Customs in common, p.51
Customs in Common, page 51
Evans-Pritchard, op. cit., p. 103.
Of course, no culture re-appears in the same form. If people are to meet both the demands of a highly-synchronised automated industry, and of greatly enlarged areas of “free time”, they must somehow combine in a new synthesis elements of the old and of the new, finding an imagery based neither upon the seasons nor upon the market but upon human occasions. Punctuality in working hours would express respect for one’s fellow workers. And unpurposive passing of time would be behaviour which the culture approved.
It can scarcely find approval among those who see the history of “industrialisation” in seemingly-neutral but, in fact, profoundly value-loaded terms, as one of increasing rationalisation in the service of economic growth. The argument is at least as old as the industrial revolution. Dickens saw the emblem of Thomas Gradgrind (“ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to”) as the “deadly statistical clock” in his observatory, “which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid”. But rationalism has grown new sociological dimensions since Gradgrind’s time. It was Werner Sombart who — using the same favourite image of the Clockmaker — replaced the God of mechanical materialism by the Entrepreneur:
If modern economic rationalism is like the mechanism of a clock, someone must be there to wind it up.2
“Capitalism”, Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1953), iii, p. 205.
The universities of the West are today thronged with academic clocksmiths, anxious to patent new keys. But few have, as yet, advanced as far as Thomas Wedgwood, the son of Josiah, who designed a plan for taking the time and work-discipline of Etruria into the very workshops of the child’s formative consciousness:
My aim is high — I have been endeavouring some master stroke which should anticipate a century or two upon the large-paced progress of human improvement. Almost every prior step of its advance may be traced to the influence of superior characters. Now, it is my opinion, that in the education of the greatest of these characters, not more than one hour in ten has been made to contribute to the formation of those qualities upon which this influence has depended. Let us suppose ourselves in possession of a detailed statement of the first twenty years of the life of some extraordinary genius; what a chaos of perceptions!. . . How many hours, days, months have been prodigally wasted in unproductive occupations! What a host of half formed impressions & abortive conceptions blended into a mass of confusion. . .
In the best regulated mind of the present day, had not there been, & is not there some hours every day passed in reverie, thought ungoverned, undirected?1
Thomas Wedgwood to William Godwin, 31 July 1797, published in David Erdman’s important article, “Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Wedgwood Fund”, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, lx (1956).
Wedgwood’s plan was to design a new, rigorous, rational, closeted system of education: Wordsworth was proposed as one possible superintendent. His response was to write The Prelude — an essay in the growth of a poet’s consciousness which was, at the same time, a polemic against —
The Guides, the Wardens of our faculties,
And Stewards of our labour, watchful men
And skilful in the usury of time,
Sages, who in their prescience would controul
All accidents, and to the very road
Which they have fashion’d would confine us down,
Like engines. . .2
The Prelude (1805), book v, lines 377-83. See also draft in Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959), v, p. 346.
For there is no such thing as economic growth which is not, at the same time, growth or change of a culture; and the growth of social consciousness, like the growth of a poet’s mind, can never, in the last analysis, be planned.
Chapter Seven
The Sale of Wives
I
Until a few years ago the historical memory of the sale of wives in England might better be described as amnesia. Who would want to remember practices of such barbarity? By the 1850s nearly all commentators were committed to the view that the practice was (a) exceedingly rare, and (b) utterly offensive to morality (although some folklorists began to toy apologetically with the notion of pagan survival).
The tone of Chambers’s The Book of Days (1878) is representative. The picture “is simply an outrage upon decency. . . It can only be considered as a proof of the besotted ignorance and brutal feelings of a portion of our rural population”. And it was the more important to disclaim and denounce the practice because Britain’s “continental neighbours” had noticed the “occasional instances of wife-sale” and they “seriously believe that it is a habit of all classes of our people, and constantly cite it as evidence of our low civilization”.1 The French, with their habitual rancorous levity, were the worst offenders in this: Milord John Bull was portrayed, booted and spurred, in Smithfield Market, crying “à quinze livres ma femme!”, while Milady stood haltered in a pen.2
The Book of Days, ed. R. Chambers (1878), i, pp. 487-8.
Interesting comments on the practice appear as early as 1776, Courrier de L’Europe (26 Nov.). Thereafter the French press often carried examples with appropriate comment. See also [J. E. Jouy], L’Hermite de Londres (Paris, 1821), ii, p. 324; Anon., Six mois à Londres (Paris, 1817); and Piliet, note 1, p. 438 below. Many examples are cited in J. W. von Achenholtz, Annals, v (1790), pp. 329-30, ix (1796), pp. 187-8.
