The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain

CHAPTER THREE Marriage

Many early Victorians supposed that they were witnessing a ‘crisis of the family’ that threatened, unless successfully tackled and resolved, to undermine the entire fabric of society and to sweep the nation into turbulent, uncharted, and perilous times of chaos and anarchy. Other social problems might be more visible, more specific, more readily identifiable, more immediately insistent, and apparently more soluble: child labour, women’s underground labour, chimney sweeps’ boys, agricultural gang labour, even massive problems like poor relief, urban sanitation, or illiteracy, all these seemed to fall into that category. But for many the most menacing, because the most insidious, problem of all was what they saw as the disintegration of the family, eating away like a worm at the very foundations of all social order. Disintegration, it was thought, was being produced by the factory system, by large-town living conditions, by irreligion, and by the weakening and destruction of traditional moral and social bonds and restraints on the unbridled and irresponsible indulgence of individual lusts and selfish appetites. Feminine rebellion against the duties and functions of childbearing and home-keeping seemed to be looming; and with the approaching collapse of parental, particularly paternal, authority, the end of the family as the basic unit of education and social training, or socialization, which transmitted all the habits and standards that enabled society to function, seemed to be in sight. Such were the views of Peter Gaskell or Friedrich Engels on the left, Richard Oastler or Michael Sadler on the right, William Greg or James Kay (Shuttleworth) in the centre, and they came to form part of standard educated middle-class opinion at the time, in varying degrees of intensity and alarm.

The family, plainly, did not collapse. It persisted as an institution cherished, tolerated, or accepted by the vast majority in all classes of society, certainly into the final quarter of the twentieth century. At this point awareness of the prevalence of single-parent ‘families’, of the incidence of divorce, of the large proportion of children with broken-home backgrounds, of the pervasiveness of permissiveness, and of the rebelliousness of teenagers, bid fair to make alarm over the approaching disintegration of the family part of standard educated conservative middle-class opinion in the 1980s. What happened in the intervening 150 years was that the family adapted itself to changing circumstances and functions, in a way which possibly it had always done, although it had never before been called on to adapt so rapidly and so radically. The mutual attraction of the sexes, the desire for companionship in ‘pair-bonded’ arrangements, and the wish to have children for their own sake and not merely as an unfortunate, and now dispensable, by-product of copulation, are probably sufficient to ensure that the family will continue to adapt, adjust, and survive. Well-meaning or interfering people were not lacking, in the nineteenth century, to help the family – meaning the working-class family – on its way to adaptation and survival, and their agency should not be ignored even if it may be doubted whether it was crucial for the purpose in mind. Religion, evangelicalism, education, factory acts, children’s acts, all these undoubtedly had some influence on the ways in which family life and family behaviour changed and developed, and contributed to making the family of 1900 different from the family of 1830. The major determinants of change, however, were the material circumstances of the men and women trying to bring up families, and the social influences of their kin, their neighbours, their workmates, and their inheritance from their own upbringing and ancestry. Well-meaning people, or busybodies, will not be lacking in the 1980s, peddling their recipes for rescuing the family from disaster. The future is quite capable of looking after itself; Victorians, in all classes, looked after themselves, but some classes were more bombarded with advice, instruction, and orders than others.

