I have always been puzzled by Tolstoy’s apodictic statement about happy and unhappy marriages at the beginning of Anna Karenina. How on earth did he know? Even today when the state and the media have penetrated deeply into our private lives, the inner workings of most marriages remain a secret to all but the couple involved, and unions which hold fast until death are frequently dismissed from the outset by outsiders as doomed to fail. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the government inspector and the nosy journalist understood that the front door was the entrance to a sanctum that none could cross uninvited, unless there was a suspicion of foul play or ill treatment of minors. As a result, marriage was an institution about which guardians of the nation’s morals might pontificate but hardly any had concrete knowledge, apart from their own and their parents’ relationships.
Victorian and Edwardian novelists, of course, and not just Tolstoy, offered their readers carefully crafted examples of marriages of all kinds, but however realistic their setting, are they anything more than the figments of an often moralising imagination? Can they be used as a source for understanding the marital lives of our ancestors, any more than they can be used to understand class relations or religious sensibilities? Social historians remain highly sceptical, despite being told for the last fifty years that their precious documents are as much the product of human contrivance as any novel, and have no intrinsic veracity. They remain for the most part convinced that a laundry list and a furniture inventory will bring us much closer to the reality of marriage in the long nineteenth century than Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, or countless other masterpieces of Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’. And to be fair to the English novel, its main driving force from Austen to Lawrence is courtship not marriage. The marriages that are depicted tend to be seen as mutually unfulfilling and the result of bad and unnecessary choices. In an age when divorce was a possibility only for the very rich, the middle-class novel became a device for teaching the young how to choose wisely. We seldom learn how the ‘perfect’ choice — Elizabeth and Darcy, Dorothea and Ladislaw, Ursula and Birkin (why do we still always refer to the men by their surnames?!) — panned out later in life; hence the modern penchant for sequels. There is only one great English novel, These Twain (1916), the final part of Arnold Bennett’s underrated Clayhanger trilogy, which wholeheartedly attempts to portray what the ‘happy ever after’ is actually like for an ordinary couple that have ‘found’ each other and settled down to domestic bliss. And their life is not a bed of roses.
Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle as Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett (BBC TV, 1995): Did they live happily ever after?
My collaborative ongoing study of four generations of some 800 professional families in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, drawn from nine distinctive provincial towns, has been referred to in two earlier posts. Our database contains the reference to some 5000 marriages contracted across the long nineteenth century. Thanks to the abundant material available on Ancestry, the basic details of every union are easy to uncover. In the majority of cases, we know the couple’s names, background, age, and place and date of marriage. We also know the number of children they went on to have, and the length of time their marriage survived: some unions lasted only a year or so before one or other of the partners sadly died — death in childbirth was uncommon, but it was not unknown — while some couples lived to celebrate their golden wedding. It is much more difficult to cross the threshold of the family home and decide whether the unions were happy or unhappy, as Tolstoy claimed to be able to discern. The most obvious source of information would be memoirs, diaries or letters — and this has been the usual point of entry for historians seeking to penetrate the secrets of the domestic hearth (and bedroom) from the Tudor Age to the present: see Simon Goldhill, A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain (Chicago, 2016), an account of the family life of an Archbishop of Canterbury. But surprisingly few individuals in the database left any personal record of their marital life, and the one who specifically wrote an account of his relations with his wife, the aesthete John Addington Symonds (1840-93), was as tortured, and therefore as unrepresentative a soul, as Edward White Benson. Symonds, the son of a successful Bristol doctor of the same name, was a frustrated homosexual who was forced to resign his Magdalen fellowship when one of his friends in another college was caught soliciting a Magdalen chorister. Encouraged to cure his ‘unnatural’ inclinations by taking a wife, in 1864 he married an MP’s daughter, Janet Catherine North, and they had four children. Five years later, even before the birth of his final child, he and his wife came to an arrangement that allowed John Addington to spend long periods abroad with male lovers ostensibly researching the Renaissance, while she brought up the children. Symonds wrote at length about the deceits and compromises of his married life, and his continual deep love for his wife, in an autobiography that remained unpublished until long after his death. What Janet Catherine thought about their relationship remains a closed book.
John Addington Symonds
The absence of more obvious sources, however, has not precluded a deeper understanding of our 5000 marriages. There is more that can be inferred from the existing digitised material on Ancestry than might seem at first glance. In addition, there are other downloadable personal documents, above all wills, which often throw a great deal of light on the warmth of a husband and wife’s affection for each other in later life. As this is a post principally about the utility of the great English novel to the historian of the family and marriage, I will limit my discussion to the information these and other sources provide about the theme that particularly exercised Lawrence and his predecessors — finding and choosing a partner.
