The Victorians in love

The Victorians: prudes and hypocrites?

The Victorian period is often associated with doctrines of sexual self-restraint and an accompanying hypocrisy. It is often said that they were so prudish that they covered piano legs with pantaloons and spoke of white meat rather than chicken breast. In their hypocrisy they ignored the dark reality - the prevalence of prostitution was high and the practice of incest among the urban and rural poor

The late-Victorian and Edwardian periods saw attacks on Victorian hypocrisy and repression - for example in  Hardy’s Tess of the D'urbervilles and H. G. Wells’s daring Ann Veronica.

There is certainly considerable literary evidence for Victorian prudishness. In Our Mutual Friend Dickens mocked the figure of Mr Podsnap, who did not wish a book to contain anything that ‘might bring a blush to the cheek of a young person’. This suggests that novelists, perhaps Dickens in particular,  felt frustrated at the limitations imposed by the conventions of propriety.

The Victorian novel can leave key questions unanswered. Is the marriage of Dorothea and Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch consummated? Is Hardy's Tess raped or seduced? The reader is led to infer that Nancy in Oliver Twist is a prostitute, but it is not made explicit. No British novel of the period has the frankness of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856).

However, this prudishness can be exaggerated. If the Victorians put pantaloons on piano legs it was probably to protect the furniture! British Victorians mocked the prudery of  Americans because they talked of ‘dark’ and ‘white’ chicken and called cockerels roosters. Pruder and censoriousness was personified in the much-mocked person of ‘Mrs Grundy’ - seen below confronted by Oscar Wilde who is showing her his Picture of Dorian Gray. By the end of the century a reaction had set in against the sexual reticence of the high Victorian period. 

And even at the height of so-called Victorian prudery, marital sex was praised and the 'unnatural' celibacy of Roman Catholic and some Tractarian clergy was condemned.

The ideology of marriage

Like ourselves, the Victorians usually married for love and expected happiness in marriage, though of course the reality often fell far short of the ideal. Romantic love is one of the chief themes of the Victorian novel, which usually ends with the proposal of marriage. Marriage was seen as always desirable for a woman – perhaps less so for a man. In 1838 Charles Darwin famously contemplated the pros and cons of marriage before he became engaged to Emma Wedgwood.

Emma Darwin, by George Richmond
Public domain

Marriage in practice

Between 85 and 90 per cent of the population married. Civil registration came into being in 1837 but the ages of those marrying were not recorded, and this has presented historians with a problem. The evidence suggests that on average women married between the ages of 24 and 25 and men at a slightly older age. 

The average marriage contracted in the 1850s produced more than five surviving children, and families of ten or more children were common. However, family size decreased from the 1870s. Between 1871 and 1911 there was a steady rise in the mean age of marriage, in the proportion of childless marriages, and in the percentage of those who did not marry at all.

From the 1870s access to artificial forms of birth control was increasingly available. By the 1890s postal retailing of prophylactics was increasing. A variety of sources make covert reference to rubber sheaths and pessaries. George Eliot may have used contraception – Dickens did not and humorously complained about the size of his growing family as though there was nothing he could do about it.

Some evidence suggests that knowledge of contraception was very slight and birth control carried a considerable stigma. In 1877 Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh published the American Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy They were put on trial, and though the case was dropped the scandal lost Besant the custody of her children. However, the trial publicised the book and sales rose.

In 1845 about 7 per cent of births were illegitimate, though the number of pre-marital conceptions was much higher. Evidence suggests that an illegitimate birth was often a disruption of marriage intentions. In villages and small towns in Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Kent and Devon, about 40 per cent of brides in the first half of the nineteenth century were pregnant. The rates were higher in rural than in urban areas.

Who to marry

On the whole people seem to have fallen in love with those from a similar class, often to people they were related to. This was almost inevitable as those were the people they met. Darwin’s marriage to his first cousin was not unusual. As a young curate Henry Edward Manning (the future cardinal) married Caroline Sargent, the daughter of his rector. The ceremony was performed by his brother-in-law, Samuel Wilberforce.

