A Problematic Solution:
Responses to the Marriage Reform Act of 1753

Five: Literary Reactions

The mid-eighteenth century was truly a ‘golden age’ for literary London. Throughout the period, great minds from a broad variety of disciplines gathered with one another to further their intellectual development. Poets and actors, historians and musicians, writers and critics came together as a community of great minds. Many of their efforts—from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses on Art—concerned themselves with the task of nation building. Great Britain, at the time, was beginning to form its identity as a nation in possession of an empire; it benefited greatly in this regard through the works of its intellectual elite. It is not surprising, perhaps, that out of this London subculture came the most monolithic and nuanced criticism of Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Reform Act. The focus of intellectual London was, after all, in the Fleet. The literary responses to the law were uniformly opposed to it. Their reasons for criticizing the law varied widely, however, as did the ways in which they communicated their opposition. As a whole, the literature that commented the statute provide fresh perspectives on the ways the act was portrayed in the public, secular arena. 

Samuel Johnson was, at the time, the preeminent figure of literary London. His centrality to the period is indicated by its frequent classification as ‘the age of Johnson.’[1] His literary club—a group of nine (later thirty-five) men of letters from a variety of backgrounds—was the premier intellectual organization of the era. An eccentric man, Dr. Johnson’s contributions to learning are still felt today. His poetic and fictional skills were complemented by extensive pursuits in other scholarly areas. He published the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language in 1755. His Prefaces Biographical and Critical to the Works of the English Poets and his Edition of Shakespeare remain seminal works in the development of modern literary criticism, and his pithy sayings continue to maintain a stranglehold on the market for clever quotations. It was serialized publications such as The Rambler and The Idler, however, that best preserved Johnson’s commentary on the society around him.

In The Idler, published in 1761, Johnson recorded his feelings on the use of class to determine marriage potential which, as we have seen, was central to much of the opposition to the Marriage Act. “There are few who do not at one time or another endeavor to step forward beyond their rank, who do not make some struggles for Fame, and shew that they think all other conveniences and delights imperfectly enjoyed without a Name.”[2] While other contemporaries, such as Walpole, claimed that wealth bred equality, Johnson recognized that one’s family could be equally (if not more) important to social mobility. In a nation with an entrenched and powerful aristocracy, commercial success could only provide a certain level of advancement. According to Johnson, attempts to break into the ranks of the nobility were frequently dependent on favorable marriage, the rare exception notwithstanding: “There is a particular period of life, in which this fondness for a Name seems principally to predominate in both sexes. Scarce any couple comes together, but the nuptials are declared in the News Papers with encomiums on each party.”[3] Inter-class marriages were not uncommon, as we have seen. Often, the children of Lords shared their titles with the children of merchants or professionals in exchange for the new wealth provided by such matches—a practice immortalized a decade earlier by William Hogarth in the six constituent engravings of Marriage A-la-Mode. Johnson understood the motivations behind attempts to marry well. He found the publication of banns altogether more perplexing:

Whence it arises that on the day of marriage all agree to call thus openly for honours. I am not able to discover. Some, perhaps, think it kind, by a publick declaration, to put an end to the hopes of rivalry and the fears of jealousy, to let parents know that they may set their daughters a liberty whom they have locked up from fear the bridegroom.[4]

It is entirely possible that Johnson’s sentiment was shared by many in the upper classes, who preferred to be married by license. After the marriage act, the less fortunate had little choice but to publish banns, the cost of licenses often being outside their means. Johnson’s musings on matrimony do not refer directly to the Marriage Act. As the dominant man of letters, however, his words would have been widely read by the increasingly literary London public, and he would doubtless have affected many of his contemporaries’ opinions.