It might be expected that many middle-class couples in Victorian and Edwardian Britain would be either blood relations, the children of friends of their parents, or men and women who had known each other since childhood and worshipped Sunday after Sunday at the same church. This is certainly the impression received from the Victorian provincial novel, which is set in closed worlds where everyone is interrelated and expected to marry within the community: hence the possibilities and dangers when strangers like Darcy, or Lydgate and Ladislaw, turn up. In fact, however, these provincial worlds were remarkably open. Only a handful of the 5000 couples in our database were cousins, hardly any had been acquainted for any time, and a large proportion found partners who were born many miles from their own place of residence and usually still living there at the time of the marriage. The 800 professional men in the 1851 census, who formed the starting point for the study, married at the dawn of the railway age, when mobility was still constrained. Nonetheless, at least a quarter married someone from a different county from the town in which they were raised and worked; in succeeding generations the fraction was much higher. In fast growing Brighton, one of the nine towns surveyed and in easy reach of London from 1841, more than 40 per cent of our cohort who were based there and born in the local county found a partner beyond its borders; among their sons born in Sussex, the figure was 80 per cent. In other words, the majority of unions in the database were contracted by couples whose parents were very unlikely to have known one another. Moreover, the parents can have had little influence over the decision, even if they did: most men married around the age of thirty; a quarter by then were fatherless; and very few brides were still minors.
How the majority of couples came to meet is the real mystery. Some met on holiday. Symonds bumped into his future wife in the Alps. Some were the relatives of college friends. Edward Charles Wickham (1834-1910) was a long-serving tutor of New College from a modest Winchester family with medical roots, whose marriage to Gladstone’s daughter, Agnes, in 1873 would eventually lead him to the deanship of Lincoln. Rather like Kittie Calderon and her first husband who met at an Oxford ball, the pair were introduced at a party in fashionable North Oxford, in the house of Edward Talbot, the first warden of Keble. Talbot’s wife was Agnes’s cousin.
Edward Charles Wickham
But the meeting place of the large majority is veiled from view. How did Wickham’s uncle, for instance, the Winchester surgeon William John Wickham (1798-1864), end up marrying Lucy Trotman, the daughter of a Northampton clergyman, born and living in a rural parish more than a hundred miles away? There is not the slightest evidence that the two families were previously connected. William’s surgeon father came from outside Winchester and his mother from Kent: they had married in London; while William John could not have met Lucy’s elder brother, Samuel Fiennes, either at school or university, as their educational odysseys were entirely different. Nor could they have met at an Oxford party. Three of William’s brothers went to Oxford, but Samuel Fiennes went to Cambridge. Yet meet they somehow did, and when Lucy was still young and presumably chaperoned, for they married two months before her eighteenth birthday.
However couples met, what is clear that most chose sensibly. Mésalliances were uncommon. Partners were normally found from families of the same status and wealth. One of the richest men in the database, the wealthy banker Robert Cooper Lee Bevan (1809-90), a senior partner at Barclays, who was living in Brighton in 1851, illustrates the point to perfection. Robert, the son of another City banker with a small estate at Walthamstow, married twice: his first father-in-law was an admiral, the second a bishop. With one exception, the fathers of his sons’ wives were equally respectable. Two were in finance, two in the army, one a barrister and one a landed gentleman. Three were titled, two became MPs, and they all died staggeringly rich, apart from the most blue-blooded of them all, a younger son of the Duke of Bedford, who left a mere £5374. The one black sheep among the Bevan brood was Hubert Lee (1860-1939), who was also the only brother to rest on his laurels after going down from university. While the others went into banking or academia (one had the chair in Arabic at Cambridge), Hubert never had a career. In 1889 he married the very un-English sounding Isabella Wieniawska. Isabella appears to have been born in Russia in 1865, although she was baptised an Anglican at Gravesend shortly afterwards. Her Polish father, Henryck, who died in Moscow in 1880, was a travelling musician and composer of some renown. Her mother, Isabella Bessie née Hampton, was a native of London who had married Henryck in the British embassy in Paris in 1860.