A multitude of observations, arguments, inferences, and prejudices converged to form the apprehensions of the alarmist early Victorians. There was the ‘virtual castration’ and transvestism of the wife as breadwinner wearing the trousers, noted by Engels as the consequence of the demand of the mills for female workers, and echoed by Ashley (Lord Shaftesbury). Engels in fact derived his view that ‘when women work in factories the most important result is the dissolution of family ties’ from Gaskell and his writings of the early 1830s in support of the campaign to regulate factory working hours and conditions. Gaskell asserted that ‘the chastity of marriage is but little known among them [factory workers]: husband and wife sin equally, and a habitual indifference to sexual rights is generated which adds one other item to the destruction of domestic habits’, the other items including, one imagines, the ‘parental cruelty, filial disobedience, neglect of conjugal rights, absence of maternal love, destruction of brotherly and sisterly affection’ which he listed in a slightly later book. Such views were the stock-in-trade of the ‘factory movement’ which aimed at improving factory conditions through legislation, and while they made excellent propaganda for audiences and readerships that had no personal knowledge of factory life, they were not therefore necessarily true or grounded on fact. Closely associated with these views was the variant which held that all female employment outside the home, whether of married or unmarried women, whether in factories or elsewhere, made women into bad housewives and mothers because it deprived them of domestic training or inclination, and hence weakened the family. From the other end of the generational telescope it was held that family ties and parental discipline were being eroded by the premature, and immature, financial independence of youths who could earn a living wage from the age of fourteen or fifteen in the mills. Millgirls were further spoiled for future family life and motherhood, it was supposed, by the presumed bawdy licentiousness of their working lives, constant deflowerings in the carding rooms or lunch breaks, as it were. Sexual harassment by overlookers or foremen was widely believed to be common, and Engels thought that ‘the factory owner wields complete power over the persons and charms of the girls working for him’, a belief shared by the French liberal journalist Leon Faucher who visited Manchester in 1844 and solemnly accepted local yarns and pub gossip about the millowners’ seigneurial rights over the bodies of their millgirls. Engels, at least, who had shacked up with his millgirl Mary Burns, ought to have known better; but the pornographic appeal of a slice of brutish capitalist eroticism, even if totally fictitious, was obviously too good to miss.

Mingling with the presumed anti-family influences of female employment, especially factory employment, were apprehensions about the converging pressures of large-town life. Housing conditions, unsavoury courts, rookeries, and cellar dwellings, and overall chronic overcrowding, were denounced throughout the nineteenth century as inimical to domestic family life and as breeding grounds for all manner of vice and unnatural practices, as well as of misery. Where an entire family, husband, wife, and children of all ages and both sexes, lived in one room any notions of modesty and decency were grotesque, and chastity was thought to be an early casualty. Constant murmurings of incest reached the ears of polite society in the reports of slum visitors and parish clergy, the images of brother-and-sister, father-and-daughter relations thinly disguised in references to ‘these breeding places of disease and vice and all manner of abomination’. If incest was at all common or prevalent, which seems most unlikely, its consequences at least must have been massaged away into conventional and respectable forms; the illegitimacy rate, never at all high, was tending to fall from around 7 per cent of all births in the early Victorian years to 4 per cent or less by the close of the century. This must have been in the main the fruits of premarital and extramarital, rather than incestuous, intercourse. Similar goings-on, whatever they may have been, were probably more characteristic, and traditional, in rural areas than in the large towns, where in any case overcrowding was quite as prevalent as in the cities. Nevertheless, promiscuity, whether incestuous or not, was felt to be encouraged by urban housing conditions and to be further stimulated by the pubs, gin palaces, music halls, and other resorts of doubtful reputation which flourished in the larger towns, partly at least as refuges from the inadequacies and unattractiveness of home life. If to all this is added the virtual breakdown of organized religion in the larger towns, of which the more earnest of early Victorians were acutely conscious, then the full force of the supposedly pernicious effects of large-town life upon the institution of the family can be appreciated.

