Carey Alcohol in The Atlantic

After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth Century
Jenny DiPlacidi · Karl Leydecker
Editors
After Marriage in
the Long Eighteenth
Century
Literature, Law and Society
Editors
Jenny DiPlacidi Karl Leydecker
School of English University of Dundee
University of Kent Dundee, UK
Canterbury, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-60097-0 ISBN 978-3-319-60098-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60098-7
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Acknowledgements
This book has its origins in the workshop series ‘After Marriage in the
Long Eighteenth Century’ held at the University of Kent. We thank
all of the participants who made the events so successful and stimulat-
ing, and the School of English, the School of European Culture and
Languages, Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
(KIASH) and the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century at
the University of Kent, which generously funded the workshops. We are
indebted to the contributors to After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth
Century: Literature, Law and Society for offering such rich and diverse
treatments of the topic and for making this volume possible. The guid-
ance and encouragement from Camille Davies and Ben Doyle at
Palgrave Macmillan was instrumental throughout the publication pro-
cess. We thank the National Galleries of Scotland and the Trustees of the
Goodwood Collection, which have allowed us to reproduce the images
in this book. Finally, we offer our sincere gratitude to our respective
partners, whose constant support throughout the writing and editing of
the book has been invaluable.
v
Contents
After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth Century: Introduction 1

Jenny DiPlacidi
Undoing the Marriage: The Resort to Annulment 21

Rebecca Probert
Bearing Grudges: Marital Conflict and the Intergenerational

Family 41
Joanne Begiato
Handsome, Gallant, Gentle, Rich: Before and After Marriage

in the Tales of Charles Perrault 65
James Fowler
‘Knights of Matrimony’, Christian Duty and Millenium Hall 91

Robin Runia
‘Be but a Little Deaf and Blind … and Happiness You’ll

Surely Find’: Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Magazines
for Women 107
Jennie Batchelor
vii
viii Contents
The Making and Breaking of Wedlock: Visualising Jane,

Duchess of Gordon After Marriage 129
Heather Carroll
Rearticulating the Economics of Exchange: Incest and After

Marriage in the Gothic 159
Jenny DiPlacidi
Marriage and its Queer Identifications in the Anne Lister

Diaries 181
Chris Roulston
Index 205
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Jenny DiPlacidi is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies and

Romanticism at the University of Kent. Her research focuses on repre-
sentations of gender, sexuality, violence and transgression and their rela-
tionship to concerns central to eighteenth-century society, such as the
legal position of women, kinship and autonomy. She explores these top-
ics in areas often neglected by scholarship: anonymous works, the Gothic
and periodical fiction. Her book Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and
Transgression (MUP, 2018) analyses the complexities of the incest the-
matic in Gothic novels, manuscripts and plays. She is working on a book
examining romantic-era magazine fiction and its relationship with popu-
lar—and canonical—literature.
Karl Leydecker is Professor of German and Comparative Literature and

Vice-Principal Learning and Teaching at the University of Dundee in
Scotland. He has published widely on marriage and divorce in German
and European literature from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s,
and German drama and social history from 1890 to 1930. His book
publications include Marriage and Divorce in the Plays of Hermann
Sudermann (1996) and After Intimacy: The Culture of Divorce in the
West since 1789 (2007, co-edited with Nicholas White).
ix
x Editors and Contributors
Contributors
Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the

University of Kent. She has published widely on eighteenth-century
women’s writing, representations of gender, work, sexuality and the
body. Her most recent monograph is Women’s Work: Labour, Gender,
Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester University Press, 2010; paperback
2014). Between 2014 and 2016, she was the Principal Investigator of a
Leverhulme Research Project on The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and
is currently writing a book on the place of the periodical in Romantic
print culture.
Joanne Begiato is Professor in History and head of History, Philosophy
& Culture at Oxford Brookes University. She specialises in the history
of masculinities, family and marriage. Her publications under the name
Bailey include Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in
England 1660–1800 (CUP, 2003) and Parenting in England 1760–1830:
Emotions, Identity and Generation (OUP, 2012). She has just completed
a book titled Sex and the Church in the Long Eighteenth Century with
co-author Prof. William Gibson (IB Tauris, 2017), and is working on
a monograph called Materialising Manliness in Britain c. 1780–1880s:
Men’s Bodies, Emotions, and Material Culture.
Heather Carroll recently completed her Ph.D. in History of Art at the
University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include portraits, satiri-
cal prints, and gender in eighteenth-century Britain. Her thesis examined
the visual representation of women who wielded, and were seen to trans-
gress, gendered political roles and who were conspicuously active in the
elite social spheres of eighteenth-century Britain.
James Fowler is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Kent and
Associate Editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. His research focuses on
‘cross-Channel’ cultural exchanges during the Enlightenment era. He has
written on various authors of the (long) Eighteenth Century, including
Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Richardson.
Publications by James Fowler include: Voicing Desire: Family and Sexuality
in Diderot’s Narrative (2000); The Libertine’s Nemesis: The Prude in
‘Clarissa’ and the ‘Roman libertin’ (2011); and Richardson and the philos-
ophes (2014). He is currently working on political aspects of French and
British ‘Augustan’ verse satire (1660–1740).
Editors and Contributors xi
Rebecca Probert is Professor of Law at the University of Exeter. Her

research focuses on the history of marriage, bigamy, divorce and cohabi-
tation, and she is the author of numerous articles and books, includ-
ing Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A
Reassessment (2009) and The Legal Regulation of Cohabitation: From
Fornicators to Family, 1600–2010 (2012), both published by Cambridge
University Press. She has also published a number of guides for family
historians, including Marriage Law for Genealogists (2012) and Divorced,
Bigamist, Bereaved? (2015), and is co-author (with Joanne Bailey and
Julie Shaffer) of A Noble Affair (2014).
Chris Roulston is Professor of French Studies and Women’s Studies
and Feminist Research at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
Her books include Virtue, Gender and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-
Century Literature (1998) and Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-
Century England and France (2010). She has published articles on
eighteenth-century marriage, including on representations of the
wedding night and on marital advice literature, as well as on Mme de
Graffigny and marriage. She also has publications on Choderlos de
Laclos and education, on Anne Lister, and on the queer eighteenth cen-
tury. She is working on boarding school narratives from the eighteenth
century to the present.
Robin Runia is Associate Professor of English at Xavier University of
Louisiana. She has published articles examining gender and sexual-
ity in the writing of Aphra Behn, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, Charlotte
Lennox, and Mary Shelley. She is working on a monograph project pro-
visionally titled Displaced Britons: Africans and Creoles in the Works of
Maria Edgeworth.
List of Figures
The Making and Breaking of Wedlock: Visualising Jane, Duchess

of Gordon After Marriage
Fig. 1 Angelica Kauffman, Jane Duchess of Gordon, c. 1772–1774,
oil on canvas, 91.4 × 70.7 cm, Scottish National Portrait
Gallery, Edinburgh 132
Fig. 2 Angelica Kauffman, Alexander Duke of Gordon, c. 1772–1774,
oil on canvas, 91.4 × 70.4 cm, Scottish National Portrait
Gallery, Edinburgh 133
Fig. 3 Matthew Darly, The Breeches in the Fiera Maschereta, 1775,
etching, M. Darly, 17.4 × 12.6 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis
Walpole Library, Yale University 136
Fig. 4 Matthew Darly, The Petticoat at the Fieri Maschareta, 1775,
etching, M. Darly, 17.5 × 12.5 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis
Fig. 5 W.A. Smith, Alexander 4th Duke of Gordon with his Family,
c. 1787, oil on panel, 88 × 136 cm. By permission
of the Trustees of the Goodwood Collection 139
Fig. 6 Scotch Wedding, 23 September 1789, hand-coloured etching,
W Holland, 25 × 37 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole
Library, Yale University 143
Fig. 7 James Gillray, The Gordon-Knot,-or-the Bonny-Duchess hunting
the Bedfordshire Bull, 19 April 1797, hand-coloured etching,
Hannah Humphrey, 26 × 36.4 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 8 Charles Williams, The Gord-ian Knot still untied

or the Disapointed Dido still in Despair, 9 May 1802,
hand-coloured etching, SW Fores, 26.9 × 33.3 cm,
British Museum, London 148
Fig. 9 Charles Williams, A Racket at a Rout or, Billingsgate Removed
to the West, 9 June 1803, hand-coloured etching, SW Fores,
23.6 × 33.7 cm, British Museum, London 149
After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth
Century: Introduction
Jenny DiPlacidi
As his hero and heroine pass the matrimonial barrier, the novelist generally
drops the curtain, as if the drama were over then; the doubts and struggles of
life ended: as if, once landed in the marriage country, all were green and pleas-
ant there: and wife and husband had nothing to do but link each other’s arms
together, and wander gently downwards towards old age in happy fruition.
William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–1848).
Sir Charles is very dangerously wounded – a friend of my lord’s hurries him away
to France, and he leaves his wife thoroughly convinced of her delinquency.—
The widow follows him, but he will not have any farther connection with her.—
She is so much hurt by his indifference, and the loss of her character, that she is
seized with a violent fever, which puts an end to her life […] The moral of this
history cannot be too much attended to by the married of both sexes.
The Critical Review XXVIII (1769)1
The contradiction between Thackeray’s perception of the treatment of

the ‘marriage country’ by novelists and the review of The Masquerade
indicates the extent to which representations of the nuptial state
and their understandings within the long eighteenth century varied.
J. DiPlacidi (*) 
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: j.diplacidi@kent.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. DiPlacidi and K. Leydecker (eds.), After Marriage in the Long
Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60098-7_1
2 J. DiPlacidi
Thackeray’s depiction of writers who conclude their narratives with

weddings (because marriage is a state ill-suited to drama) gently ridi-
cules the notion of peaceful and uneventful unions whilst overlooking
the many novels that centred on the period after marriage. The review
of The Masquerade, by contrast, points to the cultural significance of
narratives driven by dramatic incidents after marriage as both didactic
and entertaining, suggesting the possibility of the fictive history offer-
ing a useful moral to ‘the married of both sexes’. Although seemingly
at odds, Thackeray’s description of novelists and the review demonstrate
the degree to which varying conceptions of married life were a central
preoccupation of eighteenth-century society and featured prominently in
its various cultural forms. Yet the popularity of the eighteenth-century
courtship narrative has allowed subsequent writers such as Thackeray—
and, importantly, modern scholarship—to overlook the numerous novel-
ists who did indeed look beyond the curtain to the struggles and drama
of married life as material central to their works.
The essays in After Marriage in Literature, Law and Society in the
Long Eighteenth Century examine the intersections between the ways
marriage was represented in eighteenth-century writing and art, experi-
enced in society, and regulated by law. It brings together an interdiscipli-
nary and comparative series of essays by social historians and historians of
law, literature, art and print culture that work together in a dialogue to
model a new approach to thinking about after marriage. While partici-
pating in an important trend in eighteenth-century studies by focusing
on the intersections between social, cultural and literary histories, this
book is unique in exploring across not only a variety of disciplines, but
also across Europe, the wider and connected cultural implications of the
wealth of material on familial, social and sexual life after marriage. It does
so within an interdisciplinary framework that unites traditionally distinct
approaches to ‘after marriage’ to analyse the connections revealed across
disciplinary and geographical boundaries.
Scholarship is increasingly focused on marriage, family and courtship
in the long eighteenth century. The relevance of and critical interest in
this topic are demonstrated by the current focus on the actualities and
representations, in particular, of women’s lives in the eighteenth cen-
tury (for example, the 2009 annual conference of the British Society
for Eighteenth-Century Studies had as its subject ‘Eighteenth-Century
Lives’), where marriage and its aftermath necessarily occupy a central
position. As evidenced by recent works from Joanne Bailey, Ruth Perry,
Ellen Pollak, Lee Holcombe and others, scholarly interest in this field
AFTER MARRIAGE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: INTRODUCTION 3
is extensive. Important recent reexaminations of marital experiences and

representations thereof include Chris Roulston’s Narrating Marriage in
Eighteenth-Century England and France, Rebecca Probert’s Marriage
Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment and
Joanne Bailey’s Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in
England 1660–1800.2 This book seeks to go beyond analysis of schol-
ars in individual disciplines by gathering together into a comprehensive
collection important and innovative examinations of this significant topic
from scholars across the disciplines.
This volume’s elision of conventional disciplinary boundaries allows
for a distinctive examination of the overlapping and conflicting accounts
of after marriage and its surrounding politics in productive ways, mak-
ing apparent the continuities between the relationship of marriage to
law, society, culture, art and religion. After Marriage in Literature, Law
and Society in the Long Eighteenth Century, like Ann Lewis and Markman
Ellis’s book Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture, which draws
together the work of leading scholars in an excellent account of the topic
in a similar structure, unites the explorations of marriage, family and sex-
uality across diverse fields.3 And similar to Maxine Berg and Elizabeth
Eger’s Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable
Goods,4 a series of essays that raises questions about the connections
between commerce, luxury, women and philosophy, and Kathleen
Hardesty Doig and Dorothy Medlin’s British-French Exchanges in the
Eighteenth Century,5 our volume offers an interdisciplinary treatment
of an important line of research in eighteenth-century studies. While
broad in terms of methodology and disciplines, this collection remains
closely attentive to after marriage as it is represented in various cultural
forms and as it was experienced and regulated in the eighteenth century.
Demonstrating the profitable intellectual contribution afforded by merg-
ing the work of scholars across the disciplines, this volume examines how
the insights regarding social practices and laws can be seen at play within
the complexities surrounding the convention of marriage’s function as a
narrative conclusion.
Chris Roulston argues that throughout the eighteenth century ‘the
transformation of marriage into narrative […] oscillated between its ideal
and its more troubled representations […] The narration of marriage
is caught between the general – the laws, rules and customs that make
up the institution – and the particular – the private, subjective experi-
ence of the couple – which is also the experience of narrative itself’.6
4 J. DiPlacidi
It is with such oscillations in experiences and representations that the

essays in this book are concerned. The essays intervene in many of the
longstanding critical accounts of marriage and the family, which have
recently been coming under increased scrutiny. The various narra-
tive possibilities beyond the marriage ceremony, as the reviewer of The
Masquerade points to, provided eighteenth-century society with models
of behaviour and conduct to emulate or censure. This volume’s essays
focus on such marital experiences beyond the ‘matrimonial barrier’
to encompass the breadth of life after marriage in the eighteenth cen-
tury not only in Britain, but also in continental Europe. The essays are
broadly conceived to include representations of married life (after the
marriage ceremony), encompassing issues of marital bliss, spousal abuse,
parenting, incest, infidelity and career, and the period after the end of
marriage to include annulment, widowhood and divorce. This study
thus probes the interface between the lived experience of marriage in the
eighteenth century and its representation in a variety of cultural forms.
In this introduction, the dominant accounts of marriage and the fam-
ily in the long eighteenth century and their ongoing influence on con-
temporary scholarship are outlined. This leads on to an exploration of
the most recent interrogations of the longstanding critical works across
the range of disciplines represented in the essays and the scholarly
insights provided therein on eighteenth-century family structure, mar-
riage laws, divorce, separation and widowhood. After briefly showing
how such interpretations have advanced eighteenth-century studies, the
introduction concludes by demonstrating how the essays in this volume
engage with each other to enrich the current conversation on after mar-
riage in the period.
Conventional Accounts of Marriage

and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century
The traditional view encapsulated in Vanity Fair, that the eighteenth-

century novel in particular did not centrally focus on marriage or its
aftermath has long dominated the critical tradition. Ian Watt’s influential
The Rise of the Novel (1957) established the critical commonplace that
marriage in novels signals the termination of narrative. Arguing that the
rise of the novel in the eighteenth century was ‘connected with the much
greater freedom of women in modern society’ to marry partners of their
own choice, he privileges the courtship plot as the dominant mode of fic-
tion in England.7 While Watt accounts for the ascendency of the court-
ship plot by pointing to the contemporary social, cultural and legal shifts
regarding choice and marriage, his analysis tend to overlook the numer-
ous narratives that focus on the marital experience. Examining Samuel
Richardson’s immensely popular and influential Pamela; or Virtue
Rewarded (1740), Watt admits that the novel ‘departs from the usual
pattern in one important respect: […] the narrative does not end with
the marriage, but continues for some two hundred pages’, but fails fully
to address the implications of the narrative that he calls Richardson’s
‘model of conduct’ for a new type of marriage.8
Conduct literature, prevalent in the eighteenth century, took many
forms not limited to the novel but also including short tales for children
and adolescents, advice columns in periodicals, anecdotes, essays, poems
and ballads, and frequently made its subject the period after the mar-
riage ceremony. Yet representations of and plots driven by post-marital
incidents were far from unique to texts that were intended to model
appropriate conduct for their readers. When Ruth Yeazell argues that
eighteenth-century society focused on female modesty that ‘centred on
questions of middle-class marriage; and novels of the period take their
most typical form as narratives of courtship’ she draws upon Watt’s
premise that eighteenth-century novels primarily narrated the period
before marriage, linking the courtship plot to the increase in the mid-
dling classes.9 The privileging of the courtship plot has caused much
criticism to overlook the presence of adultery in the eighteenth-century
novel, locating that thematic as part of a French, rather than British
tradition.10 Bill Overton argues, for example, that while ‘the theme of
adultery’ was part of the British literary tradition until the late eight-
eenth century, it was then ‘squeezed out’, appearing in European nov-
els but absent from British narratives until the end of the nineteenth
century.11 Yet as several of the essays in this volume will demonstrate,
rather than being departures from a standard paradigm, narratives of life
after marriage, including plots featuring adultery, are ubiquitous in nov-
els of the long eighteenth century as well as in its various other cultural
productions.
The ascendency of the courtship plot in literary scholarship can par-
tially be traced to the teleological understanding of marriage and fam-
ily as evolving throughout the eighteenth century towards companionate
unions and the nuclear family. Most firmly and methodically established
6 J. DiPlacidi
in Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–

1800 the theory of familial and marital development as a linear progres-
sion has until recently been the accepted model.12 Likewise, Randolph
Trumbach’s The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and
Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (1978) asserted that
in the long eighteenth century the European family shifted ‘from a patri-
archal to an egalitarian or domestic system of household relationships’.13
In a sense, these seminal works codified what earlier, literary scholars
such as Watt had already long argued and used to frame their literary
analyses: that the eighteenth century saw ‘the development of a new kind
of family system […] the “conjugal” family’.14
The reliance upon the companionate marriage model as a lens
through which to view eighteenth-century texts is ongoing; Katherine
Sobba Green uses Stone’s and Trumbach’s conception of marriage to
argue that ‘for heterosexual women in this period, especially, the ideol-
ogy of companionate marriage involved such thoroughgoing revisions in
self-perception that a new literary form was required to represent their
altered roles’ and that this form was the courtship novel.15 More recently
Laura E. Thomason has argued that the ‘so-called rise to companionacy
was not as smooth as scholars of marriage have previously suggested’ yet
she struggles to move away from the evolution of the conjugal family
to explain its presence in eighteenth-century novels.16 The social history
of the family and marriage has thus had a longstanding role in critical
accounts of eighteenth-century literature in general, and the novel in
particular. As Christopher Flint argues, ‘the urge to align the history of
the family with the history of prose fiction has been particularly acute’.17
Recently, Stone’s narrative of the family as evolving linearly with
the economic move towards capitalism into nuclear families grounded
in companionate marriage has, however, been largely discounted by
social historians.18 Works such as Naomi Tadmor’s Family and Friends
in Eighteenth-Century England (2001) and Joanne Bailey’s Unquiet
Lives have challenged the traditional account of the family, offering new
insights that have been taken up by eighteenth-century scholars across
the disciplines. Tadmor and Bailey, for example, have each examined
the structure and understanding of family and marriage in eighteenth-
century England through careful analyses of shifts in configurations of
kinship, sexuality, marriage and laws.19 Their accounts delineate the legal
and social changes in definitions of family to reveal that the historical
narrative of family as moving away from an emphasis on consanguineal
bonds to the conjugal tie is too simplistic. Rather, in the long eighteenth
century, conjugal, affinal, and consanguineal relatives were all considered
kin and integral to the family structure, which was, Bailey points out,
much more adaptable than traditional evolutionary models suggest.20
The familial bond existed regardless of actual kinship status to include, as
Tadmor argues, other social ties such as friends and neighbours. Tadmor
notes the importance in tracing how those in the eighteenth century
described their relationships themselves and that paying attention to lin-
guistic terms enables us ‘to be able to re-locate historical family forms
within rich webs of kinship, friendship, patronage, economic ties, neigh-
bourhood ties, and, not least, political ties’.21 Marital experience took
place amongst these complex ties and varying socioeconomic statuses,
and as Bailey argues, these experiences defy simplistic models of both
marriage and sex: ‘both the marital power balance and the sexual double
standard were far more nuanced in practice than stereotypes might sug-
gest’.22 Such new understandings allow for broader definitions of family
than previously asserted and in turn open up new and richer readings of
representations of marriage and family in the eighteenth century.
A number of the most innovative interdisciplinary studies in
the British context such as Eve Bannet’s The Domestic Revolution:
Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel, Ellen Pollak’s Incest and
the English Novel, 1684–1814, Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations: The
Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818
and, most recently, Katherine Binhammer’s The Seduction Narrative
in Britain, 1747–1800 have drawn on historical, anthropological, and
legal sources in addition to literary analysis.23 In focusing on marriage
and courtship to tease out the relationship between social, cultural and
literary histories, scholars have seen literature as a way of reflecting,
endorsing, contesting, compensating for, or otherwise negotiating the
complexities of changes in the law, the social structure and the domes-
tic household in the period, particularly in the wake of Hardwicke’s
1753 Marriage Act. In her book Marriage Law and Practice in the Long
Eighteenth Century, A Reassessment Rebecca Probert draws together
legal history and literature, analysing the language of laws, parish regis-
ters, and contemporary fiction to argue compellingly for a radical reas-
sessment of the traditional scholarly view of the Marriage Act as cruel
and ineffective.24 Meanwhile Pollak’s work examines the philosophical,
political, sexual, legal, religious and social discourses surrounding kin-
ship and marriage to demonstrate that eighteenth-century ‘stories about
8 J. DiPlacidi
incestuous relations contributed to the cultural work of regulating desire

through the mechanism of its discursive production in the expanded
medium of print’.25 In a similar vein, Perry’s interdisciplinary approach
produces nuanced readings of the preoccupation of eighteenth-century
writers with representations of kinship, examining the conflicts between
marriage, the family, and the individual within a diverse range of texts.
These scholars and others have successfully complicated narratives
about the rise of the nuclear family and have done a great deal to enrich
accounts of the rise of the novel and the genre’s cultural functions in the
period. Reassessments of marriage and marital behaviour are particularly
fruitful for eighteenth-century studies given that it is the nineteenth cen-
tury that has traditionally (but only partly correctly) been seen as the
period when the British novel shifted its focus from courtship to mar-
riage and its dissolution. Scholarship that has examined the nineteenth-
century adultery thematic has done much work to, as Kelly Hager has
described, ‘understand why the history of the English novel has ignored
or overlooked the failed-marriage-plot’.26 Works like Hager’s and Tony
Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression, for example,
have helped to make visible the marriage and failed-marriage plots in the
Victorian period that, as Tanner argues, serve to mediate ‘natural, famil-
ial, social and transcendental laws’.27 The nineteenth century has been
characterised as the heyday of the novel of adultery, albeit even more so
in the European tradition, and the work of scholars in this line provides
an important model for those invested in recovering the tradition of
adultery narratives and failed marriage plots that make up a large part of
eighteenth-century texts.
To similarly recover the after marriage narrative within the long eight-
eenth century it is likewise necessary to reclaim the failed-marriage or
adultery plot so frequently aligned in scholarship with the French rather
than the British eighteenth-century novel.28 To this end, recent scholar-
ship on the cross-channel correspondences between British and French
fiction, often viewed as incongruous, have raised important questions
about influence and exchange.29 Chris Roulston’s comparative study
Narrating Marriage demonstrates the links between the British and
French traditions of marital representations in the novel in the latter half
of the eighteenth century, arguing that ‘in both France and England,
marriage narratives began to emerge alongside courtship and adultery
plots, as novels in their own right and as subplots within novels’.30 This
contemporaneous development reveals, Roulston asserts, that in spite of
the distinct historical contexts of the countries’ literature and their social
and cultural differences regarding marriage, influences from romances,
satires, and dramas crossed the channel. As the collection of essays in
British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century (2007) demonstrates,
philosophical, artistic, literary, epistolary and social exchanges between
the British and French proliferated in the period.31 Such cross-channel
influences are thus discernible not only in the development of the novel
but across a range of texts and media such as engravings, portraiture, and
satirical illustrations, all of which provided spaces in which marital experi-
ences were depicted.32
Enriching the Conversation on ‘After Marriage’

Innumerable have been the histories, founded on fact, of single women;
of Miss and Miss such a one; (sometimes distinguished with a dash —,
or a star*; sometimes exhibited with their names either g–tt–d, or at full
length:) as if the whole duty of a woman was included in a state of virgin-
ity, and ended upon her commencing a wife. Now whatever people may
think of the duties of virgins and wives, I will venture to affirm, that a
widow has a still more difficult part to perform on the great stage of the
world; especially if she happened to make her first appearance in the matri-
monial character when she was very young.33
The anonymously authored serial fiction ‘Memoirs of a Widow’ provides

an eighteenth-century ‘corrective’ to the dominant narrative of women’s
lives as concluding with marriage. The author’s position, that a woman’s
life does not end upon ‘commencing a wife’ but in fact entails a ‘more
difficult part to perform’ beyond both the marriage ceremony and the
union’s conclusion, intimates the complex relationship between marital
practices and gender; conventional wisdom and lived experience; and
performance and society. In the self-conscious attempt to offer an alter-
native history of women’s experiences, the author attests to the contem-
porary deluge of courtship narratives that she understands to imply that
‘the whole duty of a woman’ is bound up in virginity. Like the anony-
mous author, this collection of essays seeks to redress a paucity of histo-
ries, to look beyond the marriage ceremony and to enrich the scholarly
treatment of ‘after marriage’ by exploring the intricate relationship
between eighteenth-century experiences, representations and the tradi-
tional critical accounts thereof.
10 J. DiPlacidi
Evaluating further the borders between social, cultural and literary

histories has intellectual implications beyond the topic of life after mar-
riage itself. The insights provided by scholars across the disciplines work
together to demonstrate that eighteenth-century representations of after
marriage are more prevalent than writers such as Thackeray—and more
complex than historians such as Stone—suggested. Christopher Flint
demonstrates the interpretative possibilities that open up when consider-
ing ‘domestic ideology as part of a process of social reproduction rather
than a single historical account of the family’s development’, arguing
that ‘the period’s domestic paradigms were as unwieldy as the fiction that
both represented and enabled them’.34 This unwieldiness is explored and
made visible in the interconnected essays herein that range from legal
and social histories of marriage to treatments of marriage in eighteenth-
century periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine, to depictions of married
couples and families in eighteenth-century art, to parallels in French lit-
erature and diaries, to representations of violence and sexuality in Gothic
novels, and to surveys of same-sex partnerships.
As the following essays demonstrate, the narration of married life in
various media was a profitable business for writers whose readers thirsted
for depictions of connubial strife and adultery. Court cases pertaining to
divorce and marital scandal were sensationalised in the media and con-
sumed voraciously by the public. While the conception of that peaceful
and uneventful married life that Thackeray was dubious of was diffused
through the various discourses on and representations of marriage, so too
were counter models of unhappy unions. The seeming range of threats
to the marital state proliferate in representations of marriage and its
aftermath; the portrayals of married life, incidents after the marriage cer-
emony, and endangered unions are inescapable subjects in literature, art,
advice columns, news items and dramas throughout the period. Changes
in the laws pertaining to marriage and divorce and the possibility of
class fluidity engendered by economic changes—such as that depicted in
Richardson’s Pamela (1740)—were perceived as potential dangers to the
institution of marriage throughout the long eighteenth century.
Yet, as Rebecca Probert argues in her essay for this volume, ‘while
lawlessness lends itself to the demands of narrative more easily than
dull conformity, it should not be forgotten that for the vast majority
of couples the lawfulness of their marriage was a crucial consideration’
(Probert, p. 37). Probert’s essay, ‘Undoing the Marriage: The Resort
To Annulment’, which examines the occurrences of annulled marriages,
particularly in the wake of The Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753,

demonstrates through careful analyses of court cases, legislation and
marriage records that, in contrast to the period’s fiction that sensation-
alised lawless unions, most marriages were, in fact, lawful, and that the
demands and constraints effected by the Act ‘have been much exagger-
ated’ (Probert, p. 32). Substantially revising the traditional perception
of annulments in society and couples’ recourse to the law, Probert’s
essay provides the legal and social contexts that are drawn upon in the
following chapters.
Joanne Bailey’s essay points to such legal and social histories of adul-
tery and marital violence, arguing that ‘the unions that entered the
public sphere in print or law were at the extreme end of the spectrum
of conflict […] We know still less about the other end of the spectrum
where marriage difficulties did not end in scandal, violence, separation
or divorce’ (Bailey, p. 43). Redressing the lack of scholarship that focuses
on marital conflict before this breaking point and its effect within the
family sphere, Bailey draws upon a wealth of accounts of marital experi-
ences including correspondence, diaries, and autobiography. Her analyses
of marriages in crisis but before the recourse to divorce or separation—
experiences which have been neglected by scholarship that tends to focus
on the ‘worst examples of marital cruelty’—offer nuanced readings of
troubled unions to reveal ‘the concerns of unhappy husbands and wives
centred on financial problems and their spouse’s appropriate behaviour,
whether conflict was minor or extreme’ (Bailey, p. 60). Her examination
of how such conflicts were resolved and mediated within the family and
larger society enriches our understanding of marital tensions and their
impact on the wider kinship network.
The literary representations of unhappy unions that both Probert and
Bailey discuss, as well as the role such narratives play as advice or didactic
tales with discernable morals, are both central focuses of James Fowler’s
essay on the fairy tales of Charles Perrault. Perrault’s tales, published in
1697 with a dedication to nineteen-year-old Élisabeth-Charlotte d’Orleans,
daughter to Philippe, Duc d’Orléans and niece to Louis XIV, were first
given to Élisabeth-Charlotte in an illustrated manuscript in 1695. Fowler’s
examination of the tales in light of their position as a gift and their dedi-
catee reveal ‘a commentary on the relationship between dynastic marriage
and mariage d’amour’ that demonstrates that not only is the traditional
scholarly understanding of companionate marriage as corresponding to the
rise in the middling classes overemphasised, but that such companionate
12 J. DiPlacidi
marriages were very much a part of the late seventeenth- and early eight-
eenth-century ancien regime (Fowler, p. 68). The movement between class
boundaries popularised in Pamela (1740) that is achieved through one’s
virtue rather than one’s birth has, Fowler reveals, an important French
precedent in Perrault’s tales in which the author ‘mingles the culture of
the “élite by birth” with that of the “élite by worth”’ (Fowler, p. 83).
The fraught relationship between one’s desire and one’s duty, traditionally
viewed as an eighteenth-century British marital concern, is anticipated in
Perrault’s tales. As Fowler argues, the tales envision a melding of the two
seemingly distinct models of pragmatic or romantic marriage in which ‘an
inescapably dynastic marriage [can] turn out to be, in addition and without
contradiction, a mariage d’amour’ (Fowler, p. 86).
The complicated negotiation between one’s duty to family and society
and one’s individual desires and experiences regarding marriage under-
lies the histories of the women in Sarah Scott’s 1762 novel Millenium
Hall. Robin Runia’s chapter offers a comparative analysis of the work,
often viewed in light of its author’s role as a Bluestocking reformer and
most recently examined as a feminist model of dystopian/utopian com-
munity, through a religious and moral framework. The chapter’s focus
on the social, economic, and personal experiences that influence the nov-
el’s women in light of their invocation of the discourse of religious duty
provides important insights into Scott’s treatment of gender and class.
Runia argues that ‘the women of Millenium Hall testify to the growing
corruption of marriage as an institution among both elites and the lower
orders’ and that the women draw upon their faith in order to escape
from the institution ‘as well as to justify their sacrifice of other women to
it. While the law of the land requires their submission to the institution,
Christian law allows them to “be excused by sending deputies to supply
their places” (163)’ (Runia, p. 104).
While the women of Scott’s novel escape their failed marriages, it is
the mediation of marital conflict within fiction and other genres in the
periodical medium with which Jennie Batchelor’s chapter is concerned.
Her essay on The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) analyses the genres in
which marriage enters eighteenth-century women’s magazines in order
to argue that ‘[t]he magazine’s uniquely interactive format […] has pro-
found implications for how meaning is produced within it and, conse-
quently, such publications paint a picture of married life that is richer and
more complex than that found in any other textual form in the period’
(Batchelor, p. 112). The essay details the range of the periodical’s
articles on marriage that include historical and anthropological essays,

advice columns, satires, real-life marital scandals, tragedies, and court
cases as well as poems and fictional narratives. It then focuses on three
of these genres, ‘the accounts of real-life marital breakdown, advice on
marital problems, and the fantastic fictions in which these difficulties
are overcome – to assess the effect the interaction of these genres with
one another has on our sense of marriage’s meaning for magazine read-
ers’ (Batchelor, p. 113). Working against conventional scholarship that
positions women’s magazines such as The Lady’s Magazine as a vehicle
through which women were rendered ‘passive consumers of a bourgeois
domestic ideal’ (Batchelor, p. 125), Batchelor compellingly argues that
‘the magazine’s interactive character (interactive both in the sense that
it invited readers to engage with content as contributors and also in the
sense that the import of individual articles was derived from their interac-
tion with others in the same issue) means that its concerns are not easily
reducible to particular agendas. This is especially true in the case of the
conservative domestic ideology and sentimental marital ideal with which
the magazine has become erroneously associated’ (Batchelor, p. 125).
The centrality of representations of real-life marital scandal and discord
in the magazines, which Batchelor analyses as part of her essay, are only
one medium in which gossip propagated. Heather Carroll’s analysis of
Jane, Duchess of Gordon (c. 1748–1812) examines the representation of
her marital breakdown in painted portraiture and satirical prints, in con-
trast to previous studies which largely consider only the idealised public
images of formal painted portraiture. Outlining Jane’s background in
light of both cultural and legal differences between marriage in England
and Scotland, Carroll shows that her marriage to Alexander, 4th Duke of
Gordon (1743–1827) is chronicled through its dissolution. The break-
down is depicted via a series of images that increasingly challenge the
gender normativity exemplified within the pendant portraits that charac-
terise the successful period of their union. Carefully weaving together the
historical and social contexts of the Gordons’ marriage with her analyses
of its visual representation, Carroll deftly reveals that the images narrating
their marital and familial conflicts are distinguished by a lack of conform-
ity to gender, sexual, domestic and national ideals and that these images
were eagerly consumed by the public. The chapter’s unique blend of
analyses of portraiture and satirical prints ‘not only offer a more complete
picture of the cultural expectations of marriage but also the struggles that
manifest in the making and breaking of wedlock’ (Carroll, p. 153).
14 J. DiPlacidi
Similarly interested in the struggles and conflicts that occur after mar-
riage in a genre often neglected by scholarship, Jenny DiPlacidi’s chap-
ter focuses on representations of family and marriage distinguished by
incestuous relationships in the Gothic. DiPlacidi suggests that broader
literary surveys most frequently either leave the Gothic out of analyses
of marriage and kinship or rely upon the traditional narrative of familial
and marital development in the long eighteenth century that position the
Gothic’s portrayals of marriage, family and incest as exhibiting anxieties
about the father’s position of power and the potential for female victimi-
sation. DiPlacidi draws upon legal, social, literary, feminist and anthropo-
logical scholarship in her analyses of Gothic plays, novels and novellas to
demonstrate that incestuous relationships in the Gothic offer alternative
paradigms of marriage and sexuality to the dominant cultural model of
the conjugal state famously described by eighteenth-century legal scholar
William Blackstone as causing ‘the very being or legal existence of the
woman [to be] suspended during the marriage’.35 The chapter argues that
the Gothic convention of marriage as terminating in the death or impris-
onment of the wife is rearticulated through depictions of transgressive
sexualities that allow for female agency, sexuality and life after marriage.
Further investigating representations of sexuality and marriage that
defy heteronormative conventions, Chris Roulston provides a thorough
analysis of the diaries of Anne Lister, a Yorkshire landowner and diarist
who chronicled her lesbian relationships in coded journals. Roulston’s
chapter points out that while the literature of the long eighteenth cen-
tury relies upon an ‘assumption of heteronormativity’ that ‘underlies
both idealized and negative representations of married life’ (Roulston,
p. 183), in fact, in society and culture ‘female marriage formed part of
an available discourse of domestic companionship’ (Roulston, p. 183).
Examining the Lister diaries in light of Barthes’ idea of a utopian alterna-
tive to institutional structures and notions of exclusion, public and pri-
vate, bourgeois domesticity and the performance of marriage, Roulston
argues that Lister simultaneously makes use of and performs mar-
riage whilst rejecting its heterosexual framework. Incorporating satires
and lampoons of Lister’s marriage to Miss Ann Walker in her analyses,
Roulston demonstrates that the play between parody, original and copy
allows for the seeming inauthenticity of the union to be made public,
legible and authenticated. Roulston convincingly argues that ‘while the
analysis of heterosexual marriage in the long eighteenth century reveals

the powerful workings of separate spheres and fixed gender roles’,
Lister’s use of marriage to articulate gender and desire begs ‘a consid-
eration of ex-centric marital relations – of marriages that both are and
are not marriages’ (Roulston, p. 202). Ultimately, such a consideration
reveals ‘the hegemonic effects of the institution beyond its normative
heterosexual boundaries’ (Roulston, p. 202).
Jane Austen points to the complex—and at times fractured—rela-
tionship between literary representations, social practices and paradigms
of marriage in a conversation between Charlotte Lucas and Elizabeth
Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (1813). ‘Happiness in marriage is entirely
a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well
known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance
their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike
afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little
as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your
life.’36 Elizabeth misconstrues Charlotte’s honest assessment of courtship
as ironic, responding: ‘You make laugh, Charlotte; but it is not sound.
You know it is not sound, and that you would never act in this way your-
self.’37 Yet Charlotte does act in precisely this way, marrying Mr Collins
after a brief acquaintance that is nonetheless long enough to expose him
as ridiculous. Fearful at 27 years that she will never receive another pro-
posal, Charlotte dispenses with romance in favour of practicality and
weds Mr Collins before seeing further defects that will be obvious after
marriage. The emergent model of companionate marriage that bound
virtue to disinterested love and divorced it from financial interest causes
Elizabeth to understand Charlotte’s acceptance of Mr Collins as a sign of
her compromised integrity, and she turns ‘with finer regard to her sister,
of whose rectitude and delicacy she was sure her opinion could never be
shaken’ (ll). Yet in the dissonance between Charlotte’s and Elizabeth’s
views on marital happiness and the period after marriage, Austen exposes
the gulf between the reality of women’s lives and romantic ideals. Rather
than merging this gap, as seen in other genres such as the sentimental
novel, marriage manual and conduct book, Austen offers the novel as the
ideal space for staging resistances to and exposures of the burden soci-
ety places on women forced to navigate between ideal and necessity. This
book’s analyses of accounts of marriage in various forms alongside their
16 J. DiPlacidi
social and legal contexts engage closely with the intersections between
lived experiences of marriage and its representations as well as the social
practices concerning after marriage in distinct ways—in terms of medium,
genre, and gender as well as nationality, sexuality and class. The analyses
that follow offer alternative narratives of marriage and family that resist
the traditional teleological accounts and challenge the established dis-
course. In so doing, they reveal highly nuanced and fluctuating eight-
eenth-century understandings and representations of the conjugal state
and provide new and rich amplifications of and corrections to the extant
scholarship on the topic of after marriage. Central to the following essays
are occurrences of conflict, whether found in the struggles that occur
after marriage or located in the divergences between advice and life, rep-
resentation and reality, ideal and experience or whether apparent in the
breakdown of marriages or in the nonconformity of desire to the socially
prescribed models. In exploring this rich ground the volume reveals the
complexities of negotiating between legitimate and illegitimate forms of
marriage, desire and sexuality; rejecting the system of sexual and social
economics; the destructive consequences of forcing women to marry; the
anxieties over intergenerational marital conflict, and ultimately lays bare
and undoes a range of conventional narratives of after marriage in the
long eighteenth century.
Notes
1. Review of The Masquerade, or the History of Lord Avon and Miss Tameworth,
in a Series of Letters. 2 vols (London: Robinson and Roberts, 1769).
2. Chris Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and
France (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), Rebecca
Probert’s Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A
Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Joanne
Bailey’s Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England
1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
3. Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Ann Lewis and
Markman Ellis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011).
4. Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed.
Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
5. British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kathleen Hardesty Doig
and Dorothy Medlin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
6. Roulston, 12.
7. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 2nd edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 2001 [London: Chatto and Windus,
1957]), 138.
8. Watt, 149.
9. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the
English Novel (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1991), ix.
10. Watt, 137.
11. Bill Overton, Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684–1890 (London: Palgrave,
2002), vii. See also Bill Overton, The Novel of Female Adultery: Love
and Gender in Continental European Fiction, 1830–1900 (London:
Macmillan, 1996).
12. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977).
13. Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic
Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (London
and New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1978), 3.
14. Watt, 138–139.
15. Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship Novel, 1740–1820: A Feminized
Genre (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1991), 1–2.
16. Laura E. Thomason, The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women
Writers Redefine Marriage (Lanham, BD and Plymouth: Bucknell
University Press with Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 3–4.
17. Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in
Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3. See
also: J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-
Century English Fiction (New York and London: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1990), and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English
Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987).
18. I refer particularly to the narrative advanced in Stone’s The Family, Sex
and Marriage in England, 1500–1800.
19. Bailey’s Unquiet Lives and Naomi Tadmor’s Family and Friends in
Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001) are particularly useful studies of family and marriage in the long
eighteenth century. Tadmor’s introduction includes a thorough synthesis
of the scholarly debates surrounding conceptions of family and kinship
and the history of the field. See particularly Tadmor, 21–43 and Bailey,
1–11; 12–29. Further analyses of the 1753 Act can be found in Erica
Harth’s ‘The Virtue of Love: Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act’, Cultural
Critique 9 (1988): 123–154.
18 J. DiPlacidi
20. Joanne Bailey, review of Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship

in English Literature and Culture 1748–1818 by Ruth Perry (H-Albion,
H-Net Reviews, June 2006), http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.
php?id=11824 [accessed: 30 March 2011].
21. Tadmor, 11.
22. Bailey, 11.
23. Eve Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the
Novel (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000);
Ellen Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684–1814 (Baltimore, MD:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Ruth Perry, Novel Relations:
The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture,
1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Katherine
Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
24. Rebecca Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth
Century, A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
25. Ellen Pollak, 22.
26. Kelly Hager, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-marriage Plot
and the Novel Tradition (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate:
2010), 11.
27. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 14–17.
28. Eighteenth-century British texts that treat adultery or failed marriage
include, to name a few, Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798) by Mary
Wollstonecraft, The History of Lady Bradley (anonymous, 1776–1778 in
the Lady’s Magazine), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1762),
and Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1752).
29. Watt, 137.
30. Roulston, 4.
31. British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kathleen Hardesty Doig
and Dorothy Medlin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
32. See also: Steven Moore, The Novel: an alternative history, 1600–1800
(New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and Julie Park,
The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2010).
33. ‘Memoirs of a Widow, Written by Herself’, The Lady’s Magazine XI
(December 1780): 622.
34. Flint, 4.
35.
Commentaries on the laws of England. Book the first. By William Blackstone,
Esq. vinerian professor of law, and solicitor general to her majesty, 4 vols
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765), vol. 1, 430.
36. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice in The Cambridge Edition of the Works
of Jane Austen, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 25.
37. Austen, 25.
Undoing the Marriage:
The Resort to Annulment
Rebecca Probert
According to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the presiding

clergyman is required to command the bride and groom
that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully
joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it. For be ye well assured,
that so many as are coupled together otherwise than God’s Word doth
allow are not joined together by God; neither is their Matrimony lawful.
This injunction reflects the way in which the Established Church united
both spiritual and legal considerations. As one eighteenth-century cler-
gyman argued, ‘God cannot be said to join two Persons in Marriage,
but when this is done by certain legal means’.1 The lawfulness of the
marriage depended not merely on the parties being free to marry but
on compliance with certain forms. The argument that God could join
a couple in marriage without the formalities being observed met with
the response that ‘[i]f God descends Miraculously, to Marry any Man or
Woman, he Supersedes the Laws […] but if not, then God has Ordain’d
R. Probert (*) 
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
e-mail: R.J.Probert@exeter.ac.uk

22 R. Probert
all Persons to be Married, as the Legal Christian Forms of their Country

appoint’.2
But what of those who failed to comply with those forms? The annul-
ment of a marriage after it had been celebrated reflected a double law-
lessness: first, the failure of the parties to comply with the requirements
of the law; and secondly, the retroactive invalidating of the marriage,
which would be deemed void from its inception. This meant that the
entire relationship between the parties had been lawless and rendered
any children they might have had illegitimate.
A third level of lawlessness also appears from the case-law generated
by petitions to annul marriages on the basis of non-compliance with
the required formalities. This was the strategic use of the legislative
requirements by both husbands and wives. By invoking some failure to
comply with the formal requirements at the time of the marriage, they
could escape from its bonds, sometimes many years after the ceremony
had taken place. Its lawlessness lay in the fact that this was certainly not
what Parliament had intended when it passed the legislation. Individuals
were relying on the strict letter of one law—that of the law of nullity—to
achieve a result that the law did not otherwise allow save in a very lim-
ited range of circumstances—in effect, divorce.
This chapter will consider these three types of lawlessness in turn.
But before examining the way in which this area of the law was used—
and abused—it needs to be set in the context of the law of nullity more
generally.
The Law of Nullity

The law of nullity is of course designed to work before marriage, by pre-
venting certain marriages from taking place. As The lady’s law (1737)
pointed out, couples were only able to contract marriage if they were
‘not disabled to enter into that State by their near Relation to each
other, Infancy, Precontract or Impotency’.3 Or, of course, a pre-existing
spouse. The familiar ritual of calling the banns invited those present in
the congregation to declare their knowledge of any just cause or impedi-
ment that should prevent the marriage from going ahead. The invitation
was repeated before the marriage took place. And one does find occa-
sional examples of such objections being made, not only in the pages of
novels,4 but also in contemporary diaries5 and even occasionally in the
UNDOING THE MARRIAGE: THE RESORT TO ANNULMENT 23
register of marriages. Less dramatically, the law played a preventative role

in deterring others from matrimony altogether.
So was there much resort to annulment after marriage? There were of
course couples who managed to marry despite there being some impedi-
ment to their union, only to find its validity being challenged at a later
stage. There was also one ground for annulment that offered scope
for undoing the marriage, that of impotency. Technically such impo-
tency had to exist at the date of the marriage: as one text put it ‘when
Disability happens after marriage, he or she that remains Potent, shall
not be permitted to quit the impotent Person, but be compelled to bear
the Discommodity, as well as any other ill fortune in life’.6 But of course
the bride and groom were not meant to test their sexual compatibility
before the wedding, and well into the eighteenth century might still risk
the censure of the church courts for doing so.7 So the inability of either
spouse to consummate the marriage provided a means of escaping from
marriage—although the relative rarity of such suits should not lead us to
infer that most couples found sexual fulfilment in marriage. Only one act
of intercourse was required for the marriage to be consummated in the
eyes of the law, and even if this minimal level of sexual satisfaction was
not achieved there were obvious difficulties in seeking an annulment. As
one contemporary commentator put it, many
chuse rather from the humanity of their tempers, and the modesty of their
dispositions, to submit to an uncomfortable life in misery all their days,
than bring themselves or their partners to lasting shame, and be recorded
with disgrace, by having the matter litigated before a public court.8
More significant, however—certainly in the number of cases to rely

on it—was a ground for annulment that only emerged in the mid-
eighteenth century. Prior to the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753,
the only requirement for a valid marriage was that it be celebrated by
an Anglican clergyman: all other requirements were simply directory
rather than mandatory and their lack did not invalidate the wedding.9
The Clandestine Marriages Act, by contrast, set out certain formalities
that were required for a valid marriage and decreed that non-compliance
rendered the marriage void.
Since the demands of the 1753 Act have been much exaggerated,
it is worth looking at what it did and did not require.10 The legislation,
which came into force on 25 March 1754, required that every marriage
24 R. Probert
be preceded by the calling of the banns or the obtaining of a licence, and

celebrated in the parish where at least one of the parties was resident. The
former required the intended marriage to be announced on three succes-
sive Sundays in the parish or parishes where the parties were resident, while
the latter was a more private (but more expensive) procedure that involved
the person obtaining the licence to swear that there was no impediment
to the marriage and that all necessary consents had been obtained, usually
on penalty of paying a large sum if this turned out to be untrue. A failure
either to have the banns called or to obtain a licence was expressly stated
to invalidate the marriage; marriages celebrated in any place other than a
church or public (and Anglican) chapel were also stated to be void.11 In
addition, the marriages of minors (those under the age of twenty-one) who
married by licence without the consent of their parents or guardians were
void.12 Marriages of minors by banns, by contrast, perhaps on account of
their greater publicity, were valid in the absence of active dissent: if a parent
actually forbade the banns, this negated their publication,13 but if a mar-
riage went ahead without parental knowledge, it would be valid.
Other provisions of the Act were merely directory. Although the Act
stated that the parties should marry in their parish of residence, sec-
tion 10 went on to provide that a marriage could not be invalidated on
the basis that the parties had in fact been resident elsewhere. Other parts
of the Act were less explicit, but their directory nature can be inferred
from the absence of any annulling clause. So, although the statute speci-
fied that the marriage be conducted in the presence of two witnesses,
who should then sign the register, the absence of such witnesses did not
render the marriage void. Indeed, a complete failure to register the mar-
riage did not affect its validity (although the subsequent destruction of
the register would expose the offender to harsh penalties). Similarly, the
level of detail to which the Act descended when describing the form that
the registers should take should not disguise the fact that no marriage
could ever have been invalidated simply because it was not recorded in a
book with ruled pages.14
The Lawlessness of Non-Compliance

As with other aspects of the law of nullity, the requirements set out in the
1753 Act were intended to operate prospectively. The sanction of inva-
lidity was intended to ensure that couples complied with the law: ideally,
it would never need to be invoked. Incumbents do appear to have been
reasonably assiduous in ensuring that even the directory requirements

of the new law were observed. One very visible result of the Act was
that record-keeping improved considerably.15 The claim made by one
eighteenth-century commentator that ‘a regular form for the enrolment
of marriage has been universally adopted and approved’16 was perhaps
something of an exaggeration,17 but those parishes that did not have a
separate printed marriage book were very much in the minority.
Another consequence was an increase in the number of marriages cel-
ebrated in those parishes that had previously lost out to places that con-
ducted clandestine ceremonies. This was particularly marked in London,
where prior to the 1753 Act many couples had taken advantage of the
option of being married by parsons operating out of the Fleet prison.18
A survey conducted in the early 1760s found that almost all London par-
ishes had witnessed an increase in the number of marriages celebrated after
the Act: at St. Clement Danes, for example, the number more than dou-
bled,19 while at St. James Westminster the rise was even more dramatic.20
More broadly, Snell’s survey of 18,442 marriages from 69 parishes in 8
counties found that all counties showed a dramatic reduction in the num-
ber of ‘foreign’ marriages—those clandestine marriages where both par-
ties came from outside the parish and concluded that ‘Hardwicke’s Act…
shows itself to have been highly effective over all counties’.21
While some incumbents grumbled against the Act, complaints about
their parishioners’ non-compliance with its requirements might well turn
out to have another source. In 1765, for example, the Rector of Hinton
Ampner, Thomas Wingfield DD, expressed the wish that the 1753 Act
should be repealed, ‘because I think it is attended with very bad con-
sequences, having not had any one marriage for more than seven years,
the time that I have been rector of this parish’.22 While it was true that
since his induction as Rector of the parish on 28 April 1758 he had not
personally celebrated a single marriage, this did not mean that the parish-
ioners of Hinton Ampner were choosing not to marry, but rather that
they were turning to other clergymen to conduct their marriage. James
Richardson, the curate, solemnised one marriage while Wingfield was
absent from the parish, and marriages have been traced in other parishes
for other couples. Given that marriages had been celebrated in Hinton
Ampner in 1755 and 1756—after the Act came into force on 25 March
1754 but before Wingfield’s arrival in 1758—it seems to have been
Wingfield himself, rather than the Act, that was responsible for the sud-
den decline in marriages celebrated there.23
26 R. Probert
Most couples, indeed, seem to have been entirely law abiding. Despite
the claims of certain scholars that couples regularly ignored the 1753 Act
and lived together unwed, cohort studies of a variety of different types of
communities across England and Wales confirm that the vast majority of
couples married in church, as they were required to do.24
Of course, ascertaining whether couples complied with all of the
requirements of the Act is more difficult. There were certainly occa-
sions where a couple realised shortly after the marriage that they had not
observed the exact requirements, and had their marriage resolemnised.
One such was recorded in the register of the Hampshire parish of Oakley
in 1768: it was noted that ‘thro’ a mistaken conformity to the Rubrick
in the Common Prayer Book’25 the banns of marriage between Thomas
Small and Jenny Benman had been published on Easter day, Easter
Monday, and Easter Tuesday (3, 4 and 5 April), with the marriage taking
place two days later on 7 April. It went on to explain that ‘upon perus-
ing the Marriage Act … which orders the banns to be published on three
Sundays, it was thought proper to publish the banns afresh on the 1st
and 2nd Sundays after Easter’ and the marriage was again solemnised. In
this case any lawlessness was of short duration: the banns were called for
the second time on 10 and 17 April and the marriage was re-solemnised
on 18 April.
For some contemporaries, however, any marriage that did not com-
ply with the strict requirements of the Act was regarded as lawless. Thus
we find one William Garnett annotating the marriage register of the
Westmorland parish of Middleton-in-Lonsdale with the complaint that
Robert Whittington and Mary Greenall had first of all married without
banns being published in Middleton Chapel and—upon being threat-
ened by the incumbent—had then married again in Middleton after
being resident in Lancashire for a couple of months—‘which marriage,
considering their absence out of ye Parish so long, could not be lawful by
ye said Act’.26 Yet, while the second marriage had not been conducted
according to the strict letter of the law either, it would nonetheless have
been impossible to challenge it on the basis of non-residence.
As these examples show, where there was cause for concern about the
validity of the marriage, a further ceremony might well be held. When
John Page married Ann Dunkley in West Haddon in 1816—by licence,
and with her father’s consent—it was noted that ‘[t]his couple had
eloped and said to have been married in London, but the father of the
woman wished to have them remarried’.27
Nonetheless, there were sufficient failures to comply with the law to

generate a body of case-law examining whether the result was to invali-
date the marriage.
The Lawlessness of the Invalidated Marriage

