Living in Sin
Page 32
as the best they could do, starting a downward spiral. Susan Mumm’s work
on Anglican convents showed many women who ended up as prostitutes
due to unwise unions. Elizabeth McIntosh, a servant, was married to an
army officer, but he deserted her. In desperation, she lived with another
army officer in London, but he, too, left her after only three months, and
she had to turn to the streets. Other sources confirm this pattern. Carolyn
Thompson, a protégée of Charles Dickens, lived with a businessman for
nine years. When his business failed, though, she turned to prostitution to
keep from starving. In her effort to enter a higher realm of life, Thompson
had, paradoxical y, descended to a much lower one.32
On the other hand, working-class women were not invariably
victims; indeed, some legal sources reveal lifelong unions. John Vidler, a
wealthy coach-builder, lived for years with his servant, Mary Hal , after
the death of his wife. They had several children, but he did not marry her,
perhaps because his daughter from his marriage objected. Instead, he left
Hall a bond of £3,000. Similarly, the testator in In re Val ance lived for
thirty years with his cohabitee until his death in 1881. He left her a bond
for £6,000.33 Not only did these women have permanent unions and some
provision in old age, but the Victorian courts upheld the bonds, agreeing
that women should have compensation for years of faithful, if unmarried,
companionship.
Non-legal sources also reveal numerous cross-class relationships that
lasted for years. Friedrich Engels lived with Mary Burns, ‘an illiterate Irish
factory girl’ for almost twenty years, until her death in 1863; he then lived
with her sister Lizzie for close to ten.34 Engels was unconcerned with his
reputation, but some men with respectable ambitions also preferred not to
marry. Benjamin Leigh Smith, a wealthy landowner and future radical MP,
lived with Ann Longden, a milliner, in the early nineteenth century. Despite
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
the births of five children, Benjamin and Ann remained unmarried. After
her death in 1834, Smith had another liaison with Jane Buss, the daughter of
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cross-class cohabitation
an agricultural labourer, and had three more children with her. Similarly,
Wilkie Collins lived with a working-class woman named Martha Rudd
for over twenty years ( c.1868–89), a relationship that resulted in three
children.35
The women in these unions probably would have married if they
had been asked; as in many other types of cohabitation, the man was
the reluctant party. The reasons for their hesitation are many. The class
difference was an obvious bar, particularly for the man’s family. Stil , some
of these families would have preferred a lower-class wife to no wife at all;
many of Collins’s biographers argue that this was the case for him. Thus, in
many cases, some other reason(s) must have existed. Of course, some men
were already married and so could not regularise the union. William Frith,
the painter, had an affair with a working-class woman named Mary Alford
and had two children with her, but he could not marry her until his wife
died in 1880.36 But this reason will not suffice for bachelors.
Sometimes, the men had radical beliefs that made marriage pointless
or obnoxious to them. Smith came from a long line of Unitarian reformers
and may well have enjoyed being as unconventional in his personal life as
in his politics. Engels, unsurprisingly, disdained bourgeois marriage. Even
here, though, abstract theorising was not a complete explanation; after al ,
in some ways Engels’s cohabitation with the Burns sisters was harmful to
his work in socialism. Engels had inherited factories from his father; his
relationships with factory workers were, in William Henderson’s words, a
reminder ‘that the sons of rich millowners had often been accused of using
the daughters of their operatives to gratify their own pleasure.’ Arguably,
Engels would have been a more effective spokesperson for the working
class if he had married into it rather than cohabited.37
Thus, there must be other reasons stil , which leads to the issue of
how much the class difference affected these unions. And, indeed, many
men could not overcome their condescension towards working-class
women. They may even have assumed that they were doing poor women a
favour by consorting with them, particularly as they paid for the privilege.
This attitude was tied into the assumption that working-class women were
promiscuous, or, at the least, cared little about chastity. Engels is a good
example in this regard. He could not see that rather than being daring by
living with a worker, he was, in fact, participating in a commonplace, and
usual y exploitative, relationship. As Terrell Carver has argued, Engels
did not look for an ‘intellectual equal’ from his lovers, but for ‘domestic
compatibility … Engels’s intellectual mates were not women but men’.38
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
These attitudes may have been subconscious, but they were still decisive.
