Dickens's England (10 page)

9th November 1837

We have a party here today, some to dinner and some to tea. I have got eighteenpence out of one of them. It's amuseing to see the young ladies, how they manover to make the gentlemen take notice of them. They will loose their pocket handkerchiefs or drop their gloves, that the gents mite offer to find them, or they will keep a wine glass or cup and saucer in their hand until after the servant is gone out of the room, so that some of the gents mite take it of them. Their mothers take care to give them good instruction how to mannage before they leave homes. There is very fiew of them that get husbands after all, except they are very handsome or got large fortunes, as young gentlemen generaly place their afections on some poor but pretty girl and takes her into keeping and when tired of her, turns her off and gets another. Those that are turned off mostly go on the tound as comon prostitutes. If a gentleman maries a lady, it's for her money, and in a short time he gets tired of her and takes up with his kept girl again and treats his wife like a dog. Therefore women in high life has not the opertunity of getting maried as those in lower stations, as men in lower stations of life cannot aford to keep girls. Therefore they do not care about marreying except for money, and then of course there is no happyness. The husband neglects his wife, that gives the wife reason to go with other men, and there is a regular sistem of whoredom carreyed on by both parties. I mean that is the case with a great many. Of course, there are some exceptions, some good and some bad.

Diary of William Tayler, Footman, 1837
(Dorothy Wise, ed., 1962, 1998)

MARKETING WOMEN

A notorious characteristic of English society is the universal marketing of our unmarried women – a marketing peculiar to ourselves in Europe, and only rivalled by the slave merchants of the East. We are a matchmaking nation; the lively novels of Mrs Gore have given a just and unexaggerated picture of the intrigues, the manoeuvres, the plotting and the counterplotting that make the staple of matronly ambition. We boast that in our country, young people not being affianced to each other by their parents, there are more marriages in which the heart is engaged than there are abroad. Very possibly; but, in good society, the heart is remarkably prudent, and seldom falls violently in love without a sufficient settlement; where the heart is,
there
will the
treasure
be also! Our young men, possessing rather passion than sentiment, form those
liaisons
which are the substitute of love; they may say with Quin to the fair glove-maker, ‘Madam, I never make love, I always buy it
ready made.'
. . .

The custom of open match-making is productive of many consequences not sufficiently noticed; in the first place, it encourages the spirit of insincerity among all women. . . . You do not lavish your invitations on the most agreeable member of a family, but on the richest. The elder son is the great attraction. Nay, the more agreeable the man be, if poor and unmarried, the more dangerous he is considered; you may admit him to acquaintanceship, but you jealously bar him from intimacy. Thus society is crowded with the insipid and beset with the insincere. The women that give the tone to society take the tone from their favourites. The rich young man is to be flattered in order that he may be won; to flatter him you seem to approve his pursuits; you talk to him of balls and races; you fear to alarm him by appearing his intellectual superior; you dread lest he should think you a blue [‘blue-stocking': intellectual]; you trust to beauty and a graceful folly to allure him, and you harmonise
your
mind into ‘gentle dullness', that it may not jar upon his own.

Edward Lytton Bulwer,
England and the English
(1834)

WOMEN AND MEN: NO CONTEST

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the ‘superiority' of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the other, and is completed by the other; they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims and their places. Her great function is Praise: she enters into no contest, but infallibly judges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial – to him, therefore, the failure, the offence, the inevitable error; often he must be wounded, or subdued, often misled, and
always
hardened. But he guards the woman from all this: within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence. This is the true nature of home – it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. . . .

This, then, I believe to be – will you not admit it to be – the woman's true place and power? But do not you see that, to fulfil this, she must – as far as one can use such terms of a human creature – be incapable of error? So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise – wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side. . . .

Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the desire of power! – For Heaven's sake, and for Man's sake, desire it all you can. But
what
power? That is all the question. Power to destroy? . . . Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide, and to guard. Power of the sceptre and the shield . . . Will you not covet such power as this, and be no more housewives, but queens? . . . queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will for ever bow, before the myrtle crown and stainless sceptre of womanhood. But, alas! you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest; and leaving misrule and violence to work their will among men . . . There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you have provoked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are prone to fight; they will fight for any cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them when there is no cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to bear it . . . it is you only who can feel the depths of pain, and conceive the way of its healing.

John Ruskin, ‘Queen's Gardens' (1864),
Sesame and Lilies
(1865)

WOMAN'S IDEAL AND ACTUAL LIFE

Passion, intellect, moral activity – these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilization.

Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. . . . Mrs A has the imagination, the poetry of a Murillo, and has sufficient power of execution to show that she might have had a great deal more. Why is she not a Murillo? From a material difficulty, not a mental one. If she has a knife and fork in her hand for three hours of the day, she cannot have a pencil or brush. Dinner is the great sacred ceremony of this day, the great sacrament. To be absent from dinner is equivalent to being ill. Nothing else will excuse us from it. Bodily incapacity is the only apology valid. If she has a pen and ink in her hands during other three hours, writing answers for the penny post, again, she cannot have her pencil, and so
ad infinitum
through life. . . .

A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities which are called her ‘duties' forbid it. Her ‘domestic duties', high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through) forbid it. What are these duties (or bad habits)? – Answering a multitude of letters which lead to nothing, from her so-called friends, keeping herself up to the level of the world that she may furnish her quota of amusement at the breakfast-table; driving out her company in the carriage. And all these things are exacted from her by her family which, if she is good and affectionate, will have more influence with her than the world. . . .

The family uses people,
not
for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for – its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be. If it wants someone to sit in the drawing room,
that
someone is supplied by the family, though that member may be destined for science, or for education, or for active superintendence by God, i.e., by the gifts within.

This system dooms some minds to incurable infancy, other to silent misery. . . .

Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered for women to escape from this death; and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced! . . .

That man and woman have an equality of duties and rights is accepted by woman even less than by a man. Behind
his
destiny woman must annihilate herself, must be only his complement. A woman dedicates herself to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it. But if she has any destiny, any vocation of her own, she must renounce it, in nine cases out of ten. Some few, like Mrs Somerville, Mrs Chisholm, Mrs Fry, have not done so; but these are exceptions. The fact is that woman has so seldom any vocation of her own, that it does not much signify; she has none to renounce. A man gains everything by marriage: he gains a ‘helpmate', but a woman does not. . . .

The ideal life is passed in noble schemes of good consecutively followed up, of devotion to a great object, of sympathy given and received for high ideas and generous feelings. The actual life is passed in sympathy given and received for a dinner, a party, a piece of furniture, a house built or a garden laid out well, in devotion to your guests – (a too real devotion, for it implies that of all your time) – in schemes of schooling for the poor, which you follow up perhaps in an odd quarter of an hour, between luncheon and driving out in the carriage – broth and dripping are included in the plan – and the rest of your time goes in ordering the dinner, hunting for a governess for your children, and sending pheasants and apples to your poorer relations. Is there anything in
this
life which can be called an Incarnation of the ideal life within?

Florence Nightingale,
Cassandra
(1852; pub. 1928)

WOMAN'S PROFESSION

We say that the greatest of social and political duties is to encourage marriage. The interest of a state is to get as many of its citizens married as possible. . . . Women labourers are a proof of a barbarous and imperfect civilization. We should be retrograding in the art and science of civilization were more women encouraged to be self-supporters. And the reason of this is plain enough. Wherever women are self-supporters, marriage is,
ipso facto,
discouraged. The factory population is proof of this. In the manufacturing districts women make worse wives and worse helpmates than where they are altogether dependent on the man. And where there are fewer marriages there is more vice . . .

Married life is woman's profession; and to this life her training – that of dependence – is modelled. Of course by not getting a husband, or losing him, she may find that she is without resources. All that can be said of her is, she has failed in business, and no social reform can prevent such failures. The mischance of the distressed governess and the unprovided widow is that of every insolvent tradesman. He is to be pitied; but all the Social Congresses in the world will not prevent the possibility of a mischance in the shape of broken-down tradesmen, old maids, or widows. Each and all are frequently left without resources; and each and all always will be left without resources . . .

Anon., ‘Queen Bees or Working Bees',
The Saturday Review
(1859)

THE LAW

‘You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and, indeed, are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.'

‘If the law supposes that,' said Mr Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is a ass – a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law's a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience – by experience.' Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words, Mr Bumble fixed his hat on very tight, and, putting his hands in his pockets, followed his helpmate down stairs.

Charles Dickens,
Oliver Twist
(1839)

ME AND ‘ER

We treads this parf o' life as every married couple ought,

Me and 'er – 'er and me;

In fact we're looked on as the ‘appiest couple down the court,

Me and 'er – 'er and me.

I must acknowledge that she 'as a black eye now and then,

But she don't care a little bit, not she;

It's a token of affection – yuss, in fact that is love