If a marriage was annulled on the basis that the parties had failed to
comply with the crucial requirements of the 1753 Act, continued cohab-
itation between the parties—and indeed the entire marital relationship—
would be regarded as unlawful, at least in the sense of being illegitimate
if not by this time likely to expose the parties to punishment.28 This was
something to which the church courts, which had retained the jurisdic-
tion to determine the validity or otherwise of marriages, attached consid-
erable weight: in Bowzer v Ricketts (1795), where the suit to annul the
marriage was brought by the husband’s father, it was noted that it was
in the best interests of both parties that the suit should proceed so that
‘they might know the exact relation in which they stand to each other’.29
Sir William Scott, the judge in this case, noted that the sentence of the
court was declaratory only: if the marriage was void under the terms of
the Act then this remained the case whether or not the case proceeded to
a final decision. It was therefore proper, he concluded, that ‘the parties
should know their situation in the early state of their cohabitation’.30
Equally, where the spouse failed to satisfy the court that there had
been some flaw in the marriage, the court would express the hope that
the parties would be reconciled. In Hodgkinson v Wilkie (1795),31 for
example, the court was doubtful as to whether the wife had been of age
at the time of the wedding but held that in any case her mother had
consented. Sir William Scott expressed the hope ‘that it has been by
some unhappy mistake alone that she has been led to attack a marriage
bond which the laws and the religion of this country hold to be perfectly
valid, and that she will see the necessity of returning to her duty under
the connexion which she has formed’.32 In other words, if the marriage
proved to be lawful then continued cohabitation was required, if not,
any cohabitation had been unlawful.
So what can the case law on this topic tell us about the resort to
the option of nullity after marriage? One surprising finding is that
suits for nullity were often brought by husbands and wives themselves.
The Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 is often discussed in terms of
its effect on parental power, but an examination of the litigants in the
28 R. Probert
reported cases reveals that it was not usually aggrieved parents who were
responsible for bringing the suit to have the marriage annulled. Of the
37 reported cases heard between 1795 and 1825,33 only 8 were brought
by a parent, while 13 were brought by the husband and 14 by the wife.
Nor was there always a sharp distinction between the two; in Cockburn v
Garnault (1792),34 the suit was instituted by the wife’s father and con-
tinued by her when she came of age.
As one would expect, parents tended to bring suits to annul the mar-
riage fairly soon after it had taken place. In Bridgwater v Crutchley,35 for
example, the marriage had been very short lived. The facts of the case
reveal a romantic elopement: in the early hours of 23 March 1822, her
eighteenth birthday, Charlotte Hayward had climbed out of her window
and travelled to Merthyr, arriving at seven in the morning. Since by law
the marriage could not take place until eight, there was time for the party
to enjoy breakfast before making their way to the church. This also gave
the groom, Joseph Crutchley, the chance to speak to the local curate,
one Mr. Jones, who agreed to perform the ceremony. Joseph produced
the licence that he had already procured—which misleadingly swore
both that Charlotte was of age and so did not need parental consent,
and that she was resident in the parish of Merthyr itself. The marriage
accordingly took place and the new Mr. and Mrs. Crutchley, together
with Charlotte’s faithful Webb, who had accompanied her, set off in the
chaise for Hereford. In the meantime, Charlotte’s flight had been dis-
covered and her brother Augustus, together with a Mr. Bridgewater,
immediately set out in pursuit—but in the wrong direction. The cun-
ning couple had planted a note which told the Haywards that Charlotte
and Joseph were to be married at Carmarthen—around fifty miles away
to the west. But the ruse was swiftly discovered and the men followed
the real route of the couple, arriving in Hereford later in the evening.
Despite the bridal pair decamping from their first hotel to another when
they suspected that they had been followed, their pursuers arrived at
their new location ‘so close after them, that the coffee, which […] they
had ordered upon their arrival, had not yet at that time been served up’.
Charlotte was persuaded to return to her mother’s home, and found her-
self back there little more than 24 hours after setting out. As the judge
noted, ‘she has since resided there with her mother, without any sug-
gested intercourse or communication with Crutchley’.36 Her mother
almost instantly instigated a suit to have the marriage annulled. Within a
year, the Arches Court had confirmed the marriage to be void.
Similarly, if less dramatically, in Pouget v Tomkins (1812),37 it would

appear that the couple had had little time to enjoy their married life
together: the bride was the maid to the groom’s grandmother, and they
did not have the chance to set up home together after the ceremony
took place since they were attempting to keep the marriage a secret.
The marriage was annulled less than two years after the wedding had
taken place, and there is no indication from the case that it ever existed
in more than name. In the similar case of Meddowcroft v Gregory 38 the
wedding of William Meddowcroft and Mary Gregory took place on
28 February 1815; however, the pair do not seem to have lived together
openly, since his uncle removed him from his lodgings upon hearing of
the attachment and did not discover that the wedding had taken place
until the following November—after which a petition was made to the
Consistory Court and the marriage annulled the following July.
Indeed, all of the cases brought by parents were heard a relatively
short time after the marriage had taken place. George Bowzer married
Jane Ricketts in January 179439 and judgment was given just over a year
later, on 3 March 1795. And in the case of Augustus Frederick Blyth,
who had married Sarah Soden in September 1821,40 the process was still
speedier, with the Consistory Court handing down its judgment on 28
June 1822.41 In such cases the parties had little opportunity to enjoy life
after marriage.42
There are also a couple of cases brought shortly after the wedding
by individuals who had discovered that their spouses were not quite as
they had represented themselves to be: in Ewing v Wheatley43 the mar-
riage had been celebrated on 19 November 1813,44 and judgment in
the case was handed down at the start of May the following year. That
the wife’s attempt to repudiate the marriage was not immediate can be
deduced from the fact that the evidence before the court included two
letters written after the wedding that were delicately described by the
judge as ‘perfectly nuptial’.45 It was presumably after this that she dis-
covered that he should not have described himself as ‘esquire’ when they
married, since, as it was put to the court, ‘that title belongs properly to
persons of good state and quality, whereas he was a person of low condi-
tion, and assumed that description only to assist his fraudulent object of
getting possession of the lady for the sake of her fortune’.46 There was
also a relatively short period of time between the marriage of Anthony
Frankland and Ann Ross at St. Paul’s church in Covent Garden on 14
October 1803,47 and the Consistory Court of London handing down a
30 R. Probert
sentence of annulment on 29 May 1805.48 In this case the court was less
explicit as to the fraud that had been practised on the husband, merely
alluding elliptically to her conduct, condition and situation, and imply-
ing that prior knowledge of it might well have dissuaded Frankland from
marrying her.
More usually though, where the suit was brought by either the hus-
band or wife, some considerable time had elapsed since the marriage
took place. In 1815 Sir William Scott felt that the fact that the marriage
under challenge had lasted sixteen years was ‘startling’49 but in the years
that followed some still longer unions were brought before the court. In
Hayes v Watts (1819),50 for example, the marriage had lasted 18 years
before the wife brought a suit to annul it, citing the fact that her mother’s
consent to her marriage had not been valid: her mother was not, as it had
been assumed, a widow as her father was still alive. Since, as long as he
was still alive—even if, as in this case, he was in America—it was his con-
sent alone that could validate the marriage, the court had no option but
to annul it, noting that either of the parties had a right to a declaratory
sentence stating that their marriage had been void and that it was ‘a duty
this Court owes to the public to declare the situation of the parties’.51
Husbands too might suddenly reveal that they were not of full age
at the time of the marriage. In Johnston v Parker 52 the couple had mar-
ried in 1796. Nanette Parker was under sixteen at the time but her father
was present at the marriage and consented to the union. After 22 years
of marriage and the birth of 7 children, the husband instituted a suit to
annul the marriage on the basis that he had been underage at the time.
The court scrutinised the evidence very closely, noting that the length of
the relationship ‘forms a strong call on the circumspection of the court
to see that the evidence is complete’.53 It proved to be irrefutable and
the marriage was pronounced to be void, the presiding judge noting that
it was ‘better to stop at any time, lest the continuance of the marriage
should involve the interest of a greater number of persons, for there is no
time in which it will not affect the interests of parties’.54
The Lawlessness of Invoking the Law

Despite the eventual grant of annulments in relation to these long-lasting
marriages, the courts were generally more receptive to applications by
parents than by a husband or wife. As Sir William Wynne pointed out in
the case of Osborn v Goldham, which came before the Court of Arches
in 1808, when the wife instituted a suit for nullity twelve years after the
wedding, it was ‘not the intent of the Act to annul a marriage of this
kind, the object of it was to prevent minors from being drawn in without
the consent of their parents’.55 The importance of upholding the law-
fulness of the marriage wherever possible was emphasised by Sir John
Nicholl in Smith v Huson (1811):
Where a marriage has been solemnized, the law strongly presumes that all
the legal requisites have been complied with. This presumption is not less
favourable where there is no particular disparity in the age or situation of
the parties—where the marriage has not been hastily entered into—where
there is no appearance of either of the parties having been surprised or
inveigled into the contract, and consequently where the object and policy
of the statute cannot have been violated.56
The courts were particularly averse to claims of nullity brought by a

spouse who had obtained the licence prior to the marriage by commit-
ting perjury. The impact that an annulment would have on the parties—
rendering their previous cohabitation lawless—meant that the court did
not look kindly on such suits.
In the case of Agg v Davies,57 for example, the fact that a number of
years had elapsed between the marriage of John Agg and Jane Davies in
1806 and his subsequent proceedings to annul the marriage on the basis
of her minority strongly suggests that this case was an attempt to find a
solution to a marriage that had broken. What the litigation also shows is
just how reluctant the ecclesiastical courts were to allow the law of nul-
lity to be used in this way.
The marriage had taken place in the church of St. Mary in Swansea
on 1 February 1806. Rather than having the banns called in the local
church, John had obtained a licence and had been required to swear
on oath that there was no impediment to the marriage. Since the law
declared that the marriage of a minor by licence without parental con-
sent would be void, the implication was either that Jane was of age or
that her father had consented. Eight years later, John alleged that neither
condition had been fulfilled: that Jane had been, in fact, underage at the
date of the wedding, and that her father had not given his consent.
The first of these allegations would seem to be incontrovertible. The
family bible recorded that Jane had been born on 17 May 1785, even
specifying the time of birth. But the court was not satisfied with this
32 R. Probert
evidence. The judge, Sir John Nicholl, pointed out that the usual way
of proving the age of one of the parties would be to rely on the pub-
lic record made in the parish’s baptismal register and held that the onus
was on John to prove that no such entry existed (waving aside the evi-
dence of the father that his daughter had been privately baptised at home
and had never been received into the Church of England). It was also
objected that the entry of Jane’s birth in the bible had not been made
contemporaneously: it had instead been copied by Jane’s father from
an entry made in another, smaller Bible by a neighbour. And not only
had this Bible been lost, but the neighbour who had made the origi-
nal entry had died. The fact that a later mistake had been erased and
corrected was seized on as showing ‘how little reliance is to be placed
on a transcript made by ignorant persons of this kind’,58 the judge not-
ing, for good measure, that the father ‘was of a low condition in life,
the mate of a coasting vessel; seamen are not accurate’.59 And, not con-
tent with disparaging the accuracy of an entire profession—and one that
involved making precise calculations in order to navigate—the judge was
even willing to cast aspersions on the virtue of Jane’s mother. He hinted
that she might have had good reason to make out that Jane—her eldest
daughter—was in fact younger than she really was. But there was no evi-
dence that the marriage of Jane’s parents had taken place less than nine
months before her birth or that her conception might correspond with a
period when John Davies had been at sea. And so, concluded the judge,
‘I am left in doubt – there is not that precise and satisfactory proof which
convinces the Court that the minority of the woman is established’.60
Just for good measure, however, he went on to consider whether
Jane’s father had in fact given his consent to the marriage—in which case
it would not matter whether or not she had been underage at the time
of the marriage. The evidence given by Jane’s father John suggests that
both sides were keen to end the marriage. Once again, he had been at sea
at the time that the crucial events had taken place. But he told the court
in unequivocal terms that the marriage had taken place without his con-
sent. Not only had he not consented, he had informed John Agg that he
would not give his consent the very night before he set out on his voy-
age. And upon his return he had never stated explicitly that the marriage
met with his approbation. He did, however, acknowledge to the court
that his refusal of consent was motivated by the fact that John Agg’s own
father disapproved of the match, and ‘not from any dislike of the man’.61
This proved crucial. Instead of holding that this evidence established that
no consent had been given, the judge construed it as evidence of a con-

ditional consent. His reasoning ran as follows: Jane’s father might have
been willing to consent if John’s own father had approved of the mar-
riage, and so the court should assume that consent had been given in
these terms. This was, of course, pure speculation and the judge had to
resort to hypothesising about what might have happened:
It is quite consistent with this evidence that he might have told Agg if he
could get the consent of his friends, he would not object; or he might have
left authority to this effect with his wife; and I think such a conditional
consent would have been sufficient.62
Equally unconvincing were the judge’s reasons for supposing that this
had actually happened. He laid great stress on the fact that the father had
omitted to take certain steps—he had not, for example, ordered John to
break off the connexion, nor had he left instructions with his wife to pre-
vent the marriage. And it was even suggested that the circumstances of
the marriage itself justified the inference that consent had been given,
on the basis that it was celebrated in the parties’ own parish church, and
not clandestinely. One might have thought, however, that a more salient
point was that it was only celebrated once the father was safely seaborne.
One final justification for assuming that the father had consented
was that he had failed to evince the customary surprise and regret of a
deceived father on learning that the marriage had taken place. Had John
Davies wished to take steps to annul the marriage when he returned to
Swansea in the spring of 1806, there is little doubt that the court would
have interpreted the facts in the case very differently.
So in this case we seem to have the parties to a marriage doing their
best to free themselves from it by the only legal means available to them,
and a judge equally determined that they should not misuse the law of
nullity for this purpose. Whether John and Jane made the best of it and
remained together or lived separately we do not know: a 66-year-old
Jane Agg from Swansea was living alone in the 1851 census,63 but the
years between remain tantalisingly unreconstructable.
In other cases, however, we can follow the parties beyond the sen-
tence of the court. The case of Sullivan v Sullivan (1819),64 provides a
fascinating case study of what might happen after a marriage was declared
to be valid despite legal challenge—and how a declaration of a marriage’s
lawfulness might be the precursor to a new type of lawlessness.
34 R. Probert
The suit for nullity was brought by the father of the groom,
seventeen-year-old John Augustus Sullivan. The marriage had taken
place by banns in a parish to which neither party belonged. The elder
Mr. Sullivan had thus had no advance notice of the wedding and had
been unable to forbid the calling of the banns. Under the terms of
the Act, he could not challenge it on the basis that the groom was
underage, nor on the fact of the banns having been called in the
wrong parish, and so had to resort to the argument that the banns
had not been properly published, and so by inference had not been
called at all. In this case, however, the claim that the banns had not
been properly published was based on the fact that an additional mid-
dle name had been added to the bride’s name: although she was usu-
ally known as Maria Oldacre, the banns had been published in the
name of Maria Holmes Oldacre. Scott rejected the suggestion that this
had been a deliberate fraud to conceal her identity, since her parents
approved the match, noting that ‘[t]hey must have been bunglers
indeed if they placed the fraud not in the name which required to be
concealed, but in that which needed no concealment’.65
The judgment reveals the differences in age, rank and condition
that had motivated John’s father to try to have the marriage set aside.
Maria was a little older than her husband, by three years in fact,
which as the judge observed was ‘no very revolting disproportion’,66
although it would have been preferable had this been the other way
round. The disparity in rank was greater: John had been educated at
Eton and was preparing to go on to university, while Maria’s father
managed a pack of hounds, albeit a well-known one. And Maria was,
in addition, illegitimate, her parents only having married four months
after her birth. In the eyes of the judge, these differences might well
pose a risk to the success of the marriage, ‘for […] it is not to be
denied that two persons coming together with very different educa-
tions and systems of manners and habits are not likely to have that
correspondence and harmony of mind, without which the comfort of
a married life cannot exist’.67 But, he concluded, in a flight of roman-
tic rhetoric, ‘the passion which leads to marriage is apt to overleap
these distinctions, and that marriage levels them all, both in legal and
moral consideration’.68 Moreover, Maria was still young enough to be
‘susceptible of better impressions’.69
John’s father, however, was clearly not convinced that Maria was a
suitable wife for his son. He appealed to the Court of Arches—which
in 1819 simply confirmed Scott’s decision, holding that the explanation

given for the use of the extra name was satisfactory.70 He then appealed
to the highest court with jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters, the High
Court of Delegates—only for it, too, to dismiss the father’s case.
But although the father may have failed in his attempts to have the
marriage annulled, he did succeed in separating the young couple, and
eventually in bringing the marriage to an end. Although John and Maria
had cohabited for a short while after the ceremony—Mr. Sullivan being
initially unaware of the legal means of challenging its validity—before
the end of the year legal proceedings had begun and John had been
sent abroad by his father to await the outcome. The Consistory Court
handed down its judgment in June 1818. It was another year before the
Court of Arches affirmed its decision. And then there was the appeal to
the High Court of Delegates.
While the case was still pending, John and Maria agreed to separate.
Perhaps his ardour had cooled for the wife he had not seen for three
years, perhaps he was pressurised into it by his family, who had joined
him on the Continent. Whatever his motivation, once he had attained
his majority in 1819, he executed an agreement by which it was declared
that they would live separately and she would receive an annuity of £500,
with a further sum of £1000 being settled on her.
Five years later, in February 1824, the High Court of Delegates finally
dismissed the case. It had not been necessary for the court to consider
the details of the case: it appears that there had been no action by the
parties beyond the initial appeal by the father and reply by Maria. But
by this time Maria had clearly given up any hope of making a life with
John, whatever the legal outcome. In 1821 she had begun to live with
another man, one Henry Gouldney. They had tried to keep their rela-
tionship secret—living in a secluded spot and forbidding tradespeople
from approaching the house. But their relationship was discovered by the
Sullivans, and it scarcely needed the birth of two children to prove that
Maria had committed adultery.
John then sought a divorce a mensâ et thoro from the ecclesiasti-
cal court on the ground of his wife’s adultery. The case came before Sir
John Nicoll—who five years earlier had declared in favour of the validity
of the marriage, noting how the reputation of Maria would suffer were
he to resolve otherwise. This time he was less sympathetic: ‘what is there,
let me ask, to justify the wife’s violation of her marriage vow; and so to
36 R. Probert
deprive the husband […] of that remedy to which the wife’s infidelity
plainly intitles a husband under ordinary circumstances?’.71
Maria had two answers to this: first, her husband’s desertion, and
second, the terms of the separation agreement. But neither argument
was accepted by the court. It was pointed out that in the eyes of the
law neither party could have deserted the other while the litigation about
the validity of the marriage was ongoing, for the simple reason that they
should not cohabit while the validity of their marriage was uncertain.
Rather than seeking the company of another man during this period of
uncertainty, she should have used it ‘to qualify herself… by mental and
moral improvement, for the husband’s future society’.72 And although
the deed of separation had declared that Maria would be free of John’s
control, and might choose where she lived, as if she was sole and
unmarried, it was held that this did not constitute a licence for her to
live with whom she chose. Indeed, Sir John pointed out that the cloak
of clandestinity with which she had surrounded her relationship with
Mr. Gouldney rather suggested that she knew perfectly well that she was
not at liberty to act as she chose.
The court thus pronounced the decree of divorce. But a divorce a
mensâ et thoro did not bring the marriage to an end; it simply allowed the
parties to live separately. It was, however, an essential precondition to a
private Act of Parliament dissolving the marriage, and in 1825 the mar-
riage of John Augustus Sullivan and Maria Oldacre was finally brought to
an end.73
Whether or not John went on to make a more suitable match we do
not know, but at least the divorce freed Maria to make her union with
Henry Goldney lawful, which she speedily proceeded to do, marrying
him in July of that year.74
Conclusion
There were undoubtedly some couples who flouted the law, who lived
together in a union that was, in legal terms, no different from concubi-
nage, or who adopted a strategic rather than purposive approach to legal
requirements. Yet it should of course be borne in mind that the num-
ber of marriages that were challenged before the courts was tiny when
compared to the thousands celebrated each year without incident. While
lawlessness lends itself to the demands of narrative more easily than

dull conformity, it should not be forgotten that for the vast majority of
couples the lawfulness of their marriage was a crucial consideration.
Notes
1. Henry Gally, Some Considerations upon Clandestine Marriages (London,
1750), 124.
2. Ralph Lambert, An answer to a late pamphlet, entitl’d A Vindication of
marriage, as solemnized by Presbyterians in the north of Ireland (Dublin,
1704), 10.
3. The lady’s law; or, a treatise of feme coverts (London, 1737), 25.
4. See e.g. Fanny Burney, Cecilia (Oxford: Oxford World Classics 1999; first
published 1782), in which the ceremony of marriage between the titu-
lar heroine and Mortimer Delville is interrupted by an objection and the
clergyman refuses to proceed.
5. See e.g. The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765, ed. David Vaisey
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), in which a Sussex church-
warden, Thomas Turner, recorded how on 23 October 1757 Anne
Stevenson forbade the banns of marriage between Richard Parker and
Mary Vinal, claiming that he had promised to marry her. In this case
though, the objection may actually have hastened the marriage: Mary
told the churchwardens that she was with child by Richard and within
three days they had facilitated the marriage by procuring a licence.
6. The lady’s law, 26–27.
7. See e.g. Rebecca Probert, The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation:
From Fornicators to Family, 1600–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), Chap. 2.
8. Peter Annet, Social bliss considered: in marriage and divorce; cohabiting
unmarried and public whoring (London, 1749), 46–47.
9. Rebecca Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth
Century: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), Chap. 2.
10. For a detailed account see further Probert, Marriage Law and Practice,
Chap. 6.
11. Section  8.
12. Section  11.
13. Section  1.
14. As required by Section 24.
38 R. Probert
15. Donald John Steel, National Index of Parish Registers: Vol. I Sources
of Births, Marriages and Deaths Before 1837 (London: Society of
Genealogists, 1968), 34; Edward Anthony Wrigley and Roger S.
Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A reconstruction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 30.
16. James Lucas, An impartial inquiry into the present state of parochial regis-
ters; charitable funds; taxation and parish rates (Leeds, 1791), 13–14.
17. For examples of non-compliance, see The Parish Registers and Parochial
Documents in the Archdeaconry of Winchester, ed. William Andrew Fearon
and John Foster Williams (Winchester: Warren & Son, 1909), 10.
18. See Roger Lee Brown, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Fleet Marriage’, in
R.B. Outhwaite, Marriage and Society (London: Europa, 1981), 117–136;
William Reginald Ward, Parson and Parish in Eighteenth-Century Surrey:
Replies to Bishops’ Visitations (Guilford: Surrey Record Society, 1994), 6, in
which the incumbent of Battersea commented that ‘[t]he reason why our
marriages are so few is because of the evil practice of marrying at the Fleet
in a clandestine and scandalous manner’.
19. Lambeth Palace Library, Fulham Papers, Terrick 6, fol. 2.
20. Ibid., fol. 3. See further Rebecca Probert and Liam D’Arcy Brown, ‘The
Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 in action: investigating a contempo-
rary complaint’ Local Population Studies, 83 (2009): 66–69.
21. Keith Snell, ‘English rural societies and geographical marital endogamy,
1700–1837’ Economic History Review 55: 2 (2002): 262–298 (274).
22. William Reginald Ward (ed.), Parson and Parish in Eighteenth-Century
Hampshire: Replies to Bishops’ Visitations (Winchester: Hampshire County
Council, 1995), 193.
23. See further Probert and D’Arcy Brown, ‘The Clandestine Marriages Act
of 1753 in action’.
24. See e.g. Probert, Marriage Law and Practice, Chap. 7; Rebecca Probert
and Liam D’Arcy-Brown, ‘Westmorland Weddings: A Study of the 1787
Census’, Family and Community History 16: 1 (2013): 32–44; R. Probert
and L. D’Arcy-Brown ‘Catholics and the Clandestine Marriages Act of
1753’, Local Population Studies 83 (2008): 78–82.
25. Quoted in The Parish Registers and Parochial Documents in the
Archdeaconry of Winchester, ed. William Andrews Fearon and John Foster
Williams (Winchester: Warren & Son, 1909), 27.
26. The Registers of Middleton-in-Lonsdale, ed. Col. J.F. Haswell (Penrith:
Cumberland and Westmorland Parish Registers Society, 1925), 50.
27. Quoted in Steel, National Index of Parish Registers: Vol. 1, 66.
28. The ecclesiastical courts had more or less ceased to punish cohabiting

couples for fornication by the 1770s: see Probert, The Changing Legal
Regulation of Cohabitation, Chap. 2.
29. Bowzer, as Guardian of his son v Ricketts, falsely calling herself Bowzer
(1795) 161 English Reports 529; 1 Hag. Con. 212, 214.
30. Ibid.
31. Hodgkinson, Falsely Called Wilkie, v Wilkie (1795) 161 English Reports
546; 1 Hag. Con. 262.
32. Ibid., 268.
33. Case reporting in this period was still somewhat unsystematic and
dependent on individual initiative; happily, the existence of a series of
reports for the ecclesiastical courts coincides with the period that saw
the most litigation on this point: see Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Table 1.8.
34. Cockburn v Garnault (1792) 161 English Reports 608; 1 Hag. Con.
435n.
35. Bridgwater, formerly Hayward, v Crutchley (1823) 162 English Reports
167; 1 Add 473.
36. Ibid., 478.
37. Pouget v Tomkins (1812) 161 English Reports 695; 2 Hag. Con 142.
38. Meddowcroft v Gregory (1816) 161 English Reports 717; 2 Hag. Con 207.
39. London Metropolitan Archives, Saint Marylebone, Register of banns of
marriage, P89/MRY1, Item 285.
40. Ancestry.com. London, England, Extracted Parish Records [database on-
line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2001.
41. Blyth, formerly Soden, v Blyth (1822) 162 English Reports 109; 1 Add 312.
42. See also Cockburn v Garnault (1792) 161 English Reports 608; 1 Hag.
Con. 435n., in which the marriage had taken place in December 1790
and the case was heard in 1792.
43. Ewing, falsely called Wheatley, v Wheatley (1814) 161 English Reports 709;
2 Hag. Con. 175.
44. London Metropolitan Archives, Saint Marylebone, Register of marriages,
P89/MRY1, Item 184.
45. Ewing v Wheatley, 185.
46. Ibid., 182.
47. London Metropolitan Archives, Saint Paul, Covent Garden: Westminster,
Transcript of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1803 Apr–1804 Mar,
DL/t Item, 098/002/02.
40 R. Probert
48. Frankland v Nicholson (1805) 105 English Reports 607; 3 M. & S. 259n.
49. Jones, falsely called Robinson, v Robinson (1815) 161 English Reports 1146;
2 Phill. Ecc. 285.
50. Hayes, falsely called Watts, v Watts (1819) 161 English Reports 1252; 3
Phill. Ecc. 43.
51. Ibid., 44.
52. Johnston v Parker, falsely called Johnston (1819) 161 English Reports 1251;
3 Phill. Ecc. 39
53. Ibid., 41.
54. Ibid.
55. Osborn v Goldham, Arches Court of Canterbury, Dec. 12, 1808, reported
in 161 English Reports 990; 1 Phill. Ecc. 298n.
56. Smith v Huson, falsely called Smith (1811) 161 English Reports
987; 1 Phill. Ecc. 287, 294.
57. Agg v Davies, falsely calling herself Agg (1816) 161 English Reports 1164;
2 Phill. Ecc. 341.
58. Ibid., 347.
59. Ibid., 346.
60. Ibid., 348.
61. Ibid., 343.
62. Ibid., 348–349.
63. Census Returns of England and Wales, 1851, TNA, HO107/1500; fol 33,
7.
64. Sullivan v Sullivan, falsely called Oldacre (1819) 161 English Reports 728;
2 Hag. Con. 238.
65. Ibid., 261.
66. Ibid., 244.
67. Ibid., 245.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 245.
70. Sullivan v Oldacre, falsely called Sullivan (1819) 161 English Reports
1253; 3 Phill. Ecc. 45.
71. (1824) 162 English Reports 303; 2 Add 299, 301.
72. Ibid., 305.
73. 6 Geo 4 c. 80.
74. London Metropolitan Archives, Saint George, Bloomsbury, Register of
marriages, P82/GEO1, Item 023, recording the marriage of Henry
Gabriel Goldney to Maria Holmes Oldaker on 23 July 1825.
Bearing Grudges: Marital Conflict
and the Intergenerational Family
Joanne Begiato
Conflict after marriage was a common problem in the long eighteenth

century.1 Since divorce was impossible for all but a tiny minority, society
thus offered formal and informal solutions to couples suffering marital
breakdown due to infidelity or cruelty. Conduct writers advised couples
how to avoid strife, they were titillated and warned of conflict’s out-
comes by shocking accounts of cruelty and adultery, and mocking tales
of battling spouses offered stress-relieving humour.2 Scholars have found
the records generated by these problem marriages to be rich sources of
social history, revealing attitudes towards adultery and marital violence,
patriarchal authority and gender relationships, and the several ways in
which spouses tackled their problems, from family mediation to matri-
monial litigation in the Church Courts.3 This scholarship is very valu-
able, but much of it addresses marriages at crisis or breaking point, since
the unions that entered the public sphere in print or law were at the
extreme end of the spectrum of conflict, which usually involved adultery
The author of this chapter previously published under the name Joanne Bailey.
J. Begiato (*) 
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
e-mail: JBegiato@brookes.ac.uk

42 J. Begiato
or cruelty and the intervention of the law and local authorities. We still
know less about the other end of the spectrum where marriage difficul-
ties did not end in scandal, violence, separation or divorce.4
An especially obscure element of marital conflict is how it fits into
wider family relationships. Recent work such as Naomi Tadmor’s over-
view of kinship, stresses that the marital unit was not isolated from other
family members.5 So far, historians of marriage have dealt patchily with
this. There is excellent work on the role of family across several social
ranks in the making of marriage, from organising unions and marriage
settlements, to approving prospective spouses, to acting as third par-
ties and facilitators.6 For instance the Duke and Duchess of Chandos,
a wealthy, powerful, childless couple, with a mansion and estate in
Middlesex, took great pains to manage the portions of their young
female relations, prepare the women for marriage, and locate the right
husband.7 Histories of the family and illness also show that various fam-
ily members, including grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, and siblings
played vital roles in managing life-course events within marriage such
as the birth of children, childcare, nursing ill or indisposed spouses, or
assisting them in financial, physical, and emotional crises.8 As Rosemary
O’Day observes in her study of the Chandos’ marriage, ‘It is imperative
that we set the marital economy, already acknowledged by historians to
be important to individuals and the co-resident nuclear family, within the
context of the wider family economy’.9 The same can be said for other
routine aspects of marital and family life and this chapter places more
‘mundane’ marital disputes within the context of the wider intergenera-
tional family.
This chapter focuses on three case studies assembled from first-per-
son accounts including memoirs and letters written in the period 1750–
1830, which contain detail of conflict. Although such sources often
provide evidence, it is usually simply to note the parting of spouses or to
hint at dispute.10 For example, the letter that J.H. Hayward wrote from
Portsmouth to Fawley Parish Vestry in May 1834 to request poor relief
for his children, comments about their mother ‘we are rather at variance
I dont [sic] wish to see her’.11 The survival of both sides of spouses’ cor-
respondence is the most rich, but rare, evidence. Katie Barclay’s study
of the marital disputes of Anna Potts and her husband Sir Archibald
Grant, of Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, 1731–1744, for instance, reveals
in superb detail the causes of their quarrels and their negotiation of patri-
archal conventions of marital roles.12 Journals can also give considerable
BEARING GRUDGES: MARITAL CONFLICT AND THE INTERGENERATIONAL … 43
insights into unhappy marriages such as Lady Sarah Cowper’s diary

begun in 1700 and Elizabeth Shackleton’s begun in 1762.13
The cases used in this chapter are not so fulsome, but do give rea-
sonably in-depth accounts of the marriage problems of couples from
the middle rank of society, all of whom were pious, though of differ-
ent Protestant denominations. In order to raise funds, Simon Mason
[1701–?] published A Narrative of the Life and Distresses of Simon
Mason, Apothecary in 1754 describing his troubled life to date; an
account which included his marital difficulties which he believed contrib-
uted to his woeful business failures.14 In his sixties in the 1790s Thomas
Wright (1736–1797), a West Yorkshire man who tried his hand at farm-
ing and eventually became an inspector of mills, wrote a memoir for his
family. His unhappy marriage to his first wife and his terrible relation-
ship with her parents formed the narrative thrust of his life story.15 The
final troubled union is that of George Courtauld (1761–1823), occa-
sionally discussed in his correspondence with his children and the letters
exchanged between the children in the second decade of the nineteenth
century.16 George, a silk-throwster who was reasonably well off, though
not particularly successful in his various endeavours, met his wife Ruth
Minton on his first attempt to migrate to America. This chapter surveys
these accounts of marital conflict to consider their similarities and differ-
ences in comparison with more heavily scrutinised incidents in matrimo-
nial litigation.
The descriptions of marital difficulties in memoirs and correspond-
ence should not be treated as straightforward factual accounts. They
were generally written from one participant’s perspective in response to
specific events and circumstances and both forms of writing had their
own genre conventions. Accounts of marriages in autobiographies were
written after the events and could be filtered through several decades’
resentments, honing accusations, and sharpening memories of culpability
and bad behaviour. In fact, autobiographies present an ‘illusion of fixity
which occludes the selective processes through which these narratives are
formed’ as Jessica Malay shows by comparing Lady Anne Clifford’s mar-
riage arrangements at the time with her description of them forty years
later.17 Similarly, correspondence is not an authentic account of ‘reality’.
As Barclay shows, the Potts-Grant spouses constructed identities in their
letters and used them as a way to influence each other and the balance of
power between them.18
44 J. Begiato
Nonetheless, both types of source are valuable in two key ways. They
indicate the themes that were considered to lead to quarrels and they
name who was involved in them. As such they offer insights into conflict
which was not mediated through legal structures and shaped by the law’s
demands of evidence. Their discussions of marital conflict confirm that
economic issues and lack of marital respect undermined relationships,
as the scholarship demonstrates, but they also reveal the significance of
religious differences, temperamental clashes, and the role of other family
members in marriage disputes. Strikingly these informal records of dis-
pute also show that it impacted upon the intergenerational family as well
as spouses, and could endure across generations for as long as people’s
capacities to bear grudges.
Causes of Marital Conflict

Autobiographies and correspondence reveal several features of marital
conflict not in themselves sufficient to launch a suit, but problematic
enough to provide evidence of a thoroughly failing union: personality
clashes, disputes over finances and property, marital disrespect, and reli-
gious disagreement.19 Conflicting understandings of love and its expres-
sions emerge as a site of tension in the Potts-Grant union, for instance.20
A further reason for conflict that is rarely discussed in matrimonial litiga-
tion is temperament and personality clashes. Simon Mason, for example,
confessed that he did not have much to complain about regarding his
wife, except:
she is not blest with the best of Tempers; she is a very genteel, well
behav’d Woman to every one but her Husband; she is certainly a notable,
clean, industrious Woman; and was her Temper agreeable to her Person,
she would make a Husband compleatly happy; and if after thirty-one Years,
she should alter and behave in a mild affectionate Manner, nothing could
be more pleasing, but I have hop’d for this so long, that I have but little
Hope left.21
George and Ruth Courtauld did not seem to have found each other easy
to live with either. They married in 1789 in America, and returned to
England in 1794 following the birth of their two eldest children. They
settled in Braintree, Essex, and had another six children; the last born
in 1807. By 1809, and eighteen years into their union, Ruth was taking
a lengthy sojourn at her family home in Ireland. It is unclear when the
marriage ran into difficulties, although their marital conflict was being
discussed in correspondence after this date and offers some insights into
the causes of the dispute. In his letter to his son in 1813, George offered
his view of his failing marriage which suggests a fairly early development
of problems. Perhaps countering an accusation, he declared that he had
married for affection:
I married from no other motive but a desire, by contributing to her happi-

ness, to increase my own. My only hope was to have a friend and compan-
ion; ‘tis true that that feeling soon began to give way, and that it has long
been so crossed by very different sensations that it is by no means at this
day a very lively principle.22
Economic Disputes
Disagreement over financial investment or outlay was a major trigger of
conflict and distrust, regardless of level of wealth. The elite Anna Potts
and Archibald Grant quarrelled over household finances; typically her
ability to run the household economy on his provision. In 1740 Anna
wrote defensively to Archibald: ‘it is no ill management in me I cant [sic]
work miracles and must tell you plainly I am vain enough to think my
self as capable of governing a house as any of those that finds fault wit
[sic] me’.23 Securing economic security could be divisive. Thus, although
the family correspondence relating to George and Ruth Courtauld’s
unhappy marriage does not dwell on the causes of their discontent,
Ruth’s letters responding to George’s desire to emigrate to America for a
second time in the 1820s imply that one of her dissatisfactions with him
was his uncontrolled expenditure and unreliable provision. In 1822 she
wrote to her daughter Sophia, who had accompanied her father to Ohio,
insisting,
I cannot go to America under the dread of being set adrift when your
father spends all his money, which experience teaches us would be soon. I
would rather trust to his parish in England for a support, but if he will give
me the last £500 my father left me which I only lent him, I will then go
next spring if I can be of any use or comfort to him or you.24
46 J. Begiato
It would seem that the couple had a long history of disagreements over
financial outgoings with Ruth taking the view that George was a spend-
thrift. They also had different understandings about Ruth’s inheritance.
She saw it as a loan, while George saw it as a family contribution. Unless
Ruth’s father had set aside the money solely for Ruth’s use, George may
well have been in the right. What is quite clear is that Ruth did not feel
financially secure under George’s economic direction.
Hardship drove even sharper wedges between couples. Usually this
kind of extremity is mainly visible in the form of desertion recorded by
the poor law or quarter sessions authorities.25 It is rare to see a detailed
account of financial need eroding a relationship as it did for that of
Simon Mason and his wife. Simon was an apothecary who enjoyed little
success in following his trade. After several forced separations as Simon
attempted to get established, he again left his family in Cambridge to
seek work, belatedly discovering that his ‘poor unhappy temper’d Wife’
immediately sent two of his children, aged seven and five, to Simon’s
sister, their aunt, who kept them over winter despite her own financial
difficulties. Simon only realised this when his sister wrote to him request-
ing money for their upkeep or that their parents take them back. Indeed,
said Simon, ‘My good Lady’s journey to London was as much a secret
to me as her sending my Children to my Sister’s’.26 Simon’s ineptitude
and their poverty destroyed the Masons’ ability to live with each other.
As Samuel astutely reflected: couples ought to seek mutual happiness in
order to alleviate their distressed circumstances, ‘and not as some do,
vilify, and reproach, insult, and tyrannise, ever uneasy, ever dissatisfied,
perpetually destroying each other’s Distress’.27
The Masons also experienced another financial challenge to their
relationship, which is only hinted at in separation court records, namely
quarrels over the portion that a wife brought to her marriage from her
natal family. Simon envied those men who received ‘great Favours and
helps from their Wife’s Relations, who do not only relieve them when
distress’d, but will forward and promote their Interest’. Instead he
claimed to have got neither ‘fortune’ with his Wife nor ‘affectionate
Friendship’ from her relations.28 He had married her, the daughter of
a Southwark dyer, after finishing his apprenticeship in 1722. Following
the wedding Simon learnt that his wife was due £40 from her mother.
He promptly informed his parents-in-law that he expected to be paid this
sum and they handed it over on the understanding that he would invest
it in business. The couple set up business in Stony Stratford with his

father-in-law’s assistance and some stock from his old master. Simon then
went to London to receive the remainder of the fortune to buy drugs to
sell, only to learn from his father-in-law that there was just £5 left thanks
to the couple’s expenses in the country, the £5 he’d borrowed at mar-
riage, plus the stock. This set the scene for Simon’s ongoing resentment
towards his in-laws which often transferred to his wife.29
Thomas Wright was not well liked by his in-laws either, which had
financial repercussions. He married Lydia Birkhead in November 1766,
after eloping with her to Gretna Green due to her parents’ disapproval
of their courtship which began when Lydia was 15 years old and Thomas
around 26. Consequently they refused to give him their daughter’s ‘for-
tune,’ which led to arguments with his wife.30 In one argument a few
years into marriage, he nobly told her that he did not blame her for her
want of fortune and she retorted that she did not care if he were ruined
the next day. This slur on his social and masculine identity removed, he
said, any remaining esteem or love for her.31
Although both Simon and Thomas declared that their parents-in-law
reneged on supporting them, they nonetheless recorded several contri-
butions. Simon received a portion of £40 with his wife after marriage,
his father-in-law helped him purchase stock for an apothecary shop, and
advanced him £10 when he was in debt, and his parents-in-law sup-
ported his wife and children when he could not.32 Nonetheless in 1738,
after yet more failures which entailed sending his wife and various chil-
dren to her parents four times for support, he was again in debt. When
two bailiffs came to arrest him and take his effects to pay for a bond, he
turned to his wife’s relations ‘but could obtain no redress from them’.
Forced to declare himself bankrupt, he declared: ‘I could neither get
credit for a Loaf, or any thing to keep us alive with; my Wife’s Relations
(who knew I was by this Commission clear’d) yet would not advance one
Farthing to enable me to prosecute my Business’. By 1740 after losing
several children to smallpox and disease he recalled that he was ‘slighted
by my Wife’s Relations and others, who ought to have strove to allevi-
ate the cares and difficulties I was struggling with; these things were too
hard to bare [sic]!’.33
It would seem that Simon’s parents-in-law were not ungenerous, but
increasingly wary of losing further money by investing in him and sim-
ply refused when it became clear that their son-in-law failed to advance.
48 J. Begiato
Thomas Wright faced a similar situation. Having foregone his wife’s por-
tion by running away with her, he nonetheless asked her to ‘solicit for
her fortune’ to put out at interest to increase their annual income, when
facing financial difficulties a few years into marriage due to his inadequa-
cies at farming.34 His parents-in-law refused and he railed against their
tight purses; yet he also recorded their assistance at various points in his
memoir: gifts of furniture; an interest-free loan of £50 in the late 1760s;
an interest-free loan of £50 in 1773; a home and board for at least three
of his children; a £20 premium for the eldest boy’s apprenticeship, and
a loan to Thomas Junior of around £140 to buy a shop and its stock.
Again, one wonders if it was his failures to earn a decent living that made
his parents-in-law cautious. Perhaps tellingly, he reported his resentment
that his parents-in-law publicly explained the cause of Lydia’s excessive
consumption of alcohol as due to Thomas’s failure to follow a trade.35
Marital Disrespect
The descriptive sections of Libels (the plaintiff’s statement of the defend-
ant’s marital faults) in marriage separation cases list the primary com-
plaints, but also often refer to the defendant’s poor spousal behaviour;
defendants issued similar counter-accusations against the plaintiff. In
addition to listing verbal abuse and gendered inadequacies, these second-
ary allegations often centred on spouses’ lack of respect for each other.36
The accounts can be fairly formulaic and precede the main accusations
of cruelty or adultery, and thus historians can assume them to be more
indicative of social and legal prescription than individualised problems.
Interestingly nonetheless, spouses make somewhat similar complaints in
the informal records of memoirs and letters examined here, especially
noting anger and lack of respect. Archibald Grant complained to his
mother-in-law in 1739 about Anna using ‘unbecomeing [sic] language
and conduct towards me both in private and publick’ [sic].37 Simon Mason
complained that his wife behaved insolently, noisily and tyrannically
towards him. On one occasion he grumbled:
and what a shocking Folly and Madness is it, when a Wife, to gratify a vile
Spirit, will stick at nothing, be it ever so base and false, to vilify and [sic]
destroy the reputation of her Husband, tho’s she knows his, her own and
Childrens Bread depend upon it?38
Thomas Wright accused his wife of bad temper too; he records her fall-
ing into a ‘furious passion’ and their exchange of ‘warm words’.39 Like
Simon, he felt that a wife’s disrespectful words were dangerous:
Hence I advise all my children of both sexes that may happen to enter into
the matrimonial connection, to be doubly careful how they make use of
such imprudent and disrespectful expressions to their partners, for though
they may be uttered in passion, and perhaps afterwards retracted, yet are
they apt to make such unfavourable impressions, and create such aversions
in delicate minds, as perhaps they may never afterwards be able to sur-
mount as long as they live.40
In 1815 George Courtauld also identified his wife as marred by ‘capri-

cious anger’ in a letter to his children.41 Thus, both formal and informal
records relating to marriage display the power given to spouses’ words
and their ensuing impact on the quality of the relationship.
Disputed authority often appears in separation cases. This too is
reflected in personal accounts which described men as seeking to affirm
their patriarchal authority over their wives when challenged. Lady Sarah
Cowper recorded a nasty argument with her husband in which they dis-
puted the time the servants should rise in the morning. She noted ‘He
Swore – Damn mee for a Bitch did I Hector him, he wou’d fell me to
the ground. This I must own was more than I Cou’d decently bear, so
I set up to out dare, it being the only way to deal with it’.42 Of course,
Sarah hardly conformed to ideal marital conduct either since her deter-
mination to ‘out dare,’ or challenge, her husband was not the subordi-
nate comportment recommended. Preferably, wives should not criticise
their husbands’ behaviour. It could have very real consequences. Thomas
Wright commented that when his wife, Lydia, disparaged his economic
status in spring 1774, he felt less affection for her, but also sought to
reassert his power. Previously he had emphasised his patience and tolera-
tion of her insistence in visiting her parents. On this occasion, however,
he warned her that,
I was no longer disposed to put up with similar insults to those I had

received formerly, and that I insisted upon better behaviour for the future;
otherwise, she might depend upon it, I would take more severe methods
with her. This seemed (partly, at least) to have its effect, as she behaved
50 J. Begiato
afterwards, though not very respectfully, yet in a less offensive manner

towards me to the day of her death.43
At another point in his memoir, Thomas stated that he beat two of his
older children to bring them back into line and respect for him, so it is
not unreasonable to speculate that the severe method he threatened was
physical correction. Not unlike some legal and popular culture accounts
of marital conflict then, husbands’ blows and wives’ words were given
rough equivalence in their ability to ‘hurt’ the recipient. Even when
Lydia was dying of an unidentified complaint of the lungs at the age of
30, in 1777, spousal respect was still something Thomas demanded. Her
physician suggested she stay at her parents’ home since it had a southerly
aspect. Thomas accepted this situation for some time until again insisting
upon his wife’s return home, at which point Lydia, probably too ill to
respond with her former anger, adopted what he felt was more appro-
priate demeanour: ‘tears and a good deal of respectful submission’. This
changed his mind and he let her stay; she died at her parental home
shortly afterwards.44
Religious Disagreement
Studies of eighteenth-century marriage have until recently rarely
focused on religion. Steve King has proposed that it needs integrat-
ing into the scholarship on courtship since it was a factor influencing
spousal choice.45 Religion was certainly a factor of acute interest during
John Shaw’s courtship of Elizabeth Wilkinson, as their correspondence
reveals. In his letters to her in 1810–1811, John explained that he was
not a Calvinist as her Methodist family suspected, but in fact was more
a Presbyterian. Thus he insisted that they were compatible in terms of
religion and that this would determine their future happiness. This was,
he said, one reason for selecting her as a partner. On New Year’s Eve
1810 he wrote explaining that her religious education and religion made
him look forward to their future intimacy. Indeed, their shared religious
values were ‘the one thing needfull’ and would provide hope and expec-
tations of happiness in the difficulties and trials of life; it was the passport
to future happiness and never-ending joy.46 His not attending Methodist
meetings remained a hurdle, but John sought compromise and pro-
posed she attend once a day with him and he would attend the other
part of the day with her. The phrasing and serious intensity of these
letters suggests the couple saw a mutually shared faith as important to a

successful union and not merely a convention to satisfy Elizabeth’s par-
ents. This worked and by 1813 they were married and had a long, seem-
ingly happy union.47
The role of religion after the wedding is less investigated. It does
not appear as a cause of dispute in separation records during the long
eighteenth century except in unusual cases such as the cruelty separa-
tion brought by Anne More against Zachary, her Roman Catholic hus-
band, in 1719. Her unsuccessful suit for separation alleged that Zachary
attempted to poison her when entertaining a ‘Romish Bishop’ to dinner
at his Manor House, Loftus, North Yorkshire. She claimed that Zachary
gave her poisoned wine, which made her ill for several weeks to prevent
her returning to her ‘Mother Church’. Anna explained that she had been
educated in the Church of England till she was thirteen years old when
she was ‘seduced’ by a relative to the Church of Rome. While she was
a practising Roman Catholic, she married the Catholic Zachary More.
After their union, however, she sought to return to the Protestant faith.
Article ten of her Libel stated that her husband was a ‘Bigotted Papist’
and refused to allow her to do so. Anne lost the suit because the depo-
nents, including the local Church of England Minister, deposed that
she was subject to fancies or in harsher words, crazed. Here we see an
extreme example of the potential for marital dispute due to differences
in faith. It is unlikely that her actions indicate any exploitation of reli-
gious differences for her own ends of ending a union. Such strategic
thinking was probably difficult for her. Although it is impossible to tell
whether Anne was delusional, deponents certainly stated that her men-
tal or emotional health was precarious. In a society of entrenched piety,
she articulated the collapse of their marriage and the cause of her hus-
band’s violence in terms of their religious differences. Still, while there
was a pervasive local fear of Catholics in the area so soon after the 1715
Jacobite rebellion, it is unlikely that she deployed this as a strategy for
seeking separation. In truth, delineating her husband’s violence and find-
ing witnesses to it would have been sufficient for the court.48
Moreover, rather humdrum religious divisions could also be pow-
erful. Thomas Wright expressed a number of religious misgivings in
his account of his disputes with his wife and her family from the general
to the theological. His most frequent complaint was simple: his in-laws
had failed as Christians because they declared they would never forgive
him for eloping with Lydia. More specifically, he repeatedly contrasted
52 J. Begiato
his Methodism with his wife and family’s Calvinism; on one occasion he
explained that he ‘espoused the doctrine of Free-agency and Universal
Redemption’ in contrast with their strict Calvinism.49 The Arminian-
Calvinist split in Methodism was still rumbling at the end of the
eighteenth century, so Thomas probably viewed these distinctions as sig-
nificant. Thomas also believed the denominational differences led to his
wife’s inferior upbringing, their incompatibility, and his parents-in-law’s
many wrongs. These tensions were variously expressed, but usually
linked the religious division with the personal problem. For example,
he blamed his wife’s excessive drinking of rum on her bearing a sickly
infant and having to stay in bed for three months after the birth. He
reported that during that time ‘Mr. James Scott, the minister of the
Calvinistic Chapel at Heckmondwike, of which her parents were mem-
bers, paid her a visit, to pray with her and administer “ghostly comfort
and consolation”’. The term ‘ghostly’ refers to a clergyman reading the
bible and offering comfort through counselling from biblical sources.
Lydia responded to the clergyman by citing scripture ‘in the cant strain
of the party’, according to Thomas. In other words, Mr. Scott was fooled
by Lydia’s [familial] ability to use the gospels to persuade him that she
was well and distract him from warning her against drunkenness. In
Thomas’s view, the ‘minister was imposed upon, and departed without
ever discovering (that ever I could perceive) anything at all of her real
situation’.50 For Thomas, Lydia’s Calvinism was a stain on her character
and behaviour which undermined their relationship.
Resolving Marital Conflict:

Intergenerational Mediation
Historians have established from formal records of marital breakdown
that matrimonial dispute was accompanied by mediation, whether the
spouses voluntarily sought it or not.51 It lay within the remit of legal per-
sonnel in Church Courts and Quarter Sessions to facilitate agreements
between spouses, typically aimed at them living together peaceably, to
protect a wife from further abuse, or to ensure that husbands’ obligation
to provide was honoured. The stages of conflict and attempts at reso-
lution revealed in separation cases also show that family members arbi-
trated between husband and wife.52 Parents offered refuge to offspring
experiencing marital breakdown, especially wives suffering abuse. Wives’
brothers and fathers warned husbands against violence, though they also
persuaded wives to return to husbands. Generally they had the women’s
interests at heart as the marital unit was the only one that could finan-
cially support women with children. In wealthy, titled families there were
considerable vested interests in getting couples to agree. As O’Day com-
ments, establishing patronage links was a contributing factor for indi-
viduals promoting and organising relatives’ unions; thus the prospect of
those marriages ending in separation or divorce inferred the termination
of the patronage network too.53
Familial intervention is also apparent in first-hand accounts discussed
here, though it is somewhat different from its more formalised represen-
tation in legal records. It might be as simple as providing a sympathetic
ear, as Archibald Grant’s letter to his mother-in-law cited above suggests.
Here he complained of his wife’s conduct towards him and worried that
Anna misguidedly thought he did not love her. It is clear that he trusted
Anna’s mother to listen and offer guidance and help.54 The case studies
also show its less welcome aspects. Neither Simon Mason nor Thomas
Wright framed their in-laws’ actions as mediating between them and
their spouses. Both men blamed their in-laws for instigating and main-
taining conflict between them and their daughters. As well as complain-
ing that their wives’ parents disliked them and refused to support them
financially as they saw fit, both men claimed that their in-laws were
spiteful and malicious. Thomas Wright even labelled his parents-in-law
as ‘malevolent’.55 Strikingly, both often rhetorically linked their wives’
faults to their wives’ families’ faults.
Neither the Masons nor Wrights kept their tensions and arguments to
themselves. Both couples were firmly embedded within their intergenera-
tional families. Initially Simon Mason’s mother helped him until she died,
and thereafter his in-laws were prominent. He and his wife separated
whenever he could no longer support her and his children. She would
return to her family until he could establish himself again. When he
sought her out in 1746 after yet another separation, however, he noted
that: ‘I was oblig’d to take a Lodging for myself, not being permitted to
be with her, for fear of disobliging her pious Relations’.56 The situation
worsened. His brother-in-law, Mr. Cheshire, tried to help him get work,
but the ill nature and malice of my good Father-in-law, and his Consort
&c, knowing I was pretty often at his Son Cheshire’s, and finding I
pick’d up a small, tho’ an uncomfortable living, insisted that his Son
54 J. Begiato
Cheshire should forbid me coming to his House, which Mr Cheshire

was forc’d unwillingly to comply with: Such was the malice of this good
Father-in-law, that I was forc’d to shift my Quarters, to the Stone-Kitchen
in the Tower, where I was most kindly treated: But still this was an
unhappy settl’d Life; I, in one Lodging, my good Wife, in another, and
my Children, at the Parish; altogether almost depriv’d me of my Senses,
for my little narrow Way of Business was scarcely sufficient to keep me in
a State of Existence, much less to pay for my Children’s Board; and my
wife’s Relations, not being willing to contribute one Farthing to save them
from the Parish.57
Indeed, his regular criticism of his parents-in-law suggests that Simon

found it easier to blame them for his separation from his wife and chil-
dren. After all, to be solely culpable for the failure to support one’s
dependents undermined a man’s status and manhood in most peo-
ple’s eyes. Eventually both Mason and Wright came to see their wives
as tainted by their natal families; apparently unable to separate the two.
Thomas Wright regretted allowing his wife to visit her parents regularly
without him for this ‘soon operated for the worse on my wife’s mind and
behaviour’.58 During the visits ‘they continued to blackguard, vilify, and
abuse me in her presence with all the virulence and malignity that the
blackest and most diabolical pride and malice could inspire’. He insisted
this ‘entirely ruined the peace and happiness of our family’, because
Lydia returned home ‘in a bad humour, and would have abused me in
the most provoking language for hours together, when I have hardly
uttered a word in reply’. Nearer the end of the memoir he returned yet
again to this, proposing that they ‘completely inspired her with their own
spirit and prejudices, which soon discovered itself in a want of proper
esteem and regard for me’.59 Indeed Thomas represented Lydia’s visits
to her parental home as going over to his ‘enemies’.60 He also accused
them of joining in the couple’s arguments. In 1774 Lydia went to live
at her parents’ following a falling-out. His attempts to make her return
ended in more quarrels and his mother-in-law, in a ‘spirit of the most
perverse malignity, [said] that she had rather she had married a chimney-
sweeper; nay, that she had rather follow her to her grave, than see her
return peaceably home with her husband!’.61
The offspring of separating spouses did not play a prominent role in
matrimonial litigation. Seldom even named, their numbers were stated,
expenditure upon them occasionally recorded, and they were mentioned
as bystanders and victims of marital violence. Even more rarely they

appeared as deponents. In contrast, correspondence and recollections in
memoirs indicate that older and adult offspring could play an important
part in their parents’ marital problems, acting as confidantes, support-
ers, and accusers. George and Ruth Courtauld’s oldest children, Samuel
and Louisa, were drawn into their disputes and it is possible to infer that
this caused strains. George began a letter to Sam in June 1813 express-
ing surprise at his silence even though Samuel had received a packet that
contained ‘among other things a copy of a paper which your mother sent
to me by Louisa—the greater part of which was, as you will believe, a tis-
sue of gross misrepresentations’. Already it is possible to see that Louisa
was acting as go-between for her parents.62 George proceeded to defend
himself vigorously to Sam, citing the offending parts of Ruth’s accusa-
tions, clearly intending Sam to be his father’s champion. He doubted
that Sam would be ‘inclined to believe your father to have conducted
himself towards your mother (from the time when she threw herself
“completely into his power, far from friends, from country, or protec-
tors”), without either “Affection, Honour, Generosity or Gratitude”’.
The quotation he cited presumably referred to Ruth’s account of their
marriage in America in 1789. George used these categories of affection,
honour and generosity in the remainder of the letter to detail the unfair-
ness of his wife’s accusation. In doing so, it is possible to see that a split
in child-parent support might emerge. In justifying his financial deci-
sion, George defended his plan to provide more money for Sam than for
the other six children as a sensible investment in a future business. Ruth
clearly saw it as an unjustifiable inequity.63
As George’s letter reveals, people turned to their adult children to
discuss their marital tensions. George updated Sam further on 31 July
1815, for example, explaining:
Mother and I go on better than for a long time past. My last conversa-
tion upon my late proposals stated my conviction of the desirableness of
separation for the comfort of both parties – and those proposals were such
as appeared to fall in exactly with the favourite plan of both mother and
Lou; yet there rather appears, I think, to be an intention of remaining at
Braintree, which if at all tolerable I shall most certainly not oppose.64
A few weeks later he added a sad postscript to another letter: ‘Your

mother is also very well, and appears tolerably comfortable—I wish
56 J. Begiato
I could make her happy’.65 Though these reflections might seem the
conversations of friends rather than father/child, in this period par-
ents were encouraged to be their children’s confidantes and friends.66
George’s attempt to discuss his marital tensions with his adult son,
however, illuminates a facet of such relationships not revealed by the
advice literature, which ended its guidance for parents before the child
reached adulthood. George was a man who prided himself on being a
good father, caring, companionate, and devoted, as ideals recommended.
Perhaps the letters he exchanged with his adult son Samuel show the
reciprocal aspect of such ideals, when parents themselves turned to their
children as confidantes at times of crisis.
Given the large size of families, however, including one child as confi-
dante could exclude another. In her letter dated August 1813, the eldest
child Louisa complained to Sam about her father’s assumptions:
My father thinks that I defend my mother, viz. her opinions, whether good
or bad, because they are her’s; this I am sure I do not. It is true I do not
always declare my sentiments when they run counter to her’s, and I do
mostly support her’s when they coincide with my own in opposition to my
father’s.
Louisa explained that she could not lie or ‘guard my expressions’ when
discussing her mother with her father. She may have been defending
herself to Sam too, for she commented: ‘You do not know what it was
that influenced me “to take” as Papa says “My mother’s part”’. This sug-
gests that Sam was not fully informed of the issues, perhaps because he
only had his father’s side of the situation. While she admitted to Sam
that her mother was ‘often much to blame’, she distinguished between
her parents through their discussion of each other in front of their chil-
dren. She approved of her mother because she praised her husband’s
abilities as a father, regardless of what she felt that he was like as a hus-
band, but disapproved of her father because he attacked her mother’s
maternal abilities.67 In a further letter Louisa updated Sam about ‘the
mutual domestic comfort of our parents’. She reported that ‘an increase
of apparent kind attention on the one side is accepted by an increased
willingness to be pleased’. She attributed the alteration to having invol-
untarily declared her plan to assist her mother: ‘while Cath, Eliza and I
were in the room’ her father ‘began a conversation or rather a mono-
logue on the desirableness of a separation; he then read a letter on the
subject which he had written to you’. Louisa reported that her failure to
reply to this ‘displeased him, which displeasure he shewed by comparing
my conduct in this instance to my mother’s “infamous abominable” &c
&c behaviour; this forced me to a perhaps sharp defence of Mo[ther]’.
This included informing him that she was determined to take a small
school where she would live with her mother.68
Children’s involvement in parental marital breakdown shows its dia-
chronic form far more powerfully in letters and memoirs than in court
records, where at best a static picture is glimpsed. The offspring of cou-
ples who experienced sustained marital conflict often encountered it in
childhood and it could influence their actions in adulthood. Ruth and
George’s inability to live happily together had impinged upon their chil-
dren’s lives throughout childhood. Ruth had spent several years in her
natal home in Ireland with some of her younger daughters, leaving her
younger sons and two eldest children in Essex with George. Louisa used
these memories to support a second more permanent separation of her
parents in 1813. She informed Sam: ‘As to a separation, I am convinced
my mother’s happiness would be increased, I should therefore second
such an arrangement; but I could not then remain at home: I never can
forget the many wretched dreadful hours I passed during my mother’s
absence’.69 There is also evidence that marriage conflict could alter the
nature of the relationship between parent and children. In 1815 follow-
ing an undisclosed dispute with several of his adult offspring, George
wrote an open letter to them observing that they were his sole comfort
in life:
The only troubles worthy of the name which have hitherto been allotted
to me (and of these indeed I have, I believe and hope, had a larger por-
tion than falls to the lot of most men) have arisen from the relations of
Husband and Father. When, (and long after) I had given up all expecta-
tion of being happy with my Wife – (tho’ upon the hope of conjugal bliss
no man I assuredly believe ever more fondly indulged himself and assidu-
ously cherished for years, with but slight expectation of realising it) – when
this fond hope proved but an illusion and all that I could look forward to
in this connection was a bearable uncomfortableness – and even this has
scarcely been attained. When this view of earthly comfort was gone, I con-
soled myself for many years that by making friends of my children I should
secure a parent’s best enjoyments.70
58 J. Begiato
Apparently, he was not averse to a little emotional blackmail either. It is

tempting to speculate that the couple’s troubles shaped their offspring’s
lives for yet more years. George returned to America at the end of the
decade with plans to found Englishtown in Ohio, taking with him all
his children except the eldest two. Louisa Courtauld had already moved
with Ruth to Edinburgh in order to facilitate her mother’s separation
from her husband. Ruth seems to have been unable or unwilling to work
for a living and Louisa opened and taught in a school there, which sup-
ported them both. Later Louisa also backed out of the move to America
at the last minute, a decision which may have been influenced by her
mother’s refusal to accompany the other members of her family on this
venture. Mother and daughter remained together until Ruth returned
to Essex to housekeep for her son Samuel, who also refused to join his
father. The family was only physically reunited in Britain after George’s
death in America in 1823.
Conclusion: The Ongoing Familial Cost

of Marital Conflict
Due to the nature of matrimonial litigation there is a tendency for schol-

arship on troubled marriages in the long eighteenth century to focus on
their worst examples or their crises points: often the immediate lead up
to, or breakdown of, a union. Adding evidence of marital conflict that did
not reach complete breakdown or did not involve infidelity, cruelty, or
desertion, adds colour to this stark, monotone picture. It shows that the
concerns of unhappy husbands and wives centred on financial problems
and their spouse’s appropriate behaviour, whether conflict was minor or
extreme. Yet it also reveals other areas of tension, particularly differing
religious views and practices. These are often neglected in the history of
marriage, although historians of courtship are beginning to recognise
the power of religious practice, and this chapter indicates that those who
address marital difficulties will also find it worthwhile to consider, espe-
cially as it is peculiarly amenable to historicisation.71
Autobiographies and correspondence demonstrate that it is impor-
tant not to view marital conflict in isolation. Such conflicts were inter-
generational, often involving the union’s offspring as well as parents
and kin on either side of the married couple. While we know that some
family members attempted to assist unhappy spouses, it is clear that in
other marriages they were also blamed for exacerbating or even causing
arguments. Furthermore, the sources investigated in this chapter dem-
onstrate that marital conflict could have (admittedly in the eyes of
those remembering many years later) a very long genesis, occurring in
some instances even before the wedding itself. Indeed what is strikingly
evoked by correspondence and autobiographies is the extensive nature
of familial involvement in spouses’ marital problems. Even though this
may be a feature of hindsight and memory in autobiographies, some of
the husbands in the sample cited their parents-in-law as protagonists in
the marriage going wrong from the start. It also could outlive the trou-
bled marriage. Although Thomas Wright married a second time (at 45
to a 15 year old) four years after his first wife’s death, his memoir still
returned repeatedly to his first wife’s parents to recount their continued
personal animosity to him after Lydia’s death, and their role in giving
a home and work to several of his children into their own adulthood
and marriage. His mother-in-law died in 1796 and his father-in-law in
1797 and by then two of Thomas’s daughters had married two brothers
who were themselves feuding over their Birkhead inheritances. Indeed,
Thomas saw the taint of this continuing through the generations. He
warned his intended readers—his and his parents-in-law’s descendants—
that his mother-in-law’s conduct had ‘done the greatest injury to some
of her own offspring, and given occasion for the most implacable ani-
mosity to arise between the parties, who were near relations, immediately
sprung from her own family, and which malice and animosity will proba-
bly be transmitted to future generations’.72 Perhaps the view that marital
conflict could taint the lives of more people than the couple concerned
was an additional factor impelling society to encourage spouses to resolve
disputes.
Notes
1. Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown
1660–1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003); Katie
Barclay, Love Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland,
1650–1850 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011).
2. Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 137–139; Katie Barclay, ‘“And Four Years Space
they Loveingly Agreed”: Balladry and Early Modern Understandings of
Marriage’, in Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland,
ed. Elizabeth Ewan and Janey Nugent (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008),
60 J. Begiato
23–34; Ingrid. H. Tague, ‘Love, Honor, and Obedience: Fashionable

Women and the Discourse of Marriage in the Early Eighteenth Century,
Journal of British Studies 40: 1 (2001): 76–106.
3. Bailey, Unquiet Lives, passim; Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence: An
English Family History, 1660–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
4. Jennie Batchelor’s chapter ‘“Be but a little deaf and blind,/ And happi-
ness you’ll surely find”: Marriage in the Women’s Magazine’ addresses
the space that serial magazines such as The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832)
provided to readers and contributors in which to relate, address and
advise on more typical marital concerns, arguing that such serials: ‘how-
ever, are largely untapped sources of evidence for prevailing attitudes
towards eighteenth-century marriage’ (Batchelor, p. 109).
5. Naomi Tadmor, ‘Early modern English kinship in the long run: reflections
on continuity and change’, Continuity and Change 25: 1 (2010): 15–48.
6. Nicole Eustace, ‘“The cornerstone of a copious work”: love and power
in eighteenth-century courtship’, Journal of Social History 34: 3 (2001):
517–546; Jessica Malay, ‘The marrying of Lady Anne Clifford: mari-
tal strategy in the Clifford inheritance dispute’ Northern History 49: 2
(2012): 251–264; Diana O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking
the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2002); Rosemary O’Day, ‘Matchmaking and money-
making in a patronage society: the first duke and duchess of Chandos, c.
1712–35’, The Economic History Review 66: 1 (2013): 273–296.
7. O’Day, ‘Matchmaking’, passim.
8. Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England, 1750–1830: emotions, identity and
generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially Chap. 8.
9. O’Day, ‘Matchmaking’, 273.
10. For instance, in discussing Lady Anne Clifford’s marriage in the seven-
teenth century, Malay refers to three elite marriages that ended in separa-
tion, ‘The Marrying of Lady Anne Clifford’, 252, 256, 262.
11. Hampshire Record Office, 25M60/PO35, May 6th 1834 [1588].
12. Katie Barclay, ‘Negotiating Patriarchy: The Marriage of Anna Potts and
Archibald Grant of Monymusk’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 28:
2 (2008): 83–10.
13. Anne Kugler, Errant Plagiary: The Life and Writing of Lady Sarah Cowper
1644–1720 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002);
Amanda Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
14. Simon Mason, A Narrative of the Life and Distresses of Simon Mason,
Apothecary (Birmingham, 1754). For more detail on Mason’s working
life see Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early

Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 295–296.
15. Autobiography of Thomas Wright of Birkenshaw in the county of York,
1736–1797, ed. Thomas Wright (London, 1864).
16. Transcribed and printed in: S.L. Courtauld, The Huguenot family of
Courtauld, 3 vols. (privately printed, London, 1957–67) and Courtauld
family letters, 1782–1900, ed. S.A. Courtauld, 7 vols (privately printed,
1916).
17. Malay, ‘Marrying of Lady Anne Clifford’, 251.
18. Barclay, ‘Negotiating Patriarchy’, 86.
19. For the economic aspects see Bailey, Unquiet Lives, Chaps. 4 and 5, for
marital respect see Joanne Bailey and Loreen Giese, ‘Marital cruelty:
reconsidering lay attitudes in England, c. 1580 to 1850’, The History of
the Family 18: 3 (2013): 9–12.
20. Ibid., 89.
21. Mason, Narrative, 87.
22. George Courtauld to his son Samuel, 23 June 1813, Courtauld,
Huguenot Family of Courtauld, vol. 2, 42.
23. Barclay, ‘Negotiating Patriarchy’, 88, 96–99 (quotation at 97).
24. Sam and Mrs. Sam [Ellen] Courtauld to Sophia Courtauld, and Mrs.
George Courtauld to Sophia Courtauld, Bocking, morning 6 Aug 1822,
Courtauld family letters, vol. 2, 928.
25. For example, see the chapter on the Soundy family in The Narratives
of the Poor in the eighteenth century, ed. Steven King, Thomas Nutt
and Alannah Tompkins (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), vol. 1,
219–297.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 86–87.
29. Ibid., 22–29.
30. Wright (ed.), Autobiography, 116.
31. Ibid., 102.
32. Mason, Narrative, 28–29, 39–40.
33. Mason, Narrative, 39, 63, 66, 72.
34. Wright (ed.), Autobiography, p. 116.
35. Ibid., 101.
36. For marital complaints before the courts see Bailey, Unquiet Lives,
Chap. 3. This was not specific to England: cases of marital violence
in Paris, analysed for 1775, also included verbal abuse, J. Merrick,
‘Domestic Violence in Paris, 1775’, Journal of Family History 37: 4
(2012): 418.
37. Quoted in Barclay, ‘Negotiating Patriarchy’, 93.
62 J. Begiato

40. Ibid., 103.
41. 1815 George Courtauld to all his children, Courtauld, Huguenot Family
of Courtauld, vol. 2, 71.
42. Quoted in Kugler, Errant Plagiary, 50.
44. Ibid., 128.
45. Steve King, ‘Love, Religion and Power in the Making of Marriages in
Early Nineteenth-Century Rural Industrial Lancashire’, Rural History
21: 1 (2010): 1–26.
46. Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of
Birmingham, John Shaw to Elizabeth Wilkinson at Rochdale, 31 Dec
1810, Shaw 1.
47. For their courtship see Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business,
Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering &
Chatto, 2012), Chap. 3.
48. Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, C.P. I 699, Anna More v.
Zachariah (Zachary) More.
50. Ibid., 107–108.
51. Bailey, Unquiet Lives, Chap. 3.
52. Foyster, Marital Violence, Chap. 4; Merrick, ‘Domestic Violence in Paris,
1775’, 419.
53. O’Day, ‘Matchmaking,’ 292.
54. Barclay, ‘Negotiating Patriarchy’, 93.
57. Ibid., 90.
59. Ibid., 100, 253.
60. Ibid., 102.
61. Ibid., 104–105.
62. For another example, dated 1692, see Kugler, Errant Plagiary, 30.
63. George Courtauld to his son Samuel Courtauld, 23 June 1813,
Courtauld, Huguenot Family of Courtauld, vol. 2, 42–44.
64. George Courtauld to his son Samuel Courtauld, 29 July 1813,
Courtauld, Huguenot Family of Courtauld, vol. 2, 58.
65. George Courtauld to his son Samuel Courtauld, 7 Sept 1813, Courtauld,
66. Bailey, Parenting in England, Chap. 3.
67. Louisa Courtauld to her brother Samuel Courtauld 1813, Courtauld,

68. Ibid., 53–54.
69. Ibid., 52, emphasis in original.
70. George Courtauld to all his children, 1815, Courtauld, Huguenot Family
of Courtauld, vol. 2, 71–72.
71. Batchelor likewise notes the necessity to read textual sources overlooked
by traditional scholarship in her chapter, arguing that neglected materials
such as eighteenth-century magazines, ‘have the potential to nuance our
sense of popular cultural discourses about marriage in fascinating ways’
(Batchelor, p. 125).
Handsome, Gallant, Gentle, Rich:
Before and After Marriage in the Tales
of Charles Perrault
James Fowler
Today Charles Perrault is principally known as the author of eight fairy

tales in prose. Most of these conclude with a marriage, presented as a
happy ending; several begin with the evocation of a less-than-happy mar-
riage.1 But in 1697, the readers of the first published collection would be
reminded of a particularly important real-life marriage, still in the mak-
ing: that of ‘Mademoiselle’, the princess to whom Perrault’s dedication
is addressed.2 Mademoiselle was the court title of the nineteen-year-old
Élisabeth-Charlotte d’Orleans, daughter to Philippe, Duc d’Orléans and
niece to the Sun King Louis XIV himself. Of course, such a high-ranking
princess would be allowed limited choice, and perhaps no choice at all,
in the question of whom she would marry. As Vincent J. Pitts writes, a
princess of the ancien régime ‘could be used as a pawn to advance the
interests of state and dynasty as the king saw fit’.3
In 1698, the year following the publication of Perrault’s tales,
Élisabeth-Charlotte was to marry Leopold I of Lorraine.4 But in 1697,
J. Fowler (*) 
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: J.E.Fowler@kent.ac.uk

66 J. Fowler
it would be natural for Perrault’s readers to imagine her paying particular

attention to stories in which the marriage of a royal princess represents
the happiest of outcomes. Indeed, as we will see below, to reread the
tales through the frame of the dedication to Mademoiselle is to reveal
a commentary on the relationship between dynastic marriage and mar-
iage d’amour. It should be noted, however, that before the tales were
published, a manuscript version containing only five of them was offered
to Élisabeth-Charlotte, in 1695. This was a luxurious gift (or homage)
complete with illustrations and the royal recipient’s coat of arms, and
was surely intended by Perrault to increase his family’s favour at court.5
Below we will focus on the five tales contained in that manuscript vol-
ume; but we will note the variants introduced in 1697, as appropriate.6
Perrault’s Magic Mirror

Useful historical context for reading the dedication to Mademoiselle is
provided by Julie Hardwick, who argues that in early modern marriages
pragmatic considerations broadly prevailed, whilst ‘companionate’ mar-
riage only became ascendant in the course of the eighteenth century.7
We have already noted that, inevitably, during the ancien régime royal
marriages were planned for political and dynastic reasons. But Hardwick
argues that in the seventeenth century pragmatism affected marriages
across the classes to an extent that is still underestimated. She asserts that
it is only later that:
The pragmatic partnerships based on property and mutual interest in a

sustainable household that were typical of early modern marriages were
increasingly replaced, at least rhetorically, by new emphases on romantic
love and personal choice of soulmates as the appropriate bases for choice
of spouses. The much discussed ‘rise of companionate marriage’ [in the
eighteenth century] reframed domestic expectations between men and
women.8
The evidence which Hardwick provides certainly suggests that the com-
panionate marriage was on the rise in the eighteenth century, ‘at least
rhetorically’. But if Perrault’s tales are read carefully, they suggest that
Hardwick’s thesis requires considerable adaptation to fit the evidence
provided by some examples of seventeenth-century French literature.
For tales such as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ show that already in Perrault’s time it
HANDSOME, GALLANT, GENTLE, RICH: BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE … 67
was possible to doubt that pragmatic marriages would necessarily be hap-

pier than mariages d’amour. Moreover, the tales show that it was entirely
possible to dream of a marriage being formed between (social) equals
that was at once a mariage d’amour and a pragmatic one, from the out-
set. Perrault’s tales, in short, suggest that as far as some circles were con-
cerned, the early modern ascendancy of the ‘pragmatic partnership’ over
the mariage d’amour may have been overstated.
The dedication is signed ‘P. P.’ for Pierre Perrault Darmancour, sug-
gesting that it was written by Charles Perrault’s son.9 Most specialists
would agree that whilst Darmancour may have contributed in some man-
ner to the tales’ genesis, they were effectively written by the father, along
with the dedication.10 If this is indeed the case, then speaking in his son’s
voice, Perrault begins as follows: ‘Mademoiselle: On ne trouvera pas
étrange qu’un enfant ait pris plaisir à composer les contes de ce recueil,
mais on s’étonnera qu’il ait osé vous les présenter’ [Mademoiselle:
People will not find it odd that a child has amused himself by devising
the tales contained in this collection, but they will be somewhat shocked
that he dared to present them to you].11 Such disapproval will arise,
Perrault predicts, from the ‘disproportion [qu’il y a] entre la simplicité
enfantine de ces récits, et l’amas surprenant des lumières que la nature
et l’éducation ont rassemblées en vous’ [the disproportion that exists
between the childlike simplicity of these tales and the surprising accumu-
lation of wisdom which nature and education have concentrated in your
person]. But Perrault promises that each of the tales contains ‘une morale
très sensée’ [a very wise moral/morality] that will be understood ‘plus
ou moins, selon le degré de pénétration de ceux qui les écoutent’ [more
or less completely, according to the perceptiveness of those who listen to
them].12 Perhaps then, as Mademoiselle reads these tales she will discover
ideas not normally to be found in this genre adapted to children: perhaps
they will even concern her own situation. But what method of interpreta-
tion will reveal such morals, hidden as they are to the profane? Perrault
offers an answer in the verse that closes the dedication:
Pouvais-je mieux choisir pour rendre vraisemblable

Ce que la Fable a d’incroyable?
Et jamais fée au temps jadis
Fit-elle à jeune Créature,
Plus de dons, et de dons exquis,
Que vous en a fait la Nature?13
68 J. Fowler
[Surely I could offer these tales to no one better suited to lend

plausibility
To the unbelievable parts of fairy stories?
Surely no fairy, once upon a time,
Ever bestowed upon a mortal of tender years
Gifts more numerous or exquisite
Than Nature has bestowed on you?]
When Perrault writes above that fairy stories are ‘unbelievable’, he surely
means, simply enough, that adult readers generally do not believe in fair-
ies. But he proceeds to suggest that they become ‘vraisemblable[s]’ if
we read them allegorically, whilst bearing Élisabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans
in mind.14 For in the real world it seems ‘Nature’ has at least equalled
fictional fairies in endowing this real-life princess with the numerous,
exquisite ‘gifts’ which she displays. And so the dedication offers a blue-
print for reading the tales as allegories: if we substitute ‘Nature’ for the
fairies, the tales will supposedly reveal their relevance to the real world of
seventeenth-century France.
In recent decades, scholars have read these tales as allegories, but not
according to Perrault’s blueprint. In his brilliant and influential study
The Great Cat Massacre, Darnton interprets them as historical docu-
ments bearing traces of the hardships suffered by peasants in ancien
régime France; he further argues that the peasants developed an ethos
or practical philosophy which he terms ‘tricksterism’. To strengthen his
case, Darnton compares Perrault’s tales with those precedents that cir-
culated amongst the poor: ‘whenever one looks behind Perrault to the
peasant versions of Mother Goose, one finds elements of realism […] a
picture that corresponds to everything that social historians have been
able to piece together from the archives’.15 But how was it possible for
such elements to enter Perrault’s tales, fashioned for a court readership,
yet continue to provide evidence of the authentic experience of the poor?
Darnton’s answer is that the children of nobility were often cared for
by wet nurses and other women of the people, who told them Mother
Goose stories. This, for him, explains how, in Perrault, we can find a
linking of two cultures, ‘even at the height of the Grand siècle, when
they would seem to have least in common; for the audiences of Racine
and Lully had imbibed folklore with their milk’.16 The end of the seven-
teenth century would seem to mark a unique moment in French history,
indeed in history tout court, when ‘cultural currents intermingled, mov-

ing up as well as down, while passing through different media and con-
necting groups as far apart as peasants and salon sophisticates’.17
But we must careful not to view Perrault’s mode of narration through
rose-tinted spectacles. If the children of the élite were exposed to popu-
lar culture as infants, it may have done little to shake their sense of hier-
archy in adulthood. Darnton speaks of currents intermingling, but in
some cases it may be more appropriate to use a different metaphor and
speak instead of ‘interference’ coming from above, and threatening to
drown out those peasant voices. This may be illustrated by reference to a
passage from Perrault’s ‘Donkeyskin’ (or in French, ‘Peau d’Âne’), writ-
ten in 1693–1694. Towards the end of this verse tale, a handsome young
Prince announces that he will take as his bride the woman whose finger is
slender enough to wear a certain ring.18 Predictably enough, all unmar-
ried women of the kingdom decide to try their luck. But what matters
here is that they form an orderly queue, and do so strictly according to
rank: ‘L’essai fut commencé par les jeunes princesses,/Les marquises et
les duchesses’ [the trial was begun by all the young princesses,/By the
marquises and the duchesses]; next come ‘Les comtesses, et les baronnes,/
Et toutes les nobles personnes,/Comme elles tour à tour présentèrent
leur main’ [the comtesses, the baronnes/And all the nobility/presented
their hand like the aforementioned, turn by turn]; these are followed, in
turn, by ‘les grisettes’ [all the poor girls].19 The series ends with mockery
directed towards the pitiful, ‘fairy-tale’ pretensions of the lowest-born
and poorest of all, the ‘dregs’ of the kingdom who, as if in accordance
with the ‘natural’ order of things, have the thickest fingers:
Il fallait en venir enfin

Aux servantes, aux cuisinières,
Aux tortillons, aux dindonnières,
En un mot à tout le fretin,
Dont les rouges et noires pattes,
Non moins que les mains délicates,
Espéraient un heureux destin.
Il s’y présenta mainte fille
Dont le doigt, gros et ramassé,
Dans la bague du prince eût aussi peu passé
Qu’un câble au travers d’une aiguille.20
70 J. Fowler
[Finally, they had to resort

To servants, cooks,
To lower servant girls, keepers of turkeys,
In a word, all the dregs,
Whose red and blackened paw-feet,
No less than others’ delicate hands,
Hoped for a happy destiny.
Many a girl came forward
Whose fat and sturdy finger
Would as soon have fitted through the prince’s ring
As a rope through the eye of a needle.]21
This hierarchical sneering does not invalidate Darnton’s thesis, but it

surely gives us pause for thought. We must not forget that the willing-
ness of Perrault and his (initial) readership to look ‘down’ with benign
condescension was limited by social structures that owed a great deal,
still, to feudalism.22 Meanwhile, as the high-born read these tales, their
glance must have been drawn to their own image, reflected by the upper
surface of Perrault’s irony. For (in a variation of Darnton’s thesis) it has
been remarked more than once that these tales create a tension between
high and low, rich and poor, worldly and naïve, childish and adult.23
They invite the reader to ponder the age-old culture of the common
people, but also invite the élite to scour them for ironic references to
the contemporary world. The morals may then apply to the habitués
of the salons as well as, or rather than, the people. Perhaps ‘rather
than’ is to be preferred here in one particularly important respect:
pace Darnton, the tales present dreams of social ascension and cross-
class marriage as belonging firmly in the world of fantasy. Meanwhile,
we will see below that these same tales offer hope that a different kind
of fantasy might become reality: that a marriage arranged for dynastic
reasons may still prove a mariage d’amour. Small wonder then, that
Perrault calculated that his five tales, handsomely bound, might appeal
to Mademoiselle.
‘Sleeping Beauty’
This, the first tale in the collection, most closely corresponds to the verse
with which the dedication closes: ‘Surely I could offer these tales to no
one better suited to lend plausibility / To the unbelievable parts of fairy
stories? [etc.]’. It begins with a royal marriage underway, but a marriage

clouded with sadness: ‘Il était une fois un roi et une reine, qui étaient
si fâchés de n’avoir point d’enfants, si fâchés qu’on ne saurait dire’
[Once upon a time there lived a king and a queen who were so unhappy
because they had no children that words do not suffice to express their
sorrow]. The royal couple do not appeal to fairies, but employ religious
resources familiar to Perrault’s contemporaries: ‘Ils allèrent à toutes les
eaux du monde, vœux, pèlerinages, menues dévotions, tout fut mis en
œuvre, et rien n’y faisait’ [They went to all the spas in the world; they
tried everything possible: prayers, pilgrimages, and gifts to saints; but
nothing worked].24 This echoes the recent history of Mademoiselle’s
family; for Anne of Austria was thirty-six when she gave birth (in 1638)
to Louis XIV, having remained childless for the first twenty years of mar-
riage. Before the birth of Mademoiselle’s illustrious uncle there had been
pilgrimages to shrines, and prayers to Saint Leonard.25
Up to this point, the text could be the beginning of what Perrault
calls a nouvelle, which means that it can be believed to have happened in
reality.26 Once the queen becomes pregnant, however, fairies enter the
tale. There are seven such creatures in the kingdom; it is their custom
to offer gifts to a newborn princess, and so they are invited to court. As
a result, the princess was to become ‘la plus belle personne du monde’
[the most beautiful young lady in the world]; she would have ‘de
l’esprit comme un ange’ [the intelligence of an angel], and bring ‘une
grâce admirable à tout ce qu’elle ferait’ [admirable grace to everything
she did]; she would dance ‘parfaitement bien’ [perfectly well], and sing
‘comme un rossignol’ [like a nightingale]; finally, ‘elle jouerait de toutes
sortes d’instruments dans la dernière perfection’ [she would play all sorts
of instruments to the utmost perfection].27
Mademoiselle may be imagined to recall the dedication at this
point, where, we saw, a parallel was established between herself, a prin-
cess who has been showered with ‘so many gifts’, and fairy-tale prece-
dents. The decision to place ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ at the head of the
collection seems playfully to invite such a response and to suggest that
Mademoiselle’s happy future is no less certain than that of Perrault’s
‘good’ characters. But Mademoiselle is no child; to make ‘Sleeping
Beauty’ applicable to her world, more might be required than to replace
the fairies by ‘Nature’. This is the task of the moral attached to ‘The
Sleeping Beauty’ in 1695:
72 J. Fowler
Attendre quelque temps pour avoir un époux

Riche, vaillant, aimable et doux,
La chose est assez naturelle;
Mais l’attendre cent ans, et toujours en dormant,
On ne trouve plus de femelle,
Qui dormît si tranquillement.28
[To wait some time to obtain a husband

Who is rich, valiant, charming and gentle
Is quite natural,
But to wait a hundred years for him, and sleeping all the while?
No woman could now be found
Who could sleep so well.]29
Here, a situation is evoked in which a marriageable daughter entertains

a romantic fantasy of the perfect match—he will be ‘rich, valiant, charm-
ing and gentle’. But to hold out for an ideal husband too long, rather
than making one’s peace with reality, would seem, in the modern world,
equivalent to waiting a century. Comfortingly then, for a real-life prin-
cess, it is suggested here that marriage is generally a compromise, even
for those daughters born to families of lower rank (who may allow them
in principle a freer choice of husband than is possible for a royal). Even
such a daughter will need to lower her sights sooner or later when her
‘Prince’ fails to appear. And she will prove more or less wise, in so far
as she proves more or less patient. For (the moral suggests) time crawls
by for all unmarried maids. The most pleasing daydreams then, or the
highest ideals, retreat in the face of the young woman’s impatience to be
wife, mother, and mistress of the house. Further comfort for a real-life
princess is provided in the second moral, added in 1697:
La fable semble encor vouloir nous faire entendre,

Que souvent de l’hymen les agréables nœuds,
Pour être différés n’en sont pas moins heureux,
Et qu’on ne perd rien pour attendre;
Mais le sexe avec tant d’ardeur,
Aspire à la foi conjugale,
Que je n’ai pas la force ni le cœur,
De lui prêcher cette morale.30
[The fable seems also to want us to see

That often the pleasant ties of marriage
Are no less happy for being deferred,
And that one loses nothing by waiting;
But members of the [fair] sex so ardently
Aspire to take marriage vows,
That I have neither the strength nor the heart
To preach that moral to them.]
Paradoxically then, to remain patiently in the condition of marriageable

‘maiden’ (as may be required of a royal princess) may be the best way to
ensure that no compromise will be necessary between marrying advanta-
geously and marrying for love. For the headlong rush to ‘take marriage
vows’ can lead to disappointment, even, or rather especially, when the
daughter is allowed to choose for herself.
‘Red Riding Hood’

Whilst ‘Sleeping Beauty’ deploys royal characters and refined (if simple)
language, ‘Red Riding Hood’ seems the closest of the tales to oral tra-
dition and to peasant vernacular. The dedication had argued that expo-
sure to the realities of peasant life forms part of the education of princes.
After all, the desire to know the people ‘a poussé des héros et des héros
de votre race jusques dans des huttes et des cabanes pour y voir de près
et par eux-mêmes ce qu’ils ont cru nécessaire pour la parfaite instruction
des plus grands monarques’ [caused heroes of the past, indeed heroes
among your ancestors, to enter huts and hovels to see, close up and in
person, those things they thought necessary to perfect the education
of the greatest monarchs].31 ‘Red Riding Hood’ apparently reproduces
archaic-rural expressions, especially one which, thanks to this single tale,
is still known by French children today: ‘Tire la chevillette, la bobinette
cherra’ [Pull on the peg, and the latch will be released].32 Tradition
has it that one day Mademoiselle’s most famous descendant, Marie-
Antoinette, will play at being a shepherdess; here, rural expressions are
offered to her grandmother for her enjoyment and ‘instruction’.33
But ‘Red Riding Hood’ has also long been read as a sexual allegory,
especially since the publication of Bruno Bettelheim’s influential work on
the fairy tale, mentioned above.34 Perrault’s moral relates the tale to the
74 J. Fowler
dangers that face a girl or young woman who is careless of her virginity.
These are the first lines:
Dans ce conte on peut voir qu’à de jeunes enfants,

[Et] surtout de jeunes filles,
Belles, bien faites, et gentilles,
Il prend mal d’écouter toutes sortes de gens,
Et que ce n’est pas chose étrange,
S’il en est tant que le loup mange.35
[Here, we learn that young children,

Especially young girls
[Who are] beautiful, attractive and sweet-natured,
Are very wrong to listen to all kinds of people,
And that it is not [therefore] surprising
That the wolf eats so many of them.]
So much for untutored peasant girls, who face the dangers of seduc-
tion without any kind of chaperone. But the continuation of the moral
(introduced in the editions of 1697) raises the social status of the wolf’s
victim:
Je dis le loup, car tous les loups

Ne sont pas de la même sorte;
Il en est d’une humeur accorte,
Sans bruit, sans fiel et sans courroux,
Qui privés, complaisants et doux,
Suivent les jeunes demoiselles
Jusque dans les maisons, jusque dans les ruelles;
Mais hélas! qui ne sait que ces loups doucereux
De tous les loups sont les plus dangereux.36
[I say ‘the wolf’, because not all wolves

Are of the same kind;
There are some, of a winning disposition,
Discreet, without rage or spite,
Tame, obliging and gentle,
Who follow young ladies
All the way into their houses, all the way to their bedside;
But alas! Who does not know that these unctuous wolves
Are the most dangerous ones of all.]
Perrault writes ‘the wolf’ as opposed to ‘the wolves’ to make his allegory
absolutely explicit: the wolf, here, is the would-be seducer of unmar-
ried virgins. But his polished manners suggest a certain distinction, in
an age when galanterie and honnêteté were in the process of being rein-
vented or refined in aristocratic circles.37 Moreover, the worldly wolf’s
victims are ‘[de] jeunes demoiselles’, meaning high-born young ladies;
‘Mademoiselle’ might even hear an echo of her title in ‘[ma] demoi-
selle’. Incidentally, this eleventh-hour extension of this tale’s caution-
ary moral from peasantry to the high-born may not have involved an
imaginative leap for Perrault or his readers; for as Hardwick remarks:
‘Demography and law provided powerful common gender axes across
region, whether province to province or rural to urban, and even across
rank to a degree’.38 The marriage market of the poor as well as the rich
placed value on virginity—or, failing that, the avoidance of births outside
marriage.39
And so, in this moral, young ladies of rank are warned that if they
allow themselves to be (sexually) consumed they will ‘die’; effectively,
this means that they will lose their value for the marriage market. This
recalls the moral of ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Impatience for marriage, enforced
delay, and dreams of an ideal suitor spell danger for a young woman’s
virginity. In the opening tale of the collection, this danger was warded
off by the enchanted forest around the castle in which the princess slept,
but if we replace the fairies by Nature, that forest can only stand for
sexual continence, exercised by the suitor or his potential bride. Not
dissimilarly, ‘Red Riding Hood’ warns young women of all ranks that
they will pay a high price if they allow their pre-marital virginity to be
imperilled by their ‘female’ (and therefore child-like) susceptibility to
seduction.
‘Bluebeard’
By contrast with ‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘Bluebeard’ directly represents the
world of the aristocracy towards the end of the seventeenth century. It
engages with the problem of mésalliance, in the form of marriage ties
between families of unequal wealth and rank. As Hardwick emphasises,
primogeniture helped to avoid the dispersion of family wealth and led to
a situation where younger sons became officers (or entered the church),
and daughters might be encouraged into convents (a cheaper solution
than finding a suitable dowry).40 An aristocratic family whose name
76 J. Fowler
carried prestige, but whose fortune was depleted, faced choices which
must often have seemed difficult. In such a context, it was tempting to
contemplate marrying ‘down’, into the strata of the noblesse de robe, or
even families with no claim to nobility but sufficient wealth to support an
aristocratic lifestyle—ideas of which had become expensively inflated by
the example of Versailles.
The opening of this tale presents Bluebeard offering to marry either
daughter of a ‘dame de qualité’ (a woman born to aristocratic parents).
There is a hint that this marriage will be an alliance of new money with
an old name: Bluebeard is introduced as ‘un homme qui avait de belles
maisons à la ville et à la campagne, de la vaisselle d’or et d’argent, des
meubles en broderie et des carrosses tout dorés, mais qui par malheur
avait la barbe bleue’ [a man who had beautiful houses in the town and
in the country, vessels of gold and silver, embroidered pieces and car-
riages covered in gilt, but who, unfortunately, had a blue beard].41 The
label ‘gentilhomme’ is conspicuously withheld from him—unlike the
elder sister Anne’s future husband, introduced at the close of the tale.42
This omission is tantamount to indicating that Bluebeard’s origins are (at
best) bourgeois. To make matters worse, his strangely coloured beard is
presented as particularly repellent to prospective brides. This is the tale’s
second sentence: ‘Cela le rendait si laid et si terrible que filles et femmes
s’enfuyaient dès qu’il paraissait’ [This rendered him so ugly and terrify-
ing that girls and women fled as soon as he appeared].43 Intrinsically and
objectively repellent, the beard functions as an external sign to warn and
protect against the purely pragmatic marriage, devoid of the kind of love
(true love?) that excludes physical disgust. We saw that according to the
verse moral of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, unmarried daughters yearn for a hus-
band who is ‘riche, vaillant, aimable et doux’ (rich, valorous, charming
and gentle), or (in 1697) ‘riche bien fait, galant et doux’ [rich, hand-
some, gallant and gentle], with ‘rich’ heading each list. But they may be
obliged by their own impatience and/or a limited choice of suitors to
compromise. The sisters in ‘Bluebeard’ are caught in such a situation.
They do not oppose the idea of marriage per se (both are happily mar-
ried by the end). They are, however, reluctant to compromise when they
are faced with a suitor as far from ideal as Bluebeard; indeed, ‘elles se le
renvoyèrent l’une à l’autre, ne se pouvant résoudre à prendre un homme
qui eût la barbe bleue’ [they alternately pushed for the other to marry
him as they were unable to resolve themselves to marry anyone who had
a blue beard] (326).
Nevertheless, the younger daughter changes her mind when she

is allowed to entertain her friends in Bluebeard’s beautiful country
estate in his absence. Given the magnificence of her surroundings, and
her friends’ admiration, ‘la cadette commença à trouver que le maî-
tre du logis n’avait plus la barbe si bleue et que c’était même un fort
honnête homme’ [the younger daughter started to feel that the master
of the house no longer had such a blue beard, and that he was even a
very refined man].44 This fading of blueness in the eyes of the younger
daughter (but no one else’s) is a measure of her reconciliation with the
dynastic rather than the companionate marriage, but (like some moral
litmus test) it also signifies self-deceit. For it is riches and riches alone
that have persuaded her to relinquish her aversion and to attribute good
qualities to Bluebeard. ‘Rich, handsome, gallant and gentle’ may seem
now to be in reach, but only because the fulfillment of the first require-
ment has worked its magic on the other three. Not unlike a moraliste,
Perrault thus suggests that where young women are impatient to marry,
and marry well, the seeds of ‘love’ may be greed, disguised as love from
motives of pride or self-deceit.
And so the younger daughter reconciles herself to a model of mar-
riage in which pragmatism secretly prevails. In ‘Sleeping Beauty’, mari-
tal happiness is threatened by external factors: first, the gift of a wicked
fairy, then the machinations of an ogress mother-in-law. In ‘Bluebeard’,
by contrast, the danger to the marriage, indeed to the bride’s life, seems
self-inflicted: because she deluded herself concerning her motives for
marriage, she married ‘the wrong man’ in the first place. The crisis then
arises when Bluebeard informs his bride that he must depart ‘en prov-
ince’ for six weeks, whilst warning her that she can freely enter all parts
of the estate with the exception of one locked room. This test of obe-
dience has led to a plethora of differing interpretations. It would seem
perverse not to see the entering of a ‘certain room’, against the hus-
band’s orders, as encoding adultery (and we will see below that this read-
ing is invited by Perrault’s verse moral). To that extent, the wife may be
deemed ‘guilty’ for yielding to her hunger for forbidden knowledge, like
a latter-day Eve.45 But the wife’s fault does not exculpate the husband,
especially when we learn that the forbidden room contains the corpses
of Bluebeard’s previous brides. In that readers’ sympathies are likely to
be directed towards victims of the strong, especially in the fairy tale, the
husband’s guilt seems to outweigh that of his bride and his killing by her
brother may seem to most readers a kind of poetic justice.
78 J. Fowler
This is the moral offered to Mademoiselle in 1695:
La curiosité, malgré tous ses attraits,

Cause souvent bien des regrets,
On en voit tous les jours mille exemples paraître.
C’est, n’en déplaise au sexe, un plaisir bien léger;
Dès qu’on le prend il cesse d’être,
Et toujours il coûte trop cher.46
[Curiosity, in spite of all its attractions,

Often causes great regrets,
As is seen in a thousand cases every day.
It is, with all due respect to the fair sex, the slightest of pleasures;
As soon as it is indulged, it ceases to exist,
And always costs more than it is worth.]
This tends to emphasise the guilt of Bluebeard’s wife; she is a grown-up

version of Red Riding Hood, which is to say her near-demise comes not
from sexual innocence but from sexual curiosity. Let women beware their
own nature! The second moral, added in the 1697 editions, also empha-
sises the ubiquitous risk of infidelity: ‘Il n’est plus d’époux si terrible,/
Ni qui demande l’impossible,/Fût-il malcontent et jaloux’ [there is no
longer such a terrifying husband,/None who asks the impossible of his
wife,/Were he ever so angry and jealous]. In this quotation, the ‘impos-
sible’ is to expect one’s wife to be faithful. This suggests at once that all
women are prone to adultery and that Bluebeard has overreacted. And
the verse closes on a joke about who wears the trousers in the modern
marriage: ‘Près de sa femme on le voit filer doux;/Et de quelque couleur
que sa barbe puisse être,/On a peine à juger qui des deux est le maî-
tre’ [He is seen to behave submissively around his wife;/And whatever
colour his beard may be,/It is difficult to decide which one is the mas-
ter]. This presupposes a gender hierarchy in which the husband ‘should’
rule over the wife, whilst subverting it by suggesting that this hierarchy is
generally inverted in the France of Perrault’s time.
Such equivocal morals offered material for witty discussion in salon
society, where clever women were often said to ‘rule’ over men.47 Should
wives be protected from their own natural weakness by watchful husbands
who know their rights? If so, did Bluebeard commit a fatal transgression
when he allowed each of his wives too much freedom? Yet the marriage
with which the tale begins involves a different kind of transgression. We

saw that Bluebeard had wealth, but no ‘name’, to bring to the marriage.
But we do not know the source of his wealth. We are free to ask: was it
earned or inherited? If inherited, was it legitimately from his ancestors or
illegitimately from his murdered wives? Such riches, combined with the
social upstart’s evil actions, suggest that an unjust usurpation may always
be discoverable where the wealthy on the one hand and the high-born
on the other agree to a cross-class and therefore unholy alliance. In other
words, the more traditionally minded seventeenth-century reader of
‘Bluebeard’ might find it natural to ask: how can the low-born become
wealthy in the first place except by dirty dealings?
Whilst noting the theme of mésalliance, Gheeraert reads ‘Bluebeard’
as mocking the bourgeois who wanted to live like grands seigneurs.48
Hardwick alludes to a situation where (thanks no doubt to the cult of
the Sun King and his court), there developed ‘conspicuous consumption
patterns that ever more forcefully divided great aristocrats from petty
nobles who were hardly distinguishable from their non-noble peers’.49
Such material distinctions between otherwise contiguous ranks must
have generated great tensions. But given the rank of the mother and her
daughters in ‘Bluebeard’, the story could conceivably function for aris-
tocratic readers as a revenge fantasy, appealing to those who reluctantly
formed alliances with families of lower birth but greater wealth. Finally,
viewed from Perrault’s position in relation to the court, ‘Bluebeard’
might instead be read as a warning (to persons of whatever class) that
acquisitiveness must not be allowed to eclipse all finer motives. If
Bluebeard enriches himself by murdering his wives, each murdered wife
must have overcome her initial repulsion to his blue beard; and given
that it was only his wealth that could render it less repulsive, each stands
accused of greed, leading through self-deception to mortal danger.
As for Mademoiselle, ‘Bluebeard’ comfortingly suggests that her
social inferiors do not have the advantage over her when it comes to the
marriage market. Instead, it implies that the freedom to choose one’s
husband is only ever a relative one; and that at the levels of society where
money chases rank and vice versa, such ‘freedom’ sows the seeds of mari-
tal evil. Only when riches and rank are joined on equal terms can mar-
riage give rise to love, virtue and happiness. This is clarified in the tale’s
closing lines, in which the younger sister uses part of her dead husband’s
wealth not only to buy officerships for her brothers but to arrange two
marriages: the first, that of her sister Anne to ‘un jeune gentilhomme
80 J. Fowler
dont elle était aimée depuis longtemps’ [a young noble [by birth] who
had loved her for a long time already]; the second, her own to ‘un fort
honnête homme qui lui fit oublier le mauvais temps qu’elle avait passé
avec la Barbe bleue’ [a very well-bred man who caused her to forget the
bad times she had spent with Bluebeard]. These two mariages d’amour
are the opposite of mésalliances. But they could not happen until rank
and wealth came together in one noble family without the contamination
of Bluebeard’s decidedly non-blue blood.
‘Le Maître Chat’ and ‘Les Fées’,

or the Justice of Providence
Darnton uses four tales, including ‘The Master Cat’, to suggest that we
can, in Perrault, find reliable traces of ‘tricksterism’, which he sees as
the response of ancien régime peasants to their experience of life as, in
Hobbes’ phrase, ‘nasty, brutish, and short’:50
In ‘Puss ’n Boots’, a poor miller dies, leaving the mill to his eldest son, an
ass to the second, and only a cat to the third. […] We are clearly in France,
although other versions of this theme exist in Asia, Africa, and South
America. The inheritance customs of French peasants, as well as noblemen,
often prevented the fragmentation of the patrimony by favoring the eldest
son. Everywhere around him this Cartesian cat sees vanity, stupidity, and
unsatisfied appetite; and he exploits it all by a series of tricks, which lead to
a rich marriage for his master and a fine estate for himself.51
For Gheeraert, unlike Darnton (who is not included in Gheeraert’s bib-

liography or index), ‘le conte se plaît à démontrer l’efficacité du vice
et le triomphe des apparences: pour parvenir, la naissance, le mérite
ni la fortune ne sont pas des atouts aussi souverains que “l’industrie”,
“le savoir-faire”, “l’habit, la mine et la jeunesse”’ [the tale takes pleas-
ure in showing the effectiveness of vice and the triumph of appear-
ances [over reality]: to rise in society, neither birth, merit nor fortune
is more sovereignly important than ‘industry’, ‘know-how’, ‘dress, looks
and youth’]—all these terms being taken from Perrault’s 1697 moral.
Gheereart adds that the tale is ‘l’œuvre d’un moraliste qui porte sur son
siècle un regard désabusé’ [the work of a moraliste who casts a disabused
eye over the times in which he lives].52
But the framework provided by the dedication to Mademoiselle allows

us to see the tale from another perspective, with rather different results.
First, we notice that it is as irreverent as possible without becoming
impertinent. When ‘la plus belle princesse du monde’ [the most beauti-
ful princess in the world] meets her future husband, she believes he is
a marquis with vast estates and falls in love with him (333). She there-
fore accepts to marry a conman, or rather the beneficiary of a (feline)
‘conman’ (the Master Cat). But comparisons with real princesses are not
seriously invited by this tale, which begins (like ‘Red Riding Hood’, but
unlike ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Bluebeard’) in the milieu of the peasantry,
with the death of a poor miller. Moreover, it is surely only in the minds
of children (or, perhaps, peasants as imagined by the élite) that all lies (as
told by a talking cat) plausibly become self-fulfilling prophecies.
What moral, beyond Darnton’s ‘tricksterism’, may the ‘perceptive’
reader find here? The 1695 version offers only one:
Quelque grand que soit l’avantage