Johnson’s commentaries on the institution of marriage were overshadowed by other literary works that specifically considered the Marriage Act and its consequences. These responses spanned genres—they included poetry, prose, and drama—and many were published long after other writers had stopped debating the topic. In a June 1756 letter to Henry Fox, for example, Horace Walpole communicated a “dull, Grub-street and scurrilous” poem he had encountered during a trip to Scotland. It includes various prophesies, but it begins by portraying the act as a dark omen: “When Yorken name, but nae the House, / Shall rise till Lyon frae a Louse; / And bind your bairns frae matrimonie, / Till it bring unco ruin on ye.”[5] This folk-poem astutely attacks both the Chancellor’s ambition—his family name, Yorke, clearly distinguished from the ancient northern duchy of York—and the law’s only reasonable end—the ruin of common people through its prohibition of traditional forms of marriage. The discovery of this poem in Scotland is ironic, of course, since the Marriage Act did not extend beyond England and Wales. Its existence there at all suggests that provincial opposition to the law was particularly widespread. Literature aimed at the statute occasionally even exposed those who had changed their minds about it over time. Ralph Griffiths, editor and publisher of the Monthly Review, is a prime example of this. In 1755, he had characterized opposition to the Marriage Act as unreasonable, since “this law has now been in force upwards of twelvemonths, and it is now possible that experience may have dissipated the apprehensions of these presupposed dangers.”[6] Ten years later, however, while reporting the publication of a poem criticizing the law, the Mothly Review, still under Griffith’s control, espoused the opposite view:

the oppressive restrictions of the late Marriage Act are now discovered to be no less impolitic than unnatural; and we are willing to hope that the legislature may be induced to act by motives, as well of good policy as of humanity, to repeal an Act, which, by destroying the freedom of connubial choice, took away the natural right of the subject in this most important circumstance of life; an act which (not to enter into the motives of it) instead of securing and facilitating conjugal happiness, threw a restraint on those sympathies and affections, which were the very means that nature has appointed to promote it.[7]

Poems had been written against the Marriage Act since its passage. That this reversal introduces one such poem suggests that they were read carefully by at least limited sections of the population. What, precisely, did such poems say, and what parts of the Marriage Act did they critique? These questions cannot be answered summarily. The examination of two poems[8]—one published in the months before the act took effect and one published over a decade later—illustrates the breadth of concerns represented in the genre. The content both poems tied to their dates of their publication.

In December 1753, London Magazine published a brief, untitled poem which both decried the impending act’s regulation and offered a temporary solution for illicit lovers. The poem outlines the requirements for marriage under the law, lamenting that “should she marry under twenty one, / A whore the wife, a bastard ev’ry son.”[9] Given the lengthy list of marital prerequisites (seven lines’ worth), this final demand is depicted as one more arbitrary burden on the young couple. The poem goes on to ask “is this just liberty for girls mature?’ and answer that “the Spanish padlock’s easier to endure.”[10] At least, the poem implies, chastity belts provided a definitive restriction of sexuality, while the Marriage Act was posed to restrict matrimony without offering any discouragement to would-be fornicators. The poem concludes by describing the dishonor of Fleet wedding chapels, but it admits that they are a necessary evil: “the Fleet chaplain o’er us shall say grace; / With tattere’d gown, and with a rugged face. / And if the place ye not despise, I there / Invite you all my nuptial feast to share.”[11] The anonymous author of the poem offers no wisdom to those couples unfortunate enough to find their marriages forbidden after Hardwicke’s act would take effect. Until then, however, it seems obvious that Fleet weddings would continue to be popular and necessary.

In 1764, John Armstrong published his own poetic attack on the Marriage Act. Separated from its implementation by a decade, Armstrong’s Marriage, an Ode is interesting in that it very clearly addresses the changes brought about by the statute. The poem begins by asserting the randomness of the natural lottery, which “Marks who shall rule or till the earth, / Th’ignoble, or the great.”[12] Armstrong’s use of the chance of birth reminds his readers that such privilege is not earned and that any codification of one groups disenfranchisement based solely on birth is inherently unjust. Furthermore, Armstrong presents the Marriage Act as a direct challenge to Divine authority: “The Sire condemns what God approves, / And Tyranny is Law.”[13] The Lord Chancellor, as head of the Law, is by extension a tyrant. That tyranny is extended to the parents among the upper classes, for whose children “No luxury refus’d but one— / Domestic Happiness.”[14] The generous love of youth is limited only by the greed of the older generation. According to Armstrong, this has disastrous consequences. Their children become the sacrificial victims of their greed—“Better the sacrificing Kinfe, /Plung’d in her bosom, end that life / Thy fatal Passion gave”[15]—while the parents maintain their shallow concern for wealth. Blame for the lust-driven reactions of the denied children rests solely with the parents: “Welcom’d by Thee chaste Love had shed / His blessings o’er that dismal Bed, / Now wrapt in guild and fear”[16] In summary, Armstrong claims that the injustice of the Marriage Act, enforced by ambitious parents, could destroy not only the lives of children, but the entire basis of the family: a stable spousal relationship.

