Living in Sin
Page 22
kindness, and obsessed by the permanent il usion of all women that they
can Save.’37 For their part, men felt protective towards women who had
been deserted or brutalised, also accepting the women’s explanations for
the failures of their first unions. The combination of emotional attachment
and a desire to save led most to believe that the first marriage was a legal
shel . As in bigamy cases, some of these second ‘marriages’ were spectacular
successes. Gissing insisted that Lyon ‘saved’ Frederic: ‘But for his true
companion, his real wife, this work would never have been done … she saved
him & enabled him to do admirable things.’38 Another example was Gissing
himself; biographers agree that his last years with Fleury were the happiest
of his life. Other unions showed their success by their longevity. Boyd
and Bell Scott remained a couple for thirty-one years. Their relationship
was so well known that his friends sent condolences to Alice rather than
Letitia when Scott died.39 Williams and Hogg lived together for thirty-six
years, and Gillies and Southwood Smith did so for over twenty. Evans and
Lewes, the most famous example, stayed together twenty-four years with
no outward sign of discontent. Biographers disagree about whether they
were actual y perfectly happy, but few contemporaries doubted it.40
These couples were not only good for each other, but often for other
family members as wel . Flower was a successful stepmother to Fox’s oldest
daughter as well as his deaf son, and she was also close to his mother and
sister. Gillies acted as an aunt/stepmother to Gertrude Hil , Southwood
Smith’s adopted grandchild.41 Evans got along with Lewes’s three sons,
though biographers debate how much she wanted this responsibility. Stil ,
she supported them with her earnings, and she left her estate to Lewes’s
surviving child, Charles. Mary Braddon’s five stepchildren loved her, and
the family was both busy and happy, particularly after she added six more
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children to the brood.42 These stable families made a strong argument for
divorce reform, since they had few bad consequences and numerous good
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living in sin
ones. Rather than destroying families, they strengthened them.
On the other hand, some of these unions failed spectacularly. As in
legal marriages, the reasons were as various as the people involved, but
some commonalities appear. First, many of the men, such as Wel s and
Ford, had well-established patterns of unfaithfulness. The decision to live
with a man who had already deserted his wife, then, was risky. Second, the
difficulties of some of these unions came out of the strong wil s of both of
the partners; women independent enough to choose a free union were also
unwilling to sublimate their desires to men. In fact, such women resented
their partners’ comparative freedom. Whatever the reasons, the ends of
free unions were fraught with difficulties. Since the couple had never been
married, they could not divorce, so neither partner knew how to achieve
closure.
An example of these difficulties was the case of H. G. Wel s and
Rebecca West, who first became lovers in 1913 when Wel s was married
to his second wife. From the beginning, West resented Wel s’s freedom,
which was even more noticeable after she had his child in August 1914. She
was stuck in the country with no one for company, and she also resented
the interruption to her career. Their serious problems surfaced in 1919;
West wanted Wel s either to marry her or give her an allowance (for the
child) and let her go, but he resisted. Then, in 1921, Wel s became ill and
expected West to nurse him; he was also unfaithful. Since he did not visit
West when she was ill in 1920 and was as jealous of her as if they were
married, West saw few reasons to stay in a union that gave her all the duties
of a wife without the advantages. She initiated the break in March 1923. A
combination of infidelity, two strong wil s, and West’s independence led to
a long succession of quarrels.43
Facing up to the failure of a free union was difficult, particularly for
women, since they were often economical y dependent. In addition, they
were social y isolated already; being a deserted fallen woman was one of
the few situations that was worse. The pattern for cohabiting break-ups,
then, was one of desertion (usual y by the man), but not quickly or cleanly.
As stated above, West and Wel s had serious problems as early as 1919, but
the relationship dragged on until West went to America in 1923.44 Hunt
and Ford drew apart as the First World War loomed, when Ford enlisted in
the army. All the same, Ford only left Violet for Stel a Bowen, an Australian
painter, after the war. Even after he was gone, Violet could not let go,
insisting that her years of cohabitation gave her the right to stay in his life.45
Unsurprisingly, Ford did not agree, and he moved to France to be sure of
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
a complete break.
