59 Yorkshire Gazette, 14 January 1860, p. 9. See also The Times, 22 March 1890, p. 5.
60 PCOM 1/59, p. 391; The Times, 6 February 1850, p. 7 (for quote).
61 PCOM 1/138, pp. 959–60; trial on 31 July 1890.
62 PCOM 1/60, p. 221; The Times, 15 June 1850, p. 7 (for quote). For other examples, see The
Times, 26 October 1855, p. 9; 26 November 1840, p. 6; and Yorkshire Gazette, 17 March
1860, p. 4.
63 Dwyer in The Times, 8 December 1860, p. 9; Fanning in The Times, 28 October 1865, p. 11; and 10 Cox’s Criminal Cases (1864–7), 411–15.
64 David in The Times, 8 January 1840, p. 7; Stephens in The Times, 21 March 1860, p. 11;
Lewes Times, 21 March 1860, p. 1 (for quote).
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
65 Barnes in The Times, 3 March 1865, p. 12; Leicester Chronicle, 4 March 1865, p. 8 (for quote);
Green in The Times, 10 March 1830, p. 7; Nield in Lancaster Guardian, 11 March 1865, p. 2.
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bigamy and cohabitation
66 Wardle in Women’s Suffrage Journal, 14 (1883), 222; Gibbons in The Times, 30 July 1895, p.
5. S. P. Menefee, Wives for Sale: An Ethnographic Study of British Popular Divorce (Oxford:
Basil Blackwel , 1981); Thompson, Customs in Common, pp. 404–66.
67 PCOM 1/60, p. 221; The Times, 15 June 1850, p. 7; and Swansea and Glamorgan Herald and
the Herald of Wales, 28 April 1880, p. 4.
68 Thomas in The Times, 9 August 1855, p. 11; Morant in The Times, 26 August 1872, p. 9.
69 Frost in The Times, 23 August 1850, p. 6; Gibbon in The Times, 1 August 1872, p. 10.
70 The Times, 8 June 1900, p. 6; Dorset County Chronicle and Somersetshire Gazette, 7 June
1900, p. 9.
71 Erle in The Times, 30 March 1854, p. 9; Cockburn in The Times, 3 March 1865, p. 12.
72 Colwel , ‘Incidence of bigamy’, 102. See also Gilfoyle, ‘Hearts of nineteenth-century men’,
151–2.
73 The Times, 14 March 1860, p. 12; Conley, The Unwritten Law, p. 174.
74 For a very young woman, see The Times, 26 October 1855, p. 9; for a mercenary motive,
see The Times, 21 May 1845, p. 8. Malcolm in The Times, 20 October 1885, p. 3; 21 October
1885, p. 3; 22 October 1885, p. 3; 23 October 1885, p. 3; 25 October 1885, p. 8; 26 October
1885, pp. 3, 9 (quote on p. 3).
75 Gore in The Times, 7 July 1840, p. 4; Jeune in Justice of the Peace, 64 (1900), 42.
76 Birkhead in Lancaster Guardian, 24 March 1860, p. 6; Yorkshire Gazette, 17 March 1860,
p. 10; quote from Lancaster Guardian; Calverly in Yorkshire Gazette, 17 March 1860, p. 4;
Calvert in Yorkshire Gazette, 10 March 1855, p. 7.
77 Lancaster Guardian, 31 March 1860, p. 6; NA, HO 45/O.S. 6995; TS 25/1100. Hil ’s letter
dated 25 June 1860 in Home Office file. The magistrates did get the costs back, about £12.
78 HO 45/O.S. 6999; for the MP’s appeal, see Yorkshire Gazette, 2 June 1860, p. 3.
79 Justice of the Peace 31 (1867), 718.
80 Thane, ‘Women and the poor law’, 35–38.
81 Constable in HO 45 9744/A56594; Hawkins quoted in Adult 2 (1898), 61.
82 NA, DPP 1/6; R. B. Finlay to the Attorney General, 24 April 1901. E. L. Russel , Though
the Heavens Fal (London: Cassell and Company, 1956), pp. 58–82. I thank Dr Gail Savage
for the DPP reference.
