THE LOVE-MATCH
In 1847 Elizabeth Barratt wrote of her marriage to the poet Robert Browning, ‘He loves me more every day... If all married people lived as happily as we do how many good jokes it would spoil!’ Staying in Pisa having been married just seven months, Elizabeth wrote exuberantly to her sisters of the joy, affection and passion of her marriage.
‘Robert’s goodness and tenderness are past speaking of... He reads to me, talks and jests to make me laugh, tells me stories, improvises verses in all sorts of languages... There has been a hundred times as much attention, tenderness, nay, flattery even, ever since [the marriage]... We never do quarrel!’40 This letter provides a window on to the emotional and sexual intimacy within the private confines of marriage. Middle-class marriages, especially, have often been portrayed as lacking close physical and emotional intimacy, yet as Peter Gay has argued, ‘The bourgeois experience was far richer than its expression... and it included a substantial measure of sensuality for both sexes’.41 Amongst the British upper and middle classes it has been said that ‘most Victorians liked to think that they married for love’.42 Certainly, women expected their marriage to contain mutual affection and were cruelly disappointed when it did not.The marriage based on a union of hearts and minds was a common model amongst the European middle classes. For women such as the German Henriette Schleiermacher, twice married, each time to a pastor, marriage was an emotional and an intellectual partnership. She saw her first marriage in 1804 as a joint vocation, in which both partners would experience intimacy and self-knowledge. Similarly, her second marriage she imagined as an intimate partnership: ‘I could speak to you about anything and everything’, she said of her husband Ernst. ‘You are not to me as a man, but like a delicate maiden, so innocent, so like a child, and this to me is a delicious feeling.’ Ernst, for his part, was besotted with his young wife, writing to her of his ‘irresistible desire’ to see her; ‘I could never have loved any other woman as I love you.’43 Henriette and Ernst’s marriage was founded on a belief in equality: ‘thus we shall ever be as one, and will not enquire if or why the one is superior or inferior to the other.’ The pair were soulmates who regarded marriage as an institution within which each might grow and experience fulfilment.
So-called political marriages had similar foundations. The union of Margaret Gladstone and Ramsey MacDonald at the opposite end of the century was based on mutual attraction and a shared commitment to socialism. Although the match was an unconventional one in terms of their quite different class backgrounds, Margaret was convinced they were well suited: ‘the contrast between our upbringing is encouraging, not despairing: we have come by different paths to the same beliefs and aims.' Margaret was right; she described her marriage as ‘blessed by a growing happiness as all true love ought to be'.44Such unions of heart and mind could be regarded as exceptional. The typical bourgeois marriage was supposedly asymmetrical, in terms both of the respective age and experience of the partners and of their different gender roles. Both types are, to some extent, caricatures. Most marriages trod a middle course: couples aimed for a spiritual, emotional and intellectual relationship within a framework of separate spheres. Amongst the Hamburg bourgeoisie in the first half of the century, both spouses had high expectations of a ‘union of the soul' but they did not reject fundamental gender inequalities as is demonstrated in the marriage of Ferdinand and Karoline Beneke. The couple resolved to pursue jointly the path of spiritual and intellectual growth — they studied literary and historical texts together every morning. Yet, Ferdinand remarked: ‘Of incalculable value for my happiness in life is that Caroline has a degree of sympathy for these spiritual efforts, and is firmly convinced, apart from her obligations as mother and housewife, to accompany me down the road of spiritual development on this earth.'45 Marriages such as this formed what Ann-Charlotte Trepp terms marriage work: ‘understanding and intimacy on one side, subordination and inequality on the other.'46 And it was these marriages which often grew and matured into intimate and long-lasting unions.
We know more about couples' intellectual relations than we do about their sexual relations. Middle-class women may have been ignorant about sexual intercourse when they married, but it would be wrong to assume that they for ever harboured feelings of shame and disgust about the sex act. In Britain it is the postwar publications of the sex-reformer and birth control advocate Marie Stopes that are frequently credited with improving the sex lives of thousands of married couples, but the belief that women were entitled to sexual fulfilment was already current in the nineteenth century, evidenced by the French bestseller Monsieur, Madame et Bebe which first appeared in 1866, advocating and encouraging sexual love within marriage.47 Few women would admit in public to the enjoyment of sex for fear of being branded lewd or little more than a prostitute. One who did was Emma Inhoffen, the wife and soon to be divorcee of a Bonn industrialist. ‘The most important thing in marriage is sexual satisfaction', she said in 1900; but with her husband, ‘It's like making love with an old man.'48 Happier couples, though, did express their sensuality and erotic passion for one another. ‘I know on Thursday I shall be lying in your arms, close to your bosom, will press you to my heart, will be by you and in you, body and soul' were the unequivocal words written by Friedrich Perthes to his wife Caroline in 1799 during one of their separations.49
Love and sexual passion are harder to detect in the marriages of the lower classes, or at least in the romantic and sentimental form we discover in the letters of their social superiors. The relative scarcity of written sources detailing intimacy amongst men and women of the working classes has resulted in historians, like nineteenth-century commentators, representing workingclass sexuality as brutal, immoral and divorced from sentiment. Emile Zola's description of the sexual relationships within a French mining community in his 1885 novel Germinal is typical of this tendency to portray sexual passion as animalistic.
