offered an alternative social group that compensated for alienated friends
or family. Second, some actresses earned comparable salaries to men
and so survived the end of partnerships. Terry, in fact, did not lose her
income or her marriageability. More importantly, audiences separated the
lives of performers from their roles. As Theresa Davis put it, despite her
past, ‘Terry still evoked the consummation of “womanliness” in her roles
and could command universal respect and admiration’. This bifurcation
allowed women in this profession to live unconventional y and still succeed.
William Holand, the Somerset vicar, demonstrated this double vision. He
saw a play with Jordan in 1811 and had mixed feelings: ‘Mrs Jourdan [sic]
acted her part very well and made us laugh much … I hate to be pleased
with a bad character such as Mrs Jordan has tho she makes me laugh.’64
The stage both condemned women as potential y ‘fallen’, and offered them
a way to overcome the stigma, something few other professions did.
The second major group of those non-poor couples who chose not
to marry were made up almost entirely of couples in which the man was
reluctant to do so. These cases were the clearest examples of the sexual
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
double standard in this group. Women in the lower-middle and middle
classes had the most to lose if they agreed to an irregular union, so the
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the demimonde and the very poor
majority did so only because the men refused to marry. For instance, the
few lower middle-class women who appealed to the Foundling Hospital
entered cohabiting relationships hoping a marriage would follow. This
choice was risky, since they could easily slide into poverty if deserted.
Sarah Ann D., a music teacher, inherited £200 from a relative. Charles C.,
a scrivener, persuaded her to live with him for two years ‘much against the
wishes of her Mother and Friends’. The relationship was not long-lived;
when the money was gone, so was Charles.65
Women who either agreed to or were forced into sexual relations
could often not get the men to marry them afterwards, but felt compelled
to stay, since they were now ‘fallen’. Caroline W. lived for three years with
Joseph D., a French Master and clerk, in the 1840s. She claimed he was
the son of a gentleman and ‘forced her’ to have sex. The two then lived
together until he left in 1848. Men in tenuous, lower middle-class positions
were not ready for marriage, but they still wanted companionship. Jessie
H., who was ‘of respectable connexions’, lived with Alexander M., a clerk,
for five months in 1854. When she became pregnant, he ‘suddenly deserted
her’. Considering Alexander’s slender hold on respectability, his decision
was not surprising. But she was, according to the Foundling Hospital
investigator, ‘now utterly ruined’.66
The sexual double standard played out in many different ways. At
times, the men were simply not monogamous, since they did not have
to be. Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry’s son, was notoriously unfaithful to his
wives and lovers. He married May Gibson in 1893, but left her in 1898 to
live with actress Jess Dorynne. Dorynne became pregnant in 1901, and
Craig deserted her. Shortly afterwards (in 1902), he ran away with Elena
Meo, the daughter of an artist. Although May divorced him in 1904, he
never married Elena, and continued to have affairs. Similarly, the painter
Augustus John fell in love with other women even when he was living with
both his wife Ida and his mistress Dorelia McNeil . After Ida’s death, he
lived off and on with Dorelia but had numerous affairs. Like Craig, he was
simply not a good marital risk.67
At other times, the men did not regard women who would live with
them as suitable marriage material. Men could enter sexual relationships
and remain desirable marriage partners, but women could not. This was, in
fact, probably more likely to happen in the middle and upper classes, where
standards of sexual propriety were strict. Once having had sex with a man,
a woman had to stay with him or admit to the world that she was ‘ruined’.
Felix Spicer, a restaurant owner, lived with Mary Palin for seventeen years.
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
Palin wanted to marry, but Spicer would not do so, and the couple had
seven children. In 1890, Spicer told their landlord the truth about their
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living in sin
relationship. Palin left him at once, writing, ‘You mean, contemptible
scrub, did you think of my tears when, before Felix was born, I asked you
to marry me out of my shame’?68 Mary had little choice but to live with
Felix as long as he pretended to be married to her. Once he let people know
the truth, she left him in disgust.
Though men were overwhelmingly less willing to marry, a few
rare women also preferred to be free. Octavia S., only seventeen, told the
Foundling Hospital that she declined to marry Thomas E., a gentleman,
because he was going to Ceylon and would have to leave her behind. She
was reluctant to tie herself to a man who might not return.69 But such
women were a minority; middle-class women needed marriage. They had
few employment opportunities that would allow them to care for their
children in the style of a middle-class home. In addition, since respectable
women avoided telling their families about their shame, they were even
more isolated than most unwed mothers. One can only speculate about
the fate of Octavia S. after the Foundling Hospital refused to aid her, since
she feared telling her family the truth. In the end, these cases again show
the difficulties of women in every class and every type of cohabitation in
comparison with men.
