Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (review)

In Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England, Jennifer Phegley explores complicated messages regarding courtship and marriage in the Victorian period that “are supposed to be based on real feelings of affection and love, but . . . are bound by social rules” (54). Phegley’s informative work investigates the surprising ways in which Victorians negotiated romantic relations in disparate class, gender, and social networks, which provides a welcome contrast to monolithic discussions of “the marriage market.” Relying largely on conduct books, etiquette manuals, newspapers, and periodicals, Phegley’s goals are twofold: (1) to provide a thorough outline of the ways in which courtship and marital rituals across classes were reified in print and (2) to highlight how such practices were revised and resisted in both print and practice.

Chapter 1 introduces an overview of the relation between the increasing importance of the companionate ideal and the laws regarding divorce, child custody, and marital property across the period. Phegley juxtaposes the pervasive “aspiration to achieve companionate marriage based on mutual affection, respect and love” with the shifting landscape of marital law that exposed the embedded inequalities in marriage (27). In her next chapter, Phegley examines the rules and activities of courtship defined in etiquette books and periodical features, and considers how such practices offered women some control. Occurring in a variety of arenas—elite balls during the London season, middle-class picnics, lawn games, and home visits, as well as working-class coffeehouses and walks—private romantic interaction depended as much upon class status as upon individual opportunism. Phegley also includes an intriguing discussion of anti-conduct literature, which resisted mainstream manual etiquette.

Chapter 3 will be of particular interest to readers of VPR. As a growing number of urban workers became severed from their original social networks, mass-market periodicals became virtual communities. Phegley examines the alternative courtship practices facilitated by a swath of periodicals, including advice for readers unable to afford conduct books in “Letters to Correspondents” sections; “clandestine” communications printed in the “agony columns” that titillated elite readers of the London Times; and personal ads published in a variety of domestic and match-making magazines, whose editors occasionally facilitated the exchange of letters and photographs between advertisers of similar class and social status (78). Phegley profiles modern courtships (including the development of the telegraphic romance) that relied on advances in publishing, advertising, and communication systems to create connections in an “increasingly alienated society at odds with the traditional, orderly, hierarchical image of courtship represented in conduct books” (106).

In chapter 4, Phegley continues to chart the life cycle of Victorian romance in a description of laws and rituals regarding the marriage ceremony. The trappings of the wedding idealized in fashionable guidebooks and periodicals were displayed in the arrangement of the bridal party, wedding attire, ceremonial rituals, nuptial meal, and honeymoon. Phegley indicates how massive an undertaking a Victorian wedding could be, contrasting this largesse with the simplicity of working-class rural weddings and growing critiques of the “fashionable” wedding in the press, where critics reasserted the ideal of love over status. Chapter 5 addresses the people left out of marriage by circumstance or by choice. Bachelors, spinsters, and old maids might be unable to find partners or unwilling to enter into constrictive partnerships, while widows and widowers negotiated social censure when remarrying. Phegley argues that irregular unions were not uniformly condemned and may have been more acceptable than lifelong single status. Such unions included female same-sex romantic friendships, common-law marriages for working-class couples, and cohabitation arrangements necessitated by the inability of one partner to obtain a divorce. However, in both traditional and alternative relationships, feminists and reformers continued to rely on the companionate ideal as they agitated for equality between romantic partners.

In keeping with the goals of Praeger’s “Victorian Life and Times” series, Phegley’s book is aimed at readers with little historical or literary expertise; consequently, the work is consistently informative rather than overtly argumentative. While each chapter begins by paralleling...