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radical couples, 1790–1850
in other words. They thus did not give ammunition to their opponents,
though they also lost the opportunity to speak out for marriage reform. On
the other hand, considering the criticism that Fox received, perhaps they
would have had little influence on the subject anyway if their union was
public knowledge.
Unacknowledged relationships involved trade-offs, since the couple
appeared to be hypocritical by defying marriage laws but rarely speaking
about them. But Gillies and Southwood Smith both worked for other
changes – those of sanitary laws and mining conditions – that might
have failed had they lived openly together. The couple also protected and
supported Mary Southwood Smith. Like Flower and Fox, they did not have
children, a necessity for their situation to remain discreet; one is simply
unable to know if this was by choice or circumstance, since they never
wrote about it. Despite an occasional whisper of scandal, their devotion
to each other survived through many years. The support of the radical
Unitarians was also crucial; again, the alternative social group made a great
difference.73
Mary Gillies was Margaret’s older sister, a firm feminist who argued
for associated housing for married couples and women’s right to work.
Mary’s life changed when Richard Hengist Horne became part of their
circle. Horne was a self-taught poet who struggled to make a living from
his writings. His acceptance into the group gave him intellectual and social
contacts and influenced him to direct his reforming zeal to helping the
working class and supporting women’s rights. Primarily, he came under
the influence of Mary, the most important person in his adult life. Mary
was his confidante, his assistant, his workmate, and, as he put it, ‘My oldest,
truest friend’.74
The exact relationship between Richard and Mary is a mystery. They
did live together for a time (in 1846), but they never openly cohabited, and
Horne later married a younger woman. The couple were emotional y, but
probably not physical y, intimate. Stil , Mary often acted as a wife – planning
meals for Richard, sewing flannel into his waistcoat, offering emotional
support. When Horne became editor of the Monthly Repository, she was
his firmest helper, doing editorial and secretarial tasks.75 Why the two did
not marry is puzzling; Ann Blainey speculates that Mary did not like the
physical side of marriage and women’s subordination. Perhaps Horne also
did not want to; Mary was three years older and had her own career. For
whatever reason, the friendship was enough for both of them.76
All the same, when Horne did marry, in 1847, he chose a young girl
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named Kate St George Foggo; she was half his age and, seemingly, malleable
and innocent. Mary took the news well and remained his friend, but the
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living in sin
intensity of their relationship lessened. Stil , they never lost touch with
each other, and he was shattered when she died in 1870. Their relationship
may have been closer because they did not live together, giving each other
independence. But the success of their union was, again, its discretion.
If they were sexual y involved, they have left little indication of it, and
certainly neither allowed her or his personal feelings to interfere with
duties or work.77
Fox and Flower lived openly together, and the Gillieses practiced
discretion. A third option was to marry, legal y or illegal y, as in the unions
within the Wade/Linton family. Thomas Wade was a young poet when he
entered the South Place circle. Lucy Susannah Bridgman was a concert
pianist who had married a confectioner and had one son by the time she
met Wade, probably in 1834. When Wade and Bridgman became lovers is
unclear; she still had a different address from Wade’s in 1839. Nevertheless,
she gave birth to Wade’s son, and Wade celebrated their ‘chainless union’
in poems in the mid-1830s. They, then, followed their hearts rather than
the law. Stil , they married as soon as Bridgman was widowed in the early
1840s. Theirs was, to all appearances, a happy match; at any rate, Wade left
his widow his estate at his death in 1875.78
In contrast to his brother-in-law, W. J. Linton was an artisan, not
middle-class, and made his living from his engravings. His financial
problems were more severe, then, than the others in the Craven Hill group.
Linton’s union with Emily Wade was not legal because she was his sister-
in-law; they did not make a conscious choice to cohabit. Stil , Linton chose
the Wade sisters in part because of their independence and intelligence; he
described them as ‘“such women in their purity, intelligence … as Shelley
might have sung as fitted to redeem a world.”’ Also, despite his choice
to marry, Linton publicly disdained state and church controls, insisting
that ‘“all legislative interference with marriage”’ should be abolished. He
resented the ‘illegitimate’ status of his children, too; forty years later he
wrote a poem complaining about it.79
Linton had married Lara Wade in 1837; after her death in 1838, both her
mother and sister Emily moved in with him. When he and Emily became
intimate is impossible to know, but she had his son in 1842. Linton insisted
that ‘No truer marriage ever Couple made’, and they had six more children
over the next several years. Linton supported this brood by his engravings,
all the while also working for Chartism and publishing radical journals.