De jouir d’un riche héritage
Venant à nous de père en fils,
Aux jeunes gens pour l’ordinaire
L’industrie et le savoir-faire
Valent mieux que des biens acquis.53
[However great the advantage

Of possessing a rich estate
Passed down from father to son,
Normally, for young men
Industry and skill
Are of greater value than inherited wealth.]
This verse speaks of social ascension in general, rather than a fantasy born
of peasants’ hardships. Bearing Perrault’s origins in mind, one might
detect the meeting of two currents here. Where Darnton emphasises
the merging, in Perrault, of élite with popular currents, this particular
moral mingles the culture of the ‘élite by birth’ with that of the ‘élite by
worth’, to which Perrault himself precariously belonged. Families such as
his, moving at the fringes of court and salon society, might surely dream
of a world where merit brought greater rewards than inherited privilege.
82 J. Fowler
But a moral of greater relevance to Mademoiselle’s own concerns is

offered by the second moral, added in 1697:
Si le fils d’un meunier, avec tant de vitesse,

Gagne le cœur d’une princesse,
Et s’en fait regarder avec des yeux mourants,
C’est que l’habit, la mine et la jeunesse,
Pour inspirer de la tendresse,
N’en sont pas des moyens toujours indifférents.54
[If a miller’s son, with such speed

Wins the heart of a princess,
And obtains loving glances from her,
It is because dress, good looks and youth,
When it comes to inspiring tender feelings,
Are not always beside the point.]
Here, the verse is divided at its mid-point: the ‘if’ clause of the first
three lines affords a plot summary of ‘The Master Cat’, and the moral
is spelled out in the last three lines. The transition from narrative to
interpretation, from particular to universal, and from fantasy to ‘real-
ity’, is clearly marked by ‘C’est que’ [It is because]. All that precedes is
story: all that follows is the ‘way things are’. And if ‘The Master Cat’
might be thought at first to express a peasant’s fantasy of social ascent,
such an idea does not survive this transition to the real world (where,
obviously, peasants do not wear fine clothes). Instead we are sim-
ply told in the moral ‘proper’ that ‘dress, good looks and youth’ play
their role in arousing love: of these, ‘dress’ is a marker of status. And so
Mademoiselle, perhaps, can have it both ways: a man sufficiently high
born (and therefore magnificently dressed) to be approved of by one’s
father may also be chosen by one’s heart. Mariage d’amour and dynastic
marriage may happily converge.
The 1695 version of ‘The Fairies’ opens with a family situation very
close to that of ‘Cinderella’: a widower with a kind and well-mannered
daughter marries a widow with a daughter of opposite character.
Gheeraert argues that therefore, to ensure variety within the expanded
collection, in 1697 Perrault is obliged to modify this opening. Either
way, the stepsisters become sisters, one of whom resembles the virtuous
father, the other the vicious mother. Rewards and punishments then are
distributed as might be expected, at least in a world overseen by a higher

justice. A fairy disguises herself first as a poor woman then as a princess
and asks each sister to help her drink from a spring. The sisters respond
in character, which is to say with good and bad grace respectively. The
fairy informs the polite sister: ‘vous êtes si belle, si bonne et si honnête
que je ne puis m’empêcher de vous faire un don’ [you are so beautiful,
good and honest that I cannot but make you a gift]. Henceforth this
daughter’s mouth produces roses, pearls and diamonds whenever she
speaks, and as a result she marries a prince (this marriage forming the
last link in a causal chain that begins with the ‘given’ that is her natural
goodness). As for the bad-mannered daughter, she is told: ‘puisque vous
êtes si peu civile, je vous donne pour don (car il faut que chacun soit
traité selon son mérite) qu’à chaque parole que vous direz il vous sortira
de la bouche une couleuvre, une grenouille ou un crapaud’ [since you
are so ill-mannered, my present to you (for each must be treated accord-
ing to his/her merit) will be that with every word you speak your mouth
will produce a snake, a frog or a toad]. Not only does no one marry this
sister; her own mother rejects her and she dies alone in the forest.55
More clearly than its precedents, this pared-down tale seems to unfold
in a universe of perfect justice; but by whom is such justice dispensed?
We have seen that Perrault’s dedication invites Mademoiselle to sub-
stitute ‘Nature’ for the fairies. But one should understand that for the
pious of the 1690s, ‘Nature’ meant ‘Creation’, ruled over by an all-
seeing, all-powerful God (be He the Hidden God of Jansenism or a
more indulgent, because more self-revealing, version). Therefore, to
substitute ‘Nature’ for the fairies is to invoke God behind Nature. This
then, is how Perrault’s blueprint works when taken to its metaphysical
conclusion: the fairies, standing for ‘Nature’, become instruments of
providence. It must be conceded to Darnton that the oral and peasant
sources which he compares with Perrault’s narratives do indeed suggest
that life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’. But life is never brutish or short
for Perrault’s good characters in the five tales offered to Mademoiselle in
1695 (providing we classify Red Riding Hood’s innocence not as good-
ness, but as culpable naïveté). Moreover, such characters are portrayed
as being good not by choice (they are not shown fighting against their
own ‘bad’ inclinations) but by ‘nature’, a nature inherited from parents
(and/or the fairies). All these aspects of the tales, when they are read on
Perrault’s terms, can suggest that God’s blessings are passively received
rather than actively earned.
84 J. Fowler
In another context, it would be interesting to connect these instances

of passive blessedness to the Perraults’ attested links to Jansenism and
the doctrine of the Hidden God.56 However, such a reading would not
conflict with the reading offered here. The real-yet-ideal reader of the
five tales of 1695 is Mademoiselle, which is to say the king’s flesh-and-
blood niece and/or the image of her evoked by the author’s flattering
phrases. Perrault’s most important ‘moral’ for this unique reader is argu-
ably the following: be assured that providence is at work in the world.
And whilst the humble people may only guess whether they are chosen
by God, the mighty who seem so blessed may have grounds for confi-
dent hope. After all, Mademoiselle’s uncle rules a mighty kingdom, not
by chance but by divine right. In the dedication, Perrault writes of her
forebears: ‘Mais à qui convient-il mieux de connaître comment vivent
les peuples qu’aux personnes que le Ciel destine à les conduire?’ [But
for whom is it more fitting to know how the peoples [of the world] live
than for those whom Heaven destines to lead them?].57 Why then should
not God, the world and Mademoiselle’s own heart concur in the contin-
ued unfolding of her real-life fairy tale? Why should not an inescapably
dynastic marriage turn out to be, in addition and without contradiction,
a mariage d’amour?
Notes
1. The only prose tales that do not include the marriage of a prince or prin-
cess, presented as the basis of a happy ending, are: ‘Red Riding Hood’;
‘Bluebeard’; and ‘Tom Thumb’. Of these, ‘Bluebeard’ ends with the
happy marriages of two sisters of noble descent. Important discussions
of fairy-tales include: Jacques Barchilon, Le Conte merveilleux français
de 1690 à 1790 (Paris: Champion, 1975); Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of
Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York:
Knopf, 1976); Marc Soriano, Les Contes de Perrault, culture savante
et traditions populaires, rev. edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); Marina
Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: on Fairy-Tales and their Tellers
(London: Vintage, 1995).
2. Court protocol conferred this title on ‘the daughter, or sometimes eldest
daughter, of Monsieur’, the latter being ‘the title conferred on the king’s
brother, or the most senior if there were several’; Vincent J. Pitts, La
Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France: 1627–1693 (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 4.
3. Ibid., 2.
4. See Charles Perrault, Contes, ed. Tony Gheeraert (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2012), 175 (n. 2).
5. See Charles Perrault, The Complete Fairy Tales, ed. and trans. Christopher
Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xiv–xv.
6. The tales that were added in 1697 to create the published, eight-tale
collection on which most modern editions are based are: ‘Cinderella’;
‘Tom Thumb’ and ‘Riquet with the Tuft’. I have used the well-known
English titles of the five tales to be discussed here, which are in any case
very close to the French titles. The latter are: ‘La Belle au bois dormant’;
‘Le Petit Chaperon rouge’; ‘La Barbe bleue’; ‘Le Maître chat ou le chat
botté’; ‘Les Fées’; ‘Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre’; ‘Riquet à
la Houppe’; and ‘Le Petit Poucet’. For observations on the translation of
these into English, see The Complete Fairy Tales, xxxix.
7. Julie Hardwick, ‘Gender’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime,
ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 183–200.
8. Ibid., 187.
9. See Perrault, Contes, 23–24.
10. Gheeraert resumes the case for and against Pierre Darmancour as author
of the tales in Perrault, Contes, 26–35.
11. Perrault, Contes, 313. All translations from the French are my own.
12. Ibid., 313–314. A series of changes are made to these lines in the 1697
version, the most significant of which is doubtless the correction of ‘ceux
qui les écoutent’ [those who listen to them] to ‘ceux qui les lisent’ [those
who read them], which marks the entry of the tales into the medium of
print and their availability to a wider audience. See Perrault, Contes, 175.
13. Ibid., 314.
14. ‘Vraisemblable’ covers a complex range of meanings overlapping with ‘plau-
sible’, ‘true to life’ and ‘verisimilitudinous’, but also connected with the
Neo-Classical ethos that became prevalent in seventeenth-century theatre.
15. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French
Cultural History, 2nd edition (Philadelphia, PA: Basic Books, 1984), 38.
16. Ibid., 63.
17. Ibid., 63.
18. Perrault, Contes, 158–159.
19. Ibid., 159–160 ‘Grisettes’ is an archaic word that referred at first to girls
or women whose clothes were made of inexpensive, grey fabric, before
being extended to poor women in general; in both senses, it may imply a
measure of derision. See Perrault, Contes, 160 (n. 1).
20. Ibid., 160. I have translated ‘fretin’ as ‘dregs’; literally, it means ‘petit
poisson jusques à deux ans’ [small fish, up to two years old]—or fish not
86 J. Fowler
worth keeping once caught (cf. ‘small fry’); but is used figuratively ‘Des
choses de rebut, & qui sont de nulle valeur, de nulle considération’ [Of
things that are repellent, and are of no value, no worth] (Dictionnaire
de l’Académie française, 1694). All references to the Dictionnaire were
obtained via http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/dictionnaires-
dautrefois. Date of access: 12–20 December 2013.
21. I have translated the insulting ‘pattes’ as ‘paws’; properly used for ani-
mals, ‘Il se dit fig. Des hommes, mais presque tousjours [sic] en mauvaise
part’ [It is used figuratively of humans, but almost always in a pejorative
manner]; see the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française
(1694). ‘Dindonnières’ could mean ‘keepers of turkeys’ but also (mock-
ingly) ‘Demoiselle de campagne’ [young lady of the countryside]; see the
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694).
22. Perrault’s tales re-enter popular culture via the ‘bibliothèque bleue’; see
Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 63; this certainly reinforces Darnton’s
case for finding a mingling of currents in the tales, but within limits; for it
is reasonable to suggest that the literate among the French poor discov-
ered something only half-familiar in these stories.
23. For instance, of seventeenth-century fairy tales by Perrault and other,
female writers (Mme d’Aulnoy, Mlle l’Héritier and Mlle Bernard), Annie
Collognat and Marie-Charlotte Delmas remark: ‘De l’oral, le conte passe
à l’écrit pour devenir “littéraire”, mais garde la marque originelle du con-
tage’. [Having begun as an oral tradition, [around this time] the tale is
written down and becomes ‘literary’, but the trace of its folk-tale ori-
gins remains.] See Les Contes de Perrault dans tous leurs états, ed. Annie
Collognat and Marie-Charlotte Delmas (Paris: Omnibus, 2007), vi.
Soriano, Les Contes de Perrault also frequently highlights the aforemen-
tioned tension in the tales.
24. Perrault, Contes, 315.
25. See Antonia Fraser, Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun
King (London: Phoenix, 2006), 1–3, and Perrault, Contes, 177–178 (n. 1).
26. In his preface to the verse tales, Perrault classifies ‘Grisélidis’ as belonging
in the category of ‘nouvelles’, which he defines as ‘des récits de choses
qui peuvent être arrivées, et qui n’ont rien qui blesse absolument la
vraisemblance’ [tales of things that can have happened, and which con-
tain nothing that might deprive them of all plausibility].
29. ‘Aimable’ is literally ‘worthy of being loved’, and ‘doux’ has a wide range
of meanings, including ‘well-mannered’. The 1697 version of the second
line of the moral is: ‘Riche, bien fait, galant et doux’ [rich, handsome,
gallant and gentle], from which the title of the present discussion is
adapted. Perrault, Contes, 193.
32. The ‘chevillette’ and the ‘bobinette’, both made of wood, form a rudi-
mentary locking mechanism. Gheeraert suggests the famous phrase may
in fact be Perrault’s faux-medieval invention since neither diminutive
(‘chevillette’ or ‘bobinette’) can be found in any text predating his ver-
sion of ‘Red Riding Hood’. See Perrault, Contes, 65; 198 (n. 2).
33. Evelyne Lever evokes the ‘simple’ life which Marie-Antoinette instituted
at the Petit Trianon; she also notes that once the theatre was built in the
Trianon gardens, the Queen staged Le roi et le fermier [The King and the
Farmer], ‘a comedy with ariettas about a king who gets lost while hunt-
ing and is taken in by a farmer who satirizes the court for him’. As for
the casting, ‘Comte d’Adhémar played the king and Marie Antoinette a
shepherdess who is in love with the farmer Vaudreuil’. See Evelyne Lever,
Marie-Antoinette: The Last Queen of France (London: Judy Piatkus Ltd,
2007), 135–136 (136).
34. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 166–182. Some twenty
years later, Marina Warner remarks: ‘Red Riding Hood or Snow White
have become rich symbols for psychoanalysts to gloss’; see From the Beast
to the Blonde, xviii.
36. Ibid., 200; Gheeraert cites Furetière’s dictionary to show that ‘ruelle’ (lit-
erally, ‘little street’) could refer to the space between a bed and a wall, or
even an alcove with seating, in which ladies might receive visitors.
37. See Alain Viala, La France galante (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2008). The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694) defines ‘galant’
as follows: ‘honneste, civil, sociable, de bonne compagnie, de conversa-
tion agreable’ [well-mannered, civil, sociable, of good company and con-
versation]; and the many connotations of ‘honneste’ include noble birth,
manners and probity.
38. See Hardwick, ‘Gender’, 186.
39. See Hardwick, ‘Gender’ (passim).
40. Ibid. (passim).
42. We are told that this suitor loved the elder daughter; this marriage,
whilst a mariage d’amour, was pragmatically delayed until it was fea-
sible (a point to which we will return). The temptation of mésalliance
88 J. Fowler
is confirmed by the fact that once Bluebeard is dead, his young widow
is able to buy companies in the army for her brothers (younger sons
of noble families often choosing between church and army); this obvi-
ously suggests that the family was insufficiently wealthy to do so before.
Another instance of the rank gentilhomme being explicitly mentioned by
Perrault is the incipit of ‘Cinderella’: ‘Il était une fois un gentilhomme
qui épousa en secondes noces une femme, la plus hautaine et la plus fière
qu’on eut jamais vue’ [Once upon a time there was a nobleman who
[once he had lost his first wife] made a second marriage with the haughti-
est, proudest woman ever seen]; see Perrault, Contes, 223.
43. Ibid., 326.
44. Marina Warner, incidentally, offers fascinating comments on the blue
beard of Perrault’s tale, including the following: ‘Well out of fashion in
the court of the Sun King, the beard of Perrault’s villain betokened an
outsider, a libertine, and a ruffian’. See From the Beast to the Blonde, 242.
45. Warner writes: ‘“Bluebeard” is a version of the Fall in which Eve is
allowed to get away with it’; see From the Beast to the Blonde, 244.
47. Dedicating his verse nouvelle to an anonymous young lady, Perrault
writes that such a long-suffering wife as the eponymous Grisélidis would
be ‘un prodige à Paris./Les femmes y sont souveraines,/Tout s’y règle
selon leurs vœux/Enfin c’est un climat heureux/Qui n’est habité que de
reines’ [a prodigy in Paris./Women are sovereign there,/Everything is
done according to their wishes/Indeed, it is a happy clime/Where every
woman is a queen]; see Perrault, Contes, 97.
48. Ibid., 425–426.
49. ‘Gender’, 184–185.
50. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 65.
51. Ibid., 29.
53. Ibid., 335.
54. Ibid., 218.
56. Jansenism was a particularly stern predestinarian tendency that had con-
siderable influence in France in the seventeenth century. According to
John Cruickshank, ‘Jansenism influenced some of the outstanding lit-
erary figures of the 17th century, including Racine, Pascal, Boileau, La
Rochefoucauld, and La Fayette’. See the New Oxford Companion to
Literature in French, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),
408–409 (408). For relevant background, see Michael Moriarty, Disguised

Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011) and Jennifer Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy
of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
‘Knights of Matrimony’, Christian Duty
and Millenium Hall
Robin Runia
He told me, ‘he was convinced by the conduct of the ladies of this house,
that their religion must be the true one. When he had before considered
the lives of Christians, their doctrine seemed to have so little influence on
their actions, that he imagined there was no sufficient effect produced by
Christianity to warrant belief […] but he now saw what that religion in
reality was’.1
In the preceding passage from the conclusion of Sarah Scott’s Millenium

Hall (1762) Mr. Lamont reveals his ultimate celebration of the piety
practiced by the women of the novel’s eponymous estate. Lamont’s per-
spective is presented to the reader after entering the text’s narrative frame
in which a gentleman narrator writes to a friend, celebrating the conduct
of a community of women upon which he and Lamont have happened in
their travels. His narrative provides descriptions of the group, its charita-
ble efforts, and the histories of its members. It describes the stories of a
select few of these inhabitants and records their successful efforts to pro-
vide employment and housing for the poor, uneducated, and dependent.
After encountering these women’s histories and deeds, the narrator as
R. Runia (*) 
Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA, USA
e-mail: Rrunia@xula.edu

92 R. Runia
well as Lamont are able to pronounce and essentially model appropriate

reader response to the superiority of the Christian principle and organisa-
tion shaping the women’s community and their various charitable efforts.
Much of the scholarship devoted to Sarah Scott considers her role
as a Bluestocking reformer actively engaged in philanthropy and in the
championing of women’s community.2 Scott’s life with Lady Barbara
Montagu after the dissolution of her own marriage and her later attempt
to form a larger domestic community of women, including Sarah
Fielding, have determined much of the critical focus on the nature of
women’s agency in Scott’s writing. However, reexamination of the
characters’ efforts reveals the novel’s singular use of Christian piety to
defend an uneven support of women’s agency, particularly with respect
to marriage. Its various tales of forced marriage, seduction, and infidel-
ity critique the dissolution and corruption of the institution. In particu-
lar, the inset narratives of each of Millenium Hall’s founders, including
Miss Mancel, Miss Melvyn, Miss Selvyn, Miss Trentham, and Lady Mary
Jones, reveal their particular and complete incompatibility with the harsh
sexual and economic realities of marriage. Despite their incompatibility,
these women’s proclaimed adherence to the law of the land requires they
‘send deputies to supply their places’ (163). They become ‘knights’ of
matrimony, championing the institution among ‘the lower rank of peo-
ple’ (163). In the end, the Millenium Hall founders distinguish between
‘Christian law’ and the ‘political regulations of particular communi-
ties’ in order to justify their exceptionality, and they rely on their eco-
nomic independence and the greater leisure it affords them to conclude
that they are ‘required to answer only for [themselves], and it is not
man whom [they are] ordered to imitate’ (167). While this argument
demands the sacrifice of labouring-class women to marriage’s injustices,
it also gestures toward the potential of some women to use Christian
doctrine to justify their independence and agency.3
Recent criticism has largely overlooked this treatment of marriage and
instead focused on the utopian and dystopian opportunities afforded the
single founders of the estate. Nicole Pohl, for example, argues that the
novel ‘challenges the historical spatiality of gender, power and knowl-
edge in the capitalist society of mid-eighteenth century England by
creating a separatist, utopian space where women are given the oppor-
tunity of self-determination’.4 J. David Macey comes to a similar conclu-
sion about the novel’s utopianism, viewing it as an extension of Mary
Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694).5 In contrast, a number of
‘KNIGHTS OF MATRIMONY’, CHRISTIAN DUTY AND MILLENIUM HALL 93
critics have presented the novel’s preservation of unmarried women’s

ranked privilege as distinctly less than utopian. Julie McGonegal, for
example, argues that the novel’s representation of female authority is
a mere fantasy.6 Further, Judith Broom argues that the novel sacrifices
‘actual motherhood and sexuality’ to ‘recuperate power and agency for
the home and for the women whose work is in the home’.7
While this work has successfully exposed the significance of the
unmarried state of some women in Millenium Hall, it has only begun
to unpack the novel’s divergence from the eighteenth-century mar-
riage plot, as well as its presentation of alternative models of femininity.
Further examination of the novel’s representation of marriage within
the context of Christian belief and practice reveals the entangling of
marriage, religion, and female duty. Such a reexamination of Scott’s
novel exposes that the founders of Millenium Hall rely on their reli-
gious duties and activities to reject marriage. They redress the corrup-
tion of marriage by refusing to become members of the institution and
their alternative form of service to God insists that they no longer be
required to sacrifice their private wellbeing for the institution’s pub-
lic integrity. In claiming that she and Millenium Hall’s other found-
ing members ‘do not set up for reformers […] we wish to regulate
ourselves by the laws laid down to us, and as far as our influence can
extend, endeavour to enforce them’ (164), Miss Mancel highlights their
exceptionality.
Miss Mancel
Miss Mancel’s history is the first to engage in a critique of marriage
grounded in the unnecessary suffering and sacrifice of women. When the
‘distress of ruined fortune, and the too fatal success of a duel, in which
her father is unwillingly engaged’ force Mr. Mancel and his wife to flee
to the American colonies, Miss Mancel is left to grow up like an orphan
(163). Mr. Mancel’s inability to control his appetites and emotions sub-
jects his wife to exile in America. In stark contrast to the intrepid entre-
preneurship of Daniel Defoe’s earlier eighteenth-century heroines in
Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), Mrs. Mancel’s silent and
tearful acquiescence signals Millenium Hall’s solid position within the
development of the sentimental novel at mid-century. Once in America,
Mrs. Mancel’s husband dies of fever and she is left ‘entirely destitute, at
a loss how to hazard the tedious passage home, without the protection
94 R. Runia
of a husband, and with hardly a sufficient sum remaining to discharge

the expences [sic] of it’ (149). When Mrs. Mancel remarries, finding
‘her poverty was no faint adviser’ (149), she is again forced to relocate
according to her new spouse’s design, and Miss Mancel continues in the
care of a guardian. After her guardian dies, Miss Mancel’s vulnerability
manifests itself in a fainting fit that renders her ‘almost as senseless, as
the lump of clay which had so lately been her only friend’ (79). Only
Miss Mancel’s reunion with her mother many years later allows a reprieve
from these early emotional terrors. Finally, Miss Mancel’s mother’s joyful
exclamation, ‘I am that mother, that was obliged to leave thee to anoth-
er’s care; and has Heaven preserved my daughter, and restored her to
me so lovely, so amiable! Gracious Providence! Merciful beyond hope!’
(148) provides the remedy to her daughter’s early and lengthy suffering.
Unfortunately, Miss Mancel suffers from the very same corruption
of marriage by unrestrained male passions. In particular, she only very
narrowly escapes a sham marriage to her lecherous benefactor. When
she does find a match she believes suitable, parental disapproval of her
‘obscure birth’ (142) precipitates her lover, Sir Edward, to rush off to
battle and death. We are told that the ‘pride which occasioned so much
pain both to Louisa [Miss Mancel] and Sir Edward’ is ‘unforgivable’ in
its subjection of a woman who must bring ‘happiness’ and ‘honour’ as a
‘wife’ to any husband (144).
Miss Melvyn
In the next of the novel’s inset histories, the reader learns of Miss
Melvyn, who became acquainted with Miss Mancel in boarding school.
Miss Melvyn’s history begins with that of her mother, Lady Melvyn, and
her suffering from a flawed marriage that sets the stage for her daugh-
ter’s own future marital suffering. Of Lady Melvyn, we read that ‘con-
trary to her inclination’ and despite the difficulty she anticipates obeying
‘one who, though she knows not half her own excellence, she must be
sensible was her inferior’, she spends her life sacrificing herself to her
husband’s reputation (83). She ‘contrived to make all her actions appear
the result of his choice, and whatever he did by her instigation, seemed
even to himself to have been his own thought’ (84). Such sacrifice proves
essential to the maintenance of the family and the reader is told that
‘human nature cannot feel a deeper affliction than now overwhelmed
Miss Melvyn; wherein Sir Charles bore as great a share, as the easiness
of his nature was capable’ (85). Lady Melvyn’s sacrifice of her own supe-
rior intellect appears necessary to maintain family harmony, but when his
daughter observes the necessity of her mother’s selflessness and its per-
petuation of her father’s shallow feeling, the beginnings of an emotional
rift form and these beginnings are subsequently exacerbated by the mer-
cenary jealousy of his young, fortune-hunting second wife.
When the new Lady Melvyn, in a plotline reminiscent of Camilla’s
step-mother in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), banishes her step-
daughter, Miss Melvyn becomes the second generation in the family to
suffer from an unwanted husband’s immoderate sexual desire and defi-
cient powers of reason. This ‘very afflicting change’, we learn, ‘came
from a hand she too much respected to make any resistance, though she
easily perceived that it was entirely at her mother’s instigation; and knew
her father too well, to believe he could be peremptory on any occasion’
(87). Laura Thomason’s reading of the women of Millenium Hall as free
and autonomous agents is complicated by Miss Melvyn being forced by
her father to accept the attentions of a man ‘in whom age had not gained
a victory over passion’ (106). Millenium Hall is thus also involved in the
critique of ‘parental suppression of young women’s individuality’ within
marriage.8 This critique combines the aforementioned jealousy of her
stepmother with Miss Melvyn’s own commitment to filial duty, detailing
the painful coercion necessary to enter into a loveless marriage with an
alcoholic tyrant. She concludes: ‘I must either add to the contamination
of a very profligate world, or, in the face of Heaven, enter into the most
solemn vows to love a man, whom the most I can do, is not hate. This is
wilful perjury. In such an alternative duty cannot direct me’ (125). Like
her mother, Miss Melvyn has learned that the public integrity of mar-
riage as an institution requires her private sacrifice. Accordingly, she is
constrained by her duty to not ‘make [her] distresses, known [… and]
not then expose the faults of him whose slightest failings [she] ought to
conceal’ (125). Imprisoned in unreciprocated duty, Miss Melvyn suffers
to perform simultaneous duty to home and world.
Lady Mary
The novel’s thorough critique of male inadequacy within marriage con-
tinues with Lady Mary’s history:
96 R. Runia
Lady Mary was daughter to the Earl of Brumpton by his second wife, who
survived the birth of her child but a few hours. The earl died when his daugh-
ter was about ten years old, and having before his second marriage mort-
gaged to its full value all of his estate which was not settled on a son born of
his first lady, his daughter was left entirely destitute of provision (172).
The theme of imprudent marriage driven by male sexual desire and

plagued with economic insolvency again identifies children, especially
female children, as the victims. But, as if this repetition were insuffi-
cient to drive home the point, Lady Mary’s adoption by her widowed
aunt, Lady Sheerness, provides an additional example. Lady Sheerness
was married at sixteen to a man ‘in the decline of life’ whose ‘extreme
fondness for her, led him to indulge her vivacity in all its sallies’ (172).
Her husband’s irrational indulgences are compounded by his descent
into second childhood, which not only leads to his choice of an adoles-
cent companion, but also explains his inability to check his new wife’s
whims or aid in her intellectual and moral development: ‘In the love of
coquetry and gaming, few equalled her; she had neither leisure nor incli-
nation to think, her life passed in an uninterrupted succession of engage-
ments, without reflexion on the past, or consideration on the future
consequences’ (173). Like Sarah Fielding’s eponymous heroine in The
History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759), Lady Sheerness becomes com-
pletely immersed in the dissipations of society upon her husband’s death,
when she is only twenty-five. Such unchecked immersion in luxurious
and fashionable idleness not only renders her unfit for a second marriage
in what should have been her maturity, but it also leads directly to the
‘fear’, ‘melancholy’, and desperation that plague her last days (187).
In spite of these cautionary examples, Lady Mary Jones herself almost
becomes a victim to the miseries of a failed marriage, twice only narrowly
escaping such a fate. In the first case, she comes dangerously close to
marrying the already married Mr. Lenman, whose desire for consequence
had led him to deny his marriage of some years ‘to a young lady of small
fortune’ (177). Unlike Charlotte Lennox’s Miss Groves in The Female
Quixote (1752), Lady Mary luckily avoids scandal and afterwards con-
cludes that ‘there was something in this action of Mr. Lenman’s very
uncommon, fashionable vices and follies that had in her opinion received
a sanction from custom, but this was of a different and a deeper dye’
(178). Fashion demands a sacrifice that women must pay. Lenman’s
seclusion of his wife and his plan for Lady Mary’s private marriage
subsidise his gallant lifestyle. Despite the immediate terror accompany-

ing her near escape, Lady Mary falls under a similar spell in consequence
of Lord Robert’s ‘very open professions of gallantry’ (183). His skill in
the art of seduction, however, eventually provokes painful reflection on
Lady Mary’s part. The apparent lack of respect he demonstrates through
her sexual objectification causes her ‘pain’ and ‘difficulties’, and only
her extreme ‘distress’ leads her eventually to reject his attentions (184).
Uncontrolled male passion inevitably becomes visible to the women it
victimises and exposes the gendered injustice of the marriage market.
Miss Selvyn
Miss Selvyn’s history further connects unrestrained male passion to
women’s marital sacrifice. While we are told that she was ‘bred up gen-
teely’ (199) by her father, educated by him in the best way, was level-
headed and able to befriend and reform the most unlikely of characters,
she later discovers that she is the illegitimate daughter of Lady Emilia.
This older woman’s deathbed confession (199) relates that her own
father’s obsession with the marriage settlements unnecessarily tested her
own and her lover’s self-control: ‘No security appeared to him equivalent
to settlements; and many trifling circumstances requisite to the splendour
of our first appearance were not ready; which to him seemed almost as
important, as the execution of the marriage writings’ (212). In stark con-
trast to the mercenary machinations of Eliza Haywood’s Syrena Tricksy
in Anti-Pamela (1741), Lady Emilia’s principled punctilios punish both
herself and her lover by leading her to reject marriage:
I resolved never to be Lord Peyton’s wife. I saw my own misconduct in

all its true colours. I despised myself, and could not hope for more par-
tial treatment from my husband. A lover might in the height of his pas-
sion excuse my frailty, but when matrimony, and continued possession had
restored him to his reason, I was sensible he must think of me as I was
conscious I deserved (213).
Lady Emilia’s father’s decision to privilege the reputation and contingent

financial position of his family—by way of inflated settlements and the more
visible symbols of wealth in the form of moveable goods—undermines
the viability of the marriage itself. The father subjects the daughter’s
potential happiness in marriage to his own pride. However, Lady Emilia’s
98 R. Runia
insistence that her pre-marital impropriety renders her unfit for mar-
riage again follows the pattern of women’s private sacrifice in service of
the public institution. Lady Emilia’s insistence upon the impossibility of
her marriage leads to Miss Selvyn’s fortunate adoption, but it also draws
attention to her loss. Mrs. Selvyn, Miss Selvyn’s adopted mother and
aunt, we are told, dies when Miss Selvyn is only three years old, the pain
of which becomes apparent in Miss Selvyn’s response to her birth moth-
er’s story. In tears, she cries, ‘Is it possible, then […] that I have thus long
been ignorant of the best of parents? And must I lose you when so lately
found? Oh! My dear mother, how much pleasure have I lost by not know-
ing that I might call you by that endearing name!’ (217). Once again, the
consequences of marriages improperly conceived and contracted plague
future generations.
However, Miss Selvyn herself finally offers an alternative narrative of
marriage. After having seen her only serious suitor manipulate her friend,
Lady Mary, Miss Selvyn refuses to yoke herself to one whose principles
appear so changeable. Having her own fortune, she concludes ‘it could
not be advisable for her to marry; for enjoying perfect content, she had
no benefit to expect from change; and happiness was so scare a commod-
ity in this life, that whoever let it once slip, had little reason to expect to
catch it again. For what reason then should she alter her state?’ (206).
Miss Selvyn refuses to submit to the male passion rendering marriage
so uncertain a state. Her economic independence secures her from its
vagaries.
Miss Trentham
The last history does not explicitly discuss the complication and cor-
ruptions leading to and shaping marriage, but nonetheless continues to
focus on its legacies. The story of Miss Trentham begins by describing
an institution burdened by human frailty. Mrs. Alworth, ‘having out-
lived all her children’ (224), assumes guardianship of her six grandchil-
dren, the product of multiple first and second marriages. All in all, this
complex family tree outlines the inability of marriage to protect children
from their father’s desires for fresh, young, pretty, and capricious second
wives. The primogeniture governing the estate of Mrs. Alworth’s first
son leaves only this child well provided for, while the two offspring pro-
duced from the son of Mrs. Alworth’s second marriage find their future
marriage prospects plagued by limited capital. Perhaps most disturbing
in its highlighting of marital insolvency is the way in which Mr. Denham

‘very willingly complied’ with Mrs. Alworth’s offer to raise her daugh-
ter’s children (224). His second marriage repeats the ostracising effect of
the second wife and its shredding of the familial fabric already seen in the
example of Miss Melvyn. Significantly, by historicising the relationships
between the novel’s married and unmarried women, Jessie Ann Van Sant
argues that Scott’s novel depicts a ‘household family’ common in the
period and that it calls into question definitions of the modern family as
nuclear and affective.9 She concludes that Scott’s novel reflects the power
of women to shape their social relations. Similarly, Chris Roulston’s
Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France compli-
cates the critical commonplace espousing the period’s increasing preoc-
cupation with the notion of companionate marriage. Roulston’s focus on
the relationship between narration and individual subjectivity has led her
to conclude that in the period’s literature ‘the institution [of marriage]
becomes defined by individuals who inhabit it’.10 Miss Trentham’s his-
tory takes us further, insisting that the institution of marriage also defines
the lives of people outside it.
Miss Trentham’s history, however, also warns against the danger-
ous impact of familial pressure on marriage choice (227). Upon Mrs.
Alworth’s insistence, and despite the fact that their relationship did not
demonstrate ‘the true characteristics of love’ (229) and ‘they saw no
very good reason for their marrying, Miss Trentham agrees to marry
Mr. Alworth’ (230). When Mr. Alworth falls in lust with a ‘wild fantastic
girl’, Miss Trentham calls off the engagement in relief (233). However,
his marriage to this ‘wild fantastic girl’ fails when:
He saw too late the difference between sensible vivacity and animal spirits,
and found Mrs. Alworth a giddy coquet, too volatile to think, too vain to
love; pleased with admiration, insensible to affection, fond of flattery, but
indifferent to true praise; imprudently vivacious in mixed companies, life-
less when alone with him; and desirous of charming all mankind except her
husband, who of his whole sex seemed the only person of no consequence
to her (236).
His compounding regrets subsequently inform a continuing obsession

with Miss Trentham and her own emerging sensitivity to and mirroring
of his feelings. Of course these now mutual desires may no longer be
satisfied as he is trapped in a loveless marriage in which his superficial
100 R. Runia
sexual passion has faded and the new Mrs. Alworth’s undeveloped prin-
ciples contaminate her behaviour both at home and abroad. Significantly,
the failure of parents to care for their children, combined with the pres-
sures of social standing, uncontrollable male desire, and neglected female
education all contribute to a cycle of suffering for those touched by the
institution of marriage.
Mrs. Alworth’s multiple marriages and those of her children leave
Miss Trentham to grow up in a marriage market fraught with the pres-
sures of financial incentive and the connective tissue of inheritance.
When she finally manifests the affection for Mr. Alworth so much culti-
vated by all, he is already embroiled in his own failed union. As such, her
history explicitly links the corruption of marriage by past generations to
its compromised status in the present.
After Marriage
Despite these repeated indictments of uncontrollable male passion and
their rendering of marriage as an institution completely dependent upon
women’s individual sacrifice, the founders of Millenium Hall eventu-
ally find respite to cultivate their faith on their estate. Hitherto, only a
few critics have acknowledged the real significance of religion for Scott’s
novel, and in this area as well, the criticism has been conflicted. Gary
Kelly carefully accounts for the novel’s Biblical and political allusions
only to conclude that the novel’s religious ideology reflects a ‘lottery
mentality […] of the oppressed, or those who lack agency and power’
that justifies resignation to suffering for the characters.11 Similarly,
Vincent Carretta recognises the religious values of the novel but sees
them as reinforcing women’s subordination.12 However, as I argue
below, the founders of Millenium Hall use religious duty to refuse mar-
riage and the subjection of women to the institution of marriage.
Scott’s connection to religion has been explored in more detail by
scholars such as Eve Tavor Bannet and Emma Major. Bannet connects
Scott’s biography, and her need to heal from her estrangement from
her husband, to her philanthropic efforts in life and fiction, arguing
that Scott’s engagement with the sermons of Bishop Thomas Sherlock
inspired her ‘rather practical than speculative divinity’.13 This, com-
bined with Major’s emphasis on the opportunity for public and politi-
cal engagement through the moral example that religion offered women,
is significant for providing a firm starting point from which to explore
the relationship between rank, marriage, and religion within the novel.
Specifically, it encourages us to reconsider the relationship between
women’s duty to faith and their duty to marriage and family. By return-
ing to each of its histories of failed marriage, we may see how Millenium
Hall authorises its members to insist on a dichotomy between religion
and some social institutions. In particular, Mancel perceives her associa-
tion with the other founders of Millenium Hall as a divine preservation
from the sufferings of marriage. She declares
that she plainly sees the merciful hand of providence bringing good out of
evil, in an event, which she, at the time it happened, thought her greatest
misfortune; for had she married Sir Edward Lambton, her sincere affection
for him would have led her to conform implicitly to all his inclinations, her
views would have been confined to this earth, and too strongly attached to
human objects, to have properly obeyed the giver of the blessings she so
much valued […] Her age, her fortune, and compliant temper, might have
seduced her into dissipation, and have made her lose all the heartfelt joys
she now daily experiences (161).
Miss Mancel believes her ‘sincere affection’ would have led directly to
‘dissipation’, but instead her faith saves her from sacrificing her own
principles to marriage. Her connection to the women of Millenium Hall
provides a refuge in which she is joyfully at liberty.
Miss Mancel’s example is repeated faithfully in the histories of the
other founding members. Accordingly, Lady Mary’s escape from seduc-
tion leads her to embrace her faith more firmly. She concludes that ‘she
felt a gratitude to him who, she imagined, might possibly be more care-
ful over his creatures than she had ever yet supposed’ (179). In addition,
Miss Trentham finds in faith an antidote to the poison of Mr. Alworth:
‘Reason and piety, when united are extremely prevalent, and with their
assistance she restrained her affection once more within its ancient
bounds of friendship’ (185). Faith allows her once again to feel happy
and her friends allow her to feel the joys of affection.
While scholars such as Julie McGonegal compellingly expose the tyr-
anny of the obligation the gentry founders of Millenium Hall impose
on women of the lower ranks, the role religion plays in justifying this
remains to be explored.14 Specifically, the escape from marriage by
Millenium Hall members stands in stark contrast to their support of mar-
riage for other women, and this contrast depends upon the founders’
102 R. Runia
invocation of religious duty. The founder’s discourse, when confronted

by Lamont regarding the stark contrast between their own now unmar-
ried states in contrast with their championing of marriage for others,
provides new insight into this discrepancy. The women explain the neces-
sity of marriage according to principles that also justify their own escape
from it. First, they argue that marriage is an ‘absolute […] necess[ity] to
the good of society’, and insist that they see it as a ‘general duty’ (163).
Then they also acknowledge that marriage among the lower orders
‘seems going out of fashion as well as with their superiors […] for dis-
sipation and extravagance are now become such universal vices, that it
requires great courage in any to enter into an indissoluble society’ (164).
And while they next conclude that ‘whatever right people may have to
make free with their own happiness, a beneficial example is a duty which
they indispensibly owe to society’ (165), they insist it does not follow
that it is their duty as elite women to provide that positive example. This
unique logic that relies upon the premises that, first, marriage is a general
and absolute duty, and second, elites must set a positive example for the
rest of society, concludes with the assertion that the women of Millenium
Hall are an exception.
In contrast to the heroines featured in the novels of her peers, Sarah
Scott allows the women of Millenium Hall to further justify their pres-
ervation from the suffering and sacrifice of marriage by detailing the
requirements of their faith. Miss Mancel’s conclusion that ‘whosoever
live in a Christian land is obliged to obey the laws of the Gospel, or
to suffer for infringing them’ distinguishes between ‘the Christian law
[that] is written in the Bible, there, independent of the political regula-
tions of particular communities’ (166). This distinction justifies her ulti-
mate claim of independence: ‘I am required to answer only for myself,
and it is not man whom I am ordered to imitate’ (167). Ultimately, the
women of Millenium Hall testify to the growing corruption of mar-
riage as an institution among both elites and the lower orders. They use
their faith to justify their escape from the painful sacrifice the institution
imposes on women, as well as to justify their sacrifice of other women to
it. While the law of the land requires their submission to the institution,
Christian law allows them to ‘be excused by sending deputies to supply
their places’ (163). Ultimately, their histories prove the veracity of Miss
Mancel’s claim that by ‘substitut[ing] many others’ they ‘certainly much
more promote wedlock, than we could do by entering into it ourselves’
(163). And their faith validates their exceptionality, their refusal to sacri-
fice themselves for a crumbling public institution.
Such reasoning allows for their ‘furnishing a house for every young
couple that married in their neighbourhood, and providing them with
some sort of stock, which by industry would prove very conducive
towards their living in a comfortable degree of plenty’, yet this reason-
ing also contradicts their own histories (159). In addition, the first of the
founders’ tasks—the establishment of schools—further contributes to the
institution of marriage by making sure:
that the young women bred up at the schools these ladies support, are so
much esteemed for many miles round, that it is not uncommon for young
farmers, who want sober good wives, to obtain them from thence, and
prefer them to girls of much better fortunes (168).
In contrast to the agency the Millenium Hall founders practice, their

education of these young women renders them objects in a financial
transaction, purchased for the good breeding that demands their sacrifice
to their husbands.
The women of Millenium Hall have had such success in promot-
ing these marriages that one quarter of the total population served has
entered the institution since the estate’s founding over twenty years ear-
lier (168). The founders of the estate, in an episode that sketches the
kind of marriage they support, host a rustic dance for newlyweds accom-
panied by additional gifts to the bride of: ‘a fortune, and that she might
have her share of employment, and contribute to the provision for her
family […] a stocked dairy […] and poultry’ (163). The description of
the bride as ‘a pretty genteel girl, dressed in a white calico gown, white
ribbons, and in every particular neat to an excess’ (162), depicts an ideal
lower-to-middling-rank marriage. The plain-woven fabric of her calico
dress garners its strength and simplicity from pairing each thread—each
warp and weft—in a balanced crisscross pattern, perfect for a balanced
union between hard-working man and wife. Undyed, the bride’s gar-
ment also shines as a testament to the local weavers of the Millenium
Hall community and their establishment ‘in the parish a manufacture of
carpets and rugs, which has succeeded so well, as to enrich all the coun-
try round about’ (243). In contrast, the women of Millenium Hall ‘are
not so confined to oeconomical attentions […] their more extensive
influence, their greater leisure to serve their Creator with all the powers
of their minds, constitute many duties on their part, to which dissipa-
tion is as great an enemy, as it can be to those more entirely domestic;
therefore on each side there is an equal neglect’ (165). This emphasis on
104 R. Runia
the Millenium Hall members’ superior intelligence exemplifies Deborah

Weiss’s claims regarding the novel’s subordination of feeling to intellect
in moral reasoning.15 But we must also recognise that it is not a secu-
lar intellectual moral reasoning. In particular, by supporting other wom-
en’s marriages, the members of Millenium Hall claim to be doing their
Christian duty. Specifically, Mrs. Mancel explains that they ‘would wish
[the young women they support] to have leisure to consider by whom
they were sent into the world, and for what purpose, and to learn, that
their happiness consists in fulfilling the design of their Maker, in pro-
viding for their own greatest felicity, and contributing all that is in their
power to the convenience of others’ (112).
These women rely on their faith and a perception of their intellec-
tual exceptionality to circumvent a duty to domestic exemplarity. Miss
Mancel explains that this does not make them reformers: ‘we wish to
regulate ourselves by the laws laid down to us, and as far as our influence
can extend, endeavour to inforce [sic] them’ (166). In a Christian nation
that recognises marriage as a social obligation, the women of Millenium
Hall use their influence to enforce the law of the land and their place
outside of it. Ultimately, Millenium Hall exposes the suffering of women
within an unjust social institution, but rather than reforming marriage,
the novel relies on religion to justify wealthy women’s public and politi-
cal influence in enforcing marriage among their economic and intellec-
tual inferiors.
Notes
1. Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough: Broadview
Press, 1995), 248. Subsequent references to the novel are given by page
number in the text.
2. Betty Rizzo, Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-
Century British Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994),
295–319.
3. Jennie Batchelor, Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830
(New York: Manchester University Press, 2010). Batchelor also acknowl-
edges the importance of labouring-class women to the novel, arguing
that in Millenium Hall female work provides the foundation of the nov-
el’s moral economy.
4. Nicole Pohl, ‘“Sweet place, where virtue then did rest”: The
Appropriation of the Country-house Ethos in Sarah Scott’s Millenium
Hall’, Utopian Studies 7: 1 (1996): 49–59 (49).
5. J. David Macey, Jr., ‘Eden Revisited: Re-visions of the Garden in Astell’s
Serious Proposal, Scott’s Millenium Hall, and Graffigny’s Lettres d’une
Peruvienne’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9: 2 (January 1997): 161–182 (169).
6. Julie McGonegal, ‘The Tyranny of Gift Giving: The Politics of Generosity
in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Sir George Ellison’, Eighteenth-
Century Fiction 19: 3 (Spring 2007): 291–306 (292–293).
7. Judith Broome, Fictive Domains: Body, Landscape, and Nostalgia, 1717–
1770 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 136–177 (143).
8. Laura Thomason, ‘“A Consolation Under Every Affliction”: Marriage,
Duty, and Sentiment in Sarah Scott’s The Test of Filial Duty’, Papers on
Language and Literature 46: 4 (Fall 2010): 385–413 (385).
9. Ann Van Sant, ‘Historicizing Domestic Relations: Sarah Scott’s Use of
the “Household Family”’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17: 3 (April 2005):
373–390.
10. Chris Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and
France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 7.
11. Gary Kelly, ‘Introduction: Sarah Scott, Bluestocking Feminism, and
Millenium Hall’, in Kelly ed., Millenium Hall, 11–43 (33).
12. Vincent Carretta, ‘Utopia Limited: Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and The
History of Sir George Ellison’, The Age of Johnson 5 (1992): 303–325 (312).
13. Sarah Scott to Elizabeth Montagu, [c. 1762], in the Montagu Collection,
The Huntington Library, MO 5923. See also Robin Runia, ‘“Joint
Tenants of the Shade”: Collective Piety in Millenium Hall’, in Reasoning
Beasts: Evolution, Cognition, and Culture, 1720–1820, ed. Kathryn Stasio
and Michael Austin (New York: AMS Press, Forthcoming).
14. McGonegal, 291–306.
15. Deborah Weiss, ‘Sarah Scott’s “Attick School”: Moral Philosophy, Ethical
Agency, and Millenium Hall’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24: 3 (Spring
2012): 459–486.
‘Be but a Little Deaf and Blind …
and Happiness You’ll Surely Find’:
Marriage in Eighteenth-Century
Magazines for Women
Jennie Batchelor
In the words of M., the author of an essay entitled ‘Thoughts on

Marriage’ in the October 1798 issue of The Lady’s Monthly Museum,
‘Of all the various essays adapted to periodical publications, I know of
none which have obtained more frequently than those upon Love and
Marriage’.1 Patrick Brontë, father of Charlotte, evidently agreed and
burned a much-prized collection of The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832)
given to his daughter by her aunt on the grounds that it was full of ‘fool-
ish love-stories’.2 Surveying the contents of the many monthly eighteenth-
century magazines for women that flourished from the 1770 s onwards
corroborates claims for the centrality of love and marriage to the genre.
Closer scrutiny, however, suggests that Brontë’s disproportionate response
was also misguided. Not only does he over-emphasise the page-space fic-
tion assumed in such publications, but his characterisation of the magazines’
treatment of love and marriage more broadly is also inaccurate.
J. Batchelor (*) 
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: J.E.Batchelor@kent.ac.uk