Robert Cooper Lee Bevan
The last point alone is enough to conclude that Women in Love, whatever its quality as a novel, has nothing to say to the historian about middle-class courtship, let alone marriage. Liberated daughters of craft teachers, in the years before the First World War, did not form permanent relationships with mine owners’ sons or gentlemen of independent means masquerading as school inspectors. And where did the money for their liberation come from? Only a miner’s son who claimed through his art to have risen above class and who had run off with a German aristocrat could have created such an implausible background for Gudrun and Ursula, and worse was to come in Lady Chatterley. Bennett, Gissing and Galsworthy created less soul-searching fictional couples, but their inventions are of much greater interest to the social historian. Best leave Lawrence and his Nottinghamshire to those who specialise in the history of dialect or the history of the environment.
© Laurence Brockliss, 2021
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Unusually, I am going to make two separate Comments on this erudite and entertaining post; this is the first.
As with Professor Brockliss’s previous guest posts, he has radically revised a conventional wisdom about our Victorian/Edwardian ancestors, and he has done it using objective, statistical data. How many times have I heard people say that our forebears had very limited opportunities to meet members of the other sex, and therefore predominantly married the girl next door, the lad in the next field, or a cousin? It makes a huge difference to learn that ‘in fact these provincial worlds were remarkably open’, and to read about examples, even if their matrimonial life is still inscrutable.
Brockliss’s revision certainly applies to my own maternal and paternal ancestors, who were not professionals but lower down the ladder. The Victorian patriarchs in my family were policemen in Kent or farm labourers in Hampshire, and their families had been there since the late eighteenth century if not earlier. But at least half of their children married and settled hundreds of miles away (particularly in London), whilst the other half stayed put.
Again as Laurence Brockliss says, how my Victorian patriarchs’ children who moved and married far away met their spouses, we don’t usually know. However, my private theory is that it was a function of the different nature of travel in those days. A neighbour rang me yesterday evening after spending a day on business in Leeds; he had driven there from Cambridge and back in a day. People in the nineteenth century — it always comes as a surprise — travelled equally long distances on business, or in search of work, but of course they did not return the same day. I have the impression they often stayed just long enough to fall in love… That was certainly the case with a great-grandfather of mine who was an ‘excavator’ born in Cornwall and wed in Lambeth.
Like Patrick, I must thank Professor Brockliss for his very meaty post. One could make many a good meal out of it, but I will confine myself to a few salient points.
How did Tolstoy know (he asks), about happy and unhappy families? He knew by intuition, which is another kind of knowledge to that which historians and social scientists represent — and naturally defend, as somehow of superior validity. But remember Blake’s relevant observation: ‘What is now proved was once imagined.’ Who is to say that intuition is inferior to demonstration? Not I, anyway, for what it’s worth. As Freud remarked, Sophocles and Shakespeare ‘intuited’ the Oedipus complex long before his own case studies. And Freud held the poetic imagination in great respect.
Brockliss himself remarks, giving the unusual details of the Symonds household, that ‘what [Symonds’ wife] thought of their relationship remains a closed book’. Precisely; and what the novelist tries to do is to write that closed book for us. (As does Pat Barker, in her rewriting of Homer in The Silence of the Girls.)
Our author also claims to have ‘a deeper understanding of our 5,000 marriages’ thanks to the social situations which have been studied. This depends on what is being understood. (Personally, I would trust Tolstoy.) A diet of data may simply not be nourishing; as Mr Gradgrind’s educational programme based only on ‘facts’ risks constipation in the children.
A second point I would take up is where Professor Brockliss says that the novel deals typically with courtship rather than marriage. Typically, yes; but there are enough marriages studied in fiction to question this as a generality. (As early as Henry Fielding’s Amelia, for example.) And surely no-one can accuse Lawrence himself of neglecting the subject, when The Rainbow studies two marriages closely; those of Tom and Lydia, and Will and Anna. Of Tom Brangwen this is Lawrence’s summary (I quote from memory): ‘This was what his life amounted to: the long marital embrace with his wife.’ And we get snapshots from later on in the marriage of Will and Anna, in Women in Love itself, especially the conflict between the two grown daughters and their parents. The very intimate study of marriage-in-action that we find in Lawrence’s plays is another matter; but should be allowed to feed back into the argument.
If the social scientist finds more sustenance in Bennett, Gissing, and Galsworthy than in what Lawrence offers, then that is hard luck on the social scientist (and on social science). The Old Wives’ Tale, as I remember, ends with a dog’s dinner; and that’s about as much sustenance as it provides.