Longer works attacked the injustices propagated by the Marriage Act, as well. Among these was The Clandestine Marriage, a wildly popular play written by George Colman the elder and David Garrick and published and performed in 1766. The story takes place over the course of two days at the country house of Mr. Sterling, a wealthy citizen of the city of London. The main players in the drama seem to be stock characters. Fanny, the heroine, is Sterling’s virtuous younger daughter. Her older sister is ambitious and jealous. The matriarch of the family, their aunt, is the rich widow of a foreign nobleman with great hopes for her elder niece’s prospects of marriage. Juxtaposed against the Sterlings is the House of Ogelby. The aging, gout-ridden Lord Ogelby is joined by Sir John Melvil, his unremarkable nephew and heir. Another of his nephews, Lovewell, works as a clerk for Sterling. The plot, too, is not particularly remarkable. Lovewell and Fanny have been clandestinely wed prior to the play’s opening. She is restless to reveal their relationship, while he insists on delaying their announcement (how, precisely, they managed to become married remains unclear). Matters become more complicated when Ogelby and his heir arrive to finalize the terms of marriage between Melvil and the elder Miss Sterling. The heir, as might be predicted, falls in love with Fanny, though banns have already been published with her sister. Ogelby also falls for Fanny. High tensions are resolved happily enough when the heroine and her husband are discovered and win the support of both her father and his uncle.

In truth, The Clandestine Marriage’s most powerful messages are about the ways in which the ideals of companionate, loving marriage are bastardized. In comparison, the relationship between Fanny and Lovewell, though illicit, seems preferable. Lovewell’s hesitation to reveal their relationship is a reflection of Sterling’s uncompromising ambition: “You know your father’s temper—Money (you will excuse my frankness) is the spring of all his actions, which nothing but the idea of acquiring nobility or magnificence can ever make him forego.”[17] His fears about Sterling’s reaction seem reasonable, based on the latter’s reaction to Lovewell’s half-joking proposal: “but can’t think of you for a son-in-law.- - - There’s not Stuff in the case, no money, Lovewell!”[18] In the same scene, Sterling plainly states why he (and presumably other wealthy parents) has reason to fear those courting his children without his consent. “I know very well that a warm speech or two from such a dangerous young spark, as you are, will go much farther towards persuading a silly girl to do what she has more than a month’s mind to do, than twenty grave lectures from fathers.”[19] Sterling’s concern is not unique; such issues were raised repeatedly as arguments in favor of marriage reform.

Colman and Garrick’s play also highlights tensions between the classes involved. Sterling is the prototypical ‘cit,’ a resident of the square mile comprising the City of London—Britains center of trade and commerce. His marital advice to Lovewell highlights the centrality of wealth to his view of life. “Get an estate, and a wife will follow.”[20] Anticipating Lord Ogelby’s arrival, Sterling reiterates his reliance on commercial prosperity, promising that “We’ll shew your fellows at the other end of the town how we live in the city—They shall eat gold—and drink gold—and lie in gold.”[21] The other end of town, Westminster, was the focal point of British government, nobility, and fashion. Sterling’s elder daughter shares his views. She teases Fanny for being satisfied with her father’s clerk: “Love and a cottage!- - -Eh, Fanny!- - - Ah, give me indifference and a coach and six!”[22] The admiration of Mr. and Miss Sterling is not returned in kind by Ogelby. He despises Sterling as a tasteless poser: “He is a vulgar dog, and if there was not so much money in the family, which I can’t do without, I would leave him and his hot rolls and butter directly.”[23] Still, his Lordship understands the necessity of the match, admitting that “People of quality overlook every thing in a marriage contract except their fortune,”[24] he pushes the marriage plans forward.