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5
Adulterous cohabitation
Most couples who could not marry because of previous unions
did not go through another ceremony. Middle-class couples, in
particular, avoided breaking the law, but many working-class
couples were also cautious. Though they escaped criminal sanctions, these
couples’ relationship with the state was not severed, but, in some ways,
more vexed. They also faced social difficulties; open adultery was a much
more serious offence than affinal unions, especial y for women. The social
stain did not convince such couples that they were in the wrong, though;
many, to the contrary, argued that their cohabitation was a true marriage,
unlike the broken unions they had fled. They questioned the meaning of
marriage openly, refusing to accept that legal and religious rituals defined
it.
Nonetheless, these relationships were not the same as marriages,
as most of the participants were well aware, since adulterous unions had
great legal and social consequences. Thus, those in them were touchy about
their social position, and the women, especial y, worried about the future.
Though the middle class railed against the laws of marriage, then, they
regularised their unions whenever they could. In short, these unions had
special tensions, awkward beginnings, and even more problematic endings.
The experience also differed by class, as the middle class concentrated on
justifying their decisions, while the working class focused more on the financial
strains. In addition, as with bigamy cases, the working-class community was
more supportive of marital nonconformity. All in al , adulterous cohabitees
experienced great ambivalence in their family lives and at law.
Motives and means
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
Marital breakdown was complex and varied, but the law recognised only
adultery as grounds for divorce, and women had to prove an additional
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adulterous cohabitation
offence as wel . Parliament had compromised between those who wanted
to uphold the indissolubility of marriage and those who wanted several
grounds, as well as those who wanted only men to be able to divorce and
those who wanted equal grounds between the sexes. The result was a bill
that accepted the idea of marriage as a relationship, but narrowly limited
the ways to end it. All the same, Parliament had secularised divorce,
endangering marriage’s sacramental character. Because of that, future
governments could, in theory, expand the grounds for divorce to include
many other offences. This was especial y tempting to those who emphasised
the importance of love and respect to any ‘real’ marriage.1
Those few middle-class couples who chose to live in adultery in the
nineteenth century, then, fell into the latter group. Nevertheless, to justify
their actions, they had to convince themselves that the first marriage was
irretrievably dead and f
or good reason. They also had to believe that the
law of divorce was out of date with the realities of married life. In practice
this usual y meant two things. First, the second union occurred some time
after the breakdown of the legal marriage, so that the cohabitees would not
be ‘homewreckers’. Second, the participants were in professions that had
wider sexual norms, such as art, acting, or literature, and were more willing
to challenge marriage laws.
Couples justified cohabitation on causes that mirrored the list of
suggested divorce reforms in the late nineteenth century. First, those with
mental y ill spouses argued that they should be able to find happiness
elsewhere. Novelist Mary Braddon lived with John Maxwel , her publisher,
for years because his wife was insane. Her case is famous, but such
problems existed more broadly. An infanticide case in 1872, for example,
revealed that the respectable Mrs Morrall had been forced to take in
lodgers after her husband went to the insane asylum in 1871. She eventual y
cohabited with one, having his child in September 1872.2 A second reason
was desertion, especial y for women. In the early part of the century, Jane
Cleveland justified two cohabiting relationships, one to Edward Williams
and one to Jefferson Hogg, because her army officer husband had ill-treated
and deserted her.3 Third, violence and drunkenness destroyed marriages,
though these show up less often in the middle classes than in the working
classes. Stil , some men and women refused to stay with brutal or alcoholic
partners, as Cleveland’s case demonstrates.
Most observers of such hard cases agreed that the wronged spouses
were victims. They might not approve of the solution, but they could
still recognise the problems such spouses faced. A much more troubling
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
situation was that of couples who were simply incompatible. The middle-
class emphasis on the centrality of the love relationship between spouses
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living in sin
meant that those with differences of temperament and interests could
argue that their unions were not ‘true’. One writer during the ‘Is Marriage
a Failure?’ controversy from 1888 blamed the age difference with his
much older wife for the end of his marriage. He and his wife separated
after ten years, and he now lived happily with ‘a worthy girl some five
years my junior.’4 Others just had different interests. Henrietta Hodson,
an actress, left her solicitor husband to return to the stage, stultified by
her life as a lawyer’s wife. She fell in love with Henry Labouchere, and they
lived together until her husband divorced her.5 The English courts did not
recognise incompatibility as grounds to end a marriage, but for those in
uncongenial unions, the alternatives were bleak.