108 J. Batchelor
The Lady’s Magazine, which provided a model for numerous contem-

porary women’s periodicals, regularly carried essays on marriage. It also
published much besides: extracts from original and already published
non-fiction in the fields of history, philosophy, politics, anthropology and
travel; biographies of prominent women from the worlds of theatre, lit-
erature and court; advice pages; poetry, enigmas and rebuses; accounts of
domestic and foreign news; engravings, song sheets and embroidery pat-
terns; births, deaths and marriages; and a relatively small amount of orig-
inal fiction (a combination of short stories and two of three instalments
of a serialised novel per month). While much of this fiction (and, indeed,
much of the other material the magazine contained) was about love and
marriage to varying degrees, and some of this content seems foolish in
its improbability or idealism, it is also the case that The Lady’s Magazine,
like many of its rivals, was often resolutely unromantic and uncom-
promisingly practical in its response to the challenges women faced as
lovers, wives, mothers and widows. As M. continued in ‘Thoughts on
Marriage’, periodicals suggested that the ‘felicity’ matrimony promised
was ‘temporary’ and that most couples were destined to exist in a per-
petual ‘state of warfare’.3 Unlike novels of the period, which tended to
figure marriage as their endpoint, magazines concerned themselves then,
as they frequently do now, with marriage as the beginning of the rest of
women’s lives.4 How to deal with what came after marriage as felicity
dissipated and warfare began was a subject of vigorous debate among the
magazines’ mixed-sexed armies of largely anonymous and pseudonymous
contributors, and forms the focus of this chapter.
Given the centrality of marriage to late eighteenth-century women’s
magazines it is surprising that the substantial body of literary and histori-
cal scholarship in this area overlooks the genre almost entirely. Novels,
ballads, and advice literature are mobilised to great effect in studies of
marriage and the family by literary scholars including Christopher Flint,
Ruth Perry and Chris Roulston.5 These genres also figure in important
ways in recent histories of women and marriage such as those by Tanya
Evans and Amanda Vickery.6 Magazines, however, are largely untapped
sources of evidence for prevailing attitudes towards eighteenth-century
marriage, although they have featured prominently in some recent
popular books on noted marital scandals such as that of the Countess
of Strathmore and Andrew Robinson Stoney, documented in Wendy
Moore’s Wedlock (2009).7
‘BE BUT A LITTLE DEAF AND BLIND … AND HAPPINESS … 109
There are many practical reasons why magazines have not been mined
for their insights into married life in the period. Serial publications are
notoriously difficult to work with. The eighteenth-century periodical mar-
ketplace was competitive and overpopulated. Although many titles ran
for just a few months, some ran for decades leaving a dauntingly broad,
deep and heterogeneous archive of material. To complicate matters fur-
ther, no single research library holds complete runs of titles such as The
Lady’s Magazine, The New Lady’s Magazine (1786–1795) or The Lady’s
Monthly Museum (1798–1828), and since periodicals occupy the digital
no-man’s land between Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online and
the Burney Collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers,
few electronic archives exist. The recent publication of Adam Matthew
Digital’s Eighteenth-Century Journals V, which contains a complete run
of The Lady’s Magazine, goes some way to addressing this problem, but
there is a good deal of work to be done if periodical studies is to become
as firmly established for the eighteenth century as it is for the nineteenth.
Important though these practical impediments are, however, the
reluctance of scholars working on marriage to use magazines as source
material is, I would contend, as much ideological as it is methodologi-
cal in origin. Patrick Brontë’s extreme rejection of The Lady’s Magazine
and its ilk as fuelling female readers’ romantic fantasies has a corollary in
modern-day scholarship on eighteenth-century periodicals by the likes of
Shawn Lisa Maurer and Kathryn Shevelow, which argues that the demise
of essay-periodicals as well as earlier, pedagogically ambitious miscellanies
such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Lady’s Museum (1760–1761), coupled
with the rise of the multi-authored magazine miscellany, entailed a net
loss for women writers and readers.8 Post-1770 serial publications, the
argument goes, focused increasingly upon training women’s bodies in
the ‘arts of femininity’ rather than upon cultivating their minds.9 As a
consequence, the radical potential of previous women’s efforts to use the
serial form to nurture women’s intellectual lives gave way to a single-
mindedly conservative and disciplinary gender politics which coalesced
around the sentimental marital ideal. Buying (and buying into) these
magazines, according to these influential accounts, rendered its read-
ers passive ‘consumers’ of domesticity ideology.10 The conduct book, in
other words, had been reborn in a different guise.
The distortions produced by reading marriage through the prism of
prescriptive literature, especially conduct books, have been outlined
eloquently by historians including Joanne Bailey, Laura Gowing and
110 J. Batchelor
Vickery.11 Their cautions against viewing normative texts as reflective

of day-to-day realities require little repetition, but it is worth noting, as
Roulston has done, that the conduct book was itself a ‘heterogeneous’
genre. Therefore, the ‘“meaning” of marriage in the eighteenth cen-
tury cannot be easily drawn’ even from its contents.12 More pertinently,
in light of my present concerns, it is important to recognise that eight-
eenth-century magazines are, contrary to the conclusions drawn in the
small body of scholarship devoted to them, very different textual beasts
from conduct books. If, therefore, their assumed similarity is an unspoken
rationale for their rejection as source material for studies of eighteenth-
century marriage, then it is one that does not bear scrutiny. The maga-
zine’s uniquely interactive format, I will argue, has profound implications
for how meaning is produced within its pages and, consequently, such
publications paint a picture of married life that is richer and more com-
plex than that found in any other textual form in the period. In order to
make this claim, this chapter will provide an overview of some of the prin-
cipal modes and registers in which marriage is discussed in eighteenth-
century women’s magazines, drawing particularly on issues of The Lady’s
Magazine and its closest early rival The New Lady’s Magazine from the
1780s and 1790s. In the process, I will demonstrate both how a study
of the genre’s investment in and contestation of marriage can complicate
scholarly accounts of magazines as conservative purveyors of the ideal of
the domestic woman, and how the study of magazines might contribute
to the increasingly nuanced historical and literary scholarship on marriage
in the later eighteenth century.
Marital Genres
Broadly speaking, marriage enters eighteenth-century women’s maga-
zines in six principal forms, although there is a considerable slippage
between these genres. First, there are articles appearing under such titles
as ‘Observations on the Manners and Customs of …’ that treat matters
such as the traditions surrounding dowries, polygamy and divorce in var-
ious countries and across different periods as sources of anthropological,
historical and sometimes lubricious interest. Second, there are essays that
treat marriage as a vehicle for other socioeconomic and moral debates,
particularly female education and employment. Often, as in the case of
a much-contested series of exchanges prompted by a letter by regular
New Lady’s Magazine contributor Harriott M—on celibacy, such essays
offer up and debate alternatives to marriage such as spinsterhood or even

same-sex unions.13 Third, there are numerous short and bittersweet mar-
ital satires along the lines of ‘On the State of Marriage in South-Britain’,
which appeared in The New Lady’s Magazine for July 1786 and which
offered spurious statistical evidence to prove its assertion that of the
872, 564 wedded couples in the area, only nine were happily married.14
Fourth, there are accounts of real-life marital scandals and tragedies
that made the newspapers and courts. Fifth, there are essays, poems and
advice columns in which women seek and are offered practical informa-
tion on courtship and marital strife. And finally, there are fictional narra-
tives in which women triumph over marital difficulties such as adultery
or spousal abuse. A detailed analysis of all of these marital modes is the
work of a longer study. Instead, I want to focus here on arguably the
three most closely related of these genres—accounts of real-life mari-
tal breakdown, advice on marital problems, and the fantastic fictions in
which these difficulties are overcome—to assess the effect the interaction
of these genres with one another has on our sense of marriage’s meaning
for magazine readers.
Noted marital scandals and more humble domestic tragedies were
variously presented to magazine readers in the form of memoirs, crimi-
nal biographies, descriptions of trials and extracts from newspapers. High
profile cases such as the legal battles between the wealthy, wronged and
press-savvy Countess of Strathmore and her conniving, abusive second
husband, Captain Andrew Robinson Stoney, unsurprisingly occupied col-
umn after column in magazine pages published between 1786 and 1787.
Bringing such scandalous cases to their readers’ notice was presented by
magazine editors as a public service. As The Lady’s Magazine wrote in
the account of the Duchess of Kingston’s bigamy trial that opened its
April 1776 issue: ‘THE importance, the novelty of a cause of this kind
having excited the curiosity of every female of the kingdom, many thou-
sands of which could not have had access to the most august tribunal
that this nation can exhibit, we thought it our duty to meet our fair cor-
respondents and patronesses on this ground’. The magazine proceeded to
promise to offer up ‘all the information they could have reaped’ from
one of the scarce ‘ticket[s]’ to the court.15 Intriguingly, although the
trial presented opportunities for reflections on marital imprudence, the
periodical refrained from such pronouncements in favour of an ‘impar-
tial’ and ‘circumstantial’ (but in fact quite sympathetic) account of the
Duchess’s attempts to defend herself against the charges brought by the
112 J. Batchelor
deceased Duke’s nephew (171). Public interest and private gain neatly
dovetailed in such cases, and as the accompanying engraving of the
Duchess in her ‘black polenesse’ and ‘ganze cap’ suggests, the magazine
was as keenly focused on the marketing opportunities such a story pre-
sented as it was upon moralising on the state of modern marriage (172).
Satisfying an altogether different kind of reader curiosity are the brutal
and affecting cases of marital disorder among society’s lower ranks that
magazines usually consigned to their back pages. The Home News sec-
tion of the April 1788 New Lady’s Magazine, for example, opened with
a disturbing account of a man arrested for killing his newborn child.
The appalling ‘discovery’ was made by neighbours who heard the ‘cries’
of his wife, who had given birth ‘but a few days’ before, while being
‘beaten’ by her spouse. The husband and wife refused to answer any
questions about the baby’s death, but evidence was given by the daugh-
ter of these poor ‘wretches’, a ‘little girl of two years old’, who was an
eyewitness to the brutal attacks.16
Studies of criminal biography provide us with models for reading texts
like this.17 Collectively these approaches suggest that readers encoun-
tered such articles with vicarious pleasure (whether of moral superiority,
horror, sympathy or titillation), which was legitimised by the reassuringly
moral framework provided by legal intervention and verdict with which
such narratives concluded. However, when these texts interact with oth-
ers in the multi-genre format of the magazine miscellany, their collective
meaning becomes even less predictable and stable than the meaning we
might derive from reading each of these articles in isolation. I will return
later to the question of how the juxtaposition of articles written in dif-
ferent genres and registers causes meaning to proliferate and affects the
magazine’s presentation of marriage. For now it is sufficient to note that
even the interaction between various real-life accounts of marital disorder
creates a common ground of marital dysfunction that is a characteristic
of women’s magazines of the period and that unsettlingly cuts across the
social hierarchy.
This discomforting closure of the gap between duchesses and the
poor via their experiences of marital breakdown is consolidated by the
magazines’ representation of marriage among their targeted middling
sort readership. Advice to readers on courtship and marital difficulty
regularly appeared in magazines in the form of original or already pub-
lished advice literature. New works such as ‘Mrs. T—SS’s Advice to her
Daughter’, published in thirteen instalments between 1775 and 1776 in
The Lady’s Magazine, sat alongside extracts from well-known examples

of the genre, including James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1765)
and Dr. Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1761), which were
reprinted in 1776 and 1784 respectively.18 The Lady’s Magazine also car-
ried a long-running agony aunt column, The Matron, authored by a
‘Mrs. Grey’ who proffered advice and answered readers’ queries every
month from January 1774 until the column’s 224th and final appear-
ance in 1791.19 It was also plagiarised in the rival News Lady’s Magazine.
Advice was further solicited in both periodical titles in the form of open
letters to the magazines’ editors to which readers were invited to respond.
The advice meted out was often predictable and frequently reflected the
sentiments expressed in this essay’s title. My title quotation—‘Be but a
little deaf and blind … And happiness you’ll surely find’—is taken from a
poetic epigraph to an essay ‘On Nuptial Happiness’ that appeared under
the signature G. W. in the June 1788 New Lady’s Magazine, and which
asserted that ‘the general rule for […] matrimonial happiness’ was that a
wife should ‘make proper allowances for [her husband’s] particular tem-
per and unhappy disposition’.20
Such prescriptions were, however, commonly undermined in the very
texts that gave them voice. Even the author of ‘On Nuptial Happiness’
was forced to note the superhuman nature of the ‘self-denial, com-
mand of temper, and resolution’ that women had to exercise dur-
ing marriage.21 Moreover, the authority of advice givers was routinely
questioned in the form of published ripostes to particularly sententious
contributions. In April 1771 for instance The Lady’s Magazine published
Theodosia’s ‘Advice to Married People’, a letter provoked by an essay
published in the previous issue which had given ‘some instructions to
the ladies for their conduct in the matrimonial state’.22 Opening with
the premise that it must surely be acknowledged that ‘gentlemen may
be equally in need of some instructions of the same kind’, Theodosia’s
reply details five rules for men’s behaviour before and after marriage
which hinge on her conviction that marriage should be ‘a state of mutual
obligation’ and that men could only expect their wives’ gratitude when
they ‘constantly endeavoured to oblige’ them, ‘divest[ed] themselves of
an affected and overstrained superiority’ and ‘consider[ed] their wives as
their equals’.23
Other contributors preferred irony to confrontation in their efforts
to undermine the authority of received wisdom on appropriate marital
behaviour. Readers of the letter-cum-poem ‘A Young Lady’s Advice to
114 J. Batchelor
an Acquaintance, Lately Married’, printed in the poetry section of the

first issue of The New Lady’s Magazine in February 1786, would be for-
given for ceasing to read it after the predictable opening lines that iden-
tify women’s ‘narrow sphere […] in life’ and the importance of moving
within that sphere ‘aright’.24 But as with so many contributions to
women’s magazines of this period, the tone is hard to pin down, a mat-
ter about which magazine editors were frequently coy in order to allow
readers to draw their own conclusions about the seriousness or otherwise
of articles. No such room for interpretive manoeuvre is allowed by the
author of ‘A Young Lady’s Advice’, however. In the final lines, its bitter
irony becomes fully apparent as the poet’s lack of qualification for the
role of advisor on marital ‘bliss’ is laid bare:
But now methinks I hear you cry,

Shall she pretend, oh vanity!
To lay down rules for wedded life,
Who never was herself a wife?
I own you’ve ample cause to chide,
And, blushing, throw the pen aside.25
‘A Young Lady’s Advice’, insignificant as a work of poetry, is nonetheless

crucial to our understanding of one of the magazine’s key strategies for
engaging readers. It constantly lulled readers into a false sense of security
on matters of received wisdom—that they knew what was to come and
how things were supposed to be—before pulling the rug from under the
readers’ feet, contesting that wisdom via an undermining of the author-
ity of its purveyors to proffer advice, and implying that things might or
should be different.
Even when the advice-giver’s authority was taken as read—as in the
case of the Matron, who is presented as a respectable matriarch of an
extensive family with a wealth of matrimonial experience among its
members—the fact that marital longevity (if not happiness) required
that women took advice contrary to their own psychic wellbeing was fre-
quently discussed and lamented. One example may stand for many. The
April 1790 Lady’s Magazine published an affecting letter by Cornelia
L—, a woman who having made an apparently good match, albeit
young, ‘to a man every way suitable’, is forced to employ a governess
to educate her four daughters so that she can be ‘always ready to enter-
tain [her husband’s] and my friends at home, and to accompany him
abroad’.26 The accomplished nineteen-year-old, Honoria, employed

to fill this role soon ‘steal[s] the heart’ of Cornelia’s husband and eld-
est son, who has recently returned from university. The son determines
to seduce the governess himself and justifies his decision to his appalled
mother on the grounds that this act will fend off the family unit’s
destruction by preventing the father from being led astray by a woman
probably already long since ‘abandoned’.27 Cornelia pleads with the
Matron for advice on how to dismiss the governess, and concludes by
declaring her hopes that its publication alone might be enough to shame
her son and husband into right conduct.
Mrs. Grey’s reply is held over, as it often was, until the follow-
ing issue, thus allowing the reader to determine her own response to
the case. When the Matron does address Cornelia’s ‘critical’ situation,
her advice is given reluctantly and with due attention to the ‘delicacy’
required so ‘as not to seem at least to give offence to her husband’.28
Not wishing ‘to connive at a man’s keeping a mistress’, the Matron
nonetheless enjoins Cornelia to turn a blind eye to her husband’s attrac-
tion in the hope that allowing him ‘free indulgence’ with the govern-
ess might eventually provoke his ‘disgust’ and return him to his ‘sober
senses’ and the family fold (260). Only if the disgust fails to set in is
Cornelia advised to find ‘some pretence to differ with Honoria upon a
subject totally opposite to that which at present occupies her thoughts,
and from thence take occasion either to dismiss her, or make it impos-
sible for her to stay’ (260).
The remainder of the column consists of a lengthy attack on the cur-
rent state of the female labour market and a perhaps surprisingly sympa-
thetic discussion of the plight of the governess, forced, because of her
social inferiors’ usurpation of the employments of companion or house-
keeper to take a job from which her youth and attractiveness should dis-
qualify her. Despite this turn in the column’s argument, the reader never
loses sight of Cornelia’s ‘predicament’, and in large part because of the
Matron’s refusal to conceal her reluctance to give the advice she does,
the psychic costs that Cornelia will pay by sacrificing moral principle to
marital duty are writ large. Of course, it is possible that Cornelia’s let-
ter is not genuine but rather manufactured by a staff writer (perhaps by
‘Mrs. Grey’ herself). This is a perennial bugbear for periodical scholar-
ship, but it is worth noting that much of The Lady’s Magazine’s appeal
and success was widely claimed to derive from the fact that it pro-
fessed to be heavily reliant upon the production of its community of
116 J. Batchelor
reader-contributors. Even if we approach such claims guardedly—and

certainly the magazine contained much extracted and reprinted con-
tent from prior publications—the monthly demand for over fifty pages
of densely printed content, meant that its continued success was guaran-
teed only as long as writers continued to send in submissions for publica-
tion.29 In this particular case, the question of whether the correspondent
existed or not is, however, largely irrelevant. Readers were invited to
consider Cornelia’s plight, so movingly documented in the original let-
ter, as if real. As importantly, they were given a space (created by the
time-lag between the publication of the initial correspondence and the
Matron’s reply), in which to reflect on their own response to the situ-
ation and the ethical questions it posed before the magazine’s officially
sanctioned (and still profoundly ambivalent) response was produced.
Readers depressed by the magazine’s account of the marital warfare
that afflicted all women from the wealthiest aristocrats to prudently wed
middling readers and the poorest ‘wretches’, might have found light
relief in the many fantasies of female triumph over marital adversity in
which magazine authors indulged. Such tales (usually short stories) are
not notable for their subtlety. However, their ubiquity suggests that they
were popular, while the fact that many were published with accompa-
nying engravings, an expense not undertaken lightly as editors often
pointed out, indicates that the magazines clearly saw them as integral to
their appeal. Many of these stories such as ‘The Lucky Chance; or the
History of Louisa and Maria’, published in The New Lady’s Magazine
for February 1787, focus on the injustices occasioned by inflicting mer-
cenary marriages upon young couples seeking conjugal matches based
on mutual affection. ‘The Lucky Chance’ relates the story of a beauti-
ful, virtuous but fortuneless woman, Louisa, who is in love with her best
friend’s brother, Charles. When Charles declares his love for Louisa to
his ‘obdurate’ father, the latter flies into a ‘rage’ and threatens to dis-
own him should he fail to accept an alternative, financially advantageous
match.30 Charles determines to end his life, but at the very moment he
is about to drown himself in a canal, he receives a letter from his loved
one informing him that she has serendipitously won ‘twenty thousand
pounds’ in a lottery. The ‘consent’ of the parents of the couple ‘was now
easily obtained’ and we might suppose, were the story not printed in the
decidedly cynical world of the magazine, that the couple will live happily
ever after (73).
An altogether more disturbing narrative is provided in ‘The Assault’,

a story that an author’s footnote claimed was ‘founded on a recent fact’,
and that opened the April 1798 issue of The Lady’s Magazine.31 ‘The
Assault’ outlines the years of physical and mental abuse inflicted upon
Clara Irwin because of the ‘unfounded and absurd’ jealousy of her hus-
band. Eventually, she leaves her spouse for the sanctuary of her broth-
er’s house (147). Her husband locates her and, determining ‘to omit no
means, even the most violent, to bring back into his power the person of
his wife, on whom he proposed to wreak his vengeance by confinement
and ill-treatment’, he orders a servant to abduct her during a snow storm
(147). Mrs. Irwin is brought back to her marital home ‘more dead than
alive’, where upon she falls unconscious and is so ‘seriously ill’ that her
death is expected. The wife’s decline, coupled with a chance discovery
of ‘some circumstances which proved to his satisfaction, the absurdity of
the jealousy he had entertained’, prompts the husband’s remorse (148).
The story ends with Mr. Irwin ‘pour[ing] forth the most ardent vows of
unchangeable affection’ and a declaration that he will ‘never more […]
be disturbed by mean suspicion’ (149). After so unremittingly bleak and
violent a tale, it is hard to believe that even the author, let alone her read-
ers, accepts the probability of the brief yet triumphant note on which the
story ends: ‘love and joy reigned in full perfection in their hearts’ (149).
An equally unsettling tale of virtue triumphing over marital vice
comes in the form of ‘The Retaliation’, signed Arpasia, which was pub-
lished in the May 1771 issue of The Lady’s Magazine and later reprinted
without acknowledgement in the May 1786 New Lady’s Magazine. In
the letter accompanying the fiction, Arpasia introduces her contribu-
tion as ‘a warning to […] wicked triflers’ who ‘deem it no injury done
to them to ensnare’ the ‘affections’ of women and then abandon ‘them
with indifference of contempt’.32 The story itself centres on the signifi-
cantly named Clarissa, who is courted for many months by a supposedly
reformed rake, Melanthus. As the wedding day approaches, the suitor
writes to Clarissa to inform her that he has accepted another financially
propitious marriage proposal. Clarissa’s heartbreak quickly turns into a
desire for revenge and, to simplify a complex series of plot twists, she
contrives to persuade her former lover that she has poisoned him and
killed herself (472). The lover recovers (he had not in fact been poi-
soned) but is tormented by Clarissa’s faked death and becomes mor-
bidly ‘morose’, a condition that worsens when he happens upon the
very much alive Clarissa and fears her ghost is haunting him (475).
118 J. Batchelor
The story concludes by noting that Melanthus’s mind was ‘very dis-
turbed’ by his ordeal. Clarissa, meanwhile, ‘though the instrument of
inflicting it, almost pities his [Melanthus’s] condition, and confesses the
consequences of her stratagem are more severe than she either wished or
intended’ (475). The ‘almost’, here, is crucial, reminding the reader as it
does of the utter lack of pity the story’s author extended to such ‘com-
plete villain[s]’ in her accompanying letter (475).
Such fantastic fictions seem highly improbable to modern readers,
even to those well-versed in the chance encounters and serendipitous
turns of event that characterise eighteenth-century fiction. Their recur-
rence suggests that such tales addressed a deep-seated reader desire for
redress for (principally male) marital transgression. In this sense, such
short stories seem likely to have been compensatory for their readers, but
not in the same way that Perry uses the term when she argues that the
eighteenth-century novel provided a space in which writers could work
through, and textually make amends for, the losses women incurred as
kinship structures changed and the conjugal domestic unit superseded
the consanguineal family.33 On the one hand, magazines are far less sen-
timental in their approach to the subject of marriage than many eight-
eenth-century novels, and rarely are they nostalgic. On the other, I am
reluctant to read magazines as reflective of specific historical phenomena,
even in the complex and nuanced ways in which Perry reads eighteenth-
century novels. First, magazines in the eighteenth century, as now, had a
vested interest in presenting marriage as a new and pernicious problem
that they could simultaneously promise to solve. Second, the magazines’
habit of reprinting material, sometimes first published many decades ear-
lier, problematises any straightforward correlation between periodicals
and the precise period in which they were published. Rather, my pri-
mary interest here is in the dominant discourses of marriage that maga-
zines circulated and contested, and how understanding these popular
discourses on marriage might recalibrate our understanding of cultural
attitudes to wedlock in the period.
Attempting to recover how historical readers might have internalised
these discourses is a tempting but impossible project since these individ-
uals are, for the most part, unknown to us today, and where we have
been able to discover the identities of some of the people who subscribed
to such periodicals, as Jan Fergus has done, the archives rarely docu-
ment how these people read.34 Instead, we are forced to focus instead
on the hypothetical rather than the historical reader, who is potentially a
very different animal.35 Real people, for example, can fail to see or refuse
to acquiesce to authors’ encouragements to read in particular ways.
Nowhere is this perhaps more true, as Jacqueline Pearson and Edward
Copeland have noted, than in the case of magazines, whose readers can
read in much more unconventional—that is, non-linear and more mag-
pie-like ways—than when reading other genres.36
Rather than focus on different readers’ potentially divergent responses
to individual pieces of magazine content, it is arguably more productive,
as I have attempted to do here, to focus on the unstable and complex
meanings cumulatively produced by the strategic or haphazard place-
ment of articles within individual issues. The import of stories such as
‘The Retaliation’, the account of the Duchess of Kingston’s trial and the
murder of an unnamed infant, or Cornelia’s letter to the Matron, derives
as much from the context in which they are read as from their content.
While scholarship on the novel, scandalous memoirs, criminal biog-
raphies and conduct literature offer insights into ways of reading these
texts in isolation, none can account fully for how they operate in the
broader textual dialogue of magazines. No account of marriage in eight-
eenth-century serial publications for women can be complete, therefore,
without taking into account how the various matrimonial genres this
essay has outlined blend and clash within the dynamic miscellany format
to produce an ongoing debate about marriage in which nothing was cer-
tain but that matrimony was a cause of, as much as a solution to, social
and economic problems. Marriage was the beginning (not the end) of a
series of negotiations that women had to navigate with great care, and at
potentially great cost.
The Meaning of Marriage

To give a keener sense of how this intertextual dialogue might operate,
I turn now to a brief reading of marital discourses across the three mat-
rimonial modes on which this chapter has focused as they appear in a
single issue of one magazine. I have chosen the January 1787 New Lady’s
Magazine, but any issue of any women’s magazine of the period is ripe
for similar analysis. The conservative, conduct-book treatment of mar-
riage is represented in this issue in the form of R. Cole’s ‘The Happy
Marriage. An Ode’. Resting on the presumption that the pursuit of
‘sens[ual]’ pleasure propagates only ‘pain’, the poem urges ‘restraint’
among readers and the curbing of their sexual desires and economic
120 J. Batchelor
ambition when seeking a prospective partner. Like ‘the first fond pair’
before the fall, young women are enjoined to be ‘innocent and kind’ and
to stand transparently before their husbands. The earthly and spiritual
rewards occasioned by the pursuit of conjugal felicity are felt, Cole con-
cludes, only by those who pour ‘fourth the[ir] mind’ and when ‘not one
movement is conceal’d’.37
The ode’s attempt to sever mercenary and other forms of self-interest
from the affective disinterestedness the poem presents as vital to mari-
tal success is also the subject of the issue’s short story (an unacknowl-
edged reprinting of a story from the September 1772 Lady’s Magazine).
‘The Rape of the Marriage-Contract’, by Florio, relates the tale of an
unnamed young woman who is ‘intimidated’ and ‘threaten[ed]’ by her
avaricious mother into signing a marriage contract with an ‘exceedingly
rich’ octogenarian.38 Distraught at the price she has to pay for respect-
ing her mother’s wishes, unappeased by the latter’s assurances that the
prospective husband ‘could not live long’ after the marriage ceremony,
and concerned that in becoming a wife to the old man she will defraud
a favourite friend (the suitor’s niece and sole heiress) of her inheritance,
the heroine determines to adopt male dress, poses as a highwayman and,
a confident huntswoman, holds up her suitor’s carriage at gunpoint. She
orders her would-be lover to strip and steals a watch and purse for her
friend and the marriage contract for herself. She burns the document,
thereby extricating herself from a marriage to her embarrassed, superan-
nuated lover. The story concludes by observing that although the ‘char-
acter [the heroine] assumed in the wood is extraordinary for a girl; […]
how nauseous to such a one is the husband of four-score years, and what
will she not attempt, in order to get rid of him’ (31).
Despite its more obviously sensational rendering, ‘The Rape of the
Marriage-Contract’ reads as companion piece to the more sober and mor-
ally conventional ‘Happy Marriage’, but it goes still further in its searing
criticism of the unfeeling economics that underpin modern marriage and
force parents to sacrifice their children’s will and happiness to the family’s
financial and social interest. Simultaneously, ‘The Rape of the Marriage-
Contract’ exerts pressure on the notions of prudence and duty that under-
pin Cole’s conception of virtue by showing how easily such characteristics
can be tainted when they are called upon to serve the corrupt motives
of their families. Moreover, the violence such pressures occasion (albeit
comically mitigated in the robbery scene) points to the psychic price paid
by women forced to sacrifice their desires not only to the demand that
they be married well, but also the demand that they be married at all. The
unnamed heroine of the story has no other prospective and more suitable
lover waiting behind the scenes. She doesn’t reject a mercenary marriage
for the prospect of conjugal felicity, as Cole enjoins in the ode. Rather her
behaviour is a rejection of the cultural dictate that women’s lives could
only be navigated around the Scylla and Charybdis of mercenary ver-
sus companionate marriage. The young woman, in fact, has no interest
in marrying anyone; the only emotionally significant relationship she has
with anyone else in the story is with her female friend.39
That the destructive consequences that follow from the cultural insist-
ence and financial imperative that women marry at all is the central con-
cern of ‘The Rape of the Marriage-Contract’ becomes more apparent
when the story is read alongside the still more extreme case of matrimo-
nial violence presented just a few pages later in the unsigned ‘Original of
the Coroner’s Jury’. This piece, much reprinted in eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century periodicals, relates the story of a London ‘Gentlewoman’
who, after being widowed for the sixth time, finds ‘a gentleman hardy
enough to make her a wife once more’.40 For ‘several months’, we are
told, the couple’s happiness was mutual, but the new husband soon
proves to be as guilty of ‘sottishness and infidelity’ as his predecessors,
and takes to staying out very late at night and returning ‘intoxicated’.
Returning home one night apparently ‘dead drunk’, the ‘disgust[ed]’
wife melts a lead weight from a gown sleeve and attempts to kill him by
pouring the liquid down her husband’s ear through a pipe (40). The hus-
band wakes just in time and the wife is arrested. Her former husbands’
corpses are exhumed and when ‘considerable violence’ is found on each
of their decayed bodies, she is ‘condemned and executed’, to which cir-
cumstance, ‘is England indebted for that useful regulation, by which no
corpse can be interred in the kingdom without a legal inspection’ (41).
If the woman is condemned by the law, it is by no means certain given
the context in which the article appears, that she would necessarily have
been condemned by all of the magazine’s readers. After all, these were the
identical readers who were asked in the same issue to sympathise with the
plight of a woman driven to violence by the unreasonable cruelty exacted
upon her by the institution of marriage. Of course, the crime and motive
are different in ‘Original of the Coroner’s Jury’ and ‘The Rape of the
Marriage-Contract’. Indeed, one of the striking things about the former is
that no psychological motive is given for the wife’s crimes beyond the fact
that every husband she marries is unworthy of the name. Nor is she shown
122 J. Batchelor
to be remorseful or triumphant when the murders are discovered. Indeed,

it is significant that the tale ends not with the kind of moralising conclu-
sion or declaration of penitence we would expect from criminal biography.
The absence of such a clear textual directive of how we are to read the
murderess’s crimes opens up a space for moral ambiguity. Indeed, one of
the disorienting effects of reading ‘Original of the Coroner’s Jury’ in the
context of this particular instalment of The New Lady’s Magazine is that it
is hard not to view the ‘disgust’ that occasions the crimes and which is, in
turn, provoked by the ‘sottishness and infidelity’ of her seven husbands,
as legitimate. This is especially so given that in the same issue ‘The Happy
Marriage’ assumes the naturalness of such feelings among the magazine’s
readers in its condemnation of licentious behaviour.
It is, of course, impossible to prove that readers read the issue in pre-
cisely the ways outlined above. What is clear, though, is that the meaning
of individual magazine articles is generated in part by their juxtaposi-
tion with others on similar topics. If viewed in isolation, readers might
have felt confident in how to read the various articles focused on here.
‘The Happy Marriage’ for instance offers advice on right conduct and
self-regulation in courtship and marriage that seems designed to be inter-
nalised by the reader for the good of society as a whole. ‘The Rape of
the Marriage-Contract’, meanwhile, reads ostensibly as a cautionary tale
against parental tyranny and misplaced filial obedience. Finally, ‘Original
on the Coroner’s Jury’ seems to be a historical curiosity that offers a
glimpse into a shockingly transgressive world of the worst kind of marital
disorder, before demonstrating the ultimate power of the law in punish-
ing those who dare to defy its dictates. Positioned alongside each other,
however, the intertextual dialogue produced by these articles changes
how we might read them and redraws the picture of marriage the maga-
zine as a whole presents. Common ground is exposed: each article reveals
and condemns the dubious economic motives that so often motivate the
choice of a marriage partner; each points to the failures of men as suitors
and husbands, and both the ‘The Rape of the Marriage-Contract’ and
‘Original of the Coroner’s Jury’ examine the lengths to which women
are driven to extricate themselves from unsuitable matches. Getting or
being married it turns out is not that dissimilar from the experience of
reading a woman’s magazine: both entail an endless series of negotia-
tions, and both require confrontation of some rather unpalatable truths.
To use magazines in historical or literary studies of marriage is, for the
various reasons I have outlined, a fraught enterprise. The exclusion of
magazines from such studies in favour of other textual sources is, how-
ever, difficult to justify. Magazines have the potential to nuance our sense
of popular cultural discourses about marriage in fascinating ways, while
additionally focusing on the magazines’ representation of marriage helps
to dispel some of the deep-seated myths about serial publications for
women in this period. The identification of magazines as conduct books
by another name does not bear scrutiny. Marital advice is frequently
meted out by women’s periodicals, and often in predictable terms. Yet as
we have seen, the validity of the advice and the authority of the advice-
giver are always open to question. Furthermore, the space given over to
the thoughts and feelings of the recipient of the advice (often unnamed,
passive or voiceless in advice literature) makes for a very different reading
experience than reading conduct books. Letters like Cornelia’s—regard-
less of their possible fictionality—reveal the painful compromises that
translating advice into action could necessitate. As importantly, the form
in which advice is given invites deliberation or even dissent. The time-
lag that often existed between solicitations for advice and the magazine’s
official response invested readers with agency as they contemplated their
own response to the marital quandaries presented and, in some cases,
took up the magazine’s offer of a right of reply, as Theodosia did. If
then, as Shevelow suggests, the goal of the eighteenth-century women’s
magazine was to render women readers passive consumers of a bourgeois
domestic ideal, then its orchestrators chose a singularly ineffective genre
through which to achieve these ends.
The eighteenth-century women’s magazine has been likened by
Markman Ellis to a female club or coffeehouse, while magazine read-
ers toyed with other models for theorising its textual community such
as the debating house or literary coterie.41 What these various analogies
have in common is their recognition of the magazine’s importance as a
site where private concerns (and their wider cultural implications) could
receive a public airing. This is as true of the essay-periodical as it is of its
successor and competitor the magazine, but the magazine’s interactive
character (interactive both in the sense that it invited readers to engage
with content as contributors and also in the sense that the import of
individual articles was derived from their interaction with others in the
same issue) means that its concerns are not easily reducible to particular
agendas. This is especially true in the case of the conservative domes-
tic ideology and sentimental marital ideal with which the magazine has
become erroneously associated.
124 J. Batchelor
As Ruth Perry has argued, literary texts do not simply hold up a mir-
ror to reality. Magazines, like novels, are cultural symptoms, but they also
perform valuable cultural work: they reflect, refract and reconstitute real-
ity. In its variously humorous or searing cynicism of marriage the maga-
zine deserves much more scholarly attention as a forum (albeit a messy
and problematic one) in which popular perceptions of marriage were
articulated and debated. Surely few genres can do more to highlight
what Christopher Flint has referred to as the ‘indeterminate exchange
between official familial discourse and cultural practice’ more dynamically
than the late eighteenth-century magazine.42 Within its pages marriage
was presented as a goal for many, but a Pandora’s Box of problems for
everyone who entered into it. In their reflections on the difficult negotia-
tions marriage asked of women, magazine contributors responded with
pragmatism and imagination, desperation and wit. They could be roman-
tic, as Patrick Brontë declared, but they were rarely foolish.
Notes
1. [M.], ‘Thoughts on Marriage’, The Lady’s Monthly Museum, or Polite
Repository of Amusement and Instruction, 1 (October 1798): 298. Edward
W. R. Pitcher in The Lady’s Monthly Museum First Series: 1798–1806: An
Annotated Index of Signatures and Ascriptions (Lewiston: The Edwin
Mellen Press, 2000) tentatively attributes this essay to one Ann Masters.
The evidence for this attribution is self-confessedly circumstantial (150).
2. Charlotte Brontë to Hartley Coleridge, 10 Dec 1840, in The Selected
Letters of Charlotte Brontë: Vol. I, 1829–1847, ed. Margaret Smith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 240.
3. [M.], ‘Thoughts on Marriage’: 298.
4. On marriage and the novel, see Chris Roulston’s Narrating Marriage in
Eighteenth-Century England and France (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
5. Christopher Flint’s Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in
Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) is
primarily about marriage, family and the novel, but is also interested in
genres with which the novel was ‘in dialogue’ including ‘sermons, con-
duct books, legal discourse, medical tracts, philosophical treatises, and
demographic and economic works’ (24). Ruth Perry’s indispensible
Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and
Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) is
also concerned with fiction, particularly the novel’s ‘psychological’ work-
ing out of the socioeconomic shifts the period witnessed. Roulston’s
Narrating Marriage also takes the novel (English and French) as its focal
point, but situates it in relation to advice literature.
6. See, for example, Tanya Evans, ‘Unfortunate Objects’: Lone Mothers in

Eighteenth-Century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); and Amanda
Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
7. Wendy Moore, Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met his
Match (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009).
8. Shawn Lisa Maurer, ‘The Periodical’, in The History of British Women’s
Writing Vol. 4, 1690–1750, ed. Ros Ballaster (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
1992), 156–172; Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The
Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge,
1989), 186–190. For a lengthier discussions of Maurer’s and Shevelow’s
arguments see my ‘“Connections, which are of service … in a more
advanced age”: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary
Histories’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30: 2 (2011): 245–267
(246–249).
9. Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, 188.
10. Maurer, ‘The Periodical’, 166.
11. Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in
England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
8–11. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early
Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 4–7. Vickery, The
Gentleman’s Daughter, passim.
12. Roulston, Narrating Marriage, 55.
13. [Harriott’s M—], ‘On Celibacy’, The New Lady’s Magazine 3 (June
1788): 315–316. Responses (many hostile) were published for several
months after this date.
14. [Anon.], ‘On the State of Marriage in South-Britain’, The New Lady’s
Magazine 1 (July 1786): 293. This article had appeared in previous peri-
odicals from the 1740s including the Gentleman’s and London Magazine,
Universal Magazine and Scots Magazine.
15. [Anon.], ‘An Impartial and Circumstantial Detail of the Trial of the
Duchess of Kingston’, The Lady’s Magazine, 7 (April 1776): 171.
16. Anon., ‘Home News’, The New Lady’s Magazine 3 (April 1788): 219.
17. On criminal biography, see Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The
Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late-Seventeenth and
Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987); and Ian A. Bell, Literature and Crime in Augustan
England (London: Routledge, 1991). On the arguably more complex
case of crime in newspapers, see Peter King, ‘Newspaper Reporting and
Attitudes to Crime and Justice in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-
century London’, Continuity and Change 22: 1 (2007): 73–112 (77).
18. It should be noted, however, that anti-conduct book sentiments also
found space in the title, such as the publication of extracts from Mary
126 J. Batchelor
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in June and July

1792 (285–286, 355–359).
19. E. W. Pitcher has suggested that Matron pseudonym’s might conceal the
identity of the very male William Mugleston. ‘William Mugleston and
“The Matron”: Authorship of a Lady’s Magazine Essay Serial, 1774–1791’
ANQ 12: 1 (1999): 28–29.
20. [G. W.], ‘On Nuptial Happiness’, The New Lady’s Magazine 3 (June
1788): 306, 307.
21. [G. W.], ‘On Nuptial Happiness’: 306.
22. [Theodosia], ‘Advice to Married People’, The Lady’s Magazine 1 (April
1771): 393–394.
23. [Theodosia], ‘Advice’, 394–395.
24. [Anon.], ‘A Young Lady’s Advice to an Acquaintance, Lately Married’,
The New Lady’s Magazine 1 (February 1786): 44. An earlier reprinting of
this poem can be found in the London Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly
Intelligencer 21 (June 1752): 282–283.
25. [Anon.], ‘A Young Lady’s Advice’: 44.
26. [Cornelia L.—], ‘Letter to the Matron’, The Lady’s Magazine 21 (April
1790): 184.
27. [Cornelia L.—], ‘Letter’: 186.
28. [Mrs. Grey], ‘The Matron’, The Lady’s Magazine 21 (May 1790): 259.
29. Identifying and, where possible, attributing non-original and original con-
tent in The Lady’s Magazine was a major strand of the recent Leverhulme
Trust funded project, ‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding
the Emergence of a Genre’ on which I worked at the University of Kent
with Koenraad Claes and Jenny DiPlacidi (2014–2016). The project’s
annotated index can be found here: www.kent.ac.uk/english/ladys-mag-
azine/research-data.html (last accessed 6 December 2016).
30. [Anon], ‘The Lucky Chance; or, the History of Louisa and Maria’, The
New Lady’s Magazine 2 (February 1787): 71, 72.
31. N., ‘The Assault’, The Lady’s Magazine 19 (April 1798): 149.
32. [Arpasia], ‘The Retaliation’, The Lady’s Magazine 1 (May 1771): 470–471.
33. Perry, Novel Relations, 6–8.
34. Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 197–230.
35. For a recent account of the methodological problems entailed by working
with these ‘two paradigms of readers’, see Katie Halsey’s Jane Austen and
her Readers, 1786–1945 (London: Anthem Press, 2012), esp. 8–10.
36. See Jacqueline Pearson, ‘“Books, my greatest joy”: Constructing the Female
Reader in The Lady’s Magazine’, Women’s Writing 3: 1 (1996): 3–15; Edward
Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England,
1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 117–158.
37. [R. Cole], ‘The Happy Marriage. An Ode’, The New Lady’s Magazine 2
(Jan 1787): 48.
38. Florio, ‘The Rape of the Marriage Contract’, The New Lady’s Magazine 2
(Jan 1787): 30, 29.
39. This is not to suggest that the story presents the relationship between the
women as erotic. Nonetheless, the possibility that two women might live
together in a pseudo-marital (although not explicitly sexual) relation-
ship was entertained by the magazine at various points such as the much
reprinted true story, ‘Remarkable Connection of two Women’ which
appeared in The New Lady’s Magazine in June 1788: 300–301.
40. [Anon.], ‘Original on the Coroner’s Jury’, The New Lady’s Magazine 2
(Jan 1787): 40. The article had previously been published, for example,
in The London Magazine for May 1773.
41.
The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental
Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 42. Alternative
theorisations of the magazine’s community (as debating house and coterie,
for example) are examined in my ‘“Connections, which are of service”’.
42. Flint, Family Fictions, 25. Periodical literature is not analysed in Flint’s
study.
The Making and Breaking of Wedlock:
Visualising Jane, Duchess of Gordon
After Marriage
Heather Carroll
In May 1785, Lady Louisa Stuart, Lord Bute’s youngest daughter,

spent an evening in the company of Jane, Duchess of Gordon at a ball in
London. The following day the twenty-seven-year-old spinster wrote to
her friend, Lady Carlow describing the pleasures of the evening and not-
ing that the Scottish duchess,
looks as fierce as a dragon, and contents herself with spending her breath
upon politics, and ringing a daily peal in the ears of her poor husband,
with whom […] she squabbles more than ever.1
Lady Louisa’s brief but cutting observation presents a candid glimpse

of how the 4th Duchess of Gordon (c. 1748–1812) was seen by one
of her contemporaries. However, her rank and personality also made
her highly visible to the public. In the Bombay Courier detailed Jane’s
trespassing of gender boundaries, reporting that ‘the Dutchess [sic] of
H. Carroll (*) 
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
e-mail: Carroll.heather@gmail.com

130 H. Carroll
Gordon was on a late occasion, reluctantly obliged to quit the Gallery

of the House of Commons’.2 Her public involvement in politics as a
Tory political hostess made her a worthy topic of gossip, and her reputed
forceful nature would permeate the perception of her married life.
Beyond the gossip written in personal correspondence and in columns
of newspapers, the public perception of an elite couple’s married life could
be manifested in its representation in painted portraiture. As Shearer
West has argued in her seminal article, ‘The Public Nature of Private
Life’ (1995), portraiture, specifically in the marital and familial genre,
was a meticulously constructed entity, crafted to communicate particular
socioeconomic messages to viewers regarding the sitters’ legacies and val-
ues.3 Visual depictions of marriage and family offer a complex selection
of evidence which requires careful navigation. While Lawrence Stone first
postulated the use of visual sources to document what he argued was a
revolutionary shift in the way families operated, more recently art histo-
rians including West, Kate Retford, and Marcia Pointon have questioned
the portrait within the terms of image creation as a method of mediating
social values.4 West asserts that we should view painted depictions of fam-
ily life as ‘fictions generated by the realities of economic life and fanta-
sies of the family’s place within a socially unequal and unbalanced world’.5
Familial portraiture operates less as a straightforward means of document-
ing a family, and more as a declaration of the patriarch’s perception of his
domestic image and its longevity.6 Much like the expected roles in a mar-
riage itself, a wife’s position within the familial image was simultaneously
controlled by and catered to the social values of the time.
To date, studies of family imagery in the British Isles have been lim-
ited both geographically and materially. These investigations have been
based largely on English rather than British case studies and neglect
other modes of representation outside of the formal medium of painted
portraiture in oil. Across Britain, the printed image flourished in the
latter half of the eighteenth century, disseminating not only copies of
painted portraiture, but also fostering the genre of the satirical print. As
Cindy McCreery has asserted in her influential book The Satirical Gaze
(2004), satirical prints offer a critical alternative to the narratives pre-
sented in the mainstream modes of representation like portraiture.7
This chapter proposes to further the study of marital images by mar-
rying an analysis of both portraits and satirical prints related to marriage
and family, thereby offering a more holistic view of how the elite family
in eighteenth-century Britain was constructed, operated, and perceived.
Only through a balanced understanding of both media, which negotiates
THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF WEDLOCK: VISUALISING … 131
the dialogues and nuances connecting portraiture and prints, can one
achieve a closer understanding of the complexities of image-making asso-
ciated with the brokering and termination of elite eighteenth-century
marital unions: the making and breaking of marriage. Both a sitter in
familial portraiture and a target of satirical prints in the late eighteenth
century, Jane, Duchess of Gordon remains a rather understudied figure,
unlike her political ‘rival’, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Despite
being a celebrated member of society who featured prominently in news-
papers and memoirs in her lifetime, recent scholarship has been preoc-
cupied with fashionable English Whigs, leaving the study of Tory and
Scottish women sorely neglected.8 However, Jane’s varied visual represen-
tations offer a rich case study of the marriage cycle. A chronological analy-
sis of her representations can provide a lens through which to engage with
Jane’s reputation and the perception of her marriage and her married life.
Pendant Perceptions
Jane has been described as ‘something of a problematic figure in
London society’, a legacy due in part to her unconventional back-
ground.9 Born around 1748 to Sir William Maxwell, 3rd Baronet of
Monreith (c. 1715–1771) and his wife Magdalene Blair, and raised in a
second-floor tenement in the Old Town of Edinburgh, Jane had a hum-
ble upbringing. As a child, she and her sisters were known to join the
local children in riding pigs down the High Street. It was due to another
reckless act of jumping between moving carts that Jane lost the fore-
finger on her right hand.10 Her parents separated when she was young,
leaving her mother to raise Jane and her sisters in Edinburgh while her
father had a separate household in rural Galloway, where her elder broth-
ers were brought up.11 The gendered severance of the Maxwell house-
hold meant that Jane was raised in a home with a female head. Although
this division of the nuclear family may appear non-traditional, moth-
ers were commonly responsible for their daughters’ upbringing, and
marital separation was not a wholly uncommon arrangement in eight-
eenth-century Scotland. Marriage laws differed considerably between
England and Scotland, with divorce in England only being deliverable
through an act of Parliament. Scottish couples seeking divorce could do
so through Commissary Courts or, alternatively, seek a legal separation.
In contrast to England where only men had legal rights to seek a divorce,
Scottish law saw adultery as equal grounds for divorce regardless of
gender, making divorces and separations more common and culturally
132 H. Carroll
Fig. 1 Angelica Kauffman, Jane Duchess of Gordon, c. 1772–1774, oil on can-

vas, 91.4 × 70.7 cm, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
acceptable.12 Jane’s single-parent upbringing did not prevent her from

receiving a well-rounded education in Edinburgh, nor did it hinder her
marriageability.13
Fig. 2 Angelica Kauffman, Alexander Duke of Gordon, c. 1772–1774, oil on

canvas, 91.4 × 70.4 cm, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
Jane met twenty-four-year-old Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon

(1743–1827) at a ball in April 1767 when she was eighteen. It was an
unlikely match; Alexander was one of the most powerful men in Scotland
134 H. Carroll
and by wedding the daughter of a minor baronet, he was marrying sig-

nificantly below his rank and doing so for neither political nor economic
reasons, implying that it was a love match. Before their wedding on 23
October 1767, her father, Sir William Maxwell, wrote to the bridegroom
of his hopes for the marriage:
I have Just Received the Honour of your Grace’s favour, and I Shall look
on It as I think It Deserves, with the highest Gratitude for Such ane [sic]
honour done me, and my Family. And It Shall be my constant Wish that
Jeanny may by a constant Attendence [sic] to her Duty[,] Act that Part
She ought In the Spire your Grace’s example and Advice, to Gain even
the Good Opinion of the most malitious [sic] of the Female world. […] I
wish your Grace and Jeany all the Blessings and Happiness this world can
Afford, and that I may soon be a Grandfather.14
Maxwell’s letter of thanks assures Alexander of Jane’s merit as a part-

ner. It is an artefact of the process that will be termed ‘domestic diplo-
macy’, in which highly-ritualised pursuits, courtships, and negotiations
generated a marriage with the end goal of producing children of good
breeding. Maxwell’s paternal hopes for his daughter on her advanta-
geous marriage was that she would be obedient to her husband; act in a
way that was appropriate for a wife, in a manner which would not incur
censure from society ladies; and perpetuate the family line. These three
familial ambitions would be visually manifested in portraits and prints
that would publicise the family image for the next four decades.
Five years after their wedding, the Gordons had three children, with
four more yet to arrive. Alexander marked this successful period in their
marriage by commissioning pendant portraits (c. 1772–1774, Figs. 1 and
2) from Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), an artist he patronised during
his Grand Tour in the previous decade.15 Pendants were a fashionable
form of marital portraiture among the eighteenth-century elite that con-
sisted of two individual portraits that were intended to be hung side by
side.16 Jane is represented in an allegorical guise as Diana, the virgin god-
dess of the hunt. She cradles a bow and quiver in her right arm and her
gaze is fixed on her husband’s portrait, which would have been hung to
the right of hers. Alexander is represented in the popular Van Dyck dress
as a means to negotiate his masculine depiction with the fanciful theme.17
The sitters’ allegorical guises also actively mask the separate and typically
gendered achievements commonly on display in pendant portraits. Whilst
the husband’s academic or career-based prowess was presented in one

panel, the wife’s accomplishments as a mother or purveyor of femininity
were exhibited in the other.18 Thus, two contrary components—male and
female—are shown to be complementary and accordingly whole, through
their connection as husband and wife. Kauffman’s ambiguous setting
allows the emphasis to be concentrated on the sitters and their garb. This
brings into question why Jane is represented as Diana in an intrinsically
marital mode of representation. No known written agency exists allow-
ing us to pinpoint whether this was a decision of the artist, who favoured
classical dress for her female sitters, or the patrons, who were possibly
experimenting with ulterior guises.19 There is also no record of the exact
placement of the portraits after they were finished.
Now housed in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland,
the pendants were originally hung at the family seat, Gordon Castle.20
Despite portraiture’s propensity to be innately public, the small scale of
these half-lengths prompts questions of just how public these pendants
were.21 Large, full-scale familial portraits were usually in a prominent
place of display, disseminating a message of unity and lineage to visitors
and guests. The pendants, which measure only 91.4 × 70.4 cm each may
have been hung in a public room or equally, in a more exclusive setting
accessible primarily to the sitters. The unknown placement of the por-
traits obscures their function as vehicles either to broadcast the couple’s
marital love to a wider audience or stimulate their private contemplation.
However, regardless of their actual placement and visibility in the house,
the underlying message of the portraits was to convey the couple’s con-
tinued union and familial alliance.
The presence of the portrait-object, or miniature, is a device which
reoccurs throughout images of the Gordon’s marriage.22 Kauffman rep-
resents Alexander as having just been disturbed from a solitary reflection;
he looks up from a miniature with Jane’s image held in his left hand.23
As Pointon argues, men owned and cherished miniatures but, unlike
women, could not display them on their clothing without risking the loss
of their masculinity.24 Like her husband’s, Jane’s portrait references her
absent spouse through a cameo, affixed on a gilded belt at her breast, in
fitting with her classical guise and her gender. The wearing of portrait-
objects by women was a public display of loyalty, a sentiment further sub-
stantiated through the representation of Jane contentedly looking toward
her husband in the adjacent portrait.25 Kauffman’s portraits propagate
a projection of marital affection and coincide at a point when Jane was
136 H. Carroll
Fig. 3 Matthew
Darly, The Breeches in
the Fiera Maschereta,
1775, etching, M.
Darly, 17.4 × 12.6 cm.
Courtesy of the Lewis
Walpole Library, Yale
University
invested in her role as wife and mother. The family’s archive contains a
receipt from 1773 addressed to her from a bookseller in Edinburgh
which lists Hugh Smith’s Principles of Conjugal Happiness and Letters
to Married Women (1767) amongst the duchess’ purchases.26 As schol-
ars such as Amanda Vickery and Joanne Bailey have demonstrated, there
were clear expectations for the roles of the husband and wife in the mar-
riage union. Men were responsible for the family’s domestic economy
and women were responsible for household management. A fundamental
expectation of their conjugal duties was that women demonstrate a good
‘temper’ and ‘disposition’, and yield to the patriarchal requirements.27
Within this domestic setting the pendant portraits disseminated the myth
of a successful married life, propagating the image of a perfect union.
Within a few years of the completion of the pendant portraits, their
message of gendered normativity in the marriage union was challenged
by a different mode of visual representation. Matthew Darly’s 1775 The
Breeches in the Fiera Maschereta (Fig. 3) depicts Jane as a reverse of the
Fig. 4 Matthew
Darly, The Petticoat at
the Fieri Maschareta,
1775, etching, M.
Darly, 17.5 × 12.5 cm.
Courtesy of the Lewis
Walpole Library, Yale
University
adoring wife that Kauffman represented, portraying her as a domineer-

ing spouse. She is shown wearing the (impressively large) breeches in the
relationship, which stiffly stand at attention. Her distinctive profile peeks
out of the open fall, smiling. The plumed ducal coronet at the waist-
line of the trousers crowns the head of the exposed face and confirms
that this exaggeratedly breeched individual is the Duchess of Gordon.
Despite their propensity to be overstated accounts, satirical prints are
increasingly being sought out by art historians due to their valuable abil-
ity to provide an alternative perspective to conventional sources.28 They
also simultaneously react to and promote a public response due to their
high visibility. While upper- and middle-class people were the main con-
sumers of prints, they were also available to all classes of browsers on
urban streets due to their display in print shop windows.29
Darly’s satirical prints invert the pendant portraits. Like Kauffman’s
portraits, The Breeches in the Fiera Maschereta is one half of a pair. Its
companion print, The Petticoat at the Fieri Maschareta (Fig. 4), reveals
the Duke of Gordon’s unhappy profile peering out from an oversized
petticoat. While the pendant portraits follow the rhetoric of portraying a
138 H. Carroll
constructed image of the marriage, these pendant prints reveal the public
perception of their marriage, in which Alexander’s gender role has been
usurped due to Jane’s boisterous and overbearing nature. This conten-
tious attribute of her character was acknowledged by Nathaniel Wraxall
(1751–1831) when he later described Jane in his memoirs as overstepping
gender boundaries in her socially acceptable role as a political hostess:
The Scottish duchess reserved all the energies of her character for minis-
terial purposes. Desirous of participating in the blessings which the treasury
alone can dispense, and of enrolling the name of Gordon, with those of
Pitt and of Dundas; if not in the rolls of fame, at least in the substantial list
of court favour and benefaction; the administration did not possess a more
active or determined partizan.30
Wraxall’s excerpt portrays Jane as doing all in her power to assume the
role of an elected government official, a position which was prohibited
to her on the basis of her sex. Similarly, in titling the print, The Breeches
in the Fiera Maschereta, which roughly translates to ‘proud masquerade’,
Darly satirised Jane’s seemingly shameless adoption of masculine gender
roles, while simultaneously making a libellous statement as to how her
visible personality translated into her private marriage. Like the major-
ity of British aristocrats, the Gordons split their living arrangements
between their seat in Aberdeenshire and their home in London during
the season. Jane initially indicated her difficulty in navigating London
society, complaining to her brother, William Maxwell in 1771 that, ‘the
Men have not the same ideas they have in Scotland a Woman of fashion
is no more respected then [sic] a Chambermaid if she has any Levity’,
revealing her consternation over the austere societal codes for elite
women in the metropolis.31
Jane’s difficulty in adhering to social codes opened a public discus-
sion, in the form of a satirical rendering, which questioned the couple’s
private relationship and thus the formal painted representations which
displayed a message of marital harmony. Representing an inversion on
multiple levels, the Darly prints may be seen as a rebuttal of Kauffman’s
display of successful married life. Jane is represented as transgressing
the constructed gender boundaries delineated in pendant portraiture
through her adoption of the male role. Kauffman’s display of wifely loy-
alty through a portrait-object has been subverted by Darly who replaces
it with an object inscribed with masculinity: her husband’s breeches.32
Furthermore, prints, being a less expensive, less exclusive, and more

mobile form of visual communication, allowed Darly’s visualisation of
the marriage to reach a wider audience and further question the truth
behind the façade.
‘Domestic Duties’ and Dynasty

More than ten years and seven children later, a family portrait was
commissioned to be hung in Gordon Castle. Set in the style of the
conversation piece which celebrates lineage through its use as an heir-
loom documenting family continuity and the articulation of social and
hereditary property, W.A. Smith, a relatively unknown artist whose work
is occasionally found in country houses in northern Britain, painted
Alexander 4th Duke of Gordon with his Family (Fig. 5) between 1786 and
1787.33 His conversation piece is set in the grounds of Gordon Castle
and depicts all nine members of the immediate family with Jane seated in
the middle of the group. From left to right are Charlotte (1768–1842);
Fig. 5 W.A. Smith, Alexander 4th Duke of Gordon with his Family, c. 1787,
oil on panel, 88 × 136 cm. By permission of the Trustees of the Goodwood
Collection
140 H. Carroll
George, Marquis of Huntly, later 5th Duke of Gordon (1770–1836);

Georgina (sitting, 1781–1853); the duchess with baby Alexander
(1785–1808); Madelina (c. 1772–1847); Louisa (sitting with an open
book, 1776–1850); Susan (1774–1828); and finally, on the far right,
the duke. Each family member’s hair hangs loose below their shoulders,
and the women are all dressed in fashionable white muslin gowns. Like
David Allan’s portraits of the Scottish gentry that were popular in this
period, the family’s Scottish heritage is referenced through the Order of
the Thistle star displayed on the duke’s coat and George’s full highland
dress.34 The elder daughters each hold a prop to signify the refined edu-
cation that their parents have furnished upon them, with Charlotte hold-
ing a drawing portfolio, and Madelina and Louisa books. Significantly,
Smith was briefly employed as a drawing tutor to the Gordon daughters,
therefore by including these accessories the artist references his own par-
ticipation in the comprehensive education.35 Pryse Lockhart Gordon, a
memoirist and guest of Jane’s in the late 1790s, observed that the family
portrait reflected the value she placed on education:
While she has such weight in the fashionable world, she was strictly atten-
tive to domestic duties. On the education of her daughters, five in number,
she bestowed great pains, directed by the soundest judgement; taking a
comprehensive view of the relation in society in which they stood and were
destined to stand; her object was to make them amiable, accomplished,
and worthy, a task not difficult, as they were beautiful, lovely, and intel-
ligent, but which, without skill and wisdom, even with these natural advan-
tages, might not have been performed.36
Gordon’s account asserts Jane’s successful negotiation of her social and

celebrity status with her domestic responsibilities. Smith’s portrait func-
tioned much in the same way: visually detailing the Gordons’ adherence
to familial expectations and veiling any private realities.
The conventional conversation piece communicates a message of
family unity, with all members depicted in their respective roles. The
Gordon offspring are uniformly moulded to uphold an image of good
breeding. Thus, aside from the education references, George’s highland
dress alludes to his Scottish identity and thus his upholding of genea-
logical heritage. The daughters are positioned centrally, as if to remind
viewers of their marriageability. Alexander takes his patriarchal place in
the composition, positioned in front of his family estate. He asserts what
Viccy Coltman terms his ‘masculine territory’ through his extended arm
which, though resting on a branch, guides the viewer’s eyes to his prog-
eny, a nod to his genealogy, his estate, and his virility.37 Jane’s subor-
dination to her husband is articulated through her seated position. She
is surrounded by her children; her proximity to her sons, the Gordon
heirs, asserts her critical role in the successful endurance of the family
line. Unlike her mother, who was separated from her sons, Jane empha-
sises her connection with them.
Smith’s portrait asserts the adherence of the Gordon family to societal
codes of gender roles and the preservation of genealogy. It is an ideal-
ised image of the family created in the same timeframe as the opposing
accounts related by Lady Louisa Stuart and Wraxall. Jane’s representa-
tion in the Smith portrait negotiates her dual role as wife and mother,
projecting her as successfully fulfilling her gender role to secure the
family dynasty. Alexander 4th Duke of Gordon with his Family sets out
to evince the Gordons as an operational patriarchal family, one which
demonstrates the social, moral, and national importance of the family
and thus the success of their union.38 However, within a few years of
the painting’s completion, while Jane was making marriage unions for
her daughters, her own unravelled. The duke and duchess separated early
into the early 1790s and by the end of the decade were virtually stran-
gers to one another.39 An affair between Alexander and the housekeeper
produced five children between 1791 and 1810, all of whom were
raised in Gordon Castle.40 Despite the existence of an illegitimate child
living in Gordon Castle when Jane entered into the marriage in 1767,
Alexander’s resolute affair with a high-ranking domestic servant living in
their home ostensibly caused their separation.
Marriage Broker or Breaker?

