Living in Sin
Page 36
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radical couples, 1790–1850
Act, working-class couples, especial y the women, were leery of too much
sexual freedom.
Working-class radicalism, 1800–50
John Gillis has pointed out that the period from 1780 to 1840 saw a change
in working-class attitudes towards marriage. Illegitimacy and pre-bridal
pregnancies sky-rocketed, and, in the north and west, women remained
in the paternal home after having illegitimate children. Other couples,
resentful at the expense of the banns, self-married through ‘besom’
marriages or ‘tal y’ arrangements. Men and women seemed indifferent to
the moral aspects and refused to pay fees to the church or state. All the
same, these couples did not usual y espouse any ideology, and the majority
did not publicise their unmarried state. They had their own rituals, and
most regarded themselves as married. In fact, often their parsons did not
know they were living ‘tal y’ until specifical y informed.29
Thus, though the amount of working-class cohabitation was large in
the early nineteenth century, only a few were consciously radical. These
consisted of a wide variety of persuasions, including religious dissenters,
socialists, and feminists. Religious concerns led to free unions for several
different reasons. For instance, some Irish Catholic immigrants and
Dissenters disdained the requirement that they go through an Anglican
ceremony and refused to do so. However, this grievance was of limited
duration, since marriage by registrar became law in 1836.30
Despite this change, marginal religious groups continued to rebel
against legal marriage. For the most part, these associations stressed
celibacy and asceticism, as in Joanna Southcott’s movement in the 1790s.31
Many of them separated legal husbands and wives and wed their leaders
to several different ‘spiritual wives’, but these unions were, theoretical y,
without sexual contact. The Abode of Love, which had only sixty adherents,
was one such group. The leader, known as Prince, was already married,
yet he had ‘spiritual unions’ with women followers. His union with Miss
Paterson, though, resulted in the birth of child, an unexpected result, since
Prince assumed ‘his carnal life had passed away’. The group faced several
problems in the wake of this development, but the fact that there was only
one child indicated that such breakdowns were rare.32 Ascetic movements
general y held to their principles of celibacy, though splinter groups might
not. Joanna Southcott likely remained a virgin, but some of her followers,
such as John Wroe, failed due to sexual scandals.33
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
On the other hand, other radical religious groups did not demand
celibacy. As J. F. C. Harrison put it, ‘If a man believed that he had attained
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living in sin
perfection and was no longer capable of sin … he was free to do all manner
of things which were normal y forbidden. Free love, for instance, was a
sign or symbol of spiritual emancipation.’34 Some groups argued that they
should follow the example of the early church, where all things were held
in common, including, allegedly, spouses. Luckie Buchan, who saw herself
as the third part of the Godhead, lived with a married man. Buchan wrote
that ‘Where the Holy Spirit of God occupies all the person, and reigns
throughout the flesh, it matters not much whether they marry or not.’35
The Communist Church, led by the Barmbys, was another example. They
had a feminist critique of marriage, and a close relationship with the White
Quakers, a church led by Joshua Jacob and Abigail Beale, who were in a
free union (Jacob had abandoned his wife).36 Though such religious groups
were small (the Buchanites had only sixty members), they contributed
another strand to the general marital experimentation of the first half of
the century.
Secular movements were larger and more vocal. Leaders of the
working class spread rationalist critiques of marriage in the 1820s and
1830s. In particular, Richard Carlile, a radical publisher, argued for more
marital, sexual, and gender freedom. Under the influence of Francis Place,
he converted to the cause of birth control in the 1820s. In 1826, he published
Every Woman’s Book, in which he argued that celibacy hurt both men and
women far more than sex outside of marriage. Thus, he suggested the use
of birth control for both married and unmarried couples.37 Carlile also
argued that the state should only interfere in unions if the couples had
children. Like Godwin, he believed that indissoluble marriage deformed
reason, since those ‘unhappily united to one whom they find it impossible
to love’ nevertheless tried ‘to appear otherwise than they are’.38 Carlile
argued that the virtue of each union was determined by the motive of the
couple for being together, and ‘chastity’ consisted of being together for the
right reason, married or not.