Unsurprisingly, Emily’s intellectual development halted, yet she never
wavered in her support for William. When he began the English Republic,
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she wrote ‘“It is a doubtful speculation … but it is no use fretting or fearing
… dear W must serve his Great Cause.”’ (The journal failed in 1854.) The
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radical couples, 1790–1850
privation and menial toil took its tol , and Emily died of consumption in
1856, having never lessened her affection for her husband.80 Linton and
Wade’s marriage was happy; indeed, in later years, Linton compared his
third wife, Eliza Lynn, unfavourably with his second. All the same, though
so for Emily. Wade could hardly pursue her own interests when she was
caring for a family that grew every year, especial y on an uncertain income.
Wade stated after the birth of her fourth child that she wanted no more
children, yet she had three more in 1851, 1852, and 1854. She made Linton’s
work possible, but at the cost of burying her own potential.81 Because they
had economic problems and several children, they contrast with the other
Craven Hill couples; their affinal union was more acceptable to the wider
society, yet their economic woes made their lives more difficult.
The work of the Radical Unitarians in promoting women’s rights and
in challenging marriage laws was crucial to future reform movements; their
writings influenced the women’s movement that began in the 1850s.82 The
free unions of the Radical Unitarians, however, were hedged with many
caveats. Most were undertaken because they had no choice, at least some of
them were platonic, and others were discreet. In addition, the gender roles
of these households were traditional; the women’s careers were slowed
or stopped (except Gillies and Bridgman Wade), particularly when the
couples had children. None of the women expressed resentment, but none
suggested that men share the domestic duties, even when the women had
careers. In this, they were similar to the Owenites, an interesting cross-
class convergence.
The middle-class standing of most of these couples protected them
from financial struggles; Fox and Southwood Smith could afford to support
two families. But that same class standing also enjoined public silence. Fox
and Southwood Smith succeeded in many movements for change, but they
did not have much influence on divorce reform. Fox worked openly on
the issue but was compromised by his personal interest, and the others
avoided it entirely. Thus, whichever choice the couples made, their happy,
non-marital relationships had limited influence on the marriage debate.
Conclusion
The first half of the nineteenth century was one of vigorous marital
nonconformity. Many groups articulated dissents against marriage, mostly
stemming from a belief in perfectability and human reason. In addition,
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
these movements criticised two elements: marital indissolubility and
women’s legal disabilities. Stil , even in the most radical groups, the majority
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living in sin
of couples married, and those who cohabited usual y did so because they
had no choice. In this, they were similar to the cohabiting couples around
them; their only differences were their philosophical (and often public)
justifications for their choices.
In all of these groups, women and children had special difficulties.
Because men did not do domestic work and did not give birth to children,
women’s needs often got buried under housekeeping. Even more crucial y,
the freedom in these unions was contingent; women, no matter how well-
educated or independent, were more likely to sacrifice their needs for men
than vice versa. Also, a system of unions that lasted only as long as both
parties wished them to do so begged the question of what to do when one
party wanted to leave. This was particularly acute for deserted women,
who had damaged reputations and few economic prospects. And only the
Owenites had a solution to the problems of children, since they eschewed
single family units. With all others, children might bear the brunt of their
parents’ radicalism; the fate of Fanny Imlay, like that of her mother, hovered
over radical couples throughout the century.
Despite these dilemmas, most of these couples did not suffer total
isolation. All of them had like-minded people around them to offer
support, even in the respectable classes. Poor couples, of course, had more
problems because they could seldom support more than one family, but
sometimes, as with Owenism, they found temporary solutions. Whatever
the gender and class terms, and whatever the degree of radicalism, the
number of men and women willing to support new family forms showed
strong dissent from the English laws and church. Unsurprisingly, then, the
dissent continued into the middle and late nineteenth century.
Notes
1 Gillis, For Better, For Worse, pp. 100–5.
2 Quoted from Gil is, For Better, For Worse, pp. 222; Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, p. 8.
3 R. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 1957), pp. 197–207; 264; 316–76; P. Byrne, Perdita: The
Life of Mary Robinson (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), pp. 211–54; 293–305; 350–1.