All these social observations pivot around the clandestine union between Fanny and Lovewell. It is impossible to determine how they entered into a valid marriage. The 1766 play clearly takes after the Marriage Act has come into effect. It is difficult to believe that Melvil and Miss Sterling would have published banns before the statute, when marriage by license was infinitely easier. A later incident offers more concrete evidence of the law’s existence. Fearing that Fanny is planning to sneak away with Melvil in the night, her aunt wakes the family. If she hadn’t, she claims “they had been up on the scamper to Scotland by this time.”[25] It is possible that between their marriage and the time of the play’s action, the law came into force, but the play offers no evidence of that change having taken place recently. Regardless, the play closes with an appeal for the public’s support of clandestine marriage: “all our joys will be dampt, if his Lordship’s generosity and Mr. Sterling’s forgiveness should not be succeeded by the indulgence, approbation, and consent of these our best benefactors. (To the audience.”[26] While The Clandestine Marriage offers a focused criticism of the Marriage Act’s effects, it ends by addressing its message directly to the audience. As with other literary critiques of the law, Colman and Garrick are not content to merely imply the social implications of their work.

Within a year of Hardwicke’s writing his Marriage Act, author John Shebbeare responded with the publication of a novel. In The Marriage Act, according to its subtitle, “the ruin of female honour, the contempt of the clergy, the destruction of private and public liberty, and other fatal consequences, Are considered; in a series of interesting adventures.”[27] Shebbeare’s novel differs from Colman’s play in two important ways. Firstly, it directly identifies the Marriage Reform Act as a problem. It also attacks the regulation of clandestine marriages more broadly. The result is a full-fledged literary assault on the statute, opened with a quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses[28] and capped by Shebbeare’s final chapter, which abandons his narrative to critique its namesake directly.

The characters in The Marriage Act are more numerous and diverse than those found in The Clandestine Marriage. By framing his novel as a set of loosely interconnected plots, Shebbeare is able to attack the statute through a variety of voices. One of those voices echoes the themes of the Colman/Garrick play. One servant, addressing his employer, looks upon marriage “as a kind of taking Money with the Mortgage of a Wife to pay off a Mortgage on an Estate.”[29] Shebbeare extends the servant’s impression of marriage onto Parliament, contending that “the Legislature seems to have look’d upon it in the same Light, and contrived the Marriage Bill for the Emolument of the Nobility, by this late Act with restrains the Sexes from Marriage till they are of Age;”[30] Many other critics had made similar claims against the act. Shebbeare characterizes the fiscal aspects of matrimony as intimately connected to issues of power. He communicates his fear that the Marriage Act would accentuate power differentials affecting marriage through some of the ‘adventures’ featured in his novel. In many instances, the novel’s narrator intrudes on the action, offering commentary on events and assigning blame almost universally with the Marriage Act. At one point, after relating the syphilis-induced death of a “lovely young Woman, who had been sold to this young Rake by her Guardian,” the narrator interrupts: “surely this new Law has rendered Wards more in the Power of their Guardians than before, and more than it ought; if they are prevented from marrying themselves, they are render’d the Property of their Guardians.”[31] Parents shared in the same power as guardians, a fact that does not escape notice in the novel, which characterizes the act as giving “more Power over the Affections of their Children, than what was right in Nature; where they could only reason with them, and not lay the Chains of Slavery on their Minds.”[32] Shebbeare, of course, manipulates the plots to fit his preordained end: the demonization of Hardwicke’s Marriage Reform Act. By creating believable stories highlighting the statute’s supposed evils, Shebbeare’s task was easier than critics outside the literary world, who depended on discovering similar real-life incidents. Support for his attacks was tailor-made to fit its purpose. The result is a tightly organized, thematically unified collection of tales that relate the dangers posed to the public by the new law.