‘Incompatibility’ was a vague term, but one problem appeared
repeatedly. Professional men often claimed that their wives did not support
their work. In other words, many middle-class men wanted wives who
could share in their interests. Few women were both domestic angels and
professionals, especial y if they had children, so the marriages ran into
difficulties. Thomas Southwood Smith and his second wife Mary became
estranged early in their marriage. Years later, in the 1830s, he set up a
household with Margaret Gillies. In contrast to his legal marriage, Thomas
and Margaret built a relationship by col aborating on his reform work.6
Similarly, novelist George Gissing separated from his mercurial wife Edith
in March 1898, due to their contrary temperaments. He met his eventual
cohabitee, Gabrielle Fleury, in July. Gissing’s happiness with Fleury led to a
renewed enthusiasm for writing, and he considered her intelligence one of
her main attractions.7
In all these examples, the partners had not begun the second union
until the first had irrevocably ended. In other cases, though, the unhappy
spouses did not end the marriage until a new partner had come along. The
consequences were so serious in marital break-ups that many people only
faced up to it when they could look forward to a happier union. W. J. Fox, a
Unitarian minister and social reformer, married Eliza Florence in 1820. The
marriage was unhappy; Fox complained that he wanted only ‘a moderate
share of comfort, a disposition to help me in my exertions … and economy
in the management of their fruits’, but his wife failed him. He did little to
resolve the situation, however, until he had fallen in love with Eliza Flower
in 1829; he separated from Mrs Fox in 1832.8 Again, the need for someone to
‘help me in my exertions’ was crucial; Flower was Fox’s intellectual equal.
But Fox only left his wife when he had hope for a better situation.
The most disapproved adulterous union was one that broke up a
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
surviving, if not flourishing, marriage. ‘Coming between man and wife’
was a serious wrong, and the social stigma had long-lived effects. If the
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adulterous cohabitation
adulterous partner was a man, he probably would have preferred to keep
both mistress and wife rather than make the break. T. E. Lawrence’s father,
Thomas Chapman, ran off with the family governess in 1887. He only did
so, though, because his wife gave him an ultimatum, forcing him to choose
between his families. If wives were accommodating, or ignorant, the man
could keep both. Roger Ackerley, a businessman, kept two mistresses
with two separate families in the fin-de-siècle. Though he married one of
the women in 1919, he never entirely broke his connection with his other
family.9
Indeed, discretion was the key to a successful ménage à trois. William
Bell Scott, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, stayed married
to his wife of twenty years after falling in love with Alice Boyd in 1859. In
the summer and early autumn, he went to Alice’s family home; in mid-
autumn, the two returned to London for the winter. Scott made no break
with his wife and careful y described his relationship with Boyd as a ‘perfect
friendship’ in his memoirs.10 Such cases point out the much greater sexual
freedom of men in the Victorian period; I have no examples of women who
lived with two men or had separate houses with a husband and lover. In
contrast, some wives tolerated adultery as long as the situation remained
discreet; indeed, with their legal and econom
ic disabilities, they had little
choice.Such cases demonstrated that conservatives’ concern about the
consequences of secularising marriage and divorce had some basis in fact.
If individual love and happiness were the primary points of marriage,
incompatibilities of various kinds justified separations. Stil , the supporters
of divorce reform could have replied that denying all divorce did not stop
separations from happening; if anything, wronged spouses lived ‘in sin’
more often when they had no possibility for remarriage. The compromise
of the divorce bill was the result of these two points of view; like all
compromises, it satisfied neither side.
A ‘real’ marriage?
Because of the seeming irrationality of the divorce law, adulterous couples
argued that theirs were ‘true’ marriages of heart and soul. Most of the
couples took each other’s names, called each other husband and wife,
and considered themselves married. Belief in the purity of the bond was
necessary to continue living in what was otherwise simple adultery. Marian
Evans eloped with the married George Henry Lewes in 1854. She took his
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
name, called him her husband all of her life, and believed the union to
be ‘a sacred bond.’ Similarly, Gissing considered Fleury his wife, and she
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living in sin
took his name. They also went through some sort of marriage ceremony,
probably a simple exchange of rings.11 Violet Hunt always insisted that she
and Ford Madox Ford, who lived together in the Edwardian period, had
gone through a ceremony in France, though it did not stand up to scrutiny
in court.12 Most of these couples did not wish to criticise marriage – in fact,
most wanted to marry – so they acted out the roles as much as possible.
Despite their resemblance to marriage, these unions challenged
the Victorian marital regime broadly, since they had no religious or legal
sanctions. The couples justified their decisions by blaming the law rather
Living in Sin Page 20