Carlile’s dissent went beyond the theoretical, since his own marriage
was unhappy. He and Jane Carlile separated in the early 1830s, and not long
afterwards, he met Eliza Sharples. Sharples, twenty-eight, had converted
to ‘freethought and political radicalism’ from her father’s Methodism. She
came to London and wrote to Carlile (he was in prison); encouraged by his
replies, she visited him. These visits eventual y resulted in a passionate love
affair. Sharples’s views about women’s equality and marriage were similar
to Carlile’s. She argued that women suffered from indissoluble marriage,
and criticised their ‘undue submission, which constitutes slavery’. Her
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
publication, The Isis, included transcripts of trials that showed the hypocrisy
of the current system – such as bigamies and wife sales. About the latter,
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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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radical couples, 1790–1850
she wrote, ‘How much better would a quiet separation have been, and each
left to a new and free choice.’39
Carlile and Sharples were discreet for some time, since a scandal
would damage Carlile’s career. Sharples, unhappy about the secrecy, asked
‘him to acknowledge her as his “wife” rather than as a “hole and corner”
mistress’ especial y after she gave birth to his son in April 1833. Carlile final y
made things public in September when he published a lengthy defence.
He charac
terised his first marriage as ‘a degrading and soul-destroying
restraint’. He had, then, ‘divorced’ his wife, and ‘have now taken to wife a
woman with whom I am happy’.40 Thus, Carlile pointed out that his first
marriage was over before he began his second. He added in October 1834
that his settlement on his wife was generous, and that ‘I have not failed in
any promise made to her, save that of the sil y one of pledging association
for life’. Carlile tried to blunt a growing chorus of criticism by highlighting
the deliberate nature of his decision.41
Sharples publicly defended her union as wel . Like Carlile, she argued
that their relationship was based on reason and mutuality. She was even
more insistent than Carlile that theirs was not a rejection of marriage. They
were in a free union because they had no other choice: ‘though we passed
over a legal obstacle, it was only because it could not be removed’.42 Sharples
argued that their happiness was a sign that they had done the right thing,
and she was proud to have ‘set a good example’. To stress her new status,
she took Richard’s name. Sharples believed that women were intellectual y
equal to men and that only a marriage of equals would succeed. Presumably,
she had entered such a marriage.43
Carlile and Sharples, in sum, both believed in the equality and
‘morality’ of their union. In some ways, they lived up to their ideals. Though
Carlile was a strong influence on Sharples’s intellectual development, she
also influenced him, as when she ‘converted’ him to rational Christianity
in 1832. They had three more children (their first child died young) and
were still together when Carlile died in 1843. On the other hand, Richard,
fourteen years older, was the dominant personality, and Eliza’s career
stopped with the births of four children. In addition, as a middle-class
woman, Eliza found the poverty and isolation of her situation difficult,
since her family repudiated her. According to Joel Wiener, Carlile was
disil usioned with her by 1835, seeing her as ‘a woman of limited ability who
lacked the determination to pursue “serious” objectives.’ When he went on
a trip to Manchester in 1836, he left her in London and took his older son
with him instead.44
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
In addition, Carlile’s career never recovered from his conversion
to rational Christianity and his union with Sharples. Criticism of their
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Frost, Ginger S.. Living in Sin : Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England,
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living in sin
behaviour dogged him. He was also dismayed at the birth of their fourth
child, writing to a friend that it was ‘fol y’. (Despite his work on birth control,
he was strangely traditional about Eliza’s fecundity.) Money problems were
the root of his reaction; he did not have the income to support two families.
Like many working men, his means were insufficient to support his ideals,
and his second family suffered the most. After his death, Sharples was
destitute and turned to needlework. Charles Bradlaugh, who boarded with
her, saw her as a ‘“broken woman, who had her ardour and enthusiasm
cooled by suffering and poverty”’. After her death in 1852, her Owenite
friends supported her children.45
Carlile and Sharples both argued that one of the reasons that their
union was ‘moral’ was its mutuality. They had great difficulty, though,
in overcoming their physical and economic problems. Carlile resented
Sharples’s concentration on her children, rather than on philosophy, once
the babies began to arrive. Radical couples, because of their shared work in
reform movements, had special problems when the woman’s concentration
on the domestic clashed with the man’s work. In addition, though both
Carlile and Sharples argued for freeing women’s sexuality, they did not
take into account the consequences of such activities. More crucial y, they
could only imagine individual solutions to these social problems. Their
relationship showed that sexual experiments, and particularly women’s
emancipation in them, were doubly difficult in the working class.