Conclusion
Couples who chose not to marry challenged Victorian norms more than
those who would have married if they could have done so. Especial y in
the working class, some men and women saw few reasons to go through
a ceremony that made no difference to them. The couple avoided expense
and the interference of the state, and they might hope that strictures on
providing and obedience would be looser, though this often did not prove
true in practice. Also, sometimes their unions were necessarily temporary,
as with sailors or tramps; the advantages of cohabitation were clear to
couples with frequent separations.
Nevertheless, most of these unions were curiously conservative,
; particularly the stable cohabiting unions of the poor. The majority did
not advertise their status; on the contrary, they went by the man’s name
and called each other husband and wife. Furthermore, such couples kept
traditional gender roles. If cohabitation resembled marriage in every way
except the legal ritual, it was a fairly tepid rebellion against it. One might
argue instead that these couples had expanded the definition of marriage to
include long-term cohabitees well before the state did so.70 Whatever their
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
reasons, people found their own ways to form families, ones that could be
as emotional y demanding and hard to dissolve as legal relationships.
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the demimonde and the very poor
Though the state largely stayed out of these unions, it intervened in
those of prostitutes and bullies or in violence cases. At times, the courts
recognised long-term unions as marriages, as in the case of Fanny Kay; in
others, the courts harshly punished men for the irregularity, as with bullies.
Like the courts, neighbours and kin reacted in a wide variety of ways, but
sharp divisions between married and unmarried couples were not often
possible. Though not unanimous, the primary response of neighbours in
the working class was, at the least, tolerance. Voluntary cohabitees were,
though, more often pressured to marry by authorities and their families,
since they had no impediments to marriage.
In addition, gender and class differences were starker in these groups.
Men were the reluctant party more often than women, since they had less
to gain from legal marriage and paid fewer of the costs of cohabitation.
Women, with restricted economic horizons and the responsibility for
childcare, preferred marriage. Many cohabiting couples lived comfortably
together, passing as husband and wife, but those who ran into difficulties
showed the disproportionate burden for women. The only exception were
women who could earn a good living, such as actresses. Women accepted
free unions, but seldom as a first choice. A similar dynamic would be at
work in cross-class relationships, which were overwhelmingly those of a
poor woman and a better-off man. The complications of gender and class
were even more tangled in those cases, as we shall see.
Notes
1 G. N. Gandy, ‘Illegitimacy in a handloom weaving community: Fertility patterns in
Culcheth, Lancashire, 1781–1860’, (D.Phil. dissertation, Oxford University, 1978), p. 381;
Gillis, For Better, For Worse, pp. 190–228; Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 42–62;
177–96.
2 M. Davies, Life in an English Vil age: An Economic and Historical Survey of the Parish of
Corsely in Wiltshire (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909), pp. 156–84; B. Reay, Microhistories:
Demography, Society, and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. 185–97; 209.
3 Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, II, 45–85; B. S. Rowntree, Poverty: A Study
of Town Life (London: Macmil an, 1901), pp. 32–70; the one cohabiting couple was on p. 49.
4 Royal Commission, I, 112; A. Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, ed. A. Wohl
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1970), p. 61; G. Sims, How the Poor Live and Horrible
London (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), pp. 24–6, quote from p. 26.
5 Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers: Reports, Returns, and Other
Papers Relating to Marriage and Divorce with Proceedings and Minutes of Evidence, 1830–96
(Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1971), I, 44; III, 6; O. Anderson, ‘The incidence
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
of civil marriage in Victorian England and Wales’, Past and Present 69 (1975), 50–87.
6 Gandy, ‘Illegitimacy in a Handloom Weaving Community’, pp. 406–8; Gillis, For Better,
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living in sin
For Worse, pp. 116–30.
7 J. Greenwood, The Seven Curses of London (London: Stanley Rivers & Co., 1869), p. 20;
Andrews in PCOM 1/151, p. 501; Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, II, 112;
I, 475.
8 Sims, How the Poor Live, pp. 26–27; J. Yeames, Life in London Al eys, with Reminiscences of
Mary McCarthy and Her Work (London: F. E. Longley, n.d.), p. 141.
9 Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London, I:49; Mayhew, London Labour and the
London Poor, I, 45.