Moreover, historians' focus on premarital sex and illegitimacy amongst the working classes gives the impression that sex was instrumental (for instance, as a test of a woman's fertility prior to a marriage promise) or recreational but rarely an expression of love or passion. In industrial centres the combination of exhausted husbands and women's constant efforts to keep the family fed and clean in overcrowded housing and with insufficient resources may well have resulted in a ‘deadening of emotion'.50 There have been few attempts to present an alternative to the casual sex seemingly devoid of affection which has been described as ‘hit and run'.51 Alternatively, the expression of unbridled passion is interpreted as uncontrolled sexual permissiveness presaging a rise in illegitimacy rates. Yet, in the nineteenth century, partly as a consequence of the creation of a rural and urban propertyless class, affectionate relationships became the norm.52 Letters that do survive suggest passion and intimacy no less than that presumed amongst the middle and upper classes. In the 1880s, in his frequent letters to his beloved girlfriend Bruce Barclay, Shetland cooper William Brack could not have been more categorical in his love for her.Dear Bruce,
You should not vex yourself. You surely have seen enough of me to lead you to understand that I love you day and night. You are never out of my mind how I love you... Dear Bruce, O how I love you ever dear ever dear ever dear, your affectionate lover xxxxxxxxxxxx.53
Marriage that was no longer determined by property considerations meant romantic encounters were more likely to result in matrimony. Couples separated, sometimes by thousands of miles, did often keep up a regular correspondence which included romantic poetry, frequent expressions of love, and promises of eventual marriage. When James Johnston left his home in Shetland in 1858 to seek his fortune on the seas, he wrote regularly to his fiancee Catherine in letters expressing his love and desire to marry her.
In 1864 from Sydney he wrote, ‘my dear it is a long time since we parted so I thought that you were got cold towards me but I hope that [it will] get a little warmer when we meet next.' A year later, from New Zealand, James was as eager as ever to express his affection for his wife to be: ‘Dear Catherine there is one thing that I can say, that if you have not my body with you, you have my heart and where the heart is the body will be also some time, and I hope it will not be long before that time...'.54 Unfortunately, when he finally returned home he refused to fulfil his marriage promise and Catherine, understandably after waiting nine years, took him to court for breach of promise. In this case perhaps James' liking for romantic language got the better of him, but his willingness to express his feelings indicates a ready use of romantic rhetoric to woo the opposite sex and that it was as familiar in working-class as in middle-class circles. It is rare, then, to hear plebeians speaking publicly of love for one another, but expressions of mutual support and affection indicate that marriage was perceived as an intimate partnership amongst the working classes. A Scottish cobbler and his wife were described as ‘exemplary in conjugal felicity as they were in their habits of industry and sobriety'; kindness, warm affection, reciprocity, patience and mutual esteem seem to characterise the loving relationships recorded by the ‘respectable' working classes.55 Couples started out together with expectations of more than just a tolerable and viable relationship.Women, especially, looked elsewhere for affection and passion when it was lacking in their marriage. Divorces involving adulterous wives illustrate women's unapologetic search for love and passion. When Hamburger Hans Berott discovered his wife Caroline in bed with her lover in 1846, she countered that her husband ‘had not once fulfilled his marital duty and had continually neglected her'. Caroline thus justified her adultery on the grounds that her husband did not fulfil her sexual needs. Her adulterous affair appears to have been a passionate relationship as evidenced by the letters that she exchanged with her lover, containing promises of undying love and eventual marriage. ‘O my darling girl', wrote Christian to his lover Caroline, ‘don't forget what your true heart has promised me... Oh Caroline my love don't forget that I promise to be faithful to you until death.' And Caroline replied, ‘it is my greatest heartfelt wish that in time I will marry you.'56 Marriage, then, was still regarded by most as the most appropriate sign of one's love for another and the most fitting place for the passionate expression of that mutual affection.