlemarch of their honeymoon trip abroad.
When the husband and wife exchanged vows, they became one person, and, in the words of the jurist William Blackstone, “the husband is that person.” The wife, as noted earlier, upon marriage lost virtually all powers over any property that she possessed. All her personal property automatically became her husband’s property to do with as he saw fit, which is why Heathcliff locks up Cathy Linton until she will marry his son—his objective being, as Edgar Linton divines, to “secure the personal property [of the Lintons], as well as the estate, to his son, or rather himself”—that is, to transfer ownership of the money Edgar Linton has left to Cathy to young Heathcliff via a coerced marriage. Since Heathcliff Senior, controls his son, Heathcliff pére will thereby gain effective control over the Lintons’ personal property. A wife’s land was in a somewhat different category; her husband could neither sell nor mortgage it, but he owned any income from it such as rent.
Once married, a wife could not sue or make a contract on her own nor make a will without her husband’s consent. If he wished to confine her against his will, as Mr. Rochester does his wife at Thornfield Hall, until 1891 he was well within his rights in doing so. He could “correct” her if he wished, too, a right which was supposed to mean only verbal chastisement but in practice often meant physical punishment.
This presumptive legal unity of husband and wife could cut the other way, too. The husband was considered legally liable for the debts and civil wrongs of his wife. If she committed a crime she was presumed to be acting under his influence (although the presumption did not run the other way) as Dickens makes clear in Mr. Bumble’s famous reaction upon being told that because his wife made off with the trinkets from Oliver Twist’s dying mother that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.” Bumble, of course, rejoins in exasperation, “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor.”
Happy or unhappy, a marriage was difficult to dissolve. Divorces until 1857 were the exclusive concern of the Church of England, at the Consistory Courts in Doctors’ Commons in London. Three types of divorce were possible. Divorce a vinculo matrimonii meant that the marriage was a nullity from the beginning due to an improperly close blood relationship, insanity, impotence, or a similar impediment. It permitted you to remarry but made your children illegitimate. Divorce a mensa et a thoro did not let you remarry but permitted you to separate and was available in cases of adultery, sodomy, or cruelty, which last was usually understood to mean actual violence. Parliamentary divorce (usually for men) offered a third alternative; you got a divorce a mensa et a thoro and then sued your wife (successfully) for adultery and then Parliament granted you a real divorce that did not make your children illegitimate.
If you did have legal grounds for a divorce, the proceedings were enormously expensive, especially—God forbid—if you went the route of parliamentary petition as well. “Why, you’d have to go to Doctors’ Commons with a suit, and you’d have to go to a court of Common Law with a suit, and you’d have to go to the House of Lords with a suit, and you’d have to get an Act of Parliament to enable you to marry again,” Mr. Bounderby remorselessly explains to Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times when he inquires about getting free of his destructive wife, “and it would cost you (if it was a case of very plain sailing), I suppose from a thousand to fifteen hundred pound . . . Perhaps twice the money.” His estimates were fairly accurate. Women, of course, were less likely to have access to this sort of money than men; of the ninety parliamentary divorces granted before 1857, women obtained only four.
Faced with this situation, some of the poor did just what Henchard does in The Mayor of Casterbridge—they auctioned off their wives. This was not a startling bit of fictional business Hardy invented for the sake of his novel. “She was by no means the first or last peasant woman who had religiously adhered to her purchaser,” Hardy says of Susan Henchard after she’s sold, “as too many rural records show.” Between 1750 and 1850, in fact, there were some 380 of these do-it-yourself divorces effected in rural England. The general procedure was even crasser than Hardy suggests, for you typically put a halter around your wife’s head and shoulders and led her to the auction place like a cow, the only checks on the practice being occasional ostracism and not very stringent legal penalties.
Legislation ultimately changed a good deal of the most archaic laws regulating marriage and divorce. The Divorce Act of 1857 took jurisdiction over divorces away from the church courts and gave it to a new civil divorce court instead. The law also changed the grounds needed for divorce by permitting men to divorce on the grounds of adultery; women on the grounds of adultery and either incest, rape, sodomy, bestiality, bigamy, physical cruelty, or two years’ desertion. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 allowed women to treat as their own the money they were willed by others, or got from various investments, and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 made basically all property that a woman acquired on her own hers to do with as she pleased, in addition to giving her the right to sue and be sued with respect to the property, and make contracts about it.