Another factor was men’s sexual freedom; they could cohabit and have
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Created from nscc-ebooks on 2019-06-18 23:44:10.
living in sin
full social lives. Collins dined out frequently, though neither Graves nor
Rudd joined him. Smith retained his friends and was elected to Parliament,
despite having five known illegitimate children. The men, then, had all the
advantages of bachelorhood, yet also had ‘wives’. And though some men
found the secrecy a strain, others were invigorated. Collins apparently
thrived on it, contrasting his situation with married men, whom he
considered selfish bores. According to William Baker and William Clarke,
he did not want to be ‘a middle-aged married man with a growing paunch
and little freedom.’ He did not consider, though, that his freedom meant
social restrictions for Martha and his children.39
The advantages for men were considerable, then, in cohabiting with
poorer women. In part, these relationships were part of a ‘flight from
domesticity’ that John Tosh has noted for the late nineteenth century. The
domesticated middle-class man was only one type of masculinity; men
also had attractive alternatives to the bourgeois paterfamilias, like the
empire-builder. Though the alternatives might not confer as much prestige
as respectable marriage and legitimate fatherhood, they were satisfactory
to some men; indeed, by avoiding marriage, men had independence and
freedom, two important parts of masculinity, without sacrificing a home
life.40 When such men are factored in, the number of men who resisted
domesticity (at least temporarily) may well be higher than historians have
thought, and the resistance may have begun earlier in the century. All the
same, one should not overstate the men’s freedom. These men ignored the
bounds of respectability, not just by cohabiting, but by crossing class lines
to do so, which explains their determined secrecy about it. Unless a man
was independently wealthy (like Smith), discretion was vital, since sexual
probity was important to men’s professional reputations. Even Engels hid
Mary Burns away when he was working at his father’s factory in Manchester,
and Collins and Rudd used a false name when together. Aristocrats might
get away with some sexual irregularities, but middle-class men risked
losing their clientele, jobs, or public acclaim. Thus, men had other models
for masculinity, but these could not be pushed too far.41
Nor was the learning process all one way. At times, well-off men
gained a better understanding of the poor through these relationships.
Gustav Mayer credited the Burns sisters with influencing Engels about
the working class and Ireland. After Lizzie’s death, Engels wrote that
her ‘passionate feeling for her class’ greatly influenced him. Ford Madox
Brown, who lived with a working-class model before marrying her,
identified with workers in the 1840s and 1850s. This was in part because of
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
his family’s republican sympathies, but, ‘his feelings [were] reinforced by
his liaison with a bricklayer’s daughter and direct experience, through her,
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Frost, Ginger S.. Living in Sin : Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England,
Manchester University Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nscc-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1069613.
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cross-class cohabitation
of working-class poverty and solidarity.’ When the two were married, they
often gave charity to the poor even when they did not have enough money
themselves.42
As their influence makes clear, women were not always victims in
these unions, married or not. By living with Smith, Longden did not have
to struggle on as a milliner, and Buss escaped one of the poorest groups
in England – rural labourers. In addition, their children married into the
lower middle and middle classes. Rudd, the daughter of a shepherd, had
a much higher standard of life with Collins. Her three children received
excellent educations and inherited half of their father’s estate. In short, not
all working-class cohabitees were victims. On occasion, these relationships
even led to marriage. Sir Henry Percivale de Bathe lived with a woman
named Charlotte Clare; she was probably working-class, since little is
known about her. They had three daughters and a son before marrying
in 1870 and having two more sons. Charlotte, then, made the leap to the
upper classes, and her son Hugo inherited his father’s title and estates.43 As
these examples indicate, even without marriage, children of these unions
could be upwardly mobile. Few were as fortunate as Hugo, but they still did
better than their mothers’ kin, a real advantage to poor women in accepting
‘protection’.
Family and kin
In cross-class unions, both partners’ families were unenthusiastic about
the relationships. Men’s families feared a misalliance, or, at the least, an
encumbrance for the family property. They also had great distaste for ‘vulgar’
women, and this led to tensions and sometimes open breaches. Whistler
did not live openly with either Jo or Maud while his mother lived with him.