Much like the fictional Mrs Bennet from Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice (written in 1797, published in 1813) Jane had five ill-dowered
daughters whose marriageability became her preoccupation.41 Unlike
Mrs. Bennet, however, Jane was not matchmaking for a landed gen-
try family, and had strong aspirations for her daughters all to marry in
the highest ranks of society much like she, a daughter of a minor bar-
onet, had done. The first of the Gordon daughters to be married was
the second-eldest, Madelina, whose nuptials received little interest in
print media when she married her cousin, Sir Robert Sinclair, in 1789.
However, public attention shifted to focus on the eldest of the Gordons’
142 H. Carroll
children, Charlotte, once she began accompanying her mother’s rou-

tine visits during the London season to Henry Dundas’ (1742–1811)
Wimbledon home, with the objective of gaining the attention of his
nightly guest, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806).
As noted above, Sir William Maxwell’s congratulatory letter to the
Duke of Gordon introduced the concept of ‘domestic diplomacy’ which,
as will be seen here, was often a highly feminised and also highly politi-
cised process. Mothers were active participants in the prospects, nego-
tiations, and settlements of the marriage market. Aside from attractive
character and mutual affection in spouses, a desirable union advanced
familial status and property or, at the very least, kept one’s family on an
equal footing with the newly-joined relations.42 This maternal partici-
pation is evidenced in representations of marriage in the period’s litera-
ture such as in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), when protagonist Anne
Elliot is discouraged from marrying the economically-inferior Captain
Wentworth by her godmother, Lady Russell, who exerted maternal
authority and influence over Anne in place of her late mother. While it
was customary for mothers to influence their daughters’ decisions or to
veto a bad match, public attention became fixed on Jane due to the con-
troversies surrounding her daughters’ potential partners, as well as her
seemingly shameless and tactical domestic diplomacy.
Despite Jane’s friendship with Pitt, she was unable to encourage
a marriage between him and her eldest daughter, forcing Charlotte
to find a more receptive suitor. Shortly afterward, Charlotte married
Colonel Charles Lennox (1764–1819), heir of the Duke of Richmond,
on 9 September 1789. Two weeks later an anonymously authored print,
Scotch Wedding (Fig. 6) satirised the circumstances surrounding the
union.43 The print displays a bedroom in which a regimented Lennox,
with a duelling pistol protruding from each pocket, and his blushing
bride hold hands while they jump over a broom—a symbol of a hasty
marriage. Lennox had recently garnered public attention for nearly
killing the king’s second-eldest son, the Duke of York in a duel. Soon
after, he challenged the author of a slanderous letter regarding the affair
to another duel; the insult curiously being brought to his attention by
his bemused fiancée.44 Normally such a reckless, hypermasculine suitor
would have sent his future mother-in-law into despair, but in this satirical
representation Jane is shown encouraging the hasty marriage. She hap-
pily observes the couple while playing the bagpipes, almost as if, like the
Pied Piper of Hamelin, she is luring them into the marital bed. A bottle
Fig. 6 Scotch Wedding, 23 September 1789, hand-coloured etching, W

Holland, 25 × 37 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
labelled ‘Scotch Pint’ and a glass sit within reach, alluding to her nation-
ality, drinking habits, and her inclination to remain stationary while her
daughter and son-in-law consummate the marriage.
Despite the satirical and xenophobic nature of the print, its under-
lining narrative is accurate. The couple were married in Jane’s dress-
ing room and the ceremony was only witnessed by her and two serving
women; the duke was not even in residence at the time. Jane was reputed
to have a strong role in the swiftness of the wedding, which allegedly
took place to avoid the usual fanfare of wedding festivities.45 Charlotte is
represented as a model of youthful feminine beauty; she is festooned in
ruffles, plumes, and curled tresses. She looks demurely at her husband as
she motions toward the marital bed, above which a ducal seal is inscribed
on the headboard. Lennox enthusiastically leaps over the broom toward
the bed while Charlotte gracefully skips over it, further implying the
licentious urges that may have hurried the marriage. Published approxi-
mately two years after Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon, with his Family was
painted, this print sees Jane in a slightly incestuous role, again placed in
144 H. Carroll
the breeches (this time, metaphorically), aggressively confirming mari-

tal consummation. Wraxall recalled that, ‘for [her daughters’] elevation
no sacrifices appeared to her to be too great, no exertion too labori-
ous, no renunciation too severe’.46 With each daughter’s marriage the
duchess’s domestic diplomacy became increasingly visible to consumers
of print media. As we shall see, Jane’s aggressive matchmaking earned
her attention and harsh criticism for her tenacity on behalf of her daugh-
ters. Social custom frowned upon elite women actively pushing their
daughters on gentlemen, and the visual backlash that erupted as a result
of Jane’s efforts in domestic diplomacy display a woman progressively
growing larger and more hideous with each depiction. She became char-
acterised as an ambitious mother consumed with hunting high-ranking
husbands for her daughters.
The inflammatory accusations of Jane’s aggressive dynastic matchmak-
ing established in Scotch Wedding trickled through print media. By the
time Jane’s third daughter Susan was out in society in 1793, London
newspapers were already anticipating a further disregard of modesty
from the Duchess of Gordon and sarcastic remarks on her persistent
tactics to encourage her daughters’ marriages began appearing. On 15
May 1793 the pro-Tory, True Briton rose to the defence of Jane against
a now-lost insult, ‘The feelings of the Dutchess of Gordon are those of
a tender Mother, and as such are certainly highly honourable to her. We
are sorry that such is the vice of the Times as to sport unnecessarily with
those feelings’.47 Two months later the Sun (also a Tory paper) reported
that Jane’s ‘maternal feelings do her the highest honour’.48 When Susan
eventually became engaged to the Duke of Manchester in October of
1793, newspapers kept a close eye on the couple’s movements, report-
ing when the duke left London allegedly to marry Susan and when the
marriage had been confirmed. It was even reported in the World that he
received £5000 for Susan’s dowry.49 When the fourth Gordon daugh-
ter Louisa was married on 17 April 1797 to Charles, Viscount Brome,
the True Briton blithely reported that, ‘the Marriage of Lady Brome
has swept the Dutchess [sic] of Gordon’s house clean of Daughters’.50
It reported two days later that, ‘the Duchess of Gordon’s Box at the
Opera, on Tuesday evening, resembled a Drawing-room, so many came
to wish her Grace joy of the recent happy event in the family’ and sub-
sequently, ‘since the Dutchess [sic] of Gordon’s success as a Hymeneal
Negotiatrix, there has been an eager struggle among the single-sisterhood
of the fashionable world to join with her Grace in the Subscription for
an Opera-Box next season’.51 As this series of articles relates, the pri-

vate business of the Gordons continued to leak into the public realm.
However, the gossip columns failed to report, or possibly, take an inter-
est in the concurrent failings of Jane’s marriage. By this time she was
receiving a separation allowance from the Duke and with it purchased
a farmhouse in Kinrara where she lived with her youngest daughter
Georgina outside of the London season.52 Georgina’s situation now mir-
rored her mother’s youth: living under a maternal roof while actively
seeking a domestic partner.
In seeking a husband for Georgina, Jane would expose herself and
her daughter to the most vicious of visual criticism yet. The domestic
diplomacy involving Georgina became a highly political and highly con-
tentious ordeal. Unlike her sisters’ short courtships, it would take over
five years for Georgina to find a husband, despite her reputed beauty and
good nature, raising questions of how much of Jane’s infamous match-
making curtailed Georgina’s marriage prospects. Indeed, Francis, the 5th
Duke of Bedford (1765–1802) was a somewhat surprising choice as a
potential match for Georgina in 1797.53 A supporter of the Whig party,
he also had been courting the daughter of Jane’s rival political hostess,
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806).54 No longer did a
potential union with a Gordon daughter appear to be a private matter;
rather, it became a political one. The Duchess of Devonshire believed
that Bedford’s attention to Georgina was retribution for not repaying a
gambling debt owed to him, and feared he would switch allegiance to
the Tory party. The Whigs, in turn, grew concerned over losing a power-
ful ally, putting more pressure on both mother and daughter.55
The dramatic clash of titans battling over a mate for their respected
daughters to preserve their genealogical and political dynasties drew
attention in print media. Once again, Jane’s aggressive domestic diplo-
macy was emphasised. On 19 April 1797, The Gordon-Knot,-or-the
Bonny-Duchess hunting the Bedfordshire Bull (Fig. 7) by James Gillray
(1757–1815) appeared in Hannah Humphrey’s popular print shop
in London. The print is set in the Scottish Highlands and centres on
Jane and Georgina. In her outstretched hands Jane holds a blue ribbon
labelled ‘MATRIMONY’ and moves toward a brown bull, represent-
ing Bedford, which flees from her lasso. Jane’s large and ruddy-faced
physique is emphasised further through her age-inappropriate gown
and feathers. Satirists such as Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson com-
monly employed an emphasis on their female subject’s weight as a
146 H. Carroll
Fig. 7 James Gillray, The Gordon-Knot,-or-the Bonny-Duchess hunting the

Bedfordshire Bull, 19 April 1797, hand-coloured etching, Hannah Humphrey,
26 × 36.4 cm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
means to classify them as unnatural and monstrous. In his medical trea-

tise, Discourse Concerning the Causes and Effects of Corpulency (1727)
Thomas Short even described a female case study as ‘a Monster in nature
for Bulk’.56 Georgina, however, is represented behind Jane, a skinny
foil to her colossal mother, hunched over with her claw-like hands rapa-
ciously positioned toward the bull. The three elder Gordon daughters
(excluding Madelina) who had already been successfully married, are rep-
resented in the background dancing in a circle.57
Just as Smith identified the daughters’ education through props in
Alexander 4th Duke of Gordon with his Family, here each daughter’s aus-
picious marriage is identified through props relating to their husbands.
Charlotte dances on the left, as indicated by the spaniel which is attached
to her by a ribbon labelled ‘K. CHARLES BREED’ to indicate her hus-
band, Charles Lennox, while on the right a broom is strung in the tar-
tan sash around Louisa’s waist to place her as Lady Brome. The central
figure of these three Macbethian witches is Susan, the back of whose

dress is open to reveal breeches which read ‘MANCHESTER VELVET’
across her backside, suggesting that like her mother in The Breeches in the
Fiera Maschereta, Susan ‘wears the breeches’ in her marriage.58 The pres-
ence of the three sisters is a reminder of the successes of Jane’s fruitful
history of domestic diplomacy. To further lampoon the duchess and her
young daughter, Gillray includes speech bubbles filled with Aberdonian
vernacular above the two women’s heads.59 Jane yells to halt the flee-
ing bull whilst Georgina greedily urges, ‘Run, Mither! – run! run! O
how I lang to lead the sweet bonny Creature in a string!’. Georgina’s
speech makes allusions to baby leading strings, implying that Georgina
will, like a puppet-master, control her husband just as her mother was
publically perceived to have done with her husband. Significantly, it is
Jane who Gillray represents as holding the metaphorical leading strings
that Bedford is attempting to escape from and which Georgina yearns to
acquire from her mother.
In an unfortunate twist, the ‘Bedford Bull’ did escape the ‘Gordon-
Knot’ although through no fault of the duchess or her daughter. Nearly
five years after Gillray’s print was released, marking the commencement
of the courtship, Bedford suffered a strangulated hernia during a game of
tennis and died. Sources differ as to whether Georgina and Bedford were
engaged at this time or not, but it appeared that nevertheless the marriage
was anticipated at the time of Bedford’s sudden death.60 Two months
after Bedford’s death, a print by Charles Williams (d. 1830) mocked Jane
and Georgina’s apparent grief over his loss. Its title references Gillray’s
print, suggesting the familiarity print consumers would have had with The
Gordon-Knot and continuation of the matrimonial saga. The Gord-ian
Knot still Untied or The Disapointed Dido still in Despair (Fig. 8) depicts
Jane and Georgina at Bedford’s funeral. They stand in black mourning
dress on either side of the duke’s ornate red and gold coffin, on which a
seal with the words, ‘che sara sara’ (What will be, will be) are inscribed.
Georgina disrobes herself of any feminine accoutrements; she throws
off her wig and jewellery. Once again, a miniature features as part of the
narrative; in her grief, Georgina divests herself of a bracelet miniature of
Bedford. She laments her failed spousal attempts, never having the oppor-
tunity to ‘feel the genial warmth of mine and Mothers Love [sic]’. Jane,
even more obese than Gillray had portrayed her, fills the composition with
her indelicate presence. She assures her daughter that Bedford’s death will
not deter their search for a husband, ‘I’ll take You down to the Abbey
148 H. Carroll
Fig. 8 Charles Williams, The Gord-ian Knot still untied or the Disapointed Dido
still in Despair, 9 May 1802, hand-coloured etching, SW Fores, 26.9 × 33.3 cm,
British Museum, London
[Woburn Abbey, the Duke of Bedford’s seat] and try again’, implying that
in her eyes, marriage is merely a contractual arrangement. While there is
no doubting the artist’s interpretation on how Georgina viewed her beau,
the print poses the question of whether the young woman is seeking a
beloved husband or a lucrative economic arrangement. In doing so, the
print accuses Jane’s young unmarried daughter of inheriting her mother’s
purported personality flaws.
Following the death of the Duke of Bedford in 1802, Jane and
Georgina went to Paris, where they were entertained by Napoleon
Bonaparte (1769–1821). The duchess promptly began to pursue a mar-
ital union between Empress Josephine’s son, Eugène Beauharnais, and
Georgina. Bonaparte, however, would not allow the marriage. He, like
Jane, was an astute administrator of domestic diplomacy and aimed for
a more advantageous political union for his stepson.61 Regardless, Jane
had managed to establish herself in the new French court and returned
Fig. 9 Charles Williams, A Racket at a Rout or, Billingsgate Removed to the

West, 9 June 1803, hand-coloured etching, SW Fores, 23.6 × 33.7 cm, British
Museum, London
to England with a portrait of Bonaparte—a gift from the emperor. The

exchange of the intimate gift with Britain’s former enemy offended the
Prince of Wales (later, George IV, 1762–1830), resulting in a quarrel
between the prince and the duchess. Jane defended herself by highlight-
ing the popularity of Bonaparte portraits in the British print market,
stating that ‘it was not worse to have his picture than his print which
all London bought’ and declared that she and Georgina would not be
attending the upcoming King’s Birthday. When the two ladies did
appear at the Birthday they were ostracised by the other guests, inspiring
another satirical print by Williams, published five days later.62
A Racket at a Rout or Billingsgate Removed to the West (Fig. 9) ima-
gines the contested portrait as a miniature in the prominent place that
her husband’s cameo featured in Kauffman’s portrait (Fig. 1) thirty years
earlier, thus ascribing her public loyalty to Bonaparte. Jane’s representa-
tion has evolved into a monstrosity: nearly devoid of all feminine features
and brandishing a large bottle of spirits, she engages in a verbal argument
with the Prince of Wales. At the same time, this print reveals a change in
150 H. Carroll
the depiction of Georgina, who is now rendered more sympathetically.

With her arm looped to her mother’s, she holds her head in shame mut-
tering, ‘Oh dear I de-Clare I am so frighten’d I wish I could get away’.
Unlike The Gord-ian Knot, where Georgina is rendered as rivalling her
mother in greed and masculine attributes, she is now depicted tethered
to Jane’s arm, a prisoner to her mother’s will and a pawn in her plans for
marriage brokering. In the background, two party attendees observe the
scene in shock while two others walk away whilst saying, ‘nothing New
my Lady often taken so’. Rather than benefactor, Georgina is now a vic-
tim of her mother’s domestic diplomacy, which has caused her the loss,
perhaps forever, of a respectable husband. In contrast to previous satirical
depictions of Jane, an audience has been added to the composition to
emphasise further the shame of her actions in the public realm.
As defamatory as Williams’s print was, within a month of its publi-
cation, Georgina had married the Duke of Bedford’s brother and
heir, John, who had fallen in love with her after their first meeting.63
Effectively, the dialogue in The Gord-ian Knot still Untied (Fig. 8) was
prophetic; the second attempt at ‘Woburn’ proved to be fruitful. To ven-
erate the last of the daughters finally and successfully being married, the
duchess threw an ostentatious ball in a self-congratulatory display of tri-
umph in the face of social criticisms.64 Jane’s resolve had succeeded in
cultivating the family line and its best interest despite the ultimate failure
of her own marriage.
Throughout her life Jane’s public image had been shaped by others
but in death she sought to control her lasting image. After being absent
from their marriage for the previous twenty years Alexander returned
to his husbandly duties to oversee that Jane’s final wishes were fulfilled
after her death in 1812. Her grave, located at her beloved Kinrara Estate,
allowed Jane to memorialise herself in her own words. It notes her par-
entage and the date of her own marriage then lists her seven children,
whom they married, their titles, and their issue, thus commemorat-
ing her domestic diplomacy as her worldly achievement. The memorial
concludes, ‘This monument was erected by Alexander Duke of Gordon
and the above inscription placed on it at the particular request of the
Duchess his wife’.65 As this chapter has detailed, what may appear attrac-
tive in inscription could still have cracks in the foundation. Like her
own marriage, those of her children also faltered. By 1808 Lennox,
now the 4th Duke of Richmond, insisted that his mistress eat with the
family at dinner, primarily to provoke his jealous wife.66 Susan’s mar-

riage fell apart before the eyes of the public after she was discovered hav-
ing an affair with her footman.67 Consequentially, her eldest daughter,
Lady Jane Montagu, moved out of her father’s home and in with her
grandmother, Jane, marking her as the third generation of daughters to
be raised under a matriarchal roof.68 Georgina too was unfaithful after
having met the painter Edwin Landseer, who had been commissioned
with a family portrait of Georgina, her son, and her brother, George,
5th Duke of Gordon, who is positioned in what would normally be the
traditional placement of her husband.69 The painting, Deer Stalking in
the Highlands (1824–1828, National Galleries Scotland) represents the
Duke of Gordon, Duchess of Bedford and her young son, all in highland
dress to express both their Scottish identity and their Gordon genealogy.
For our purposes, her husband’s noticeable absence signifies the cyclical
nature of the Gordon family’s unhappy marriages.
In the course of Jane’s attempt to create and preserve a family leg-
acy, a visual legacy also emerged. Previous studies in familial imagery
have largely considered formal painted portraiture which crafted an
idealised public image. The addition of satirical depictions of the elite
family challenges those carefully-constructed representations, allowing
further insight into family narratives. Satirical representations offer a win-
dow onto the perception and criticism of elite families, expanding our
understanding of the wider culture. The progression of Jane, Duchess of
Gordon’s married life both as successful wife and mother and as domi-
neering spouse and matchmaker at once echoes and entwines, with a
dialogue forming between both manners of depiction. These modes of
representation not only offer a more complete picture of the cultural
expectations of marriage but also of the struggles that manifest in the
making and breaking of wedlock.
Notes
1. The Letters of Lady Louisa Stuart, ed. R.B. Johnson (London: John Lane
The Bodley Head, 1926), 77. It should be noted that like the Duchess of
Gordon, Lady Louisa was also a female member of Scottish aristocracy.
2. Bombay Courier, 5 January 1793.
3. Shearer West, ‘The Public Nature of Private Life: The conversation piece
and the fragmented family’, Journal for Eighteenth–Century Studies 18
(1995): 153–172 (158).
152 H. Carroll
4. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800

(London: Penguin Books, 1977), 259. Stone cited familial portraits
displaying affection as proof of an increase of actual affection for chil-
dren in the eighteenth century. For criticism on Stone see West, ‘The
Public Nature of Private Life’, 153; Kate Retford, ‘Sensibility and
Genealogy in the Eighteenth-Century Family Portrait: The Collection
at Kedleston Hall’, The Historical Journal 46 (2003): 542; and Joanne
Bailey, ‘Parenting in eighteenth-century England’, in The Family in Early
Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 232.
5. West, ‘The Public Nature of Private Life’, 167–168.
6. See West, ‘The Public Nature of Private Life’, Kate Retford, The Art of
Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), and Marcia Pointon, Hanging the
Head, Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
7. Cindy McCreery, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth–
Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 38.
8. For an overview on scholarship exploring eighteenth-century English
celebrity culture, see Cheryl Wanko, ‘Celebrity Studies in the Long
Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Overview’, Literature Compass
8: 6 (2011): 351–362.
9. Christine Lodge, ‘Gordon, Jane, duchess of Gordon (1748/9–1812)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, at
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11059 [accessed 11 July 2012].
10. Rosemary Baird, Mistress of the House, Great Ladies and Grand Houses
1670–1830 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), 213.
11. Ibid., 213.
12. Leah Leneman, Alienated Affections: The Scottish experience of divorce
and separation, 1684–1830 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1998), 1–2, 9. Likewise, while divorced English women were com-
monly seen as demi-reps, or shamed women, due to their husbands
going through such extremes to dissolve the marriage, Scottish women,
while still experiencing a gendered double-standard, could retain their
honour and remarry.
13. Baird, Mistress of the House, 213–214. The family friend, Henry Home,
Lord Kames was instrumental in developing Jane’s education. An advo-
cate of women’s education, he encouraged her to develop her reading in
his personal library.
14. NAS GD44/43/18, William Maxwell (Senior) to Alexander Gordon, 16
October 1767. Jane was sometimes known as ‘Jean’, ‘Jeanny’, or ‘Jennie’.
15. NAS GD44/43/18.
16. Retford, The Art of Domestic Life, 19–47.
17. Ibid., 34. For more on Van Dyck dress in portraits see David A. Brenneman,
‘Thomas Gainsborough and the “Thin Brilliant Style of Pencilling of
Vandyke”’, Huntington Library Quarterly 66: 1 (2003): 80–95.
18. Retford, The Art of Domestic Life, 20. For example, in Benjamin West’s con-
temporaneous pendants of the king and queen (1779, Royal Collection)
King George is represented in a military uniform, making preparations to
defend Britain against a French invasion whilst Queen Charlotte is repre-
sented at home, with her children visible through a window.
19. For an overview of Kauffman’s female sitters see Angela Rosenthal,
Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006).
20. SNPG Curatorial File PG 2786.
21. Pointon, Hanging the Head, 164 and Retford, ‘Sensibility and
Genealogy’, 535. I have adapted West’s definition of public and private
relating to the social and household, respectively, but having porous
boundaries. See West, ‘The Public Nature of Private Life’.
22. I have adopted Pointon’s phrasing, ‘portrait-object’ which compromises
the multiple forms of miniature portraiture, two of which are repre-
sented within the artworks discussed, see Marcia Pointon, ‘“Surrounded
with Brilliants”: Miniature portraits in eighteenth-century England’, Art
Bulletin 83: 1 (2001): 48.
23. SNPG Curatorial File PG 2786.
24. Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”’, 59.
25. Ibid., 51–53.
26. NAS GD44/43/82.
27. Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in
England 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
61–81; Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in
Georgian England (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 1998) 40.
28. Since Diana Donald’s publication The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints
in the Reign of George III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996),
scholars such as Cindy McCreery, Vic Gatrell, and Amelia Rauser have
been demonstrating the usefulness of satirical prints in reassessing eight-
eenth-century cultural studies. See also, Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects:
A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery. (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), 196–197.
29. McCreery, The Satirical Gaze, 30–38.
30. Nathaniel Wraxall, The Historic & Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel
William Wraxall, 1772–84 (London: Henry B. Wheatley, 1836),
154 H. Carroll
298–299. Emphasis is my own. The quote refers to the great Statesmen

and friends of Jane: Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger and
Edinburgh MP, Henry Dundas.
31. NLS 7043. Jane Gordon to William Maxwell (Junior), 8 Sept 1771.
32. Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London
(New York: Walker and Company, 2006), 352–357. Gatrell includes a
brief discussion of women wearing their husband or lover’s breeches as a
satirical trope to indicate a crossing of gender roles.
33. Email from James Peill, Curator of Goodwood Collection, 10 April,
2012; West, ‘The Public Nature of Private Life’, 158; Pointon, Hanging
the Head, 159. Goodwood Estate, where the painting is housed, dates
the painting at c. 1785 and spells the artist’s last name as ‘Smyth’. Based
on the correspondence between the Gordons’ cashier and the artist I
can, however, confirm that his full name was William Augustus Smith
and the portrait’s creation can be dated to c. 1787, based on Smith
requesting the payment of £50 in January of the following year (NRS
GD44/51/320/7 W.A. Smith to John Menzies, 2 January 1788).
34. N. Whiting ‘Gender and National Identity in David Allan’s Small,
Domestic and Conversation Paintings’, Journal of Scottish Historical
Studies 34: 1 (2014): 20–39.
35. NRS GD44/51/320/7, receipt signed by W.A. Smith to Gordon Estate,
4 December 1788.
36. Gordon, Public Characters of 1799–1800, 514–515.
37. Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain
since 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 163.
38. West, ‘The Public Nature of Private Life’, 157.
39. It is difficult to pinpoint a precise date when the marriage ended due to
the equivocal nature of personal relationships. They may have been living
separately as early as 1789; by 1792 they had parted ways and Jane was
receiving an allowance from Alexander. At this stage of their estrange-
ment Jane would occasionally return to Gordon Castle to take up hostess
duties to select visitors. See ‘Kinrara’, Historic Scotland Data Website,
at http://data.historic-scotland.gov.uk/pls/htmldb/f?p=2400:15:0::::G
ARDEN:GDL00246 [accessed 30 June 2014], and Baird, Mistress of the
House, 225.
40. Elizabeth Grant noted that at this point Alexander lived ‘disreputably
in this solitude’, implying that having a separate family within the main
household was unusual; see Elizabeth Grant, Memoirs of a Highland
Lady; The autobiography of Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, afterwards
Mrs. Smith of Baltiboys (London: John Murray, 1911), 101.
41. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, Vol. VII

(London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 387. It should be noted that
in Pride and Prejudice Austen satirises both the business-like aspect of
marriage and a mother’s militaristic campaigns in securing husbands for
her daughters.
42. Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy, Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland,
1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press) 71; Vickery,
The Gentleman’s Daughter, 82; and Marcia Pointon, Strategies for
Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Culture
1665–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59.
43. According to the Lewis Walpole Library the print is either by Henry
Wigstead or William Holland.
44. Matthias Damour, Memoir of Mr. Matthias Damour (London: Longman,
Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1836), 181–182. Damour was
Jane’s servant; his memoir details first-hand accounts of the events lead-
ing up to both duels. He detailed how Charlotte had heard of a letter
being published blackening Lennox’s name and sent for a copy which she
handed to him after teasing, ‘See Colonel, what a curious letter I have
got here’.
45. Damour, Memoir, 185. Damour’s memoirs imply that the wedding was
planned and it was always Jane’s intention to have them married at
Gordon Castle in a small ceremony after returning from London. He also
noted it was her best dressing room.
46. Wraxall, Memoirs, vol. IV, 559.
47. True Briton, 15 May 1793. I have been unable to locate the original
insult. The Times reported on 14 May 1794 that there was a prema-
ture report of Jane’s son, George, having been killed in action against
the French which caused a friend of Jane’s to prepare herself mentally to
deliver the sad news to the mother. Given the futile nature of the report
it is unlikely that it gave any offence.
48. Sun, 6 July 1793.
49. World, 15 November 1793.
50. True Briton, 18 April 1797.
51. True Briton, 20 April 1797 and 28 April 1797.
52. Baird, Mistress of the House, 225–226, 216.
53. Despite being a loyal Tory, Jane was known for not prejudicing herself
against people based on their rank or political sympathies. This tolerance
of Whigs expanded into suitors for her daughters; otherwise the Duke of
Manchester, who came from a Whig family, would not have been permit-
ted to marry Susan.
156 H. Carroll
54. At this point in time the Duke of Bedford was not courting both girls
given that Lady Georgiana Cavendish had accepted the marriage proposal
of Lord Morpeth, however the duke’s attention still stirred up intrigue.
55. Amanda Foreman, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (London: Harper
Collins, 1998), 354.
56. Thomas Short, Discourse Concerning the Causes and Effects of Corpulency
(London: J. Roberts, 1727), 9.
57. Madelina tended to be ignored in print media due to her brothers-in-law
socially outranking her husband.
58. Like her parents, Susan and her husband separated from one another.
59. I would like to thank Dr. Catriona Murray for indicating that the dialogue
in the print can be pinpointed as a dialect heard in Aberdeenshire.
60. Bedford’s entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography claims he
and Georgina were engaged whereas Baird states that they were ‘almost’
engaged (Baird, Mistress of the House, 222). A third source is perhaps the
most accurate since it is a combination of the two; according to Amanda
Foreman, Jane insisted the two were engaged, ‘in a flat contradiction of
Bedford’s brother […] who claimed that his brother had never expressed
any intention of marrying’ Georgina (Foreman, Georgiana, 354).
61. Baird, Mistress of the House, 222.
62. George 1947, NPG website.
63. John, 6th Duke of Bedford had been married previously and had issue.
64. Baird, Mistress of the House, 222.
65. Ibid., 230.
66. Rosemary Baird, Goodwood: Art and architecture, sport and family
(London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2007), 159.
67. Grant, Memoirs of a Highland Lady, 158.
68. Baird, Mistress of the House, 228. Jane furnished her with the high stand-
ard of education she had insisted upon for her daughters.
69. F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Russell, John, sixth duke of Bedford (1766–1839)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; at
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24322 [accessed 9 July 2014].
Acknowledgements This chapter draws from my Ph.D. research at the

University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Dr. Viccy Coltman. I am
grateful to her and the editors of the volume for their helpful advice on earlier
drafts. I would also like to thank the friends and colleagues whose conversation
helped to develop the ideas for the text, namely, Elisabeth Gernerd, Jordan
Mearns, Catriona Murray, Alexandra Greer, and Alexander Collins.
Rearticulating the Economics of Exchange:
Incest and After Marriage in the Gothic
Jenny DiPlacidi
The Gothic is the eighteenth century’s literary problem child: its

heterogeneous blend of supernatural, horrifying, violent, sexual, and

pathologically genealogical tropes form an unwieldy genre that resists
neat categorisation or analysis. It fits into neither the literary narra-
tive of the rise of the (courtship) novel, nor the historical understanding
of the development of the nuclear family. The relationship of ‘the his-
tory of the family with the history of prose fiction’ discerned by historian
Christopher Flint is challenged by representations of kinship in eighteenth-
century Gothic texts.1 Accounts of the time period’s literature that posi-
tion the rise of the novel as coterminous with that of the nuclear family
have sought to explain the form’s preoccupation with questions of court-
ship, kinship and the marriage plot through a teleological understanding of
the eighteenth-century family. Gothic novels, tales and plays similarly make
use of the marriage plot, often following a couple’s trials before their even-
tual marriage signals the text’s conclusion. However, the genre’s empha-
sis on usurpations and transgressions diverges from the conventions of the
J. DiPlacidi (*) 
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: j.diplacidi@kent.ac.uk

160 J. DiPlacidi
eighteenth-century novel of realism, courtship, and domesticity to focus

most intently on the consequences suffered and options afforded after
marriage. These ‘after marriage’ possibilities, inevitably bound up with the
Gothic’s preoccupation with desire and the inescapable bonds of blood,
engender an amalgamation of incestuous ties and the conjugal state.
Kinship, Desire, and Marriage

Dreadful was the whole! truly dreadful! A story of so much horror, from
atrocious and voluntary guilt never did I hear! Mrs. Smelt and myself
heartily regretted that it had come in our way, and mutually agreed that we
felt ourselves ill-used in ever having heard it.
Frances Burney (1786)2
Frances Burney’s assessment of Horace Walpole’s play The Mysterious

Mother (1768) reflects a strong discomfort with its depiction of mother-son
incest that offers revealing insights into the nature of the play’s reception.
Almost universally condemned or criticised, Walpole’s play was unper-
formed in his lifetime and was read by a narrow audience as a consequence
of its limited print run from his Strawberry Hill press. Burney’s reaction—
characterised by horror, regret and feelings of ill-use at having been wit-
ness to, and participant in, the reading of the play—illuminates the play’s
content as highly troubling. Her pointing towards the ‘voluntary’ nature
of maternal guilt alludes to the mother’s instigation of incest by posing as
a servant and having sex with her unwitting son who later marries his sis-
ter/daughter. Burney’s discomfort with the ‘dreadful’ and ‘atrocious’ work
indicates how deeply it troubles conventional depictions of incest in which
men are the active abusers of women. Conversely, Eliza Parsons’ The Castle
of Wolfenbach (1793), a Gothic novel that, like Walpole’s play, centres on
incestuous desires and marriages, is ‘read with pleasure’ by its anonymous
reviewer who summarises the narrative as morally ‘unexceptionable’.3 The
difference between the responses to these Gothic works lies in the type of
incestuous relationship depicted. Parsons’ novel presents the obsessive love
of an uncle, Mr. Weimar, for his niece, Matilda, which culminates with
Weimar stabbing Matilda when she refuses to marry him. Parsons’ novel is
praised (though faintly) by the reviewer because the form of incest appears
to conform to conventional sexual and gender ideologies. An uncle’s violent
pursuit of his niece positions the female as passive victim to an aggressive
male sexuality that, while condemned for its violation of the incest taboo,
nonetheless adheres to a familiar structure of power and sexuality.
REARTICULATING THE ECONOMICS OF EXCHANGE: INCEST … 161
Gothic representations of incest vary as much in their depictions of

familial relationships and constructions of gender and sexuality as they
do in the responses provoked by their perceived conformity to the con-
ventional eighteenth-century models thereof. In this chapter I inter-
vene in the scholarly accounts of incest, kinship and marriage in the long
eighteenth century that can, like the Gothic’s contemporary readings,
limit understandings of incestuous relationships. By questioning the tra-
ditional critical accounts according to which the genre has been read, I
argue that it is possible to see how incest functions in a number of para-
doxical ways, acting as a consequence of patriarchy’s control of female
bodies and property, as an escape from this patriarchal control and as an
exposure of the inadequacy of the available models of sexuality and kin-
ship. The account of the family advanced by historian Lawrence Stone
as evolving linearly in line with emerging capitalism towards a nuclear
structure and companionate marriage casts a long shadow, particularly
in the work of literary scholars.4 Gothic scholarship that uses Stone as a
framing paradigm locates the increased incestuous desires associated with
the genre as occurring in the context of a nuclear family that, having less
consanguineal loyalty, adheres less to the incest taboo. Tania Modleski,
for example, relies on the traditional narrative of familial development
and the threat of masculine desires within the domestic setting when
she argues that Ann Radcliffe’s plots ‘became popular at a time when
the nuclear family was being consolidated […] It spoke powerfully to
the young girl […] in a home where the remote, but all-powerful father
ruled over an utterly dependent wife’.5 Similarly, in Novel Relations,
Ruth Perry argues that the focus on familial bonds in eighteenth-century
fiction reveals nostalgia for the importance of the blood tie. Perry posi-
tions the Gothic’s deployment of the incest trope as a product of the
shift towards companionate marriage and a concurrent weakening of the
incest taboo: ‘both fathers and brothers began to see their female rela-
tives […] as possessions in their power and hence possible sex objects’.6
These readings concentrate on violent depictions of incest as resulting
from the father’s position in the new, eroticised nuclear family, but leave
out the potential for female sexual desires and agency—the focus of this
chapter—by positioning women as victims without offering alternatives
to their role within marriage, the family and home.7
In analysing the intersections between representations of incest and
marriage in the Gothic, the works of social historians can shed light on
the tangled nexus of familial bonds represented. Recent scholars such
as Joanne Bailey and Naomi Tadmor have compellingly argued that
162 J. DiPlacidi
contemporary understandings of the eighteenth-century English family

were much broader than Stone conceived, and encompassed conjugal,
affinal and consanguineal relations as kin.8 Such a recognition implicitly
(since this is not the focus of the work of these historians) widens our
understanding of incestuous possibilities. Drawing on these multiple
models of family is particularly fruitful for the analysis of incest in the
Gothic, wherein various representations of family comprised of non-
blood individuals, foster, adopted and blood kin overlap and blur. The
insights provided by social historians into the coexisting nature of various
family bonds opens incest in the Gothic up to being read not solely as a
threat to women in the nuclear family from their fathers and brothers,
but as a form of desire and sexuality that exists within the multiple defi-
nitions of family.
Representations of marriage and ‘after marriage’ in the Gothic novel
of the long eighteenth century, in spite of their relative exclusion from
broader literary surveys, have been examined extensively by scholars of
the genre interested in the corresponding concerns of female sexuality,
male authority and the laws of coverture and primogeniture. The legal
reality of women’s experience of marriage was famously described by
eighteenth-century legal scholar William Blackstone as a civil death.9
Gothic scholars such as Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Diana Wallace have
taken up Blackstone’s description of women after marriage to argue
that conventions such as the imprisonment, starvation, haunting, and
disappearance of wives at the hands of violent husbands or brothers-in-
law reflect this civil death after marriage. Commenting on the textual
effacement of wives after marriage, Anolik asserts that: ‘the conflation of
marriage and death in the Gothic novel is supported by a complex of
frequently recurring conventions. The trope of the dangerous male rela-
tive reflects the legal reality that the father and the husband, who pro-
mote marriage, whose economic plots and possession of the woman are
supported by marriage, are the primary causes of the civil death of the
woman’.10 The twin threats to women of patriarchy and domesticity also
manifest themselves, as Kate Ferguson Ellis and Eugenia DeLaMotte
have argued, in the oft-employed Gothic motif of incestuous desires and
relationships.11 The genre’s explorations of the law, property, inherit-
ance, ownership, equality, individual choice and obligation to one’s natal
family mediate a range of concerns central to experiences of marriage in
eighteenth-century Britain. I argue that Gothic writers foreground the
limitations of and dangers within the institutions of marriage and the
family through their portrayals of incestuous relationships.
Central to both our understanding of marriage and incest is the

exchange of women, which is ensured by the incest taboo and theorised
as necessary to society. The prohibition of incest was defined by structural
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss as ‘the fundamental step’ in form-
ing society, the transgression of which resulted in atavistic endogamy.12
Gothic representations of the constraints and dangers experienced by
women after marriage are, I argue, not only literalisations of their legal
status and entrapment in domesticity. Such representations are also the
consequence of the economics of exchange that positions women as
objects transferred and—as Anolik points out—‘possessed’ by the hus-
band in marriage. In eighteenth-century Gothic texts, specific configura-
tions of incest, which function as the endogamic opposite of exogamic
marriage, respond to this restrictive model of marriage to reveal the
exchange of women as prohibiting female sexuality, agency and property.
The perils of the marriage market are depicted most clearly through the
figure of the uncle, whose violent incestuous threats demonstrate that
an economy of women endangers commodified female bodies. In con-
trast, the incestuous desires of the daughter for her father eradicate the
restraints on female sexuality and agency imposed by the commodification
of women and rearticulate exogamic exchange into an endogamic alterna-
tive of culture and marriage. Gothic representations of incest reveal that
both the exchange of women in marriage and the incest taboo are legal,
social and sexual constraints that maintain—not culture—but an unequal
distribution of power. The understanding of exogamy as both natural
and essential to culture is challenged by various Gothic representations of
incest. These depictions reveal that the exchange of women in marriage
and the incest taboo are rather legal, social and sexual constraints that
maintain—not culture—but an unequal distribution of power.
In this chapter I examine the competing models of desire and mar-
riage found in the figures of the mother, uncle and father in Horace
Walpole’s play The Mysterious Mother (1768), Eliza Parsons’ novel The
Castle of Wolfenbach (1793), and Mary Shelley’s short novel Mathilda
(1820). The range of incestuous desires in these texts work to display,
challenge and replace the dominant cultural model of marriage that con-
cluded with social, legal and physical death for the wife. Because Gothic
novels frequently depict the marital paradigm of the wife’s effacement
alongside or in addition to incestuous desires, the liberating potential
of incestuous conjugality is often obscured by the more familiar repre-
sentations of marriage as a state of female subjugation to male desires.
164 J. DiPlacidi
The Castle of Wolfenbach depicts a paradoxical repercussion of the eco-

nomics of exchange in which the younger brother’s inability to inherit
the property and wealth required for the exchange of women in marriage
creates the violent threat of endogamic uncle-niece incest. The exchange
of women is similarly challenged in Mathilda through the daughter’s
manipulation of her father’s desires in order to remove herself from the
traffic in female bodies. These representations of incest reveal and under-
mine the economy of exogamic exchange that underlies portrayals of
the silenced, imprisoned and civilly dead wife. A model of consanguin-
eal conjugality emerges in which Gothic heroines not only exist but also
experience female agency and sexuality in the period ‘after marriage’.
Mourning Mothers and Incest After Marriage

Walpole’s play The Mysterious Mother resists the designation of incest
identified by modern scholarship on the Gothic that conflates incest, a
sexual act associated with transgression and violations of power, with
sexual violence and the repression of female sexuality. Anne K. Mellor,
for example, argues that ‘the Gothic novel written by men presents the
father’s incestuous rape of his daughter as the perverse desire of the
older generation to usurp the sexual rights of the younger generation,
while the Gothic novel written by women represents incest as a cul-
tural taboo which functions to repress the sexual desires of women’.13
Mellor’s assessment represents what a large proportion of scholarship on
the genre argues: that individual depictions of incest fall into the cate-
gories of overt masculine perversion or feminine sexual repression. This
standard view is corroborated by David Punter and Glennis Byron: ‘the
male Gothic text […] is usually considered to be particularly transgres-
sive: violence, especially sexual violence, is dealt with openly and often
in lingering detail […] In the female Gothic plot, the transgressive male
becomes the primary threat to the female protagonist’.14 Walpole’s
drama depicts a transgressive mother, the Countess of Narbonne, who,
on the night of her husband’s funeral, learns of her son’s assignation
with a maid. The Countess disguises herself as the servant and engages
in sexual intercourse with her son, Edmund, who is unaware of his
mother’s deceit. Afterwards she sends Edmund away and the daughter
conceived from their act, Adeliza, is raised in a nearby convent. Upon
Edmund’s return he marries his sister/daughter and the Countess dis-
closes their kinship status. The mother’s agency in the play reveals, not
a desire to usurp her son’s sexual rights, but to reassert her own via the
closest physical substitute for her husband. The play suggests that the
aberrant repression of female sexual desire outside of and beyond wed-
lock will culminate in incestuous acts that disrupt not only the family
structure but also the systems of inheritance and exogamy.
In Walpole’s drama the commission and confession of parental incest,
as in Shelley’s story Mathilda, is aligned with a collapse of exchange.
Raising questions of natural and unnatural desires alongside breakdowns
in exogamy and inheritance within both Walpole’s and Shelley’s works
challenges the social order by making possible female desire and exist-
ence after marriage. E.J. Clery finds in the Countess ‘hints that female
desire […] might be impervious to the social desiderata of sexual repro-
duction and the patriarchal family, that it might even be at war with
them’.15 The disruption that female desire presents to the patriarchal
family is manifested in the disordering of patrilineal inheritance caused
by what other characters in the play refer to as the Count’s excessive love
for his wife. This extreme love, resulting perhaps from the Countess’s
strong sexual desire for her husband, puts her in the unusual position
of power in her role as mother and wife.16 Anolik writes: ‘Gothic rep-
resentations of marriage as dangerous and confining to the wife, and
of motherhood as resulting in the disappearance of the mother, work
to literalize and thereby reveal the horror implicit in two legal princi-
ples that governed the lives of women in England through the middle
of the nineteenth century: coverture and primogeniture’.17 Because the
Countess defies this disappearance through the inheritance disruption,
she becomes a highly dangerous figure: this rearticulation of the power
structure has successfully destroyed the tradition of primogeniture.18
The mother’s sexual desires after marriage that disrupt the transmis-
sion of property and wealth eventually lead to her instigation of incest
whilst she mourns the death of her husband. A conversation between
monks establishes their belief that a sexual transgression lies behind
the Countess’s self-imposed penance for a secret sin and Benedict says
of her: ‘this woman was not cast in human mould’.19 The monk unwit-
tingly voices the church’s perception of the incest that prompts her devo-
tion as monstrously unnatural. Yet it is precisely her ‘human mould’
or physicality that Edmund focuses on when seeking his mother’s for-
giveness for his own sexual sin: ‘she herself was woman then, a sensual
woman. Nor satiety, sickness and age, and virtue’s frowardness, had so
obliterated pleasure’s relish—she might have pardoned what she felt so
166 J. DiPlacidi
well’ (II.i.18–19). Edmund believes that his mother, a ‘real’ woman with
desires, would have forgiven his misdemeanor with the maid, compar-
ing his active male sexuality to his mother’s. That the Countess desires
her son based on his ‘wondrous’ physical similarities to his father draws
attention to her sexual desires that endured long after the marriage cer-
emony. Jeffrey N. Cox points to the Countess as a sexual being with
passion for her husband and argues that: ‘It was this passion that hurled
her into the arms of her son’.20 While Cox ignores the mother’s agency,
implying that she was mindlessly propelled by passion rather than cun-
ningly disguising herself to deceive her son into sex, the play suggests
her incestuous agency from the start. Peter, the porter of the castle, says
of the Countess regarding her deceased husband: ‘I marvel not my lady
cherishes his remembrance, for he was comely to fight, and wondrous
goodly built. They say his son Count Edmund’s mainly like him’ (I.ii.4).
Peter’s description counters Cox’s tendency to overlook the Countess’s
action; comparisons between the physical appearances of family mem-
bers, particularly cross-generation, often cause sexual desires.21
The consequences of the Countess’s sexuality and sexual agency,
which have already proved inimical to patrilineal inheritance, continue
to derange the social structures. Clery writes: ‘the incest which is a con-
sequence of female desire must blow the family apart’.22 After Edmund
has fought in wars for sixteen years he grows weary of his mother’s
banishment: ‘to stain my sword with random blood’ no longer pleases
him; he wants to return home (II.i.21). Walpole uses the Gothic meta-
phor of sword for penis in a typically bloody image, uniting it to incest
via Edmund’s desire no longer to stain his sword with foreign blood
but to return it to his native soil: into the sheath, as it were, of fam-
ily. Edmund’s return will reunite him not only with his mother, but also
with Adeliza, with whom he falls in love and enters wedlock—an initial
tightening of the familial structure before its ultimate dissolution. Marcie
Frank perceives the link between Walpole’s treatment of property and
desire: ‘the very means by which Edmund seeks to secure his patrimony
invalidate it; his desire to marry Adeliza, his own daughter, reveals that
in place of his father’s estate, he has inherited his mother’s perversion’.23
Frank’s argument, however, locates the incestuous union as an inherited
perversion rather than an inheritance of desires incompatible with lawful
wedlock and sexuality.
When the Countess, who believes Edmund is dead, faints upon
seeing him alive, Edmund says: ‘stand off, and let me clasp her in my
arms! The flame of filial fondness shall revive the lamp of life, repay the
breath she gave, and waken all the mother in her soul’ (III.iv.45). Of
course, Edmund’s ‘filial flame’ is the precise ‘fondness’ that has led to
his banishment and the loss of his mother. On reviving, the Countess
repeatedly asks if Edmund is Narbonne, a confusion of husband and
son that confirms the idea that this conflation has happened before. The
Countess asks Edmund: ‘art thou my husband wing’d from other orbs
to taunt my soul? What is this dubious form, impress’d with ev’ry feature
I adore, and every lineament I dread to look on! Art though my dead
or living son?’ (III.iv.45–47). The Countess calls herself a monster and
describes her sins as unheard of, as ‘horrors’, and asks Edmund: ‘has
not a mother’s hand afflicted you enough?’ (III.i.36). Acknowledging
her own agency by her reference to her hands as the cause of Edmund’s
miseries and cast as the aggressor, the Countess inverts traditional para-
digms of sexuality. The confusion underscores the physical likeness and
desirability of both father and son. Edmund says: ‘to thy eyes I seem’d
my father, at least for that resemblance-sake embrace me’, to which his
mother replies: ‘horror on horror!’ (III.iv.47). Edmund’s attempt to use
his physical likeness to his father as the means of receiving forgiveness
and physical affection from his mother recalls the Countess’s memory of
her sexual transgression with him. Likewise, his naïve hope that a mar-
riage to Adeliza might reconcile his mother with him gestures ironically
towards this genealogy of past and future incestuous acts: a multigenera-
tional destruction caused by uncontrollable desires.
Edmund’s disclosure of his marriage to his sister/daughter prompts
the Countess to reveal her incestuous actions in order to prevent the
consummation of the marriage, but her speech also serves to disrupt her
son’s ownership of their daughter in marriage. Her confession: ‘my fancy
saw thee thy father’s image […] while thy arms twin’d, to thy think-
ing, round another’s waist, hear, hell, and tremble!—thou didst clasp
thy mother!’ unveils the female desire that positioned Edmund as the
dupe, victim, and prey. Edmund’s reply underscores his impotence to
act against his mother: ‘my dagger must repay a tale like this! Blood so
distemper’d—no—I must not strike—I dare not punish what you dar’d
commit’. The Countess orders him: ‘Give me the steel—my arm will not
recoil!’, further troubling convention in her use of the knife/metaphoric
penis of Gothic fiction usually found in the hands of violent male aggres-
sors (V.vi.80–81). She is tempted to wield the knife against her daugh-
ter out of pity, but does not. Rather than simply invert the paradigm of
male aggression and violence, Walpole implicitly acknowledges the limits
of such inversions. Instead, the Countess mirrors the incest act by taking
168 J. DiPlacidi
Edmund’s sword and stabbing herself with it, taking agency, again, away
from her son in a final act of suicidal, metaphorical rape. The play con-
cludes with Edmund rushing off to war as he commands the clergy to
take Adeliza to become a nun.24 He says: ‘to th’ embattl’d foe I will pre-
sent this hated form—and welcome be the sabre that leaves no atom of it
undefac’d’ (V.vii.83). Edmund’s attempt at suicide is a final performance
of submission to the sword of an other that concretises his inability to
execute the act himself. Rendered impotent to consummate the nup-
tials unmasked as incestuous due to his mother’s sexual desires, the male
experience of after marriage for Edmund is a disempowered disappear-
ance akin to that suffered by Gothic women.
Usurping Uncles and Thefts After Marriage