SEX
The majority of women (happily for them),” wrote the eminent Dr. William Acton in the mid-1860s, “are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. . . . No nervous or feeble young man need, therefore, be deterred from marriage by an exaggerated notion of the d
uties required from him.” Indeed. “The married woman,” continued the good doctor, “has no wish to be treated on the footing of a mistress.”
Dr. Acton’s books were very popular, and they suggest how much truth there was in our stereotypes of the constrained character of nineteenth-century English sexual behavior. In proper middle-and upper-class circles, for example, women were supposed to have no sexual contact before marriage—a hand around the waist, a kiss, and a fervent pressing of the hand was probably the accepted limit in most cases.
It was only marriage that licensed proper women to inquire into “improper” subjects at all. “. . . get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett—Roderick Random, Humphry Clinker,” Mr. Brooke suggests to the doubtlessly unreceptive Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch, “they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she’s married you know.” An end-of-the-century Punch cartoon showed a new bride of three hours in a railway station begging her husband to buy Tom Jones for her: “Papa told me I wasn’t to read it till I was married! The day has come . . . at last! Buy it for me, Edward, dear.”
The consequence of this prudery was that women often came to their wedding nights ignorant and terrified. If they survived it with sexual feelings intact, the absence of effective birth control, other than coitus interruptus or breast-feeding, meant that sex equated to constant pregnancy (Dickens’s wife had ten children in thirteen years), which—in addition to the fatigues of pregnancy itself—meant all those children to care for. Plus the risk of dying in childbirth was about 1 in 200 in 1870. The fact that the law for many years basically guaranteed a man access to his wife’s body whether she desired it or not—a right that induced Harriet Taylor to flee in disgust from her bewildered husband to the sympathetic embrace of John Stuart Mill—cannot have made women feel more comfortable about this. Yet Dr. Acton’s reassuring murmurings about the absence of sexual feeling among nineteenth-century Englishwomen were contradicted even by contemporary scientific evidence. A Scottish gynecologist with sufficient prestige to address the Royal College of Physicians wrote in the 1890s that of the approximately 190 women out of 504 who had responded to his questions, 152 said, yes, they did have sexual desires, and 134 reported that they had orgasms.
The dreary asexuality of the Victorian era was not characteristic of the early years of the century. In Jane Austen’s era, Evangelicalism had not yet cast its blight over everyday middle-class and upper-class life, and clothes were still gaily colored and tight fitting—in women’s cases sometimes damped down with water to hug the body—and unmarried men and women could sometimes socialize or go for carriage rides together, unchaperoned, as do Catherine Morland and Mr. Tilney in Northanger Abbey, without damage to reputations or anyone fearing that the country had succumbed to immorality.
The same would not have been true thirty years later. Layers upon layers of shape-concealing petticoats and crinolines had been imposed on the female body, and men adopted heavy materials and shapeless trousers in lieu of the previously form-fitting tights. An anaphrodisiac black became the basic color of all male garments, and Evangelicalism had helped to make sexual pleasure and activity seem wicked and base.
There were varying responses to this new prudery. In some cases it undoubtedly froze sexual relations to the level Dr. Acton imagined, perhaps partly sublimated in Murdstonian talk of a higher piety. In cases like that of the Reverend Charles Kingsley (author of the children’s book The Water Babies) the sexuality and the morbid religiosity born of Evangelicalism were fused in a passionate mixture that produced letters to his fiancée in the 1840s that spoke of how “my hands are perfumed with her delicious limbs, and I cannot wash off the scent. And every moment the thought comes across me of those mysterious recesses of beauty where my hands have been wandering.” Together, he and his fiancée shared drawings he had made of them having sex while floating across the ocean tied on a cross.
In some cases the emotional warping was complete. Lewis Carroll—his father a prominent clergyman—never married and acquired a passion for soliciting the friendship of little girls whose nude photographs he sometimes took, generally dropping all acquaintance with them when they reached puberty. The critic John Ruskin was unable to consummate his marriage and was divorced by his wife, only to fall in love with a ten-year-old girl when he was forty. Perhaps because of the growing inhibitions against mature sexuality, we should not be surprised that not until 1885 did Parliament raise the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen. “Oh, my husband and father” says the infinitely younger Annie Strong to her husband in David Copperfield, a much-older man whom she marries who was “the friend of my dead father.” The May-December marriage of a Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke was surely more likely among the English in the 1800s than it is today.