Despite this, his brother-in-law, Seymour Haden, refused to let Whistler’s
sister, Deborah, visit the house. This meant, in practice, that Deborah could
never visit her mother. Whistler, never one to suffer fools gladly, argued
fiercely with Haden, and their relationship never recovered.44 Benjamin
Smith’s sisters and mother were appalled at his relationship with Longden.
His mother felt he was in ‘thraldom’ to a conniving whore, and his sister
would not even use Ann’s name in letters.45 Friends, though usual y loyal,
were uneasy. John Mil ais, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, considered Collins’s
unions ‘unhealthy’ and warned his friend, William Holman Hunt, against
following the example.46 A man’s friends might regard him in two negative
ways, then – as a dupe of a lower-class woman’s wiles, or as a cad, taking
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
advantage of a helpless young woman. Neither role was attractive.
Working-class women’s families also disapproved, since they feared
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living in sin
that such relationships had no future. Many pressured the men to marry
or end the unions. Mary Croden, a barmaid, lived for six years with Joseph
Brimble, a businessman. Croden’s sister and mother tried to get Brimble to
marry her, to no avail. Mary’s sister confronted him openly about it, and
later insisted, ‘She would not have recognised him if she had not thought
he intended to marry her sister.’47 Families were right to be suspicious of
upper-class lovers and to try to persuade their daughters to give them up,
though they had limited success. Few working-class families repudiated
their daughters, though; they instead blamed the man for ‘seducing’ an
innocent girl. Examples abound of mothers, parents and siblings who
remained loyal despite their relative’s ‘fal s’; Ellen Blum’s mother, for
example, took her daughter in twice after well-off protectors disappeared.48
Ironical y, then, both families were hostile to these unions, though for
different reasons.
Pygmalions
Not all men were satisfied with working-class women as mistresses; some
instead wanted to transform them into wives. The myth of the upper-
class man moulding a poor girl into a beautiful princess was powerful.
Men who tried to accomplish it did so for a variety of reasons, including
a sense of responsibility, a desire to ‘redeem’ fallen women, and a defiance
of bourgeois snobbery. These cases were a small group in comparison with
temporary unions, but their experiences were instructive. Though they
might see themselves as challenging social mores, these men’s desire to
turn their lovers into middle-class ladies had a conventional core. These
instances, in fact, were good examples of the cross-class mix of defying
marital restrictions while, at the same time, accepting gender norms.
In
addition, though a man’s motives were often good, he gained a sense of
power changing a woman into whatever he wished her to be. Whether he
actual y succeeded in this quest was a different issue. Working-class women
had much to gain by becoming middle-class wives, but they sometimes
stubbornly retained aspects of working-class life.
The premier example of reshaping working-class women was the
Pre-Raphaelite circle. Unlike Whistler, these artists tried to reform their
models, reinforcing each other in the process. Dante Gabriel Rosetti,
William Holman Hunt, and Ford Madox Brown all met and fell in love
with lower-class models and tried to reinvent them as ladies. Brown and
Rosetti eventual y married Emma Hill and Lizzie Siddal , but Hunt was
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
never satisfied that Annie Miller would be an acceptable bride. Stil , the
transition for all these couples was difficult. The men and women had to
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Frost, Ginger S.. Living in Sin : Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England,
Manchester University Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nscc-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1069613.
Created from nscc-ebooks on 2019-06-18 23:44:10.
cross-class cohabitation
renegotiate their relationships as the women gained more education and
earning power; in addition, even the most willing woman retained some of
her working-class habits, and some of these women were not particularly
willing.
These men were good examples of professionals who faced either
several years of celibacy or unmarried liaisons. A relationship with
a working-class woman was one solution to this problem, and such
cohabitation had other advantages as wel . In contrast to ladies, poor
women accepted economic difficulties and worked when necessary. In
addition, the artists were encouraged in their hopes of transforming an
uneducated beauty into a middle-class wife precisely because these women
were models. After al , the artists had already re-made these women on a
regular basis, posing them in a variety of guises. If the painter could turn a
milliner into a princess on canvas, he could certainly teach her to be a lady
in real life – or so he hoped.