In short, unless one of the partners was ruthless, cohabiting unions
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adulterous cohabitation
died a slow death. Men felt guilty, and women faced major economic and
social difficulties. Having insisted their unions were ‘truer’ than many
marriages, couples were chagrined to discover their free unions also fell
apart. This was the danger of defining marriage by emotional attachments
alone, since the latter could change rapidly. Problems also developed because
of couples’ confusion about what they wanted from these unchartered
relationships. Most of these men wanted intellectual companions, but they
also wanted women who would take care of domestic matters and consider
their careers secondary to men’s. Successful relationships tended to be like
that of Flower, who ran Fox’s home, did secretarial work for him, and was
a stepmother to his children, to the neglect of her musical career.46 Unions
that mirrored Victorian gender roles, then, were more likely to survive,
though at a cost for the women.
A few rare relationships were happy with independent women,
though only when the women’s careers did not challenge domestic roles.
Braddon and Maxwell had a successful marriage with Braddon continuing
to write her novels, though she also ran the house. The same could be said
of Evans and Lewes; Lewes strongly encouraged her writing, but he did
not t
ake over domestic duties. Gillies and Southwood Smith lived together
for twenty years, and she had a successful painting career. In fact, when
Southwood Smith lost his job on the Board of Health, she was the main
breadwinner. He did not object to her work; on the contrary, he helped her
get some of her commissions. As a result of this equality, as well as their
shared beliefs in Unitarianism and social reform, theirs was a happy home,
lasting until Southwood Smith’s death in 1861.47 Some adulterous unions,
then, were both happy and relatively equal, but these were the exceptions.
In addition, even in a successful union, the woman knew that her
position was delicate. Though without the legal advantages of marriage,
male cohabitees still had more power. Thus, any separation or quarrel was
magnified. Williams suffered from Hogg’s frequent absences, and wrote
to him, in 1833 that her ‘health has suffered so cruel y by this abominable
absence, that I can bear nothing.’ Rather than reassuring her, Hogg’s reply
scolded her for making him feel guilty, a letter that must have been hard
to bear. All relationships had ups and downs, but for a cohabiting woman,
the down periods were especial y frightening.48 Women cohabitees had
good reason to fear desertion, especial y if the men had already left their
wives. In addition, female cohabitees were wary of hostile family influence.
Fleury left Gissing in London after a brief trip and returned to France to
care for her ailing mother in 1901. Gissing’s friends persuaded him to stay
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
in England for medical care, which alarmed Gabrielle. She wrote several
letters, worried that his family would try to get him to go back to his
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living in sin
second wife.49 She summarised her fears in a letter: ‘I should have very
much preferred to have all these people living with us, beside us, rather
than between us’. Gissing returned to France after his treatment, so Fleury
had underestimated him, but her fears were not unrealistic. Like most
cohabitees, she had anxieties unknown to wives.50
Middle-class adulterous cohabitation showed both the possibilities
and limitations to marital rebellion. These couples defined marriage
broadly, but only so they could marry themselves. As usual with the middle
class, rebellion was limited, and the fallout redounded more on the women
than the men. Despite having financial resources, these couples had severe
economic strain, and they handled both the beginnings and ends of their
unions awkwardly. Stil , for some of these couples, the happiness of their
unions mitigated the worst of the social disapprobation, and their isolation
was not total even at the height of Victorian respectability.
Working-class adulterous cohabitation
The restrictions of the divorce law hit the working class harder than better-
off couples, since few could afford the process even with legal grounds.