The relationships between heroines and their uncles in the Gothic novel
are often underpinned by sexual threats, financial entanglements and
legal issues.25 The uncle, driven by lust for the daughter, wife, familial
titles and property belonging to his older brother, persecutes the hero-
ine who is frequently a physical reflection of her mother and who stands
for a younger generation onto which he can project the sexual desires
thwarted by the marriage of his titled and wealthy older brother.26 In
Parsons’ novel The Castle of Wolfenbach the uncle, Mr. Weimar, grows
increasingly attracted to Matilda, the niece he has raised. When Matilda
overhears a conversation that implies her uncle plans to rape her, she
flees only to be tracked by Weimar who tells her that she is not his blood
kin but is an unknown orphan he raised and fell in love with. Matilda
refuses his marriage proposal but Weimar abducts her onto a ship and,
when they are overtaken by Turkish pirates, he stabs her and confesses
that she is his niece, the daughter of his older brother whom he killed for
the inheritance. Parsons’ novel unites incestuous desires, threats of rape
and female imprisonment with thefts of inheritance, female-held prop-
erty and the usurpation of the paternal position by the younger brother.
Weimar’s ability to view his niece as kin or non-kin depending on
his personal desires reveals a danger within the consanguineal family,
yet displaces the threat from the nuclear unit, reinforcing the mutable
and flexible nature of kinship. Recent accounts of family in the eight-
eenth century by social historians suggest that understandings of kin
were adaptable rather than fixed, offering new models through which
to investigate incest in the Gothic.27 Weimar’s desires and position as
family/guardian are repeatedly transposed and consolidated through a

series of exchanges, obligations, and transactions. One of the exchanges
that particularly highlights the links between the variable nature of kin-
ship and its sexual and financial footing is Weimar’s purchase of a sexually
suggestive book for his niece. The gift has a very different educational
purpose from the conduct books relatives often gave to young girls, but
is grounded in the historical association between pedagogy and por-
nography.28 It thus binds his role as her guardian and educator to his
incestuous desire to instruct her in sexual matters via a gift that will place
her in his debt. Matilda describes the books as akin to erotica and she
innately shrinks before them: ‘He produced his books and drawings […]
the attitudes and want of decent drapery confused and hurt me […] I
therefore could not examine them with the accuracy I wished, much less
praise them, as I saw he expected’.29 Weimar expects (or wants) Matilda
to respond to the images with praise but Matilda identifies the incident
and others as unsettling: ‘my uncle’s behavior was to me unaccount-
able, he was for ever seeking opportunities to caress me, his language was
expressive of the utmost fondness, he praised my person in such glow-
ing colours as sometimes filled me with confusion […] I began to be
extremely uneasy at freedoms I scare knew how to repulse’ (12). When
she overhears Weimar being advised to inform her they are unrelated and
do what he likes to her, Matilda is convinced that regardless of Weimar’s
actual kinship to her he poses a threat and she flees his estate.
The uncle represents, more than any other male family figure in the
Gothic, the threat of patriarchy in general terms—a combination of usur-
pations from women. Incestuous sexual abuse is tied to thefts of prop-
erty, highlighting the links between person and purse, female bodies and
property seizure, female genitalia and exchange. Levi-Strauss argued that
the incest prohibition ensured women were exchanged between groups
of men through marriage to enable social formation.30 The theories on
women as gifts and objects of exchange advanced by Marcel Mauss and
Levi-Strauss are anticipated in eighteenth-century literary representa-
tions of marriage, society and incest, as has been demonstrated by the
work of Cynthia Klekar and Linda Zionkowski.31 Such notions permeate
representations of desire in the Gothic, highlighting the delicate balance
between exchange and the incest taboo. The genre’s incestuous configu-
rations are rooted in shifting economic and social systems and weighted
with differing consanguineal, conjugal and affinal notions of kinship.32
In signalling the inconsistency of contemporary notions of kinship,
170 J. DiPlacidi
exogamy and endogamy, Gothic authors foreshadow the work of femi-

nist theorists such as Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray who
argue that Levi-Strauss’s work does not take into account alternatives to
the commodification of women resulting from the incest taboo. Irigaray
and Rubin reassess understandings of the development of a predomi-
nantly patriarchal culture that facilitates alliance building through the
incest taboo and exchange of women. Irigaray argues that such a system
does not create culture but rather dehumanises women who: ‘are “prod-
ucts” used and exchanged by men. Their status is that of merchandise or
“commodities”’.33
The uncle’s endogamic incestuous threats function similarly to the
exogamic exchanges of marriage—both disregard female agency and
desire and are understood to be inevitable. In stealing from his older
brother, Weimar takes not just his property but his daughter, laying claim
to Matilda’s body in a move that suggests the development of incestu-
ous desires is the result of the available familial, legal, sexual and marital
models. Weimar’s lust intensifies when his niece is a teenager and after
he spends time abroad; when they reunite Matilda describes: ‘the rap-
ture and transport with which he embraced and praised me; he dwelt on
the improvement in my person with such delight, that I felt confused
and uneasy; […] and I repulsed his caresses involuntarily’ (11). Matilda
focuses on the attention Weimar lavished on her—the sexual attrac-
tion that she pinpoints as inspired by her physical improvement over his
nine-month absence—to explain why she fled from him.34 Weimar states
that his desires developed as he watched his niece mature: ‘As Matilda
grew up, I became passionately fond of her; my love increased with her
years, and I determined to possess her’ (150–151). Although marriage
was not originally part of Weimar’s plan (‘I had an aversion to that tie’)
(150), he would have wed Matilda had she accepted him. Yet her con-
sent is irrelevant: ‘It was my intention to have married you, unless you
rejected me—in that case you must take the consequence’ (150–151).
Matilda questions Weimar’s control of her when she falsely believes they
are not kin, stating: ‘How you mean to dispose of me, or by what right
you assume yourself to be master of my destiny, I know not […] since I
am not your niece, you have no legal authority over me’ (142). Matilda’s
belief that Weimar is not a consanguineal relation means that he has no
claim to her; blood ties are represented as a bond that legally grants male
control over women while at the same time keeping them (theoretically)
safe from their sexual advances. Matilda believes her chastity would be
safe if Weimar were her uncle but that the lack of kinship jeopardises her
virginity while it correspondingly frees her from his legal control over
her and her presence on the marriage market. Weimar abducts Matilda,
intending to imprison her as his sex slave until or unless she marries him,
but her repeated refusals demonstrate that she understands the positions
he offers—that of wife or imprisoned rape victim—as synonymous.
The legally sanctioned male authority over female relatives that
Matilda recognises was noted by seventeenth-century English theo-
logian and clergyman Jeremy Taylor, who believed that only marriages
between parents and children or children-in-law were against the prime
laws of nature. Taylor’s views that unions between uncles and nieces
did not constitute a violation of the natural law are, as literary historian
Ellen Pollak argues, grounded in the conviction that such relationships
did not overturn ‘the proper order of familial authority’ as the unnat-
ural union between parent and child would.35 Gothic representations
of kinship engaged with and troubled these earlier understandings of
incest and marriage. Taylor’s argument locates Weimar’s usurped posi-
tion as Matilda’s familial head as causing their potential marriage to be
unnatural, not the fact of their consanguineal relationship as uncle and
niece. These views suggest that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
society would be appalled at the disruption of authority resulting from
Weimar’s marriage to Matilda as his ward rather than at the violation of
the incest taboo by his marriage to her as his niece. This indicates that
such interruptions of power are unnatural and positions them (rather than
transgressions of the blood tie) as violations of the natural law. Parsons’
use of uncle-niece incest resists understandings of ‘proper’ authority
as grounded in the specific kinship configuration of parent/child. As
Weimar’s actions demonstrate, any familial relationship between men and
women in a cultural economy of exchange is invested with the ability to
maintain the male authority (read: power) that is demonstrably in need
of disruption.
Weimar exploits the eighteenth-century notion of obligation in order
to persuade Matilda to marry him as a repayment for his investment in
her upbringing. Matilda replies that she cannot refuse him if he is not her
uncle because of this debt, but that she will never love him:
The conversation […] is ever present to my mind, and could I forget that,
then my reverence for my uncle would return, and I should shudder at the
idea of a nearer connexion. [… A]n unaccountable repugnance makes the
172 J. DiPlacidi
idea horrible to me; yet after all, if you persist in wishing me to become
your wife, I do not think myself at liberty absolutely to refuse, but I tell
you candidly, I never can love you; that though I will obey you and do my
duty, I know I shall be miserable (67–68).
Matilda phrases it so that her refusal is primarily couched in her inabil-

ity to forget the conversation in which Weimar plotted to rape her, and
which, if forgotten, would cause her to view him again as her uncle,
making the idea of marriage horrible. She constructs a logical paradox
that renders a union impossible based on the tautology of his position as
rapist or kin. But she undercuts the complete refusal this construct allows
her by claiming that if he persists in his proposals she will marry him due
to her obligation to him.
Parsons invokes the language of obligation and liberty found in works
such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, or Principles of
Political Right (1762) and Emile, or On Education (1762) to depict the
burden that such notions place on women who are not, like men, repaid
for their fulfillment of duties with a corresponding freedom. Matilda’s
friend Charlotte De Melfort discerns the financial underpinnings of mar-
riage and kinship and attempts to eliminate the debt through a financial
transaction. Once Weimar asserts that Matilda is not his kin, his right to
her is based on the investment that requires that she either be purchased
from or made use of by him. Charlotte’s intervention as a buyer in the
market of female bodies undermines Weimar’s male privilege of purchase
and ownership: she offers to compensate him for the expenses incurred in
raising Matilda in order to have adoptive claim to her. Charlotte attempts
to free Matilda from her uncle in an act of exchange that reverses the tra-
ditional commerce in female bodies. The intervention reveals that these
exchanges and the ownership of women by family reduce their bodies to
currency, entailing incestuous desires. Matilda rejects the violent attempts
to force her into an endogamous marriage and reclaims her stolen wealth
and birthright, marrying the man of her choice once she becomes owner
of herself and property without a male relative to exchange her.
Desiring Daughters and Life After Marriage

The exchange of women, as Gothic writers were keenly aware, is not
merely the commodification of women but a system of sexual and social
economics that demands female passivity and the absence of female
desire. Alert to the ways in which the female body figured into the
exchange of money and property necessary to preserve patriarchy, Mary
Shelley takes up this cultural demand in order to explode it in the rep-
resentation of father-daughter incest in Mathilda. Shelley prefigures the
challenge to Levi-Strauss’s theories on culture and exogamy posed by
Irigaray: ‘the exchanges upon which patriarchal societies are based take
place exclusively among men. Women, signs, commodities, currency
all pass from one man to another; if it were otherwise, we are told, the
social order would fall back upon incestuous and exclusively endogamous
ties that would paralyze all commerce’.36 The incestuous love between
Shelley’s eponymous heroine and her unnamed father, although never
actualised, is made overt through the father’s verbal declaration and
written confession and Mathilda’s later revelation of her own desires.
Mathilda is raised by an aunt until she is reunited with her father who
has been travelling throughout the East since the death of his wife in
childbirth sixteen years earlier. Mathilda, who physically resembles her
dead mother, has spent her life gazing on a portrait of her father and
fantasising about the moment of their reunion—which, when it occurs, is
an erotic and romantic moment that establishes mutual desires between
father and daughter. The two live happily together for some time,
delighting in each other’s society until the intrusion of a suitor.
The father’s incestuous desires are exposed partially through a depic-
tion of his anxiety regarding the suitor’s interest in his daughter and her
manipulation of his fears, although Mathilda claims to be unaware of
the cause of her father’s unease: ‘I now remember that my father was
restless and uneasy whenever this person visited us, and when we talked
together watched us with the greatest apparent anxiety’.37 In spite of
her feigned ignorance, Mathilda recognises her father’s discomfort and
uses the suitor to exhibit her desirability in order to elicit a response
from her father. The presence of a third party creates tensions between
Mathilda and her father that reveal his emotions as too excessively jealous
to belong purely to paternal love and demonstrates Mathilda’s appeal,
prompting the father to remove her completely from the economy of
exchange in London to a remote estate. Mathilda’s ‘value’ as a commod-
ity is not shown in reference to another, which Irigaray argues is the only
way for worth to be assigned to an object: ‘in order to have a relative
value, a commodity has to be confronted with another commodity […]
its value is never found to lie within itself’.38 Instead, Mathilda estab-
lishes her own importance and desirability in a way that Irigaray posits
174 J. DiPlacidi
she cannot, manipulating the system of exchange to position herself as

valuable in relation to another ‘buyer’ on the market. When Mathilda is
removed from the marriage market there is a paralysis of commerce, as
Levi-Strauss assumed, but the incest that was meant to terminate culture
instead enables the formation of a new social order exempt from marital
exchange. That Mathilda’s father is incapable of offering his daughter to
the suitor begins the breakdown of the traffic in women that Mathilda
completes when she forces her father’s declaration of love. The transfer
of women between men is most clearly visible in this incestuous con-
figuration, underscoring how incestuous desires weaken paternal ties
and thus the exogamic marriage exchanges on which patriarchal society
(rather than culture) is based.
Kate Ferguson Ellis argues that the Gothic heroine worked ‘to
destabilize the patriarchal underpinnings of this […] [“affective nuclear
family”], albeit with the aim of reforming it’.39 But rather than re-
member the nuclear unit—which Mathilda never experienced—into
a reformed structure, she forms a family with her father until his death
whereupon she abandons her extended relations and structures of all
kinds. Mathilda does not destabilise the family structure in order to
reform it but works from within what is an already destabilised, weak and
flawed form to leave it behind forever. The father’s confession of incestu-
ous love for his daughter is closely followed by his suicide. Here, Shelley
reworks a long tradition of incestuous revelations and self-destructive
impulses dating back to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and more recently recon-
ceived in The Mysterious Mother. Shelley unites parental suicide and inces-
tuous desires with an end to exchange by depicting endogamic unions
as affording a potential for female sexuality removed from the transfer
of female bodies demanded by exogamic marriage. After her father’s
death Mathilda’s relatives force her to return to London—identified
with society, marriage and exchange—and oppress her with their
demands that she seek an appropriate suitor, requiring her readmis-
sion onto the market economy. In a grim parody of her father’s death,
Mathilda fakes her own suicide and flees to escape the demands for her
exchange required by her new position as a wealthy heiress.
Mathilda’s provocation of her father’s incestuous confession effec-
tively ends the family line and circumvents the inheritance of both wealth
and women. Living in solitude on the moors, Mathilda looks eagerly for-
ward to her impending death, stating: ‘In truth I am in love with death;
no maiden ever took more pleasure in the contemplation of her bridal
attire than I in fancying my limbs already enwrapped in their shroud: is
it not my marriage dress? Alone it will unite me to my father when in an

eternal mental union we shall never part’ (66–67). Mathilda yearns for
death in order to reunite with her father. That her shroud doubles as her
wedding dress preempts Blackstone’s description of wives as ‘civilly dead’
after marriage. Shelley’s story resists the scholarly understanding of wed-
lock as resulting in the death of the narrative and the wife by requiring
the heroine’s death—and thus the termination of the narrator and nar-
rative—before the incestuous marriage can take place. Mathilda’s union
with her father thus offers the eternal experience of life after death and
‘after marriage’, eliciting a comparison to the civilly dead Gothic wife’s
existence. The physical nature of their reunion is intimated by Mathilda’s
assertion ‘I go from this world where he is no longer and soon I shall
meet him in another’ (69). This allusion to the Nicene Creed’s ‘I look
for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come’40 dis-
places the traditional Christian heaven with a vision of incestuous desire.
Her appropriation of religious tenets allows Mathilda to anticipate a cor-
poreal resurrection and reunion with her father that suggests a bodily as
well as ‘mental union’.41 Incestuous love here removes the female body
from the marriage market but requires the ultimate erasure of self from
culture before the father-daughter wedding can be consummated.
Representations of incest reveal that the Gothic convention of pre-
senting women’s life ‘after marriage’ as synonymous with imprison-
ment and death is a consequence of the cultural demands of transferring
women in marriage. Incestuous desires function as complex reactions
against the economics of exchange that designate women as objects.
Uncle-niece incest reveals endogamic desires and their concurrent violent
thefts as paradoxically demanded by the models of law, inheritance and
marriage available in a culture of exchange. Representations of mother-
son and father-daughter incest have the revolutionary power to break
apart the familial and kinship ties necessary to the demands of exog-
amy, causing a rupture in the efficacy of patriarchy. Irigaray’s point that
‘the economy of desire—of exchange—is man’s business’ is anticipated
by Gothic writers in their representations of transgressive sexualities.
The use of these incestuous configurations demonstrates the presence
of female desire and sexuality, imagining a culture beyond the trade in
female bodies through marriage.42 The Gothic convention of impris-
oned, missing, or murdered wives and mothers who literalise the legal
status of women after marriage is rearticulated in the representations
of heroines and incestuous desires to offer an alternative narrative that
allows for life after marriage.
176 J. DiPlacidi
Notes
1. Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in
Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3.
2. Frances Burney, diary entry for 28 November 1786. Diary and Letters of
Madame D’Arblay, Author of “Evelina,” “Cecilia,” &c. Edited by Her Niece,
ed. Charlotte Barrett, 7 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1842), vol. 3, 235.
3. Anon., The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, vol. 10 (1794): 50.
4. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977). Stone’s understanding of the
emergence of the nuclear family in the long eighteenth century contrib-
utes to readings of the father as an all-powerful and sexually dangerous
threat within the domestic space.
5. Tania Modleski, Loving With A Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies
for Women (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982; repr. New York and
Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 11.
6. Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English
Literature and Culture 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 377.
7. Perry, Novel Relations, 375–376. Novels that belie Perry’s claim about
brothers viewing sisters as possessions or sex objects include, for example,
Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian
Romance (1790) and the anonymous Adeline or the Orphan (1790).
8. See particularly Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage
Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003) and Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) which are par-
ticularly useful studies of family and marriage in the long eighteenth century.
9. Blackstone wrote: ‘by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in
law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended
during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that
of the husband’, Commentaries on the laws of England. Book the first. By
William Blackstone, Esq. vinerian professor of law, and solicitor general to
her majesty, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765), vol. 1, 430.
10. Ruth Bienstock Anolik, ‘The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal
Absence in the Gothic Mode’, Modern Language Studies, 33: 1/2
(Autumn 2003): 25–43. Anolik argues that Gothic writers literalise mar-
ried women’s status in society through their textual erasure (27). See also
Diana Wallace, ‘“The Haunting Idea”: Female Gothic Metaphors and
Feminist Theory’, in The Female Gothic: New Directions, ed. Diana Wallace
and Andrew Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 26–41.
11. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion
of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 1989); Eugenia
C. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-
Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
12. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (London:
Taylor & Francis, 1969), 24.
13. Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters
(London: Routledge, 1989), 197–198.
14. David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004), 278–279.
15. E.J. Clery, ‘Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility
of Female Desire’, in The Gothic: Essays and Studies, ed. Fred Botting
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 23–46 (36).
16. Clery, ‘Impossibility of Female Desire’, 36, cites ‘conjugal passion’ as
responsible for the Countess’s replacement of Edmund as his father’s heir.
17. Anolik, ‘The Missing Mother’, 26.
18. Marcie Frank notes that ‘incest blocks inheritance’ in ‘Horace Walpole’s
Family Romances’, Modern Philology, 100: 3 (2003): 417–435 (417).
19. Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy. (London: 1791),
I.ii.7. Subsequent references will be given in the text. The play does not
include line numbers. References cite act, scene, and page number.
20. Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘First Gothics: Walpole, Evans, Frank’, Papers on
Language and Literature, 46: 2 (2010): 119–135 (133).
21. Shelley’s Mathilda also employs the convention of similar physical char-
acteristics between mother and daughter to presage the father’s incestu-
ous desires for his daughter as does Sheriffe’s Correlia, or the Mystic Tomb
(1802) while Emily Brontë uses cross-generational doppelgangers in
Wuthering Heights (1847) partially to explain sexual attraction.
22. Clery, ‘The Impossibility of Female Desire’, 37.
23. Frank, ‘Horace Walpole’s Family Romances’, 420.
24. This is similar to Mary Robinson’s Gothic novel Vancenza; or, The
Dangers of Credulity (1792), in which the lovers discover they are siblings
prior to their wedding; the sister dies of a fever and the brother joins the
army, the implication being that he hopes to die in battle.
25. Recently, chapters in Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds.), The Female
Gothic: New Directions by Wallace, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, and Lauren
Fitzgerald have focused on William Blackstone’s 1765 legal text and its
applicability to the intricacies of Gothic themes such as women’s owner-
ship of property, estates and legal rights within marriage.
26. Gothic novels in which fratricide and sister-in-law rape are part of the plot
include Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), The Italian
178 J. DiPlacidi
(1797), and The Romance of the Forest (1791), Eleanor Sleath’s The
Orphan of the Rhine (1798), and Parsons’ The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793).
27. Tadmor, Probert and Bailey have examined important shifts in kinship,
sexuality, marriage and the law in the period and their works provide an
important social context for the sometimes elusive nature of family bonds
underpinning Gothic representations of incest.
28. Parsons’ representation of the parent/guardian as would-be sexual edu-
cator is located within a tradition of texts that link the pedagogical and
erotic such as the pornographic work L’Escole des Filles (The School for
Girls, 1665) that explicitly points to the overlap of sexuality and educa-
tion. James Turner notes the connection between pedagogy and por-
nography from the sixteenth century onwards and its influence on
eighteenth-century texts in Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic
Education in Italy, France and England 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
29. Eliza Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach (London: The Folio Press, 1968),
12. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
30. Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship; see also Margaret
Mead, Male and Female (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) and Marcel
Mauss, The Gift (London: Routledge, 1990).
31. The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth Century England, ed. Cynthia Klekar
and Linda Zionkowski (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009).
Although their work does not specifically address the Gothic, Klekar and
Zionowski’s points about gift exchange and notions of obligation provide
important context for reading their deployment in the genre.
32. Juliet Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing
and Women (1974; repr. as Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical
Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 2000))
argues that incest is decreasingly taboo in capitalist society, 380.
33. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and
Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 84. Irigaray
challenges Levi-Strauss’s acceptance of the exchange of women as a nat-
ural requirement in the creation of culture, 171. Gayle Rubin similarly
questions Levi-Strauss’s assertion that society would not exist without the
incest taboo and exchange of women in ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on
the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women,
ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210.
34. Judith Lewis Herman and Lisa Herman in Father-Daughter Incest
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) analyse fathers who
react to their daughters’ adolescence by attempting to establish control
over their emerging sexuality (117).
35. Ellen Pollak, Incest and The English Novel, 1684–1814 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2003), 37. Pollak locates Taylor’s arguments
within the tradition of seventeenth-century thinkers Hugo Grotius and
Samuel Pufendorf.
36. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 192.
37. Mary Shelley, Mathilda & Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Classics,
2013), 17–18. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
39. Kate Ferguson Ellis, ‘Can You Forgive Her? The Gothic Heroine and
Her Critics’, in Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), 257–68 (264–265).
40. The Nicene Creed, Book of Common Prayer.
41. Jenny DiPlacidi, ‘Introduction’ to Mary Shelley, Mathilda & Other Stories
(Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2013), vii–xxxv; xxiv.
Marriage and its Queer Identifications
in the Anne Lister Diaries
Chris Roulston
In the literature of the long eighteenth century, the assumption of

heteronormativity underlies both idealised and negative representations
of married life. In fact, marriage is not readily intelligible outside of this
hegemonic framework. Yet as Sharon Marcus has convincingly argued,
heterosexual marriage was accompanied by a tacit recognition of long-
term domestic relationships between women that to all intents and pur-
poses mimicked the marital bond. These female couples, Marcus argues,
were recognised as such, to the extent that ‘women who established
longterm relationships with other women […] saw themselves, and were
seen by others, as placid embodiments of the middle-class ideal of mar-
riage’.1 Rather than being a complete anomaly, female marriage formed
part of an available discourse of domestic companionship, one that often
included the sharing of property and financial assets.
How this could become an intelligible and even acceptable model is
tied to the strong same-sex friendship tradition that existed alongside
heterosexual marriage. While wives’ legal and property rights were lim-
ited, they had considerable leeway in terms of their intimate relationships
C. Roulston (*) 
University of Western Ontario, Ontario, Canada
e-mail: Croulsto@uwo.ca

182 C. Roulston
with other women. Susan Lanser suggests that friendship, ‘founded

ostensibly on choice rather than […] kinship bonds’, and affirming
‘autonomy and mutuality […] may have been particularly suited to the
social order that was reorganising Western Europe in the early modern
period’.2 Homosociality for both sexes—married or not—was actively
encouraged and the parameters of same-sex intimacy could be extremely
elastic, leaving room for the possibility of female domestic partnerships.
Marcus reads this accommodation in terms of Barthes’s idea of the
‘play of the system’, which offers a ‘utopian alternative’3 to institutional
structures. However, Marcus reorients the play in question and argues
that it is ‘built into systems’ rather than outside of them. In Marcus’s
terms, ‘play signifies the elasticity of systems, their ability to be stretched
without permanent alteration to their size or shape’.4 Marriage, in
this sense, could incorporate female same-sex relations, even as these
remained outside the institution proper.5 Yet this also raises questions
about inside and outside, private and public, official belonging and
exclusion. What did marriage mean to those who could only perform it
unofficially? How was it conceived of, and how did its discursive param-
eters both enable and block homoerotic desires and conceptions of bour-
geois domesticity? This paper considers these questions in relation to the
diaries of Anne Lister (1791–1840), whose multi-volume journals trace
her numerous erotic relations with women.
Following a critically acclaimed BBC drama and documentary in
2009, the diaries of this Yorkshire gentlewoman have garnered attention
beyond the confines of academia. Anne Lister’s diaries, comprised of 27
volumes—nearly four million words spanning 35 years—have been of
particular interest to scholars of the history of sexuality, on account of
their explicitly queer sexual content. Roughly ten percent of the diaries
are written in code, which include details of Lister’s various seductions,
romances and sexual encounters with other women. Lister’s extraordi-
nary diary challenges not only the assumptions around female sexuality
in pre-Victorian Britain, but also provides a unique insight into the con-
struction of gender roles during this period, and more specifically, the
extent to which they were being shaped by the institution of marriage.
Lister was a highly conservative and class-conscious Tory landowner who
was constantly seeking to protect the interests of her Shibden Hall estate,
which she was to inherit from her uncle in 1826, but her class identifi-
cation was filtered through a masculinised subject position, which made
her very resistant to the idea of becoming a ‘wife’, even for economically
MARRIAGE AND ITS QUEER IDENTIFICATIONS IN THE ANNE LISTER DIARIES 183
advantageous reasons. While Lister never actually passed as a man, she

early on chose to dress only in black in part to ‘neutralise’ her femininity,
and her erotic orientation was expressed through what we would today
call a butch-femme dynamic. As part of this dynamic, the framework of
marriage and the gendered scripts it offered became key to Lister’s erotic
and gendered self-presentations.
Marcus has shown how Lister’s engagement with marital discourse
formed part of a larger cultural context that rendered the idea of female
partnerships acceptable. For example, reminiscing about her first board-
ing school affair, with fellow pupil Eliza Raine in November 1825, Lister
writes: ‘[we] once agreed to go off together when of age’.6 In this elope-
ment scenario, the marital imaginary is foregrounded, with Lister cast-
ing her relationship with Eliza in these terms less as a way of mimicking
heterosexuality than refusing the distinction between heterosexual and
homosexual gendered and sentimental subject positions. In Eliza’s own
diary entry of 17 August 1810, Eliza writes about Anne: ‘my husband
came to me & finally a happy reunion was accomplished’.7
In fact, Lister’s and Eliza’s relationship would become more complex
a few years on, as not only did Lister actively flirt with other women,
but Eliza would be courted by male suitors. In June 1812, Eliza asks
Lister for advice concerning a certain Montagu: ‘teach me if you think
my regard foundered upon an empty foundation, teach me to root up
prepossession; if you would have me never marry tell me so – & I obey –
I can say no more – than that Mr. M. is going soon to Sea & I per-
haps may never see him again –’.8 Here, Eliza is asking for Lister’s advice
simultaneously as her ‘husband’—she belongs to Lister and will obey
her—and as an intimate female friend—one who can provide emotional
support over important decisions. These lines are an extraordinary con-
flation of multiple subject positions, blurring conventional distinctions
between homo and hetero, and male and female. A possible marriage to
Montagu in no way cancels out Eliza’s ‘marriage’ to Lister, as if both
could exist on parallel tracks. This elastic approach to the marital narra-
tive will also appear in Lister’s diaries, particularly in her fraught relation-
ship with Mariana Belcombe.
In terms of gender, marriage also gives Lister the framework and the
parameters to perform as a masculinised subject without actually identi-
fying or passing as a man. Rather, Lister appropriates the codes of mar-
riage to fashion her singular gender presentation, turning marriage into
both a strategic and a psychic necessity. In this sense, Lister can never
184 C. Roulston
do without its heterosexual framework. The marital narrative in the

diaries is repeatedly transposed into different scenes of seduction, mak-
ing marriage one of Lister’s principal preoccupations. Yet Lister is never
seamlessly able to appropriate the marital paradigm. Hers is not a neat
expansion of the terms of heterosexual marriage onto or into her own
experiential model. Rather, her diaries expose marriage as a highly prob-
lematic institution that is desirable and fraught in equal measure.
In ‘Critically Queer’, Judith Butler claims that the marriage vow
serves as the exemplary instance of the performative speech act, argu-
ing that ‘the centrality of the marriage ceremony in J.L. Austin’s exam-
ples of performativity suggests that the heterosexualization of the social
bond is the paradigmatic form for those speech acts which bring about
what they name’.9 In the case of marriage, the marriage vow affirms not
only the fact of heterosexuality but also the gender roles through which
the vow is rendered intelligible. Marriage is the bedrock of both heter-
osexuality and gender coherence. As Butler argues, in a seamless move
from gender identification to heterosexual practice, ‘the initiatory per-
formative, “It’s a girl!” anticipates the eventual arrival of the sanction, “I
pronounce you man and wife”’.10 The function of marriage is to police
gender as well as property, inheritance and family alliances. Perhaps more
than any other institution, marriage generates, constitutes and fashions
the normative, discursively and performatively inscribing the subject as
appropriately gendered and sexually orientated. Yet as Butler also points
out, the fact of the marriage vow entails the fact of queerness, which
‘operat[es] alongside, as a deformation of, the “I pronounce you…” of
the marriage ceremony’.11 Marriage, or what we might call licit sexuality
contains within it the possibility of illicit sexuality and incoherent gen-
der performance and belonging. If marital heterosexual monogamy were
entirely naturalised, there would be no need for the marriage vow. The
very fact of necessitating such a vow entails the possibility of its undoing.
It is within this dynamic that Lister constitutes herself, and is undone, as
a subject.
It is no coincidence that in her diaries Lister notices marriage every-
where. In 1819, at the age of 28, she records that she has been to see
a freak show, a common form of entertainment in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries that could include any kind of ‘abnormal’ creature,
animal and/or human. In this particular instance, Lister is going to see a
giant and a giantess: ‘he from Norfolk, aged 18 and 7 ft 5 ins high, she
from Northampton, aged 16 and 6 ft 5 ins high’.12 Lister then notes that
Edwards the bookseller ‘said the giant and the giantess had been married
in the morning’.13 While Lister makes no further comment, this anec-
dote arguably functions as a meta-discourse on Lister’s own being-in-
the-world; how she moves through the world as a kind of spectacle, an
anomaly, a freak, but also how she behaves like a giant, larger than life,
refusing the constraints the world seeks to impose. Ultimately, however,
the giant and the giantess have access to a kind of normalcy through
their marriage, a fact hinted at in Lister’s use of ellipses. The giant and
the giantess in fact exist in the seam between the normal and the abnor-
mal, between their right to a legitimate union and their monstrous size.
Yet the characteristic mark of the monster is to exist in isolation, and to
long for, in the words of Frankenstein’s creature, ‘a fit companion to
dote on to beguile the tedious hours’.14 Lister’s ongoing desire for legit-
imate companionship reflects a kind of monstrous isolation that causes
her to fetishise the importance of marriage. At the same time, unlike
the giants and the monster, Lister has class status, economic security, a
respectable family lineage, and an endless stream of lovers. Lister belongs
to her world in a way neither the giants nor the monster ever can, but it
is around the thorny issue of marriage and of her exclusion from it that
Lister constructs much of her identity. The question then becomes, what
does Lister ‘do’ with marriage, and what does it ‘do’ with her? While
so much of today’s queer identity is being organised around privileging
marriage as the ultimate form of belonging and legitimacy, Lister’s dia-
ries expose both the benefits and the dangers of using marriage as the
lynchpin for coherent identity formation.
Lister is writing at a time when marriage for women was not only the
norm but also virtually an imperative, particularly in her socioeconomic
bracket, where strategic family alliances still ensured economic stability
and social status. Marriage was also bound up with notions of feminin-
ity, so that an unmarried woman or spinster tended to be caricatured—
although less virulently than in the seventeenth century—as ‘an object of
polite pity, slight admiration, and temperate ridicule’.15 Lister herself was
keenly aware of the reputation of single women as asexual, noting with
sarcasm in her diary that ‘I have always found that neatness, modesty,
economy, & humanity, are the never-failing characteristics of that terri-
ble creature, an “old maid”’.16 Lister’s defence of ‘old maids’ offers a
critique of how marriage imposes a particular kind of normative feminin-
ity, outside of which the female gender loses its legitimacy. Femininity’s
intelligibility therefore remains intimately bound to heterosexuality.
186 C. Roulston
In light of Marcus’s research, the freedom offered to women

to pursue intimate female friendships—whether married or not—would
suggest that Lister, who was both class-conscious and financially strate-
gic, would ‘normally’ have signed up to a marriage of convenience. On
several occasions she raises the issue of the kind of man she could bear
to wed; in a conversation with Mrs. Waterhouse, a Halifax acquaintance,
she says: ‘Speaking of what would be my choice in men, I said above all
things, after good sense and good temper, good family and remarkably
elegant manners’.17 Yet the conclusion to this conversation is an asser-
tion that if any man were to ask for her hand in marriage, ‘[she] should
instantly make up [her] mind to say no’.18 Getting married, for Lister,
is unthinkable, even as she dwells on marriage continuously. How, then,
does marriage signify for Lister?
In a revealing letter from October 1825 to Sibbella Maclean, a friend
with whom Lister was close, but not sexually intimate, Lister lays out her
philosophy of marriage:
I smiled to read, that it would not now surprise you ‘so much’, even if
I should marry. Be prepared for all things; for I am persuaded ‘joy flies
monopolists’; and, if you are ‘one’, and I am not another ‘made to live
alone’. I could be happy in a garret, or a cellar with the object of my
regard; but, in solitude, a prison or a palace would be all alike to me […] I
have ventured to urge, that the rational union of two amiable persons must
be productive of comfort […] There is no pleasure like that of thought
meeting thought ‘ere from the lips it part’. Give me a mind in unison with
my own, and I’ll find the way of happiness – without it, I should feel alone
among multitudes; and all the world would seem to me a desert.19
This passage is remarkable for its carefully articulated gender-neutral

language. Sibella had clearly been asking Lister about marriage, and
Lister strategically shifts the discussion from assumed heterosexual-
ity to a strongly inflected Enlightenment language of universality, ‘the
rational union of two amiable persons’ and ‘the object of my regard’.
Lister recasts marriage on a philosophical plane that, in its rational
spirit, refuses the heterosexual model. This language is grounded in the
Platonic ideal of the union of minds, echoing the language of comple-
mentarity found in much eighteenth-century literature on marriage, but
pointedly refusing its gendered frame. We also have a further echo of the
fear of solitude, of what we might call the ‘monstrous’ position: ‘but,
in solitude, a prison or a palace would be all alike to me’.20 For Lister,

this becomes a discussion on the dangers of solitude versus the pleasures
of companionship, the latter of which should be universally accessible,
regardless of gender identification. As Lister makes gender recede and
renders it invisible she arguably offers one of the earliest rational pleas for
same-sex marriage. This is fuelled by an active rebellion against the het-
erosexual bias of the institution, which appears early in the diaries.
Marriage as Queer Negation

Lister’s early refusal of heterosexual marriage also enables her to estab-
lish her queer identity, in both its modern and nineteenth-century senses,
as orientated towards women as well as ‘odd’ or ‘different’. Marriage’s
naturalised status highlights Lister’s embracing of the non-natural
and the non-normative. Even prior to deciding she will always dress in
black, Lister ‘knows’ she will never marry. In early entries from 1816,
the refusal of marriage acts as a queer shorthand. As Lister explains to
her friend Nantz: ‘Lamented my fate. Said I should never marry. Could
not like men. Ought not to like women. At the same time apologizing
for my inclination that way’.21 This refusal further reflects the hegem-
onic dominance of the verb ‘to marry’, in that to reject this discursive
economy is to inhabit an outsider status, both in terms of gender and
sexuality. Marriage becomes the master-discourse or reference point
around which all other expressions of desire must set their compass. The
turning away from marriage therefore becomes a turning towards some-
thing other. The ‘could not’—a state of natural repulsion—generates
the ‘ought not’—a state of possibility as well as social censure. To an
important degree, Lister’s knowing she cannot marry produces an
alternative knowledge economy, a way of registering her unique form
of desire, embodying what Heather Love calls ‘a form of romantic
exceptionalism’.22
This structure of negation works in two ways, however, in that Lister
is both the subject who refuses, and the object who is refused. Lister’s
pre-emptive gesture of resisting marriage is shadowed by the fact that
she has always already been turned away. As her desire cannot be legiti-
mated through marriage, her singularity becomes a source of social
shame as much as one of individual pride. Lister is repeatedly confronted
with what Love calls ‘the historical “impossibility” of same-sex desire’.23
Yet this impossibility is precisely why marriage serves as the barometer
188 C. Roulston
according to which Lister judges her social worth, one that over time
will increase rather than decrease in importance. Lister’s refusal of het-
erosexual marriage is therefore in no way an attempt to ‘dismantle the
master’s house’.24 Lister critiques marriage, she is obsessed with it, and
she feels repeatedly betrayed by it. However successful she is as a seducer
of women, more often than not she loses them on their wedding day.
Lister talks of the recently engaged Miss Browne, who had been one of
her love interests, as being now ‘out of [her] reach’.25 While in the case
of Miss Browne, it is a welcome relief, Lister is nevertheless repeatedly
thwarted by the legitimacy conferred by marriage.
It is with the love of her life, Mariana Belcombe, that Lister is con-
fronted with marriage’s full capacity to delegitimise her own desire. In
the midst of a passionate affair begun in 1812, Mariana unexpectedly
announces her engagement to the wealthy Charles Lawton in 1816. It is
during the honeymoon period that Helena Whitbread begins her Virago
edition of the Lister diaries, recognising this as a turning point in Lister’s
life. During the honeymoon, Lister promptly seduces Nantz, Mariana’s
sister, which exposes above all Lister’s disempowerment in the face of an
institution that she cannot challenge. Although Mariana’s is a marriage
of convenience in that as a doctor’s daughter, she has no independent
means, and Lister’s and Mariana’s relationship will in fact continue, this
event forces Lister to meditate seriously on the meaning of relationships
and of modes of belonging. Can a relationship have value outside of
marriage, or does marriage reduce relationships to a utilitarian model?
Lister’s reading of marriage oscillates between the sentimental and the
instrumental, reflecting her own investment in and understanding of the
position of women as objects to be bartered. Although Lister never refer-
ences Mary Wollstonecraft, the latter’s statement that women are ‘often
legally prostituted’26 is echoed in Lister’s own claim that Mariana’s
marriage is ‘legal prostitution’.27 Lister’s refusal of the position of the
feminine is also a refusal of the position of object, one she witnesses
repeatedly as she loses her lovers to marriage. To label heterosexual mar-
riage as ‘legal prostitution’ also allows her to situate her own claim to
marriage as existing beyond this system of exchange. Mariana’s prosti-
tuted marriage to Charles Lawton is therefore distinct from Lister’s and
Mariana’s marriage of the soul. Yet marriage-as-prostitution also confers
benefits with which Lister cannot compete, and it interpolates the subject
in particular ways. Lister muses on how Mariana cannot fully disengage
from the institution of which she has become a member:
Letter from M- … her letter breathes little of affection & indeed I do not
estimate her feelings towards me very highly […] I suppose she is more
comfortable now than formerly with [Charles]. She has her carriage &
the luxuries of life & thinks proportionately less of me […] M-’s conduct
to me has certainly been as strange a mixture of weakness, selfishness &
worldly-mindedness. Consider her conduct on our first acquaintance;
before her marriage; about her marriage; & ever since. An unfaithful friend
to Isabella, a weak & wavering companion to me.28
Here, Lister notes marriage’s capacity to create new needs and a differ-
ent economy of desire. While Mariana still cares for Lister, she is seduced
by the accessories of marriage, and by its legitimating effects. Marriage
trades uniqueness for social capital.
Yet while Lister unpicks the fabric of marriage, her own desire con-
tinues to be defined by its terms. If anything, the marital language in
the diaries intensifies after Mariana’s wedding. In an echo of the Eliza
Raine letters, marriage occupies two signifying registers; as Catherine
A. Euler argues, after Mariana’s marriage to Lawton, ‘both Anne and
Mariana for many years considered themselves married to each other …
especially when they discovered in 1825 that Charles had still not bro-
ken her hymen’.29 The detail of the unbroken hymen helps to secure
the legitimacy of the ‘other’ marriage, and we can see a split between
Mariana’s worldly marriage to Charles Lawton, and Lister’s reappropria-
tion of marital discourse as a utopian possibility housed in the privacy of
her diaries. Mariana’s wedding enables Lister to resignify marriage within
the conceptual space available to her, with a focus on idealised romantic
love. It is therefore only after Mariana’s heterosexual wedding that Lister
writes in April 1820: ‘I am indeed satisfied of [Mariana’s] regard & I
shall now begin to think & act as if she were indeed my wife’.30 The idea
of ‘begin[ning] to think’ of Mariana as her wife four years after Mariana’s
marriage to Charles generates a queer temporality, what Madhavi Menon
calls ‘the haphazard time of desire’.31 Linear time is disregarded in favour
of a cyclical return to the sustaining refrain of Lister’s desiring subjectiv-
ity; her utopian promise to be as a husband to her lovers.
Marriage for Lister exists outside of institutional parameters; in the
place of an official, intelligible narrative, it inhabits the time and rhythm
of individual desire. Here, marriage temporarily secures Lister’s hold
on Mariana, then slips away again. Mariana participates equally in this
alternative marital bond: ‘I shall not lose you, my husband, shall I? Oh,
190 C. Roulston
no, no. You will not, cannot, forget I am your constant, faithful, your
affectionate wife’.32 In J.L. Austin’s sense, these declarations are pure
performative speech acts, in that they are unsupported by anything exter-
nal to themselves. Mariana and Lister perform their marriage through a
series of declarations that cannot move beyond the private sphere, and
that are unrealisable in a public sense. Yet this very impossibility enables
such declarations to remain anti-utilitarian, reconfiguring the ‘impossibil-
ity of same-sex desire’ as an imaginable event. Paradoxically, the more
consciously theatrical these performed roles are, the more they are expe-
rienced as authentic. Desire here is entirely dependent on the force of
the speech act that brings it into being. Dislocated from the world of
material relations, marriage in Lister’s diaries becomes increasingly liter-
ary, a fictional construct that anchors desire in an idealised parallel space.
The diaries are not fictional, however; they repeatedly enact the jour-
ney between life and text; they record the impact of lived events on
the first-person narrator. In this sense Lister cannot bypass the material
realities of Mariana’s married state. Yet this too becomes strategically
reappropriated as a form of guilty jouissance: ‘I felt that [Mariana] was
another man’s wife. I shuddered at the thought & at the conviction that
no soffistry [sic] could gloss over the criminality of our connection’.33
Lister’s erotic transgressions with Mariana ensure her agency as a com-
petitor in the heterosexual world, and keep her within the circuits of
power. Mariana becomes both Lister’s mistress and her wife, strategically
confusing this traditional heterosexual distinction. Mariana’s adultery
also supports Lister’s masculine subject position as a viable rakish rival to
Charles Lawton. Lister effectively transforms her non-belonging into an
active disruption of the marital bond, ensuring an alternative futurity to
the heterosexual script.
Furthermore, Lister’s strategic idealisation of marriage is never far
removed from the language of economics. While the discourse of roman-
tic love serves as a way of distinguishing her relationship with Mariana
from that of Charles Lawton’s, Lister also conceives of her ‘marriage’ in
terms of cost and expense: ‘M- loves me. Certainly her heart is wholly
mine. If I could have allowed her twenty or thirty pounds a year in addi-
tion to what she had, she certainly would not have married’.34 Regardless
of gender identity, love is translatable into economics, making the obsta-
cle in question not marriage, but money. Following the logic of mar-
riage as prostitution, Lister knows she could have bought Mariana if
the price had been right. While Lister actively refuses the position of the
woman/wife, she acknowledges the translatability of desire into money,

through which all value is registered. Indeed, the fact of Mariana’s mar-
riage transforms the language of desire into that of cost and expense. As
Lister writes: ‘[Mariana] had never before known how I loved her or half
what her marriage had cost me’.35
Marriage as Dynasty
Over time, in the diaries the language of cost will supersede that of
romance in relation to marriage. Excluded from the institution proper,
Lister creates a parallel marital economy whose intelligibility will be fil-
tered through a business model. As she gradually comes to acknowledge
the permanence of Mariana’s marriage, Lister begins looking elsewhere
for a wife, and eventually settles on a neighbouring heiress, Ann Walker.
Jill Liddington has made available the key diary extracts from this rela-
tionship in Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority (1998), which
covers the years 1833–1836, during which time Lister is courting and
eventually settling down with Miss Walker. However, alongside moments
of peaceful domesticity, the Ann Walker years are marked by tensions,
frustrations and general unhappiness. Although the difficulties are due in
part to the illegitimate status of the marriage, they are also the result of
how Lister interprets the married state, and her masculinised gendered
role within it. Throughout the long eighteenth century, marriage in
Britain was still based on the governing principles described in William
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1753), in which ‘the
husband and wife are one person in law: that is the very being or legal
existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least
incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband’.36 It was not
until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 that divorce other than by Act
of Parliament became a possibility, and even then it was far less acces-
sible to the wife than to the husband, in that the husband only had to
prove adultery, whereas the wife had also to prove ‘adultery aggravated
by desertion, cruelty, rape, “buggery”, or bestiality’.37 In contrast to cer-
tain other female ‘marriages’ such as those of the Ladies of Llangollen
or of Emily Faithfull,38 Lister’s conception of marriage was deter-
minedly patriarchal. Lanser has also convincingly argued that a number
of ‘gentry sapphists’, including Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen, made
use of their class privilege as a form of ‘compensatory conservatism’ that
worked to counter their non-normative sexual identities.39 However,
192 C. Roulston
although class privilege enabled certain expressions of gender queerness,