The Marriage Act pushes beyond concerns about parental concern and the financial motivations of some marriages—concerns expressed in both the poems we have examined and in The Clandestine Marriage—to raise specific religious and moral objections to the act. Shebbeare protests that “Clergy may be innocent in performing the Marriage Right, and yet the only Sufferers.”[33] He offers an anecdote illustrating the injustice of punishing clergy for illicit marriages: “a License is obtained by the Perjury of the Seducer, who swears that both Parties are above the marriageable Age; in consequence of this the Divine unites them together, the Marriage is annulled, the Clergyman confined in a Gaol and banished to another Land, for not knowing what he could not possibly know.”[34] Shebbeare sees the punishment of the pastor for the perjury of the married party as a grave injustice. Other incidents in the novel highlight the moral injustices perpetuated by the act. At one point, a young woman ironically lectures the married man with whom she having sex on the benefits accorded to mistresses by the new law: “Matrimony has seldom been a Prejudice to us, who enjoy the Company of Gentlemen without that Clog, and this Marriage-Law bids fair to improve our Advantage. Wives, in general, grow so negligent of their Husbands, because they think themselves secured in their Persons by Marriage, that they send their Hearts to us; who must use them with Civility, to preserve them, having no other Tie upon their Behaviour.”[35] Shebbeare latches onto the idea that the new law will encourage sex outside marriage. While he asserts that it will foster adultery, he also explains at length how the virtue of young women will be ruined by inevitable fornication. “When they made this Law to keep young People from marrying, they should have made another to prevent them from seeing one another. Do they imagine an Act of Parliament, because it can annul Marriages, can annihilate Desires; or, because they can keep the World from one Part of the Ceremony, they can from the other.”[36] In a fit of hyperbole, he claims that he would not be surprised if “half the young Ladies in England should be seduced by means of this Act of Parliament.”[37] The law foolishly encourages debauchery, he argues, saving “the Fortune from the Hands of a Man, when he has robbed the Lady of her Virtue.”[38] Aside from vague references to the rashness of adolescent decision making, however, Shebbeare offers no reason to believe that loss of virtue is anything besides voluntary. While his assertions are valid, he neglects the wide range of experiences that don’t directly reflect those in his plots. This oversight would be easily forgiven in most literature, but the novel’s obvious political motives hold its arguments to a higher standard of realism.

What sets The Marriage Act apart from the other literary reactions we have examined in this chapter is its vicious closing section. In it, Shebbeare abandons the several stories included in the novel in favor of a diatribe against the Marriage Reform Act and its author. He justifies reacting to the law as if its provisions extended beyond minor children by arguing that “such is the Nature of the Law, and such is human Nature itself, that some way or other the Parent and Guardian can accomplish all their Designs on their Children.”[39] The power of parents and guardians over their children is unnatural, according to Shebbeare: “Whoever then would divert Mankind from following the Dictates of most refined and uncontaminated Nature, is an Enemy to the Race of Man; and he that thinks it can be effectuate without universal Mischief, is a Stranger to the Ways of Providence.”[40] Hardwicke stands as both enemy and stranger, then. The novel closes with an appeal to readers “to decide Whether an Act which does not obviate the very Evil for which it was intended, that must increase the Number of ruined Virgins, propagate Adulteries, bring Religion into Disgrace, be productive of unhappy Marriages, and transfer Estates to those who have no natural Right to them, should be continued or not.”[41] Having just encountered innumerable cases of injustice fostered by the law in question, however, there is little room for the reader to make a judgment different than the one repeated again and again by Shebbeare.

Taken as a whole, the literary reactions to the Marriage Reform Act provide a unique perspective on the law. The variety of forms employed by literary opponents of the law, coupled with their works’ thematic differences, offers readers new ways of understanding perceptions about the law’s effects on society. These images, however, must be considered critically as fictional reflections of their authors’ biases. Despite their limitations, these works communicate the voice of a sector of a population almost entirely distinct from the peers, parliamentarians, legal theorists, and ecclesiastics whose opinions otherwise dominated discussion of the Marriage Act. Literature concerning the law gives a human face to the theoretical arguments made in other debates. By treating such works as creations of biased individuals and reminders of the law’s human consequences, a deeper understanding of the contemporary reaction to Hardwicke’s controversial statute can be reached.