Whether or not any or all of these apprehensions were well grounded, they were the perceptions which induced, or contributed to induce, a whole range of movements, campaigns, moral crusades, religious, educational, and political endeavours, that were intended to reform or correct the material and cultural environment so that, among other objectives, the family might be preserved from the perils which appeared to threaten it. These efforts, very largely but not totally misconceived and misplaced, will be considered more fully in later chapters, as external influences on working-class lives. They were, of course, very much internal influences on the lives of the middle classes, in the sense that they were largely generated by middle-class moralists and social reformers and presumptively reflected what were thought to be already existing habits and conditions within middle-class families. To this extent the content and aims of missionary efforts intended to save the working-class family are most informative about actual middle-class precepts and practices, and most of all perhaps about middle-class fears of the fragility of their own family ideals unless these were protected with constant vigilance by elaborate ramparts of morality, modesty, reticence, sexual segregation, parental discipline and authority, and male dominance. Any self-acknowledgement of such fragility was customarily phrased in terms of the need for barriers of privacy and propriety to protect the middle-class family from contamination by chance contact with vulgar and undesirable people and their corrupting habits, people who might include the raffish aristocracy as well as the great unwashed. The defences may also have been required to protect the middle-class family from the self-destructive potential of the desires and appetites of its own members. The double standard, of strict chastity for the girls and condonation of wild-oat sowing by the young men, never more than obliquely mentioned, was a tacit acknowledgement of this.

The family, regardless of the social class to which it belongs, is always subject to actual or potential internal strains and conflicts which threaten breakdown or disintegration unless kept at bay by observance of accepted rules and conventions, and by all members, husband and wife, parents and children – and in some societies, other generations and other kin – playing their expected roles. What is expected and what is conventional varies between social classes, and over time. This is what the family’s function in socializing its members, and what the social history of the family, are all about. The question for the Victorian period is not so much whether working-class families were so precariously based that they could not have survived without a reform and stiffening of their values and morals imposed, or nurtured, by official and middle-class-voluntary policy and preaching. It is, rather, whether and how working-class families managed to handle the manifest pressures of physical hardship, and the stresses of an environment almost turned upside down by urbanization, in such a way as to preserve the cohesion of the family and hold in check its self-destructive potential. The extent to which the routes towards this conservation of the essential cohesion of the family were mapped out by the working classes for themselves, were copied from middle-class examples, or were constructed by legislation, institutions, and moral pressures of largely middle-class inspiration, are matters of lively historical dispute, more informed by the ideologies of the participants than by direct evidence, which is far from plentiful.

Marriage is the conventional starting point for families, and there was plenty of it about throughout the Victorian years. There was, indeed, a scare in the early Victorian decades that socialist ideas were attacking the very concept of matrimony. Robert Owen was after all on record as opposing the ‘single-family-arrangement’ of the traditional social order, and his critics thought that Owenites were indulging in all sorts of sexual experiments and trying to establish new forms of communities in which free-love reigned and there was ‘indiscriminate intercommunion of the sexes, according to all the irregularities of temporary libidinous inclination’. But this was not only a misreading of Owen, who in his ideal new-harmony communities looked for some new form of free association between a man and a woman superior to traditional marriage and freed from the subjugation of wife to husband, but still dedicated to motherhood and child-rearing; it was also a grotesque exaggeration of the practical influence of socialist ideas, which was minimal. Ordinary people paid no attention, and the scare about marriage amounted to no more than a flutter in the clerical dovecotes. If, over the nineteenth century, some couples could always be found who ignored the forms of marriage and simply got on with cohabiting, that was not out of high-minded idealism but out of indifference. To be sure, a small number in the poorer classes were obliged to live in illicit unions because divorce from a previous partner remained practically and financially beyond their reach, in spite of the formal legalization of divorce from 1857. Even then, there was a strong likelihood that such couples would go through a bigamous form of marriage, or trust that prolonged cohabitation would establish an effective ‘common law marriage’, while there is some evidence that public wife-selling as a form of popular divorce accepted by the community was still being practised until after mid-century: all of these indicated acceptance of formal and legal marriage as the norm, and a compelling need to find irregular substitutes when some impediment made the norm unattainable. Those who deliberately opted out of this norm when there was no legal obstacle to a legitimate marriage were not the irreligious, who probably formed the majority of the working classes, nor the atheists and secularists, who were a small and mainly bourgeois minority, but rather the minute proportion of the residuum, the dregs of the society, which was incorrigibly disreputable.