Lanser suggests that these women’s status was nevertheless ‘jeopardized
whenever they were perceived to exceed the limits of gender propriety’.40
In the delicate balancing act between class privilege and gender non-
conformity, Lister appears to have used same-sex marriage as a way of
reproducing a normative, if inverted, frame, that would be recognised by
the social elite.
Lister’s choice of a wealthy heiress has been well documented by
Liddington; without question it provided a source of cash flow that
would allow improvements to the Shibden estate and to Lister’s coal-
mining ambitions. In the diary entries, the language of marital romance
present in the Lister-Mariana relationship gives way to a much more
utilitarian conception of marriage, the very one Lister accused Mariana
of entering into with Charles Lawton. Marriage is now engaged in the
field of power rather than desire. However, while reading Lister as a
nineteenth-century husband who, as Liddington argues, was neither bet-
ter nor worse than the norm,41 provides an important contextual frame,
it also masks the fissures in this self-consciously performative identity.
On the one hand, everything about Lister’s liaison with Miss Walker is
a strategic grab for increased wealth, respectability and social capital. On
the other, this very public relationship will cause Lister both private anxi-
ety—due to Miss Walker’s fragile emotional make-up—and public scru-
tiny, culminating in the couple being burnt in effigy in Halifax, to which
we will return.
Paradoxically, the diaries reveal how Lister’s most public liaison also
becomes her most unstable one. While Miss Walker is an heiress, she is of
a lesser social rank and suffers from fits of depression and later, bouts of
excessive drinking. She is also positioned from the beginning as Lister’s
project; there is none of the mutuality present in the Lister-Mariana rela-
tionship. In August 1832, Lister writes: ‘Thought I, “she little dreams
what is in my mind – to make up to her. She has money and this might
make up for rank”’.42 Here, Miss Walker is both commodified and femi-
nised; Lister adopts a masculinised language of objectification that never
fully disappears from descriptions of the relationship. A month later,
Lister notes: ‘I can gently mould Miss W- to my wishes; & may we not
be happy?’.43 Lister’s project is as much one of genderification as of gen-
trification; the ongoing feminisation of Miss Walker as a passive object
confirms Lister in her masculine role-play.
The use of marriage as a way of constructing gender roles in this

pairing requires further consideration. Lister’s appropriation of the
marital template positions the relationship within specific sociocul-
tural parameters and ensures a particular kind of gendered and sexual
dynamic. While it is clear from the diaries that Miss Walker has always
suffered from a weakened mental state, this becomes exacerbated after
her encounter with Lister. While Lister’s language is one of control,
often verging on manipulation, we only have glimpses of Miss Walker’s
responses, which are usually cast in the form of resistance followed by
capitulation, signaling an ongoing state of indeterminacy. For Lister, the
framework of marriage offers stability, recognition and status, whereas
for Miss Walker it appears to generate anxiety and confusion.
The first public sign of Lister’s and Miss Walker’s relationship is
marked by their decision to travel together to the continent. Miss Walker
says that ‘it would be as good as a marriage’,44 and Lister talks of ‘trav-
elling and ultimately settling together’.45 Although marriage implies a
move towards domesticity and cohabitation, in this case moving away
from home and the familiar becomes the sign of mutual devotion. The
honeymoon precedes rather than follows the ‘wedding’. This places a
queer twist on the courtship-cum-marriage, particularly as Lister often
used the euphemism of ‘travelling to Italy’ to signal sexual activity, allud-
ing to the Classical tradition of same-sex love.
Miss Walker is also terrified of ‘travelling to Italy’, however, both in
its literal and metaphoric senses. She begs Lister to delay the journey
‘till I have fewer torments of conscience than I endure at present….
Weak as I am, it would be madness to leave the Kingdom’.46 Here, the
idea of ‘leaving the Kingdom’ is tied to leaving a legitimate and stable
sexual identity as well as to leaving home, the familiar, and the known.
Liddington explains that ‘from her few letters that survive, Ann Walker’s
voice sounds wracked by shame’.47 Miss Walker also confesses to Lister
that she could have married a Mr. Ainsworth, who had recently been
courting her. Lister therefore takes Miss Walker away from heterosex-
ual stability into, to continue with the travel metaphor, uncharted and
unknown territory. Lister’s diary clearly shows that Miss Walker has not
only succumbed to Lister’s sexual advances, but that she has developed a
taste for them. Lister’s references to ‘grubbling’ and ‘kisses’ (her meta-
phor for orgasm) abound in the early days of their courtship.
Yet, as we have seen, Miss Walker is tormented by her sexual attraction
to Lister. In December 1832, Lister notes: ‘[Miss Walker] had got into
194 C. Roulston
the way of it & did not know how she should do without it…. Yet still
she talked of her suffering because she thought it wrong to have this
connection with me …. She will not do for me’.48 Here, in contrast to
heterosexual marriage, sexual connection fails to confirm Miss Walker
in her identity as a wife, producing instead a dissolution of the self and
a kind of moral panic. Eventually, Lister will have Miss Walker consult
Dr. Stephen Belcombe, Mariana’s brother, to treat her depression. This
consolidates the feminisation of Miss Walker and exacerbates the tra-
ditional distinction between passive femininity and active masculinity,
one which Lister appears to support rather than resist. Lister becomes
increasingly identifiable with the husbands later critiqued in Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)—where the doctor-
husband prescribes bed rest for his ‘neurotic’ wife, and Henrik Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House (1879)—in which the husband can only see his wife as a
‘sweet little skylark’.49 Lister deplores Miss Walker’s weakness of spirit,
complaining that there is ‘[n]othing the matter with her but nervous-
ness’,50 yet fails to take Miss Walker’s needs and anxieties into account.
Lister wants a feminine wife who is not weakened by her femininity, even
as nineteenth-century constructions of femininity relied on a blurring
of boundaries between female submission and female frailty. Coventry
Patmore’s influential poem, The Angel in the House (1854) imagined a
wife ‘too gentle even to force/His penitence by kind replies’,51 offering
up a female subject who is constitutionally unable to show resistance.
The question arises as to how a relationship evolves when it exists in
the interstices of language and social intelligibility. While Liddington
points to the fact that, unlike gay male relationships, women could
slip unnoticed into ‘marriages’ and be read as companions or roman-
tic friends, this sexual invisibility could not but affect the realm of inti-
macy, and the ways in which female couples read each other. The very
fact that, as Liddington argues, ‘there was a lack of public discourse
through which respectable Halifax could express any reservations about
Anne Lister’s sexuality’,52 also had an impact on the sphere of intimacy
for the likes of Miss Walker. While Lister meticulously constructed
her lesbian identity over the years—through a careful reading of the
Classics and Romantics, and through a series of successful seductions—
Miss Walker was without an intellectual, literary or experiential frame-
work; she was functioning in a conceptual void. Although Lister believed
marriage could fill that gap, Miss Walker was continually registering that
theirs was not a marriage, it was only like a marriage. This ambivalent
space between being and seeming, between the original and the copy,
offered both the freedom of anonymity, and created unanticipated anxi-
eties. Miss Walker experienced compulsory heterosexuality, as Butler
argues, ‘as the original, the true, the authentic’, and her erotic attach-
ment to Lister as ‘a kind of miming […] which [could] always and only
fail’.53 While Marcus has convincingly shown the extent to which female
partnerships were an acceptable part of the fabric of late eighteenth and
nineteenth-century society, this does not fully address the psychic cost of
having to negotiate a sexual identity that remained largely unacknowl-
edged, and if acknowledged, censured and/or mocked in the public
sphere. Indeed, it is in this uncomfortable space of non-belonging that
the queer, non-normative body emerges, creating a subject who can
only know itself through its alienation. To this extent, female same-sex
desire’s repeated erasure in the social realm could not but affect its con-
struction in the private sphere. Miss Walker became a casualty of female
same-sex desire’s illegibility, in that Lister’s discourse of marriage was
highlighting the performative impossibility of a legible ‘I do’.
This impossibility is re-enacted in the diaries precisely through Lister’s
obsession with the marriage vow. From her early affair with Eliza Raine,
to her intense relationship with Mariana Belcombe, through to her prag-
matic marriage with Miss Walker, the marriage vow, rather than being a
singular, binding act, is instead performed over and over. Each iteration
is therefore also an undoing, an implicit avowal of the unacknowledged
status of lesbian desire. At age fifteen, Lister became betrothed to Eliza
Raine, with an exchange of rings and shared wedding vows.54 As we have
seen, Lister and Mariana referred to each other as husband and wife, and
on 23 July 1821, Lister writes:
[We] bound ourselves to each other by an irrevocable promise for ever,

in pledge of which, turned on her finger the gold ring I gave her several
years ago & also her wedding ring which had not been moved off her fin-
ger since her marriage. She seems devoted to me & I can & shall trust her
now … It has occurred to me – can C- have given her a venereal disease?55
In this passage, the sentimental discourse and the marital pledge between
Lister and Mariana are interrupted both by the symbol of the official
wedding ring from Mariana’s marriage to Charles Lawton, and by the
final reference to venereal disease. In other words, the lesbian vows are
literally contaminated by the diseased heterosexual body, which nullifies
196 C. Roulston
the possibility of an original declaration, one that can in any way precede
heterosexual discourse. In its attempt to achieve recognition, the lesbian
marriage vow is always imitative, and therefore endlessly reproducible.
The lack of a recognisably singular binding exchange of vows that is
translatable into the public sphere is highlighted with particular clarity in
the Lister-Walker relationship. Lister writes in December 1832:
Miss W- told me in the hut if she said ‘Yes’ again it should be binding.
It should be the same as a marriage & she would give me no cause to be
jealous – made no objection to what I proposed, that is, her declaring it
on the Bible & taking the sacrament with me at Shibden or Lightcliffe
church.56
While the importance of the symbolic for Lister is made apparent—the

declaration, the Bible, the church—the vow’s imitative and conditional
status also dominates the language: ‘the same as a marriage’, ‘should’,
‘would’. Instability is therefore built into the structure of the vow, so
that whenever marriage is rendered intelligible within the couple, it risks
fragmentation as soon as it leaves the private space of, in the above case,
‘the hut’. To this extent, Miss Walker’s ongoing, and to Lister, her infu-
riating equivocation, is merely an embodied response to the structural
instability of a performative declaration that has no recognisable context.
In another exchange of vows—this time with rings—the diary entry
makes it unclear to whom the ring belongs: ‘I asked her to put [on]
the gold wedding ring I wore […] She would not give it me immedi-
ately but wore it till we entered the village of Langton and then put
it on my left third finger in token of our union – which is now under-
stood to be confirmed for ever tho’ little or nothing was said’.57 This
confusing exchange of rings is underscored by the silence that accom-
panies it, suggesting either a state of perfect intimacy, or an inability to
communicate the meaning of what is taking place. What Lister means
and what Miss Walker means by the exchange may not coincide, as this
marriage has no script, and no witness. In this sense, the marriage finds
itself continuously open to interpretation. While this provides possibili-
ties for redefining the institution, it also leads to mutual suspicion and
a breakdown of intersubjective relations. As Lister writes: ‘Somehow it
often strikes me she hesitates to take me for better or worse, but wants
to make me a stepping stone into society’.58 While Lister appears to con-
trol the shape of the relationship, there are moments when she suspects
Miss Walker of having her own agenda. Neither participant can in fact
trust the discourse of marriage, even as they attempt to reproduce its
official language.
The Lister-Walker marriage also has two separate components: the
private seduction of Miss Walker by Lister, and the public negotiation
of wills and property. In a nineteenth-century heterosexual marriage, the
negotiation of the marriage settlement would form part and parcel of
the courtship ritual. For example, during the highly romantic courtship
of Anthony Trollope’s parents, Thomas and Frances Trollope, Thomas
made sure to explain to his future wife that his annual income was about
900 pounds.59 In the case of Lister and Miss Walker, the financial nego-
tiations formed the most covert aspect of the courtship, even as they
necessarily took place in the public sphere, among relatives and lawyers.
Lister had to play an intricate game of diplomacy and subterfuge, con-
vincing both Miss Walker and her relatives that the former should move
to Shibden Hall, and that they should bequeath to each other a life-
tenancy on each of their properties. All this needed to take place within
the discourse of female companionship rather than marriage, so that no
sexual taint was attached to the proceedings. On 2 October 1834, Lister
writes: ‘all the town talking of A’s coming here – so cruel to leave her
aunt […] with her fortune so strange to give up her [home] and come
and live so out of the world’.60 Indeed, it is precisely because Lister’s
and Miss Walker’s relationship so closely resembles a marriage that it
becomes subject to rumour and speculation. Lister’s search for marital
legitimacy is paradoxically the very thing that will make the social world
begin to read the Lister-Walker relationship as an illegitimate sexual
union.
In the early 1830s, Lister became increasingly focused on improve-
ments to her Shibden estate, which included plans to open her own coal
mine. However, this also put her in direct competition with the region’s
lead suppliers of coal, the Rawson clan. The rivalry between Lister and
the Rawsons would extend to political in-fighting, which would in turn
lead to an increased exposure of Lister’s private life. In the critical years
of 1834–1835, a time of growing radical political activity on the part of
the working class, just prior to the rise of Chartism, Lister became closely
involved in Tory politics to protect her land-owning interests. Not coin-
cidentally, it is also during this period that the Lister-Walker relationship
became public property. On 10 January 1835, the Leeds Mercury pub-
lished the following ‘wedding’ announcement: ‘Same day, at the Parish
198 C. Roulston
Church H-x, Captain Tom Lister of Shibden Hall to Miss Ann Walker,
late of Lidget, near the same place’.61 The announcement was then
reprinted in the Halifax Guardian a month later. As Liddington points
out, the choice of the first name, Tom, alludes to the term ‘tommy’,
often used in the eighteenth century to describe masculine women in
same-sex relationships, as well as lesbians of lower socioeconomic sta-
tus, in contrast to the more genteel term of ‘sapphist’. Public lampoon-
ing was not uncommon during election periods, and as Liddington
argues, in this case it is more likely that politics rather than sexuality was
its driving force.62 However, it also reveals the open secret of Lister’s
and Miss Walker’s relationship, and it is telling that what could not be
named in polite Halifax society is rendered explicit in the local newspa-
pers. Ironically, this lampooning expresses exactly what Lister wants to
achieve, namely a recognisable marital bond. The fact that this can only
be done in the form of parody brings us back to the original and the
copy, and to how Lister’s search for legitimacy is repeatedly blocked by
hegemonic heterosexuality.
Yet this inauthenticity is also reversible, in that if the aim of the Leeds
Mercury lampoon is to reveal Lister as a mimic: in her gender, in her
marriage and crucially, in her politics, it also reveals her as compellingly
unique. In her appropriation of masculinity, which is reinscribed in the
wedding notice as a parody, Lister’s gender has entered a field of play
that reveals the performative nature of all genders, one that ultimately
places, as Butler argues, ‘heterosexuality […] at risk’.63 Furthermore,
parodies can only work if the original has made enough of an imprint on
the social map—as in Henry Fielding’s parody of Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela (1740)—so that the very fact of being lampooned in this way
signals, particularly in the case of Lister, a profound originality.
Lister herself appears relatively unfazed by the parody, taking it
‘with mere amusement’.64 She will experience other jibes, as when she
is invited to an all-male dinner for the ‘blues’ or Tories by her oppo-
nents in May 1835.65 Then in March 1836, she hears rumours of
Mr. Christopher Rawson, her main rival in the coal-mining industry, hav-
ing ‘set the people on, & treated them to the rum-tea-drinking. The tea-
drinking last monday […] & the people burnt A- & me in effigy […]
Strange piece of business on the part of Mr. Rawson’.66 As with the mar-
riage notice, being burnt in effigy is a political attack, yet once again it
is these politicised gestures that make the marriage legible, for all to see.
They are a kind of striptease or laying bare of what polite society refuses
to name, inadvertently authenticating the ‘copy’ while also creating a

form of monstrous visibility. As with the giant and the giantess, Lister
and Miss Walker are now on public display, their perverse liaison meto-
nymically signaling their political transgression.
Lister also becomes more of a public figure politically precisely as
she is negotiating the complex property settlements with Miss Walker
and her relatives. Miss Walker’s injection of cash enables Lister to have
a stronger political and business profile, which in turn highlights her
anomalous gender presentation and sexual orientation. However, as
Liddington argues, the repeated attacks against landowners during these
years also meant they had to put up a united front, which gave Lister
a certain leverage among her Tory peers.67 To an important degree,
Lister’s ‘marriage’ to Miss Walker gave her what she needed: increased
business opportunities, local political influence and power, and eventu-
ally the money to go abroad with her wife. In this sense, Lister achieved
a political and social belonging that had eluded her in her younger years.
Yet the marriage also never really begins; rather it remains in a perpet-
ual state of negotiation. Miss Walker appears simultaneously terrified
of being ‘married’ to Lister, and of Lister leaving her. As late as March
1836, Lister writes: ‘[Miss Walker] had been fearing I should leave her
& be tired of her etc.’.68 And the day before the final signing of the will:
‘long talk – A- thought it her duty to leave me—explanation – said I
could not stand this – she must make up her mind and stick to it. She
should have no difficulty in leaving me, but I thought her very foolish.
The fact is, as I told her, she did not like signing her will’.69 The will, a
source of anxiety in its own right, is also in a metonymical relation to the
marriage itself. It both makes and displaces its centre from sexual rela-
tions to contractual ones. Furthermore, the signing of the will on 9 May
1836 seems to have signaled the end of the sexual relationship. Lister,
who was meticulous in recording her sexual acts, intermittently begins
entering the phrase ‘no kiss’ as early as 30 May 1834. By March 1836,
it is the only entry she makes referring to sexual activity, or lack thereof.
The marriage, perhaps in another aping of heterosexuality, has become
non-sexual by the time it attains its most official status.
In fact, the wrangling over the publication of the will and the manage-
ment of Miss Walker’s estate continued on until 1839, just before Lister
and Miss Walker finally set sail for Moscow. Lister then died unexpect-
edly on 22 September 1840, having been bitten by a fever-carrying tick
in Western Georgia.70 It would take Miss Walker six months to bring the
200 C. Roulston
body home, and within two years she would succumb to her bouts of
mental instability and be committed to an asylum run by Dr. Belcombe.
It remains ironic that Lister’s ongoing attempts to create a marriage that
was as official as possible—from the symbolic exchange of rings to the
signing of the will—contributed significantly to her wife’s mental break-
down. Shibden Hall became Miss Walker’s closet upon her return from
Russia, a home/prison where she locked herself in, alongside Lister’s
volumes of diaries, which were hidden behind a set of panels, keeping
the secret of the ‘real’ marriage. Eventually, according to Liddington:
‘Assisted by the local constable, who had to take one locked door off its
hinges, Ann was taken to Dr. Belcombe’s private asylum near York’.71 In
1845, Ann Walker was returned to Shibden Hall, and later transferred to
Cliff-Hill, her original estate.72 She died ‘much impoverished’73 in 1854.
While the ending of this marriage verges on the Gothic, it also high-
lights the complexity of negotiating the space between the legitimate
and the illegitimate. The Lister-Walker marriage shows how hegemonic
discourses perform the work of exclusion in multiple and overlapping
ways. Its fascination lies in its permanent incompleteness and its constant
struggle to balance the visible and the hidden, and the legible and the
closet. Lister repeatedly occupies both positions in a manner that ensures
a kind of non-resolution to the marital narrative. Yet marriage continues
to be the defining model for the articulation of both desire and gender.
Lister cannot imagine herself, and more specifically, articulate her differ-
ence, without it. In contrast, Miss Walker fails to mimic it enough; she
remains trapped in a realm of psychic incoherence. While the analysis of
heterosexual marriage in the long eighteenth century reveals the pow-
erful workings of separate spheres and fixed gender roles, a considera-
tion of ex-centric marital relations—of marriages that both are and are
not marriages—helps to show the hegemonic effects of the institution
beyond its normative heterosexual boundaries.
Notes
1. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in
Victorian England (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2007), 21.
2. Susan Lanser, ‘Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts’,
Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.2 (1998–1999): 181.
3. Marcus, Between Women, 27.
4. Ibid., 27.
5. Although Sharon Marcus bases her theory of elasticity on Barthes, this
also resonates with Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘cultural hegemony’,
where civil society works to regulate and incorporate normative values
through ‘hegemony and consent as the necessary form of the concrete
historical bloc’. Antonio Gramsci, A Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings
1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988),
195.
6. Anne Lister Papers, West Yorkshire Archive Service, SH:7/ML/E/8
Journal volume from 20 June 1824 to 31 July 1825, 143.
7. Anne Lister Papers, SH:7/ML/A/14, 17 August 1810.
8. Eliza Raine, Halifax, to Anne Lister, York, 5 July 1812, CDA. SH:7/
ML/A/42. Quoted in Catherine A. Euler, ‘Moving Between Worlds:
Gender, Class, Politics, Sexuality and Women’s Networks in the Diaries
of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax, Yorkshire, 1830–1840’, D.Phil,
University of York, UK (May 1995).
9. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New
York and London: Routledge, 1993), 224.
10. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 232.
11. Ibid., 226.
12. The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, ed. Helena Whitbread (London:
Virago Press, 2010), 29 June 1819, 106.
13. Secret Diaries, 29 June 1819, 106.
14. Ibid., 26 September 1819, 106.
15. Susan Lanser, ‘Singular Politics: The Rise of the British Nation and the
Production of the Old Maid’, in Singlewomen in the European Past,
1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 304.
16. Secret Diaries, 15 December 1822, 251.
17. Ibid., 2 June 1818, 56.
18. Ibid., 2 June 1818, 56.
19. Miss Lister of Shibden Hall: Selected Letters 1800–1840, ed. Muriel M.
Green (Lewes: The Book Guild Ltd., 1992), 87.
20. Ibid., 87.
21. Secret Diaries, 15 August 1816, 2.
22. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.
23. Love, Feeling Backward, 4.
24. See Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the
Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984),
110–113.
25. Secret Diaries, 27 July 1819, 109.
202 C. Roulston
26. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]

(Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1985), 77.
27. Secret Diaries, 18 November 1819, 120.
28. Ibid., 31 August 1818, 69.
29. Euler, 157.
30. Secret Diaries, 13 April 1820, 137.
31. Madhavi Menon, Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean
Literature and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 3.
32. Secret Diaries, 7 June 1820, 145.
33. Ibid., 18 November 1819, 119–120.
34. Ibid., 17 February 1820, 132.
35. Ibid., 4 April 1820, 135.
36. William Blackstone, ‘Of Husband and Wife’, in Commentaries on the Laws
of England (1765–1769). http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/blackstone/
bla-115.htm.
37. Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife (New York: HarperCollins, 2001),
188.
38. Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1832), known
as the Ladies of Llangollen, fled from Ireland in 1778 in order to set
up house together in Llangollen, Wales, and Emily Faithfull had two
long-term relationships with Kate Pattison (1869–1883) and Charlotte
Robinson (1884–1895) respectively. Both are examples of publicly recog-
nised female partnerships.
39. Lanser, ‘Befriending the Body’, 190.
40. Ibid., 191.
41. See Jill Liddington, Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority: The
Anne Lister Diaires and Other Writings, 1833–1836 (London: Rivers
Oram Press, 1998), 244–245.
42. Female Fortune, 17 August 1832, 61.
43. Ibid., 27 September 1832, 62.
44. Ibid., 27 September 1832, 62.
45. Ibid., 29 September 1832, 63.
46. Ibid., letter from Ann Walker, 12 November 1832, 67.
47. Ibid., 67.
48. Ibid., 6 December 1832, 67–68.
49. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, trans. R. Farquharson Sharp and Eleanor
Marx-Aveling (London: Dent, 1911), 9.
50. Liddington, Female Fortune, 66.
51. Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (London and Cambridge:
Macmillan and Co., 1866), 48.
53. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in The Lesbian

and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and
David Halperin (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 312.
54. Hughes, Early Life of Miss Anne Lister, 25.
55. Secret Diaries, 176.
56. Female Fortune, 14 December 1832, 69.
57. Ibid., 27 February 1832, 95.
58. Ibid., 10 February 1834, 92.
59. Yalom, History of the Wife, 178.
61. Ibid., 143.
62. Liddington argues that rather than Lister and Miss Walker being har-
assed on the basis of their lesbian sexuality, ‘lesbian sexuality was being
deployed symbolically to persuade [Lister and Miss Walker] to curtail
their political activity’ (Female Fortune, note 12, 273, italics in original).
63. Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, 314.
64. Female Fortune, 10 January 1835, 143.
65. Ibid., 9 May 1835, 173.
66. Ibid., 27 March 1836, 221.
67. See Liddington, Female Fortune, 167.
68. Ibid., 10 March 1836, 211.
69. Ibid., 8 May 1836, 233–234.
70. See Liddington, Female Fortune, 237.
71. Ibid., 238.
72. Ibid., 239.
73. Ibid., 239.
Index
A Anonymously authored print,

Adultery, 5, 8, 10, 11, 17, 18, 35, 41, Scotch Wedding, 142
48, 77, 78, 111, 131, 190, 191 Anti-Pamela, 97
Adultery plot, 8 A Racket at a Rout or, Billingsgate
Advice columns, 5, 10, 13, 111 Removed to the West, 149
Agg v Davies, 31, 40 Austen, Jane, 15, 19, 126, 141, 142, 155
Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon, 13, Austin, J.L., 184, 190
133–135, 150, 152, 154 Autobiography, 11, 61–63, 154
Alexander 4th Duke of Gordon with his
Family, 139, 141, 143, 146
Allan, David, 140, 154 B
Alternative history, 9, 18 Bailey, Joanne, 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 16–18,
Alternative paradigms of marriage and 41–63, 109, 125, 136, 152, 153,
sexuality, 14 161, 176, 178
Ancien régime, 12, 65, 66, 68, 80, 85 Ballads, 5, 108
Anecdotes, 5, 185 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 7, 18, 100
Angel in the House, The, 194, 202 Barclay, Katie, 42, 43, 59–62, 155
Anne Lister Diaries, 14, 15, 181–203 Barthes, Roland, 14, 182, 201
Anne of Austria, 71 Batchelor, Jennie, 12, 13, 60, 63, 104,
Annulled marriages, 10–11 107–127
Annulment, 4, 10–11, 22, 23, 30, 31 Beauharnais, Eugène, 148
Annulment of a marriage, 22 Behaviour, 4, 8, 11, 43, 48, 49, 52,
Ann Van Sant, Jessie, 99, 105 54, 57, 58, 100, 113, 121, 122
Anolik, Ruth Bienstock, 162, 163, Belcombe, Mariana, 183, 188, 195
165, 176, 177 Belcombe, Stephen (Dr), 194, 200
Anonymous, 9, 18, 88, 108, 160, 176 Berg, Maxine, 3, 16
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 205

Eighteenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60098-7
206 Index
Bettelheim, Bruno, 73, 84, 87 Charles, Viscount Brome, 144

Binhammer, Katherine, 7, 18 Chartism, 197
Birkhead, Lydia, 47, 59 Christian duty, 104
Blackstone, William, 14, 19, 162, Christian law, 12, 92, 102
175–177, 191, 202 Church Courts, 23, 27, 41, 52
Blair, Magdalene, 131 Cinderella, 82, 85, 88
Bluebeard, 75–80, 81, 84, 88 Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753,
Bluestocking, 12, 92, 105 11, 23, 27, 38
Blyth, formerly Soden, v Blyth, 39 Class, 5, 10, 12, 16, 70, 79, 92, 104,
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 148, 149 137, 181, 182, 185, 186, 191,
Boundaries, 2, 3, 12, 15, 129, 138, 192, 197, 200, 201
153, 194, 200 Clery, E.J., 165, 166, 177
Bourgeois domesticity, 14, 182 Clifford, Lady Anne, 43, 60, 61
Bowzer v Ricketts, 27 Cockburn v Garnault, 28, 39
Breeches in the Fiera Maschereta, The, Coded journals, 14
136–138, 147 Coltman, Viccy, 140, 154
Bridgwater, formerly Hayward, v Commissary Courts, 131
Crutchley, 28, 39 Companionate marriage, 6, 11, 15,
British, 2, 3, 5, 7–9, 12, 16, 18, 60, 66, 77, 99, 121, 161
104, 125, 130, 138, 148, 149, 201 Complex relationship, 9
British narratives, 5 Conduct book, 15, 109, 110, 119,
Brontë, Charlotte, 124 123, 124, 169
Brontë, Patrick, 107, 109, 124 Conduct literature, 5, 119
Broome, Judith, 93, 105 Conflict, 8, 11–14, 16, 41–45, 50, 52,
Burney, Frances, 160, 176 53, 57–59, 84
Butler, Eleanor, 202 Conjugal family, 6
Butler, Judith, 170, 184, 201, 203 Connubial strife, 10
Byron, Glennis, 164, 177 Consanguineal, 6–7, 118, 161, 162,
164, 168–171
Conservative domestic ideology, 13, 123
C Consistory Court, 29, 35
Capitalism, 6, 161 Copeland, Edward, 119, 126
Captain Andrew Robinson Stoney, 111 Correspondence, 8, 11, 34, 42–45,
Career, 4, 135 50, 55, 58, 59, 116, 130, 154
Carlow, Lady, 129 Countess of Strathmore, 108, 111
Carretta, Vincent, 100, 105 Courtauld, George, 43–45, 49, 55, 61–63
Carroll, Heather, 13, 129–156 Courtauld, Ruth, 44, 45, 55
Cavendish, Lady Georgiana, 156 Court cases, 10, 11, 13
Castle of Wolfenbach, The, 160, 163, Court of Arches, 30–31, 34–35
164, 168, 178 Courtship, 2, 5–9, 15, 17, 47, 50, 58,
Cecilia, 37, 176 60, 62, 111, 112, 122, 134, 145,
‘Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de 147, 159, 160, 193, 197
verre’, 85 Courtship narrative, 2, 9
Index 207
Courtship plot, 5 Domestic system, 6

Cowper, Lady Sarah, 43, 49, 60 Donkeyskin, 69
Cox, Jeffrey N., 166, 177 D’Orleans, Élisabeth-Charlotte, 11,
Critical accounts, 4, 6, 9, 161 65, 68
Critical Review, The, 1, 176 Drama, 1, 2, 9, 10, 164, 165, 182
Critical tradition, 4 The duchess with baby Alexander
Cross-channel, 8, 9 (1785–1808), 140
Cruelty, 11, 41, 42, 48, 58, 61, 121, 191 Duchess of Kingston, 125
Cruelty separation, 51 Duchess of Kingston’s bigamy trial,
Cultural forms, 2–4 111, 119
Duke of Bedford, 148, 156
Duke of Bedford’s brother and heir,
D John, 150
Darly, Matthew, 136–139 Duke of Manchester, 144, 155
Darmancour, Pierre Perrault, 67, 85 Duke of Richmond, 142
Darnton, Robert, 68–70, 80, 81, 83, Duke of York, 142
85, 86, 88 Dundas, Henry, 142, 154
Death, 14, 38, 50, 58, 59, 81, 94, 96, Dyck, Van, 134, 153
108, 112, 117, 147, 148, 150, Dynastic, 66, 70, 77, 144
162, 163, 165, 173–175 Dynastic marriage, 11, 12, 66, 82, 84
Deer Stalking in the Highlands, 151 Dystopian/utopian, 12, 14, 92, 93,
Defoe, Daniel, 93 104, 182, 189
DeLaMotte, Eugenia, 162, 177
Desire, 3, 8, 12, 15, 16, 45, 73, 95,
96, 99, 100, 117–120, 160–170, E
172–175, 177, 182, 185, Economic disputes, 45
187–192, 195, 200 Economic independence, 92, 98
Diaries, 10, 11, 14, 22, 182–185, Economics, 6, 7, 10, 12, 16, 44–46,
187–193, 195, 200–203 49, 60, 61, 92, 96, 98, 104, 119,
Diarist, 14 120, 122, 124, 130, 134, 148,
DiPlacidi, Jenny, 1–19, 126, 159–179 162–164, 169, 172, 175, 185, 190
Discourse, 7, 10, 12, 14, 16, 60, 63, Egalitarian, 6, 17
102, 118, 119, 123, 124, 181, Eger, Elizabeth, 3, 16
183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 194–197 Eighteenth-century art, 10
Discourse Concerning the Causes and Eighteenth-century novel, 4, 5, 6, 8,
Effects of Corpulency, 146, 156 118, 160
Disinterested love, 15 Eighteenth-century periodicals, 10, 109
Divorce, 4, 10, 11, 18, 22, 36, 37, 39, Eighteenth-century representations, 10
41, 42, 53, 110, 131, 152, 191 Eighteenth-century society, 2, 4, 5, 171
Divorce a mensâ et thoro, 35, 36 Eighteenth-century studies, 2–4, 8,
Doig, Kathleen Hardesty, 3, 16, 18 151, 200
A Doll’s House, 194, 202 Eighteenth-century women’s maga-
Domestic ideology, 10, 177 zines, 12, 108, 110
208 Index
Élite by birth, 12, 81 Family sphere, 11

Élite by worth, 12, 81 Family structure, 4, 7, 165, 174
Ellis, Kate Ferguson, 162, 174, 177, 179 Father, 14, 26–28, 30–35, 45–47,
Ellis, Markman, 3, 16, 123 53–59, 67, 81, 82, 93, 95, 97,
End of marriage, 4 98, 107, 113, 115, 116, 131,
England, 3, 5, 6, 8, 13, 16–18, 26, 134, 151, 161–164, 166, 167,
32, 38–40, 44, 45, 51, 60–62, 173–178
92, 99, 105, 121, 124–126, 131, Female marriage, 14, 181
149, 152, 153, 165, 176, 178, Female Quixote, The, 96
191, 200, 202 Female victimization, 14
Epistolary, 9 Feminist, 12, 14, 170, 176, 177
Essays, 2–5, 9, 10, 13, 16, 107, 108, Fergus, Jan, 118, 126
110, 111, 177 Fictional narratives, 13, 111
Euler, Catherine A., 189, 201 Fielding, Henry, 18, 198
European novels, 5 Fielding, Sarah, 92, 95, 96
Evans, Tanya, 108, 125 Financial interest, 15
Ewing, falsely called Wheatley, v Flint, Christopher, 6, 10, 17, 108,
Wheatley, 39 124, 159, 176
Ewing v Wheatley, 29, 39 4th Duke of Richmond, 150
Ex-centric marital relations, 15, 200 Fowler, James, 11, 65–89
Exchanges, 3, 9, 16, 18, 110, 169, Francis, the 5th Duke
170, 172–174 of Bedford, 145
Exogamic, 163, 164, 170, 174 Frank, Marcie, 166, 177
Experiences, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 45, Frankland v Nicholson, 40
46, 57, 68, 80, 101, 112, 114, French, 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18, 68, 69,
122, 123, 152, 162, 164, 168, 73, 80, 85, 86, 88, 124, 148,
175, 198 153, 155
French literature, 10, 66
F
Failed-marriage, 8, 18 G
Fairies, The, 68, 71, 75, 82, 83 Gender, 9, 12–15, 17, 41, 75, 78,
Fairy tales, 11, 65, 84–86 85, 87, 88, 92, 104, 109, 127,
Faithfull, Emily, 191, 202 129, 131, 135, 138, 141, 154,
Family, 2–8, 10–12, 14, 16, 17, 31, 160, 161, 182–187, 190–193,
35, 37, 38, 41–46, 50–54, 58–63, 198–203
66, 71, 75, 80, 82, 88, 94, 95, Gender normativity, 13
97–99, 101, 103, 105, 108, 114, Genres, 12, 13, 15, 108, 110–112,
115, 118, 120, 124, 127, 130, 119, 124
131, 134–136, 139–142, 144, George, Marquis of Huntly, later 5th
150–152, 154–156, 159, 161, Duke of Gordon (1770–1836),
162, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 140, 151
174, 176–178, 184–186
Index 209
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, History of prose fiction, 6, 159

131, 145 History of the Countess of Dellwyn,
Georgina (1781–1853), 140, 145– The, 96
151, 156 History of the family, 6, 61, 159
Gheeraert, Tony, 79, 80, 82, 85, 87 Hodgkinson v Wilkie, 27
Gillray, James, 145–147 Holcombe, Lee, 2
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 194 Holland, William, 155
Gord-ian Knot still Untied or The Household relationships, 6
Disapointed Dido still in Despair,
The, 147
Gordon-Knot,-or-the Bonny-Duchess I
hunting the Bedfordshire Bull, Ibsen, Henrik, 194, 202
The, 145, 146 Idealized representation, 14
Gordon, Madelina (c. 1772–1847), Illegitimate, 16, 22, 27, 34, 79, 97,
140, 141, 146, 156 141, 191, 197, 200
Gordon, Pryse Lockhart, 140 Imprisonment, 14, 162, 168, 175
Gossip, 13, 130, 145 Incest, 4, 7, 14, 18, 160–171,
Gothic, 14, 159–172, 174–179, 200 173–175, 177–179
Gothic novels, 10, 159, 163, 177 Incestuous relationships, 14, 160–162
Gowing, Laura, 109, 125 Infidelity, 4, 36, 41, 58, 78, 92, 121,
Gramsci, Antonio, 201 122
Grant, Archibald (Sir), 42, 45, 48, 53, Institution, 3, 12, 15, 92, 93, 95,
60 98–100, 102–104, 182, 184,
Green, Katherine Sobba, 6, 17 187, 188, 191, 196, 200
Grisélidis, 86, 88 Institutional structures, 14, 182
Institution of marriage, 10, 99, 100,
103, 121, 182
H Integrity, 15, 93, 95
Hager, Kelly, 8, 18 Interaction, 13, 111, 112, 123
Hardwick, Julie, 66, 75, 79, 85, 87 Interactive format, 12, 110
Hardwicke’s 1753 Marriage Act, 7, Interdisciplinary approach, 2, 3, 7, 8,
17 152
Harriott M, 110 Intergenerational family, 16, 42, 44,
Hayes v Watts, 30, 40 53, 58
Haywood, Eliza, 97 Invalidated marriage, 24
Hegemonic, 15, 181, 187, 198, 200 Irigaray, Luce, 170, 178
Heteronormative conventions, 14
Heterosexual framework, 14, 184
Heterosexuality, 183–186, 195, 198, J
199 Jane, Duchess of Gordon, 13, 129,
Heterosexual marriage, 14, 15, 181, 131, 132, 137, 144, 151, 152
184, 187, 188, 194, 197, 200 Jansenism, 83, 84, 88
High Court of Delegates, 35 Johnston v Parker, 30
210 Index
Johnston v Parker, falsely called Legal separation, 131

Johnston, 40 Legislation, 11, 22, 23
John, 6th Duke of Bedford, 156 Legitimate, 16, 79, 97, 122, 185, 187,
Jones, falsely called Robinson, v 193, 200
Robinson, 40 Le Maître Chat, 78, 80, 85
Josephine, Empress, 148 ‘Le Maître chat ou le chat botté’, 85
Lennox, Charles (Colonel), 142, 146
Lennox, Charlotte, 96, 109, 139, 150
K Leopold I of Lorraine, 65
Kauffman, Angelica, 132–135, 137, ‘Le Petit Chaperon rouge’, 85
138, 149, 153 ‘Le Petit Poucet’, 85
Kelly, Gary, 100, 104, 105 Lesbian, 14, 194–196, 198, 203
King George, 153 Lesbian marriage, 196
King, Steve, 50, 62 Lesbian relationships, 14
Kinship, 6–8, 14, 17, 18, 42, 60, 118, Lesbian sexuality, 203
159, 161, 164, 168, 169, 171, ‘Les Fées’, 80, 85
172, 175–178, 182 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 163, 169, 170,
Kinship network, 11 173, 174, 177, 178
Klekar, Cynthia, 169, 178 Lewis, Ann, 3, 16
Liddington, Jill, 191–194, 198–200,
202, 203
L Linear, 6, 119, 189
‘La Barbe bleue’, 76, 80, 85 Lister, Anne, 14, 15, 181–203
‘La Belle au bois dormant’, 85 Literary representations, 11, 15, 169
Ladies of Llangollen, 191, 202 Long eighteenth century, 1–8, 10, 14,
Lady Barbara Montagu, 92 15–18, 37, 41, 51, 58, 152, 161,
Lady’s Magazine, 10, 12, 13, 18, 162, 176, 181, 191, 200
60, 107–117, 119, 120, 122, Lord Bute, 129
125–127 Lord Kames, Henry Home, 152
Lady’s Monthly Museum, 107, 109, 124 Lord Morpeth, 156
Lady’s Museum, 109 Louisa (1776–1850), 55–58, 63, 94,
Lampoons, 14, 147, 198 116, 126, 129, 140, 144, 146,
Landowner, 14, 182, 199 151
Landseer, Edwin, 151 Louis XIV, 11, 65, 71, 86
Lanser, Susan (1774–1828), 140, 144, Love, Heather, 86, 187, 201
147, 151, 155, 156, 182, 191, Loveless marriage, 95, 99
192, 200–202
Law of nullity, 22, 24, 31, 33
Laws, 2–4, 6–8, 10–12, 16, 18, 19, M
21–24, 25–28, 31, 36, 37, 38, Macey, J. David, 92, 105
41, 42, 46, 75, 92, 93, 102, 104, Maclean, Sibbella, 186
122, 131, 156, 162, 171, 175, Magazines, 13, 60, 63, 107–110, 112–
176, 178, 191, 202 114, 116, 118, 119, 122–124
Lawton, Charles, 188–190, 192, 195 Major, Emma, 100
Index 211
Malay, Jessica, 43, 60 Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, 191

Marcus, Sharon, 181, 186, 195, 200, Maurer, Shawn Lisa, 109, 125
201 Mauss, Marcel, 169, 178
Mariage d’amour, 11, 12, 66, 67, 70, Maxwell, William (Sir), 131, 134, 138,
80, 82, 84, 87 142, 152, 154
Marie-Antoinette, 73, 87 McCreery, Cindy, 130, 152, 153
Marital bliss, 4 McGonegal, Julie, 93, 101, 105
Marital breakdown, 13, 41, 52, 57, Meaning, 12, 13, 75, 84–86, 110–
111, 112 112, 119, 122, 176, 188, 196
Marital conflict, 11, 12, 16, 42–45, Meddowcroft v Gregory, 29, 39
50, 52, 57–59 Media, 9, 10, 69, 130, 141, 144, 145,
Marital disrespect, 44, 48–50 156
Marital experiences, 3–5, 7, 9, 11 Mediation, 12, 41, 52
Marital power balance, 7 Medlin, Dorothy, 3, 16, 18
Marital practices, 9 Mellor, Anne K., 164, 177
Marital scandal, 10, 13, 108, 111 Memoirs of a Widow, 9, 18
Marital strife, 111 Menon, Madhavi, 189, 202
Marriage, 1–18, 21–39, 41–51, 55, Mésalliance, 75, 79, 80, 87
57–60, 62, 63, 65–67, 70–73, Middling classes, 5, 11–12
75–80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 92–105, Millenium Hall, 12, 91–93, 95,
107–113, 117–125, 127, 130, 100–105
131, 134–136, 138, 139, 141– Miss Walker, 191–200, 203
148, 151–155, 159–165, 167– Modleski, Tania, 161, 176
172, 174–176, 178, 181–200 Moll Flanders, 93
Marriage As Queer Negation, Montagu, Elizabeth, 105
187–191 Montagu, Lady Jane, 151
Marriage ceremony, 4, 5, 9, 10, 120, Moore, Wendy, 108, 125
166, 184 Moral, 1, 2, 11, 12, 34, 36, 67,
Marriage country, 1 70–78, 80–82, 84, 87, 96, 100,
Marriage is ‘legal prostitution’, 188 104, 105, 110, 112, 115, 122,
Marriage laws, 3, 4, 7, 16, 18, 37, 38, 131 141, 194
Marriage manual, 15 More, Anne, 51
Marriage plot, 8, 18, 93, 159 Mother Goose, 68
Marriage records, 11 Mysterious Mother, The, 160, 163,
Married life, 2, 4, 10, 12, 14, 29, 34, 164, 174, 177
109, 110, 130, 131, 136, 138,
151, 181
Mason, Simon, 43, 44, 46, 48, 53, 54, N
60–62 Narrative conclusion, 3
Masquerade, The, 1, 2, 4, 16 National ideals, 13
Master Cat, The, 80, 82 Nationality, 16, 143
Mathilda, 163–165, 173–175, 177, 179 Network, 11, 53, 201
Matrimonial barrier, 4
212 Index
New Lady’s Magazine, 109–114, 116, Perrault, Charles, 11, 12, 65–71, 75,
117, 119, 122, 125–127 77–88
Nicene Creed, 175, 179 Perry, Ruth, 2, 7, 8, 18, 108, 118,
Nonconformity, 16 124, 126, 161, 176
Normative, 14, 15, 110, 184, 185, Persuasion, 142
187, 191, 192, 195, 200, 201 Petticoat at the Fieri Maschereta, The,
Novel, 5–9, 12, 15, 17, 18, 91–95, 137
99–101, 104, 108, 119, 124, 126, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, 11, 65
159–164, 168, 176, 177, 179 Pitt, William, the Younger, 138, 142,
Novelists, 1, 2 154
Novel of adultery, 8 Pitts, Vincent J., 65, 84
Nuclear families, 6 Poems, 5, 13, 111, 119, 120, 126,
194
Pohl, Nicole, 92, 104
O Pointon, Marcia, 130, 135, 152–155
O’Day, Rosemary, 42, 53, 60, 62 Pollak, Ellen, 2, 7, 18, 171, 179
Osborn v Goldham, 30, 40 Ponsonby, Sarah, 202
Overton, Bill, 5, 17 Pornography, 169, 178
Portraiture, 9, 13, 130, 131, 134,
135, 138, 151–153
P Potts, Anna, 42, 45, 60
Painted portraiture, 13, 130, 151 Pouget v Tomkins, 29, 39
Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, 5, 10, Power, 7, 14, 27, 43, 49, 55, 58–60,
12, 198 62, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 103, 104,
Paradigms of marriage, 14, 15 117, 122, 138, 155, 160, 161,
Parenting, 4, 60, 62, 152 163–165, 171, 175, 190, 192, 199
Parody, 14, 174, 198 Pride and prejudice, 15, 19, 141, 155
Parsons, Eliza, 160, 163, 168, 171, Prince of Wales (later, George IV,
172, 178 1762–1830), 149
Patmore, Coventry, 194, 202 Probert, Rebecca, 3, 7, 10, 11, 16, 18,
Patriarchal family, 6, 41, 42, 49, 136, 21–40, 178
140, 141, 161, 165, 170, 173, Public and private, 14, 153
174, 191 Punter, David, 164, 177, 179
Pattison, Kate, 202
Pearson, Jacqueline, 119, 126
Peau d’Âne, 69 Q
Pedagogy, 169, 178 Queen Charlotte, 153
Pendant portraits, 13, 134, 136–138
Perform, 9, 14, 28, 95, 124, 140,
182–184, 190, 195, 200 R
Performance, 9, 14, 168, 184 Radcliffe, Ann, 161, 176
Periodicals, 5, 10, 12, 107–109, 111, Radical reassessment, 7, 178
113, 115, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127 Raine, Eliza, 183, 189, 195, 201
Index 213
Rawson, Christopher, 198 Scotland, 13, 59, 131, 133, 135, 138,
Real-life marital scandals, 13, 111 151, 154, 155
Red Riding Hood, 73–75, 78, 81, 83, Scottish law, 131
84, 87 Scott, Sarah, 12, 91, 92, 102, 104, 105
Religious, 7, 12, 44, 50–52, 58, 71, Sentimental marital ideal, 13, 109, 123
100, 175 Sentimental novel, 15, 93, 127
Religious duty, 12, 100, 102 Separation, 4, 11, 36, 42, 46, 48, 49,
Representations, 1–5, 7–11, 13–16, 51–58, 60, 131, 141, 145, 152
53, 55, 93, 112, 123, 130, 131, 1753 Act, 17, 23–27
135, 136, 138, 141, 142, 149, Sexuality, 3, 6, 10, 14, 16, 93,
151, 155, 159, 161–165, 169, 160–164, 166, 167, 174, 175,
171, 173, 175, 178, 181 178, 182, 184, 187, 194, 198,
Retford, Kate, 130, 152 201, 203
Review, 1, 2, 16–18, 38, 60, 176, 178 Sexual passion, 100
Richardson, Samuel, 5, 198 Sexual threats, 168
‘Riquet à la Houppe’, 85 Shackleton, Elizabeth, 43
Riquet with the Tuft, 85 Shaw, John, 50, 62
Rise of the novel, 4, 8, 17, 159 Shelley, Mary, 163, 173, 177, 179
Robinson, Charlotte, 202 Shevelow, Kathryn, 109, 123, 125
Romance, 9, 15, 176–178, 182, 191, Short, Thomas, 146, 156
192 Simple, David, 95
Romantic marriage, 12 Sinclair, Robert (Sir), 141
Roulston, Chris, 3, 8, 14–16, 18, Sleeping Beauty (tale), 66, 70–73,
99, 105, 108, 110, 124, 125, 75–77, 81
181–203 Smith v Huson, 31, 40
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 172 Smith, W.A., 139, 154
Rowlandson, Thomas, 145 Social historians, 2, 6, 68, 161, 162, 168
Roxana, 93 Social histories, 10, 11
Rubin, Gayle, 170, 178 Social practices, 3, 15, 16
Runia, Robin, 12, 91–105 Social reproduction, 10
Sophocles, 174
Spousal abuse, 4, 111
S Stone, Lawrence, 6, 17, 39, 130, 152,
Sacrifice, 12, 92–98, 100, 102, 103, 161, 176
120, 144 Stuart, Lady Louisa, 129, 141, 151
Same-sex partnerships, 10 Sullivan v Oldacre, 40
Same-sex unions, 111 Sullivan v Sullivan, 33, 40
Satires, 9, 13, 14, 111, 154, 155 Sun King, 65, 79, 86, 88
Satirical prints, 13, 130, 131, 137,
149, 153
Scholarship, 2, 4, 5, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16, T
41, 44, 50, 58, 63, 92, 108–110, Tadmor, Naomi, 6, 17, 42, 60, 161, 176
115, 119, 131, 152, 161, 164 Tanner, Tony, 8, 18
Taylor, Jeremy, 171
214 Index
Texts, 5, 6, 8, 9, 18, 110, 112, 113, 155, 175, 177, 188, 189, 193,
119, 124, 159, 163, 178 195–198
Thackeray, William, 1, 2, 10 Wedlock, 13, 102, 108, 118, 125,
Thomason, Laura E., 6, 17, 95, 105 151, 165, 166, 175
Tom Thumb (tale), 84, 85 Weiss, Deborah, 104, 105
Transgressive sexualities, 14, 175 West, Benjamin, 153
Trollope, Anthony, 197 West, Shearer, 130, 151
Trollope, Frances, 197 Whitbread, Helena, 188, 201
Trollope, Thomas, 197 Widowhood, 4
Troubled unions, 11, 43 Wife, 1, 9, 14, 27–31, 33–36, 43, 44,
Trumbach, Randolph, 6, 17 46–55, 57, 59, 72, 77–79, 88,
93–97, 99, 103, 112–114, 117,
120, 121, 130, 131, 134–137,
U 141, 150, 151, 161, 163–165,
Unions, 2, 5, 9–11, 13, 14, 23, 30, 168, 171–173, 175, 176, 182,
36, 41–45, 51, 53, 58, 100, 103, 184, 189–191, 194, 195, 197,
111, 131, 135, 136, 141, 142, 199, 200, 202, 203
145, 148, 166, 171–175, 185, Wigstead, Henry, 155
186, 196, 197 Wilkinson, Elizabeth, 50, 62
Usurpation, 79, 115, 159, 168, 169 William Blackstone’s Commentaries
Utopianism, 92 on the Laws of England, 191
Williams, Charles, 147–149
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 18, 125–126,
V 188, 202
Vanity Fair, 1, 4 Wraxall, Nathaniel, 138, 141, 144,
Vickery, Amanda, 60, 108, 136, 153 153, 155
Victorian period, 8 Wright, Thomas, 43, 47–49, 51, 53,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 54, 59, 61–63
126, 202
Violence, 10, 11, 41, 42, 51, 53, 55,
60–62, 120, 121, 164, 167 Y
Virginity, 9, 74, 75, 171 Yeazell, Ruth, 5, 17
Virtue, 12, 15, 17, 32, 79, 89, 104, Yellow Wallpaper, The, 194
117, 120, 165 Yorkshire, 14, 43, 51, 182, 201
W Z
Walker, Ann (Miss), 14, 191, 193, Zachary, 51, 62
198, 200, 202 Zionkowski, Linda, 169, 178
Wallace, Diana, 162, 176, 177
Walpole, Horace, 160, 163, 177
Watt, Ian, 4, 17
Weddings, 2, 23, 27, 29, 31, 34, 38,
46, 51, 59, 117, 134, 142–144,

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After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth Century

ISBN 978-3-319-60097-0 ISBN 978-3-319-60098-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944584

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth Century: Introduction 1

Undoing the Marriage: The Resort to Annulment 21

Bearing Grudges: Marital Conflict and the Intergenerational

Handsome, Gallant, Gentle, Rich: Before and After Marriage

‘Knights of Matrimony’, Christian Duty and Millenium Hall 91

‘Be but a Little Deaf and Blind … and Happiness You’ll

The Making and Breaking of Wedlock: Visualising Jane,

Rearticulating the Economics of Exchange: Incest and After

Marriage and its Queer Identifications in the Anne Lister

About the Editors

Jenny DiPlacidi is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies and

Karl Leydecker is Professor of German and Comparative Literature and

Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the

Rebecca Probert is Professor of Law at the University of Exeter. Her

The Making and Breaking of Wedlock: Visualising Jane, Duchess

Fig. 8 Charles Williams, The Gord-ian Knot still untied

William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–1848).

The Critical Review XXVIII (1769)1

The contradiction between Thackeray’s perception of the treatment of

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Thackeray’s depiction of writers who conclude their narratives with

is extensive. Important recent reexaminations of marital experiences and

It is with such oscillations in experiences and representations that the

Conventional Accounts of Marriage

The traditional view encapsulated in Vanity Fair, that the eighteenth-

in Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–

incestuous relations contributed to the cultural work of regulating desire

Enriching the Conversation on ‘After Marriage’

The anonymously authored serial fiction ‘Memoirs of a Widow’ provides

Evaluating further the borders between social, cultural and literary

particularly in the wake of The Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753,

articles on marriage that include historical and anthropological essays,

analysis of heterosexual marriage in the long eighteenth century reveals

20. Joanne Bailey, review of Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship

According to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the presiding

© The Author(s) 2018 21

all Persons to be Married, as the Legal Christian Forms of their Country

The Law of Nullity

register of marriages. Less dramatically, the law played a preventative role

More significant, however—certainly in the number of cases to rely

be preceded by the calling of the banns or the obtaining of a licence, and

The Lawlessness of Non-Compliance

reasonably assiduous in ensuring that even the directory requirements

Nonetheless, there were sufficient failures to comply with the law to

The Lawlessness of the Invalidated Marriage

Similarly, if less dramatically, in Pouget v Tomkins (1812),37 it would

The Lawlessness of Invoking the Law

The courts were particularly averse to claims of nullity brought by a

no consent had been given, the judge construed it as evidence of a con-

in 1819 simply confirmed Scott’s decision, holding that the explanation

lawlessness lends itself to the demands of narrative more easily than

28. The ecclesiastical courts had more or less ceased to punish cohabiting

Conflict after marriage was a common problem in the long eighteenth

© The Author(s) 2018 41

insights into unhappy marriages such as Lady Sarah Cowper’s diary

Causes of Marital Conflict

Fig. 8 Charles Williams, The Gord-ian Knot still untied

Conventional Accounts of Marriage

Enriching the Conversation on ‘After Marriage’

20. Joanne Bailey, review of Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship

The Law of Nullity

The Lawlessness of Non-Compliance

The Lawlessness of the Invalidated Marriage

The Lawlessness of Invoking the Law

28. The ecclesiastical courts had more or less ceased to punish cohabiting

Causes of Marital Conflict

38. Mason, Narrative, 95.

67. Louisa Courtauld to her brother Samuel Courtauld 1813, Courtauld,

‘Le Maître Chat’ and ‘Les Fées’,