Laurence Brockliss’s latest post has certainly addressed the two questions about marriage that I asked in my introductory one to this series on Women in Love. It’s addressed them so effectively that I now find those questions rather half-baked!
Taking the second one first — ‘Were there no happy Edwardian marriages?’ — I appreciate Brockliss’s explanation that there just isn’t the intimate documentation to quantify happiness in Victorian/Edwardian marriages. I should have thought of this, since it is broadly confirmed by my own experience of personal archives from the Edwardian period. Moreover, no-one did then what could presumably be done today, namely commission a mass poll with the question ‘Do you consider your marriage happy?’.
On the other hand, Brockliss concludes from his data-crunching that ‘most couples chose sensibly’ and ‘mésalliances were uncommon’. I assume, from his next sentence and his stance as a social historian, that by mésalliances he means ‘socially and financially unsuitable combinations’, although he will be well aware that to most people the word will mean ‘unhappy or temperamentally unworkable combinations’. Even given the fact that ‘divorce was a possibility only for the rich’, Brockliss’s conclusion about mésalliances would suggest that a majority of Victorian/Edwardian marriages were happy, or at least successful in terms of duration and children.
This in turn suggests that the institution of marriage itself was successful, which casts a searching light on my first question, which was ‘Is there any substance to Birkin’s critique of contemporary marriage, or is it guff?’.
The searching light quickly led me to realise that Birkin doesn’t criticise the institution of marriage itself at all. On the contrary, he seems sufficiently impressed by it to make ‘sex-marriage’ — a sexually complete partnership with one woman for life — his ideal. Neither he nor Ursula can wait to get married ‘by law’ as well. His belief in marriage, I gather, is something that feminists hold against Lawrence.
Nevertheless, I find the view of other people’s marriages presented in Women in Love both warped and bleak. I agree, of course, with Damian Grant in his last Comment that The Rainbow actually celebrates two ‘conventional’ marriages. But in Women in Love the marriages of Will and Anna Brangwen and Thomas and Christiana Crich are seen through their children’s eyes as having petered out in procreation, the nine to five, material wealth and falling asleep by the fire. It is this, and not the institution of marriage, that Birkin inveighs against at the beginning of chapter 16: ‘The thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive. He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were’ (etcetera).
And whereas Laurence Brockliss showed in his previous guest post that some Late Victorians and Edwardians were consciously choosing not to have children, procreation is a strong thread and gauge of happiness/success in his present one. The Rainbow is full of children, but I think I am right in saying that no-one of Ursula’s generation in Women in Love aspires to having any. Lawrence may, I assume, have meant to suggest that after her terrible miscarriage in The Rainbow Ursula could not conceive again. But there is no indication that Birkin wants children. I do not know the real reasons that Lawrence and Frieda remained childless (a fact that worried Leavis), but I don’t think one can deny that both Birkin and Lawrence were utopians. There is no place in a utopia for children. Utopia is by definition perfect; children want to change things. As Sylvia Plath wrote, ‘Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children’.
Patrick: a point about Lawrence and children. It’s true that Birkin inveighs (somewhere in the novel: I haven’t looked for it) against people having children; but this is part of his general pessimism, and especially in the war years — having children is simply deathly. This is part of the ‘bitterness…to be understood’, I think.
Lawrence himself, in his own life, was unambiguous. He wrote to Frieda on 15 May 1912: ‘I want you to have children to me’, and explicitly rejected the idea of ‘interfering there’ (Marie Stopes style) when people were in love — and preferably married? There never were children between them; but Lawrence grew to have a good (if tempestuous) relationship with Frieda’s children, and by all accounts was very good value with children generally.
There is surely nothing more movingly depicted than the relationship between Tom Brangwen and Lydia’s child Anna in The Rainbow. And it’s important to remember that at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie is pregnant by Mellors. This is Lawrence’s last fictional word on the subject!
Dear Damian, thank you so much for taking all this trouble to attend to my entirely speculative passing point about Lawrence and children. Your Comment brilliantly addresses it. Of course, I am never happy attributing something in one historical period to a cause in a later historical period (‘having children in the war years’). But I can well imagine that Lawrence enjoyed the company of children. It occurs to me also that his TB might have affected his fertility. I agree with you, the relationship between Tom Brangwen and Anna as a child is ‘on another plane’. I would never deny it: Lawrence is a great writer. Thanks again for all your Comments, Patrick
Utopia did, I believe, have children who were adorned with jewels relinquished upon maturity. Thanks as ever for stirring my mind.
x Jill