4 Quoted from P. Marshal , Wil iam Godwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984),
p. 88.
5 W. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice 3 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1946), II, 507–12, quotes from pp. 508, 507, and 509; Marshall, Wil iam Godwin,
pp. 88–90.
6 M. Wol stonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Scribner and
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
Welford, 1890), pp. 118–19.
7 M. Wol stonecraft, Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1975), pp. 89, 128 (for quote); Vindication, p. 72; C. Kegan Paul (ed.), Mary
j
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radical couples, 1790–1850
Wol stonecraft: Letters to Imlay (London: Kegan Paul, 1879), pp. 84–7.
8 J. Todd, Mary Wol stonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Colombia University Press,
2000), pp. 426–32.
9 Kegan Paul, Mary Wol stonecraft, pp. 40–1; Wol stonecraft to Imlay, February 1794.
10 Ibid. , p. 85, Wol stonecraft to Imlay, 30 December 1794, pp. 84–7; Todd, Mary
Wol stonecraft, pp. 231–60.
11 Kegan Paul, Mary Wol stonecraft, p. 102, Wollstonecraft to Imlay, 10 February 1795,
pp. 100–3; Todd, Mary Wol stonecraft, pp. 261–87; 303–64, quote from p. 303.
12 Kegan Paul, Mary Wol stonecraft, pp. 112–14; Todd, Mary Wol stonecraft, p. 354.
13 Kegan Paul, Mary Wol stonecraft, p. 187–9.
14 W. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London:
Penguin Books, 1987), p. 245 and note.
15 Ibid. , p. 258 and note.
16 R. Wardle (ed.), Godwin & Mary: Letters of Wil iam Godwin and Mary Wol stonecraft
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), pp. 14–23, 40–1; Wol stonecraft to
G
odwin, 10 November 1796, p. 46 (for quote).
17 Quoted in Marshal , Wil iam Godwin, p. 186.
18 W. St Clair, The Godwins and the Shel eys: A Biography of a Family (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1989), pp. 316–21; Marshal , Wil iam Godwin, pp. 302–5.
19 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shel eys, pp. 321–2.
20 A. Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
pp. 47–89; P. Grosskurth, Byron: The Flawed Angel (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
21 M. Seymour, Mary Shel ey (New York: Grove Press, 2000), p. 96; St Clair, The Godwins
and the Shel eys, pp. 356–66.
22 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shel eys, pp. 371–3; Marshal , Wil iam Godwin, pp. 305–
21; Seymour, Mary Shel ey, pp. 98–130; K. C. Hill-Miller, ‘My Hideous Progeny’: Mary
Shel ey, Wil iam Godwin, and the Father–Daughter Relationship (Newark, NJ: University
of Delaware Press, 1995), pp. 32–42.
23 Hill-Miller, ‘My Hideous Progeny’, pp. 22–5; Seymour, Mary Shel ey, pp. 48–50; 57–63;
70–2; Marshal , Wil iam Godwin, pp. 240–54; 295–8.
24 Marshal , Wil iam Godwin, p. 324.
25 St Clair, The Godwins and the Shel eys, pp. 414–22; Seymour, Mary Shel ey, pp. 175–8;
Marshal , Wil iam Godwin, pp. 323–5; P. R Feldman and D. Scott-Kilvert (eds), The
Journals of Mary Shel ey, 1814–44 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), I, 1–8; 44.
26 Seymour, Mary Shel ey, p. 116.
27 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 43–4; 172–82; R. Owen, The Marriage System
of the New Moral World (Leeds: J. Hobson, 1838), pp. 87–91; J. Wiener, Radicalism and
Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 123; W. J. Linton, Three Score and Ten Years, 1820 to 1890:
Recol ections (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), p. 26.
28 K. Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s
Rights Movement, 1831–51 (London: St Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 63; Seymour, Mary Shel ey,
pp. 556–7; ‘Shelley on marriage’, Anarchist 1, #4 (1886), 7; E. Aveling and E. Marx Aveling,
Shel ey’s Socialism (Oxford: Leslie Peger, 1947), pp. 12–13; J. Rose, The Intel ectual Life of
the British Working Class (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 35–6; 48; 120;
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Living in Sin Page 38