For those who weren’t sexually dysfunctional, there was still the problem of what to do for a sexual outlet before marriage. Among the working classes in London this was not much of a difficulty, it seems—many costermongers lived with their girlfriends starting in their early teens. Elsewhere in the working class premarital sex was generally winked at as long as the couple got married. Indeed, in 1800, about a third of the brides were pregnant on their wedding day.
For middle- and upper-class men, premarital sex would have been with servants and prostitutes since, of course, “nice girls” didn’t engage in sex before marriage. Despite the legend of the master seducing the parlormaid, such evidence as exists suggests this may have been somewhat more rare than popular legend would lead one to believe. Only 659 out of a survey of 16,000 “fallen women” said that a “gentleman” had first seduced them, and, in their usage of the term, they included clerks and shop assistants. Perhaps more common was the Jane Eyre master-and-governess syndrome. George Eliot, for example, boarded awhile in the house of her employer, the editor of the Westminster Review, who carried on a ménage à trois with his wife and his children’s governess. Governesses were sometimes kept by dashing young men in secluded apartments around London. Nor was it only the gentlemen who dallied with their servants. “I often heard the name of a duchess, not now living,” wrote an American diplomat in the 1880s formerly at the Court of St. James’s “connected with that of her groom of the chambers, and a countess who waited at Windsor was discovered caressing her footman in her own drawing-room.”
It is hard to know how widespread prostitution was. The count frequently given of 80,000 prostitutes in London seems high, but “gay” women with their “fancy men” (pimps) were not uncommon in the city. They congregated near Covent Garden and in the theater district, skirts partly tucked up as a badge of their calling, sometimes wandering into theater lobbies during intermission to solicit customers. Hippolyte Taine reported shortly after the middle of the century that it was impossible to walk down the Strand or Haymarket in the evening without being solicited by prostitutes, asking for gin or for rent money. They were unusually alluring to soldiers, most of whom were forbidden to marry. Venereal disease was sufficiently widespread in the army that, starting in 1864, Parliament passed a series of Contagious Diseases Acts, which provided for the examination of prostitutes in military towns, and, if they proved to be infected, their detention for a cure.
By the end of the century things began to change. Once again the country had an heir apparent whose attentions to the ladies were well known. Oscar Wilde was able to publish his Picture of Dorian Gray, with its fairly clear suggestions of homosexuality, and Thomas Hardy published a frank account of a woman’s adultery, seduction, and bodily charms in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, boldly subtitling it the story of “a pure woman.”
On the other hand, homosexuality was still punishable as a criminal act. (Since 1563 the act of sodomy had been punishable by death, and the last executions for such an offense were in the 1830s.) In 1885, a new law was passed—the one under which Oscar Wilde was convicted—making the solicitation or commission of any homosexual act in public or private punishable by up to two years in prison.
; AN ENGLISHMAN’S HOME
The dwelling of the rural poor was generally a thatch- (or slate-) roofed cottage, with one big room if the family were very poor, or a kitchen and then a separate bedroom if the family were a bit better off, and up to four rooms (in a substantial cottage, maybe even a second story) in a really good dwelling. In places like the East End or St. Giles, the very poor in London made do with a single room, where they were all jammed in one on top of another, eating, sleeping, and preparing food in the same room, where they cooked over a small fireplace with a grate. Those too poor to afford a room slept on the stairways or landings. Workers with some income could do better, and a clerk like Bob Cratchit, at the bottom of the middle class, characteristically might enjoy a small four-room house in a London suburb like Camdentown with one room for the kitchen, one for a dining room-parlor, and the other two for bedrooms.
For those with more money, the object was to have a house like the nobility or gentry. Where space and expense were less of a concern, the house was divided into an area for public entertaining and an area for the family’s private use. As the century wore on, these areas were in turn subdivided so that the children’s rooms were separated from those of the parents, and the rooms of servants were increasingly separated from those used by the dwelling’s owners.