The Marketplace of Love

This chapter reveals what was new to the material culture of courtship, from porcelain snuffboxes and glass signets printed with romantic motifs to the increasingly elaborate laced and embossed valentine cards sold by printers, booksellers, and stationers’ shops. The Georgian era is presented as an important transitional period in the modernization and commercialization of romantic customs. After Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753 required marriages to take place at church in a single legal event—precluding suits in the church courts to compel the performance of a marriage contract—courting couples exchanged an ever-diversifying range of new consumer goods as romantic gifts. A growing number and variety of novelty items such as printed handkerchiefs were designed specifically as valentine souvenirs, as Valentine’s Day developed into a love industry. The chapter explores how love was packaged and sold to consumers in new ways, and the consequences of this shift for the rituals and experiences of romantic love.

Love Letters

This chapter considers how letters worked to move a relationship forward and facilitate greater emotional intimacy between writers. The chapter evaluates the role of the love letter on the path to matrimony using the correspondences of eight couples of varied social rank. Letter-writing is presented as a distinct stage of courtship, during which couples negotiated, tested, and cemented a marital bond. Men and women adopted particular gendered strategies, with women demonstrating their virtue, modesty, and self-doubt to suitors, who in return emphasized their sincerity, and—with increasing frequency over the century—rhapsodized about their depth of feeling. Engagement to marry was not a single moment but a lengthy process, becoming more assured as greater numbers of letters were exchanged. The chapter demonstrates the emotional value of missives as ‘thoughts’ or ‘favours’ sent by loved ones, which were treated as treasured possessions and praised as sources of pleasure that could even transcend death itself.

Breach of Promise

This chapter analyses the legal consequences of broken relationships using ninety breach of promise cases under the common law. It unpicks the nature of the suit including the verdicts, gender balance, damages awarded, age, occupation, and social status of plaintiffs and defendants. The chapter reveals that while women brought 80 per cent of cases, they were also more likely to win. It show how the action changed in response to the emotional shifts outlined in Chapter 5, as by the 1790s, romantic hurt was presented in court as a uniquely female grievance. Cases increasingly came to rely upon demonstrating the hurt feelings of spurned lovers, where a man was not thought to suffer as equally as a woman. Finally, the chapter reveals how objects such as love letters, wedding licences, wedding clothes, and furniture for the marital home were crucial in providing material evidence of proximity to marriage.

Romantic Suffering

This chapter examines the cultural codes of romantic suffering, beginning with an analysis of how men and women engaging in troubled relationships conceptualized their turmoil using the language of the heart. It considers the cultural influence of archetypal heroines such as Armida, Queen Dido, and Ophelia, as women’s suffering from love assumed an increasingly dominant role in popular culture from mid-century. The cult of sensibility transformed women in love into objects of sympathy, whose misfortunes were caused by their tender and feeling hearts. This redefinition of gender roles transformed the suicidal lover from a female to a male figure—exemplified by Goethe’s Werther—with eighteenth-century men committing heroic acts of passion whilst their sweethearts languished away. The chapter closes by tracing the disintegration of relationships through objects, revealing how it was imperative for lovers to return letters and romantic gifts with the utmost urgency in order formally to terminate an engagement.

Love Tokens

This chapter uses sensory interaction with love tokens to explore the process of falling in love. It brings together gifts typically selected by courting men, such as garters, rings, and stay busks, with those characteristically chosen by women, such as violets and hair-work tokens, plus letters, locks of hair, silhouettes, and miniature portraits exchanged by both sexes. The chapter reveals how highly ritualized ways of gazing at, touching, and smelling these items both created and expedited the experience of love. As the nun Héloïse wrote to her tutor Abelard, in the absence of a lover the power of imagination could make pictures ‘grow the more finish’d, and acquire a greater Resemblance’, while letters could fire the passions ‘as if the Persons themselves were present’. By considering how individuals collected and interacted with gifts, the chapter responds to Monique Scheer’s call for historians of the emotions to think ‘harder about what people are doing’ by looking at the ‘bodies and artifacts of the past’.

The Language of Love

This chapter rediscovers the ‘script’ shaping romantic language in Georgian England. As the social psychologist Lubomir Lamy argues, love ‘is first and foremost a story’, with individuals following a ‘script for love that describes how a romantic relationship should normally unfold’. The chapter provides a thematic overview of the various religious, physical, and literary tropes shaping the language of love. It sets out the wider framework that guided the language used by lovers in Georgian England, and how they conceived, navigated—and therefore experienced—love itself. The language of love is presented as a learned style crafted within a number of historically specific frameworks, which enabled couples to elucidate their feelings, determine their compatibility, chart the changing status of their relationship, and build a closer emotional bond before matrimony.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes the book by outlining the nature and purpose of the language of love, which is presented as a supremely adaptable lexicon with a vital function in facilitating intellectual exchange, determining a couple’s compatibility, shaping their emotions, and helping to make sense of their budding relationship. It demonstrates how courting practices actively cultivated particular feelings, and sets out the wider significance of these findings for histories of courtship, emotions, and material culture. The chapter closes by charting the continuing modernization and commercialization of romantic customs over the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, arguing that the language used by couples to navigate relationships today is no less culturally and historically specific.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the central aim of the book to rediscover the emotional experience of courtship, asking, what did it mean to marry in Georgian England? It introduces the sixty key couples from a broad variety of social and occupational groups, using materials drawn from thirty archives and museum collections. The chapter foregrounds the interdisciplinary methodologies used throughout the book, which draw upon anthropology, art history, literary theory, philosophy, and psychology to examine the cultural codes of love. It situates the chapters that follow among histories of emotions, romantic love, courtship, marriage, the family, and material culture.