Working-class people often married because they lived in the same street or village, went to the same church or worked in the same place. In 1847 Joseph Arch, the future leader of the Agricultural Workers’ Union, married Mary Ann Mills, a domestic servant. Her father was a carpenter from the neighbouring village. Keir Hardie married Lillie Wilson in June 1879. They were both engaged in temperance work and shared interests were an increasingly common way of meeting.

On rare occasions, middle-class men married working-class women. In 1857 William Morris met Jane Burden at the theatre in Oxford. She was probably a domestic servant, but with parental permission she agreed to become a model for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with whom she later fell in love. She and Morris married in 1859. Their honeymoon was a six-week continental tour.

Jane Morris, photographed in 1865
Public domain

Courtship and marriage

Courtship was ritualized and, at least among middle-class families, closely supervised. Engaged couples wrote letters and gave each other presents. The bride was meant to choose the date of the wedding. Better-off brides devoted a considerable amount of attention to the trousseau. This activity involved all the female members of the family.

After uniform postal rates for the entire United Kingdom were established in 1840, the English Valentine card tradition began in earnest. Decorated papers were folded sheets in quarto size, commonly decorated with embossed borders as well as pictorial scenes. The sheet would be folded and sealed with wax for mailing.

The modern large public wedding is Victorian in derivation. (Earlier weddings were small occasions, involving only close family members.) In spite of the Marriage Act of 1836 most marriages took place in church. A Victorian bride wore a white dress (or grey or lavender if in mourning), with orange blossom in her hair. She was attended with bridesmaids. The wedding photograph came in in the 1850s.

The consummation of the marriage could be traumatic. Among well brought up young people there was considerable fear and ignorance of sex that could be the cause of great unhappiness. In 1844  Charles Kingsley wrote to his fiancée, Fanny Grenfell: 

‘You do not understand how often a man is struck powerless in body and mind on his wedding night.’Quoted Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1985), p. 62.

The couple made the decision to delay the consummation of their marriage for a few weeks, which turned out to be a very sensible one. Their marriage was consummated after five weeks and a child almost immediately conceived.

On the other hand, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert consummated their marriage immediately and the queen's journal shows her delight in the experience. Like Fanny Kingsley, she quickly became pregnant.

On the other hand, the marriage of John Ruskin and Effie Gray was annulled after six years on the grounds of his 'incurable intimacy'. A year later, in 1855, she married the pre-Raphaelite painter, John Everett Millais. He had earlier depicted her in his historical painting, The Order of Release 1746, when he was already probably in love with her.

Effie immortalised in art
Tate Britain
Public domain

The Ruskins' marriage was clearly not typical, but in one sense they followed a middle-class pattern by honeymooning abroad - something made increasingly easy with the development of the railway. They went to Normandy in 1848 immediately after their marriage and a year later they visited Venice. 

The honeymoon enshrined the notion that the newly married couple needed a period of togetherness, which involved the separation from the everyday world and the exclusion of others. Not all couples went abroad. Charles and Catherine Dickens spent their honeymoon in his old childish haunts in north Kent. For those who went abroad, the long period away from home might have been quite stressful and many couples must have felt the need for other company. 

Transgressive relationships

The Ruskins were not the only couple unable to live up to the ideal of monogamous and happy marriage. John Stuart Mill fell in love with a married woman, Harriet Taylor, and was very open about the relationship - perhaps because he felt the couple had nothing to hide. Dickens separated from his wife had an affair with the actress, Ellen Ternan and kept it secret. George Eliot lived for many years with the writer G. H. Lewes, who was unhappily married but unable to divorce his wife. Jane Morris fell in love with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Mary Benson, the wife of the archbishop of Canterbury, had passionate relationships with other women. See here for the extraordinary lives of the whole Benson family.

Conclusion

1. Because of the available evidence, the case-studies of Victorian marriages are slanted to the articulate middle classes, and this might well distort our picture. 
2. These studies show that there was no single model for love and no certain recipe for a happy marriage.
3. Throughout society there were changes towards the end of the period, especially in the trend towards smaller families.