Those who never married were a small, but significant, proportion of the total population: in England and Wales about 11 per cent of males were unmarried at the age of forty-five, declining to about 9 per cent in the 1870s and 1880s, and rising again to 11 per cent by 1901; for females the proportions were about 12 per cent, falling to 11 per cent in the 1880s, before rising to 14 per cent by 1901; Scotland functioned with greater celibacy, the unmarried males running at 13 to 14 per cent, and the females at nearly 20 per cent. These, it can safely be assumed, were genuinely unmarried in personal and social terms, as well as by legal definition; they constituted a group, especially of the spinsters and especially in the middle classes, of which society became increasingly aware. Working-class spinsters were expected to fend for themselves, merging unobtrusively into the general body of the female labour force if not required to look after ageing parents; it was the middle-class spinsters in families unable to support them in idleness who were perceived as constituting a social problem, because of the scarcity of jobs of acceptable status. There may, indeed, have been considerably more than the national average proportion of middle-class spinsters, given the socially specific marriage habits that prevailed. Only a limited amount of research has been directed to this subject, although the necessary evidence in the shape of marriage certificates recording parental occupations as well as those of bride and groom is massively available, at a high price in search fees, from the 1840s onwards. These data, together with the genealogies of the propertied classes, convey a strong impression that the upper class and the middle classes had an overwhelming propensity to marry only with their social equals, a category frequently defined in restrictive sectarian and locational terms, and that this tendency only began to weaken towards the close of the century. This meant that if a girl failed to find a partner from within her own social set she was likely to remain a spinster. In the working classes, by contrast, habits of marrying within a particular occupational, geographical, or social group were much less rigid, although they were by no means wholly absent. The net result, however, was that both on grounds of social convention and on grounds of economic necessity marriage was the destiny of the vast majority of working-class daughters.

There were well-established traditions by the 1840s of shoemakers’ sons marrying shoemakers’ daughters, and this type of craft-based marriage is readily intelligible in terms of propinquity, opportunities of meeting, shared outlook and customs, and the desirability of finding a wife able to assist in the husband’s trade. It was a pattern no doubt repeated in most of the traditional skilled artisan trades, where wives had an essential supporting role in the work process: the furniture trades, tailoring, and some of the metalworking trades fall into this category. Spinners and weavers may once, in the domestic outwork and cottage industry stage, have had analogous economic reasons for intermarrying; these were eroded by the advance of mechanization, but were replaced by the social substitution of the mill as meeting place and marriage market, which seems to have produced a fair proportion of factory marriages. In general, practical economic reasons for endogamous unions within the same occupation would seem to have weakened and disappeared with the development of factory and large workshop organization, and never to have been present in the traditional building trades or the new engineering occupations. To some extent the relaxation of technical and economic incentives for marrying-in among the skilled and semi-skilled was balanced by the sustained and increasing sense of social stratification and group identity within the working classes, although the effects of this would be more likely to show up in keeping marriages within a broad social category such as the ‘labour aristocracy’ or the ‘respectable’, rather than within a single occupational group. The miners, because of their isolation and lack of opportunities for meeting other folk – except in such newer coalfields as that of the East Midlands, intermingling with the hosiery districts of Nottinghamshire as it opened up from the 1880s – remained in this, as in so much else, a law unto themselves. Miners’ sons married miners’ daughters, with some slippage of surplus daughters who went away into domestic service and maybe found husbands from completely different spheres. By and large, however, the impression is that marriages crossed the boundaries of social subdivisions within the working classes with relative ease and increasing frequency by the late Victorian years.