Working-class women, especial y, faced an uphill battle. Unsurprisingly,
then, numerous sources indicate that working-class adulterous cohabitation
was widespread. At the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce in
1912, John Palin, a police missionary, gave typical testimony when he stated
that in his district in Yorkshire, one neighbourhood had seven cohabiting
couples, four of which were adulterous. Appendix XI of the report included
160 cases of separated married couples; in 47 of these, at least one of the
partners was already living with someone else.51 In 1911, the Women’s
Cooperative Guild surveyed its members about divorce reform, and the
report included stories of 76 couples with marital problems. Of these
couples, 30 had at least one of the partners living with someone else after
the marriage ended.52
Historians’ work on self-divorce also indicates a large number of
adulterous unions. S. P. Menefee and E. P. Thompson have shown that
wife sales continued into the nineteenth century. Menefee identified
approximately 270 wife sales between 1800 and 1900, though most were in
the first half of the century. Thompson’s sample included 42 cases between
1760 and 1800, 121 between 1800 and 1840 and 55 between 1840 and 1880.
Wife sales were not the norm in self-divorce, and these numbers are smal .
But since the majority of self-divorces would have been unrecorded, they
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
indicate acceptance of separations followed by irregular cohabitation.53 In
addition, in my cases involving violence, over 40 per cent of the couples
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adulterous cohabitation
(92 of 217) had at least one partner married to someone else. In short, such
couples were a significant portion of working-class cohabitees, probably
half. If one factored in bigamy cases, the percentage of those who lived
together because they were already married was a clear majority of
working-class adulterous cohabitees.
Though they avoided criminal sanctions for bigamy, these couples had
legal problems, primarily due to the expense of keeping two families. Few
working-class men could afford to do so, and they often found themselves
charged with neglecting to support a wife or affiliated for illegitimate
children. Their relations with the state, then, remained contentious. In
addition, their reasons for second unions were similar to those of the
middle classes. When they could not live compatibly in early marriages,
they refused to submit to an unhappy or celibate future. The working-class
community, though, was more tolerant of marital irregularity, since they
knew that divorce was costly.
Motives and means
I have already discussed working-class justifications for leaving unhappy
marriages in the previous chapter, and many of these were the same in
adulterous unions. They also matched the motives of middle-class couples.
Illnesses, both mental and physical, justified finding comfort elsewhere, as
a wide variety of sources make clear. Mrs T4P, one of Elizabeth Roberts’s
interviewees in Preston, discussed one of her neighbours, who lived with
a married man, since ‘[h]is wife was a chronic invalid in a chair and they
wouldn’t be able to live a normal married life’.54 Mental illnesses could be
even more difficult. Ellen Lanigan had to support four children with a small
shop after her husband went insane in 1873. She cohabited with a lodger,
though he was just as unreliable, leaving her the mother of twins. Mrs S7P,
century because the woman had a ‘mental y deranged’ husband. She added,
‘they lived together until she was 84 but she wasn’t promiscuous.’55
Infidelity was also a cause, though women tolerated adultery more
readily than men. Many of the people who wrote to the Royal Commission
of 1912 about infidelity were working-class men, often those who had to
be away from home for their jobs or who had lodgers. A good example of
both was a man who complained of having come home from a business
trip to find his wife in bed with their lodger. She eventual y ran away
with him, and her husband could not afford to divorce her.56 Conversely,
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
husbands also deserted wives for other women. Francis Fulford, a rector
in Cambridgeshire, had such a situation in his parish. He tried to shame
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living in sin
Thomas Pestil , a shoemaker, into returning to his wife in the 1840s, but
with no success. Pestill preferred his new lover.57
Working-class couples, too, had incompatibilities which were only
compounded when new partners came along. In some marriages, in fact,
conflict was endemic. Sarah Cook married William Cook in 1859 and they
lived together until 1875. By that time, both became jealous of other people,
Sarah of a Miss Clegg and William of a shoemaker named Wyatt. The two
quarrelled bitterly, so Sarah left to live with Wyatt until his death in 1879;
William lived with Clegg. He was still cohabiting when Sarah became a
pauper, and the JPs demanded that he support her. Cook appealed, and the
High Court concluded that the couple had lived ‘in a state of discomfort,
having constant bickerings.’ Given these problems, it tacitly approved of
the separation by relieving William of his responsibility for Sarah.58
Some class differences do emerge from the evidence. Cases of
drunkenness and brutality were more common in poor couples. Dr Ethel