Love in the Time of Victoria

by Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, John Howe (Translator)

‘Vice and wretchedness exist in their most appalling and hideous forms, stalking about with bold front, unblushingly, as though vice were virtue.’ For the middle-class moralists and reformers of Victorian London, poverty was synonymous with their descriptions of the urban working classes portray a swarming, undifferentiated mass, impoverished and immoral. In the absence of written accounts by the poor themselves, these nineteenth-century prejudices still cloud our understanding of popular attitudes to sensuality and courtship, marriage and pregnancy.

Love in the Time of Victoria overturns these prejudices by presenting and analyzing an extraordinary range of hitherto unpublished first-hand love letters and testimonies from working-class women who faced pregnancy alone, and from their suitors, relatives and employers. These unique and moving writings provide the fullest and most accurate picture to date of love and sex among the poor in Victorian London.

Francoise Barret-Ducrocq has painstakingly uncovered autobiographical fragments which show women and men who are neither depraved nor unusually virtuous. They meet in the course of their work, in the streets or through family and friends; they seek romance in parks and pubs, servants’ attics or rented rooms. The women’s own records of their relationships resonate with all the singularities of desire, passion and regret, and they reveal a wide range of responses to separation or abandonment. For, despite their limited options, these women continued to exercise real choice. Their words vividly bring to life the material and emotional conflicts of the poor in nineteenth-century London.

This remarkable book restores dignity and individuality to its subjects, but never idealizes them. The stories here contain cynicism and tenderness, cruelty and generosity. As the author says, this is history amazingly like real life.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian, Love, Historical

226 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Eva]

This book was a fascinating look into the sex and love lives of London's working poor during the Victorian Age. Francois Barret-Ducrocq stumbled across documents from the Foundling Hospital which accepted children under the age of 1 year old once their mothers had proved they could not take care of them. The documents included testimonies of the girls which detailed the affairs they had from those with their masters (usually coercive with the girls as maids) to those with butchers boys or others met around town. The incredible documents and Francoise's analysis show how varied life was and how different the reality of the working poor was from their depiction via the middle class and aristocracy.

Circumstances were different as were the choices of the women and their future prospects. While some knew that their affair might last a night others had been promised marriage after over two years of marriage.

An incredible and essential book if you want to understand what life was like for the working poor, who while depicted as being without morals and without any purpose other than to serve had hopes and dreams of their own. As I read this I furthered my opinion that life as a woman in the Victorian Age was horrendous.

[Jewels]

To give a little bit of background, I'm in the midst of working on a research paper about the Victorian age divide between morality and hypocrisy. This volume sheds a bit of light on whether or not the working classes were too depraved to be saved. On the contrary, from the evidence the author has gathered, it seems rather that the working poor had their own set of rules as to courtship and marriage, and dealing with pregnancy outside matrimony. It was an interesting look into what is often pointed to as the supreme underbelly of Victorian England, and it's not as bad as it's been made to seem.

[Robert Monk]

Most of us have an idea of the Victorian age, and specifically of sexuality in the Victorian age, an idea formed by Thomas Hardy novels and Queen Victoria's scowl: a deeply repressed time, in which sex itself was essentially banned from the public discourse. This book tries to get at what the working class actually did, using as its resource the records of a London foundling hospital. Women who were giving up their children had to explain the details of their situation, which gives us a glimpse into what was expected (if not necessarily what was true; these women had an inducement to lie). We get, as a result, interesting anecdotes that belie the idea that there was a rigid, brutal code of sexual conduct in mid- to late-Nineteenth century England. There's not much in the way of analysis here, and there are (acknowledged) limitations to the source. But it does help give us a better idea of what people actually did back then. (Spoiler: they did have sex.)

[Abdul Qayoom]

It is fascinating book

[Nikhil]

The author gained access to previously restricted documents from a Foundling Hospital in London. The documents, first-hand accounts and letters of working class women, their friends, family and acquaintances allow the author to examine the sexual mores and behaviors of working-class women in Victorian London.

Much of the book consists of providing detailed excerpts from these documents to rebut the dominant middle-class/bourgeois view of working class sexuality and fertility behavior. Middle-class observers/reformers/evangelists viewed the pre-marital sexual relations, births out of wedlock, and large families of working people as sins and travesties, tarnishing the Empire. In particular, much blame was attributed to loose sexual mores and promiscuity. The author rebuts these views by showing how sexual behavior and fertility among working peoples followed its own set of mores that delinked sexual behavior from marriage. Pre-marital sexual relations were condoned by families but it was implcitily understood that the men had promised themselves to the women and that marriage would eventually ensue and that financial and material support would be offered in the event of pregnancy. These mores were rooted in fertility mores from agrarian working communities in previous centuries, and were being eroded by the anonymity of the city, the volatility of employment and income in an industrial society, and the erosion of social support for unmarried women as embodied by the Poor Law of 1834.

The final section of the book, which details how women, men, family members, and employers responded once the pregnancy could no longer be concealed is particularly good. The author's exploration of how working women tried to deal with poverty, childbirth, and the necessity of working without any real ability to force men to pay child support or any assisstance in the form of maternity leave is still relevant. The inability of working women to breastfeed children at work (or the inability of working women to bring their children to work), required women to find childminders and wet nurses at substantial cost. The difficulties of reconciling industrial (and post-industrial) patterns of work with raising children remains unresolved. The book also highlights how maternity leave has different implications for women in different occupations/income levels. While only providing maternity leave (instead of family leave) can widen the wage gap and reduce women's upward mobility in skilled labor positions, for poorer women working as unskilled labor, maternity leave ensures they do not have to give up their children to make ends meet.

Men primarily appear in these narratives as individuals who abandoned the women they had promised marriage/engagement to and refused to provide material compensation to help women through confinment and the first year of child-rearing. The explanations for men's behavior are varied, ranging from the vagaries of industrial employment and financial insecurity to callousness and brutality. Regardless, the changing legal framework and options for immigration combined to allow men to leave with impunity, leading to the breakdown of the sexual mores of working peoples.

[Ben]

Fascinating study of adoption cases from Victorian orphanages - reveals the moralistic bourgeois view of the working classes as depraved beasts was a little more subjective than we tend to think. Useful companion volume to Mayhew, Engels. Although the book is academic in nature, Barret-Ducroque infuses it with sympathy and humanity. Thorough endnotes support his thesis, although it flies in the face of some long-accepted conventional wisdom concerning the Victorian scene.

[Wealhtheow]

After an exhaustive study of the meticulous records of London's Foundling Hospital, Barret-Ducrocq wrote a book about how Victorians viewed sex and its afteraffects.

[Alexandria]

Must reread to review.