10 Mumm, ‘“Not worse than other girls”’, 527–47; LMA, A/FH/A8/1/3/63/1, Petition #63;
Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria, pp. 125–7.
11 LMA, A/FH/A8/1/3/59/1, Petition #143, 13 November 1852; A/FH/A8/1/3/39/1, Petition #6,
11 January 1832.
12 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, III, 404.
13 LMA, A/FH/A8/1/3/56/1, Petition # 90, 16 June 1849; A/FH/A8/1/3/44/1, Petition #16, 22
February 1837. The Hospital did not take widows’ children, so Elizabeth would not have
received help in any case.
14 Mumm, ‘“Not worse than other girls”’, 532. See also A. Higginbotham, ‘Respectable sinners:
Salvation Army rescue work with unmarried mothers, 1884–1914’, in G. Malmgreen (ed.),
Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–1930 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1986), 227.
15 For Langford, see ASSI 54/5; Manchester Examiner and Times, 28 January 1887, p. 3; for
White, see The Times, 6 August 1860, p. 10; Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser, 4
August 1860, p. 2.
16 Fulford, The Rector and his Flock, p. 32.
17 W. Plomer (ed.), Kilvert’s Diary, 1870–79: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis
Kilvert (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 27; 41; 43; 141; 145, first quote from p. 27,
second from p. 43, third from p. 145.
18 C. Rose, European Slavery; or Scenes from Married Life (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1881),
p. 46; Royal Commission, III, 31; LMA, A/FH/A8/1/3/37/1, Petition #29, 1830.
19 The Times, 19 April 1869, p. 6; 20 April 1869, p. 9; Mayhew, London Labour and the London
Poor, II, 225.
20 Booth, Labour and Life of the People of London, XVII, 41; Reay, Microhistories, pp. 186–8.
21 Reay, Microhistories, pp. 186–7; HO 45/9315/14967; Manchester Weekly Times, 20 April
1872, p. 7; 4 May 1872, p. 3; The Times, 1 May 1872, p. 12; 3 August 1872, p. 6.
22 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, II, 119; III, 384–5.
23 L. Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 143–58.
24 Reay, Microhistories, p. 196; Booth, L
abour and Life of the People of London, IV, 317–22;
Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, II, 294.
25 Gillis, For Better, For Worse, p. 204; Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, IV,
226–36.
26 HO 144/161/A41540 (for quote); Liverpool Mercury, 17 November 1885, p. 3; 9 December
1885, p. 7.
27 J. W. Rounsfel , On the Road: Journeys of a Tramping Printer, ed. A. Whitehead (Horsham:
Caliban Books, 1982), pp. 19–20.
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
28 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, III:403; M. Higgs, Glimpses into the Abyss
(London: P. S. King & Sons, 1906), p. 94.
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the demimonde and the very poor
29 Gillis, For Better, For Worse, pp. 201–5; quote from p. 204.
30 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, I, 20–2, 34–40; II, 177 (for first quote), 294
(for second quote).
31 Sims, How the Poor Live, p. 26; Booth, Labour and Life of the People of London, XVII, 42.
32 See Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, p. 45; Conley, The Unwritten Law, pp.
72–3.
33 The Times, 28 July 1866, p. 12; Lancaster Guardian, 9 June 1866, p. 8 (for quote); 28 July,
1866, p. 3. See also Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 72–8; Ayers and Lambertz, ‘Marriage relations,
money, and domestic violence’, pp. 195–219; A. Clark, ‘Domesticity and the problem of
wife beating in nineteenth-century Britain: working-class culture, law and politics’, in
S. D’Cruze (ed.), Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850–1950 (New York: Longman, 2000),
27–40.
34 Bennet in The Times, 18 August 1854, p. 10; Gloucestershire Chronicle, 19 August 1854, p. 3;
Carter in PCOM 1/106, pp. 438–42; The Times, 29 October 1874, p. 11.
35 Wiggins in PCOM 1/92, p. 511; Taylor in The Times, 12 August 1893, p. 3; Tonbridge
Telegraph, 12 August 1893, p. 5.
36 Townend in The Times, 11 July 1872, p. 12; Leeds Mercury, 11 July 1872, p. 7; Abigale in HO
144/98/A16400/11; confession dated 21 May 1882. For striking out, see Yorkshire Gazette,
23 May 1885, p. 9; Leeds Mercury, 20 May 1885, p. 8; for taking each others’ names, see
Living in Sin Page 29