Carlile’s writings acted as a bridge between the revolutionaries of the
1790s and the Owenite movement of the 1820s to 1840s; he and Eliza had
contacts with both groups. Unlike previous radicals, though, Robert Owen
concentrated on economic issues. As Barbara Taylor has shown, Owen’s
social critique was broad; for him, the three major evils were religion,
private property, and marriage. Owen believed that all of society had to
change for any single reform to work, and his vehicle was communal living.
In theory, this system would solve the problem of women’s fear of desertion
in free unions; if society as a whole cared for all members, women did not
need individual providers. Moreover, Owenites argued that women could
not be free until they were released from a contract that treated them as
chattels.46
Owen’s views of marriage echoed many earlier rationalist criticisms.
Like Godwin, Owen considered it ‘absurd and farcical’ for two people to
promise ‘to love each other, without any reference to the changes which
may arise in the appearance, qualities, and character of the parties.’ Owen
insisted that marriage was ‘only a legitimate and varnished prostitution.’
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
Both sexes suffered, but women did so the most, since they belonged to
their husbands and vowed to obey, thus soon becoming entirely artificial.
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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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radical couples, 1790–1850
Owen blamed ‘priestly’ superstitions and the system of private family homes
for this situation. Nuclear families perpetuated ignorance and inequality.
Only communal living could rectify these evils.47 He also challenged
conventional arguments about virtue and chastity. He argued that ‘The pure
and genuine chastity of nature’ existed only when unions were from love
alone; otherwise, they were ‘the most degrading prostitution’. Furthermore,
Owen, echoing Wol stonecraft, argued that chastity was necessary for both
sexes, ‘for if men are not chaste, how is it possible for women to be so?’48
Particularly in his assertions about women’s equality, Owen had
support from others in the movement, mostly famously William Thompson
and Ann Wheeler, in their work, Appeal of One Half the Human Race,
Women, Against the Pretensions of the other Half, Men, published in 1825. In
a much-quoted passage, Thompson scoffed at idea of marriage as a
contract:
‘A contract implies the voluntary assent of both the contracting parties …
Have women been consulted as to the terms of this pretended contract?’
Thompson pointed out that marriage gave all the power and advantages
to men and all the duties to women, and compared it to the ‘contract’
between slaves and their masters.49 Frances Morrison, one of Owen’s most
fervent supporters, echoed these themes. Born Frances Cooper, she lived
with James Morrison for some years before they married, partly because
she had ‘an almost pathological distrust’ of marriage. She would not marry
him ‘until she knew “if he was kind”’, and she may not have done so at all
except that she became pregnant.50 Though her own marriage was happy,
Frances complained about women’s social limitations, and denounced the
sexual double standard. Morrison agreed with Owen that the only hope for
women was to organise society ‘rational y’.51 Similarly, Charles Southwel ,
a Socialist speaker in the 1840s, insisted that women must be educated so
they would marry for the right reasons; a woman should be ‘the friend
and companion of man’ rather than a ‘cringing slave’.52
The Owenite movement, then, made a strong argument against
traditional marriage. But what to put in its place? Owen proposed an
inexpensive ceremony without the interference of church or state. The
couple simply stated their intention publicly to be married. They then
went through a year’s probation after which they could divorce by mutual
consent, though they had to wait six months for the community to attempt
reconciliation. Owenites insisted that their system was cheaper, simpler,
and more flexible than the traditional one. Joshua Hobson wrote in 1838 that
it ‘recognizes no authority but that of love – no tie but that of tenderness’.
Because only happy couples stayed together, men and women developed
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
rational y and virtuously.53
In some Owenite communities, like Queenswood, couples married by
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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.