The social identities of marriage partners, usually depicted by the social and occupational background of the spouses’ families but ideally including the education and jobs of the bride and groom themselves, are among the most sensitive and acute indicators of community or class feelings. Who marries whom, without courting alienation or rejection from a social set, is an acid test of the horizons and boundaries of what each particular social set regards as tolerable and acceptable, and a sure indication of where that set draws the line of membership. It is, therefore, unfortunate that historical insights into acceptability and unacceptability are so largely hemmed in by the nature of the evidence to the views of the educated and articulate, that is substantially to the upper and middle classes. The vast literature on the working classes, even when it is not concerned to establish the existence of a single working class with a distinctive class consciousness – for which purpose any concern with differences in marriage alliances would be a distraction – has only scratched the surface of the subject. Marriage certificates, as already noted, can be made to supply this deficiency; but the labour is immense, and has so far only been undertaken in a few pioneering studies. For the period 1846–56 11,000 marriages have been studied in the three towns of Northampton, Oldham, and South Shields (John Foster); over 8000 marriages for the two periods, 1851–3 and 1873–5, for Kentish London, meaning the towns of Deptford, Greenwich, and Woolwich (Geoffrey Crossick); and about 2000 marriages for 1865–9 and 1895–7 for Edinburgh (Robert Gray). This is a vast number of marriages in comparison with the numbers of upper-or middle-class unions that have been scrutinized for their social messages, but a tiny proportion of the total amount of marrying going on in the working classes; in Britain as a whole there were 180,000 marriages a year in the 1850s, 226,000 a year in the 1870s, and over 250,000 a year in the 1890s, and at least three quarters of these must have been in the working classes.

Even if the methods of analysing and classifying the data in these three dips into the enormous brantub were similar and comparable, which unhappily they are not, it is therefore rash to generalize about the social structure of marriage and its development from the existing evidence, except in very broad and probabilistic terms. There are, however, no obvious reasons why behaviour in these towns should not have been broadly representative of the generality of British urban working-class populations of broadly Protestant sympathies. That is, the marriages of the Irish have been excluded from the count; the Irish Catholics, and other similar highly distinctive immigrant or religious groups, could be expected to intermarry on strongly extra-social grounds, their choices determined by cultural affinities which transcended purely class or status considerations. The investigations were primarily concerned with testing the degree of stratification within the working classes, but they do show, incidentally, that almost complete social exclusiveness in the choice of marriage partners was confined to the upper middle class of the large employers, and remained so. The middle and lower middle classes, of some of the professions, small masters, shopkeepers, and clerks, did substantially follow suit but were consistently less exclusive. There was always a considerable downward traffic of lower-middle-class daughters marrying beneath themselves, finding husbands from the skilled trades mainly, but also from among the agricultural labourers, and this was probably growing larger during the second half of the century. The middle- and lower-middle-class males were probably more selective and class-conscious in their choice of wives, and did not become any less so; but they also consistently found a significant proportion of their brides, between a third and two fifths, from across class frontiers, daughters in the main of skilled workers but not altogether excluding the daughters of urban and rural labourers.

Working-class girls, therefore, could and did marry upwards in the social scale in significant numbers, chiefly into the lower middle class, many of them no doubt making the transition via a spell in domestic service. As a straw in the wind, the marriages of daughters of men in the skilled engineering, metal, and shipbuilding trades in Kentish London do show some changes in the third quarter of the century. The proportion finding husbands from the identical trades remained steady at one quarter, as did the proportion, just below 60 per cent, whose husbands came from the general group of skilled trades. But the proportion marrying upwards, with husbands from the ranks of white-collar workers, shopkeepers, and the gentry, increased from 18 to 30 per cent. Working-class men were apparently much more conservative and had less inclination or opportunity to jump over this social divide: the proportion of skilled workers in Kentish London who married shopkeepers’ daughters remained unchanged at 11 per cent, while in Edinburgh it apparently declined from 12 per cent to 8 per cent between the 1860s and the 1890s. Nevertheless, this social frontier between the skilled working class and the lower middle class, although policed with more vigour on both sides by the men than by the women, was not impenetrable and showed no signs of becoming any more difficult to cross during the second half of the century, indicating that at the least social attitudes were not hardening.