The Book of Days was able to gather only eight cases, between 1815 and 1839, and these cases, with three or four more, were circulated with little further enquiry for fifty or more years in antiquarian or journalistic accounts. As enlightenment waxed, so curiosity waned. For the first half of this century historical memory was generally satisfied with occasional throwaway references in popular accounts of eighteenth-century popular mores. These were commonly offered as a colourful element within an antithetical liturgy contrasting the animalistic culture of the poor (Gin Lane, Tyburn and Mother Proctor’s Pews, bull-baiting, fireworks tied to animals, pugilism with nailed boots, naked races, wife sales) with whatever forms of enlightenment was supposed to have displaced these.1
Thus wife sales find mention in J. Wesley Bready, England Before and After Wesley (1938), under a section headed: “Immorality as Sport”.
Against this indifference, one powerful influence was asserted: the careful reconstruction of the sale of a wife, in a credible human context, taking a significant place in the structure of the plot of a major novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge. Thomas Hardy was a superbly perceptive observer of folk customs, and his touch is rarely more sure than in this novel. But in the episode of Michael Henchard’s sale of his wife, Susan, in a wayside fair to a passing sailor, Hardy appears to have relied, not upon observation (or direct oral tradition) but on newspaper sources. These sources (as we shall see) are usually enigmatic and opaque. And the episode, as drawn in the novel, in its seemingly casual provenance and in its brutal expression, does not conform to more “typical” evidence. The auction of Susan Henchard lacks ritual features; the purchaser arrives fortuitously and bids on impulse. Hardy succeeds admirably, in his reconstruction of the episode and in his disclosure of its consequences, in presenting the general popular consensus as to the legitimacy of the transaction and as to its irrevocable character — a conviction certainly shared by Susan Henchard.1 But in the last analysis Hardy’s presentation still fell within the same stereotype as that of The Book of Days. “For my part”, the drunken Henchard says,
Hardy attributes Susan’s conviction to “the extreme simplicity of her intellect”: by the sale, her purchaser “had acquired a morally real and justifiable right to her. . . though the exact bearings and legal limits of that right were vague”.
I don’t see why men who have got wives and don’t want ’em, shouldn’t get rid of ’em as these gipsey fellows do their old horses. . . Why shouldn’t they put ’em up and sell ’em by auction to men who are in need of such articles?
The assumption underlying both accounts is that the wife sale was a direct chattel purchase. And once this stereotype has become established, it is only too easy to read the evidence through it. It can then be assumed that the wife was auctioned like a beast or chattel, perhaps against her will, either because the husband wished to be rid of her or for merely mercenary motives. As such, the custom disallowed any scrupulous examination. It could be taken as a melancholy example of abject feminine oppression, or an illustration of the levity with which marriage was regarded among the male poor.
But it is this stereotype — and not the fact that wives were on occasion sold — which requires interrogation. In any case, it seemed advisable to collect some evidence before offering confident explanations. In the 1960s I commenced — with much assistance from friends and correspondents — to build up files on “ritual” sales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and in the late 1960s and through the 1970s I inflicted drafts of this chapter upon many seminars and audiences in Britain and the United States. By 1977 I had some three hundred cases on my index cards, although at least fifty of these are too vague or dubious to be taken as evidence. Meanwhile I delayed publication of my findings, although these were briefly reported in other scholars’ work.2 Further delay resulted in my research being overtaken, and in 1981 there was published a substantial volume, Wives for Sale, by Samuel Pyeatt Menefee.
I reported some conclusions in “Folklore, Anthropology, and Social History”, Indian Historical Review, iii, 2 (1978). For other reports, see J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (1981) and Robert W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1780 (1981), pp. 103-4.
Mr Menefee’s ethnographic study was undertaken as a dissertation in the Department of Social Anthropology at Oxford University, and the subject had perhaps come to the notice of this Department when I gave a paper on this theme to one of its seminars. I could claim no proprietorship in the topic, and, indeed, my intention had been to arouse historical and anthropological interest. Nevertheless, my first response was to regard my own work as having been made redundant. Mr Menefee had pursued the theme with great industry; had circulated many libraries and record offices; had assembled much curious and some relevant material; and had over-passed my own count, with an Appendix of 387 cases. Moreover, he shared my redefinition of the ritual by subtitling his volume, “An Ethnographic Study of British Popular Divorce”. With a little sadness — for the theme had preoccupied me for some years — I laid my paper aside.
It is revived now, and presented tardily to the public, because I do not think, after all, that Mr Menefee and I duplicate each other or are pursuing the same questions. Mr Menefee wrote as an apprentice ethnographer, and his knowledge of British social history and its disciplines was elementary. As a result he has little understanding of social context, few criteria for distinguishing between sound and corrupt evidence, and his fascinating examples appear in a jumble of irrelevant material and contradictory interpretations. We may be grateful for his book, which is immensely painstaking and carefully documented. But it cannot be taken as the final word on the sale of wives.
The ritual may be of only marginal interest, and may have little general relevance to sexual behaviour or marital norms. It offers only a small window upon these questions. Yet there are not many such windows, and we will never have a full view until every window is uncurtained and the perspectives intersect. From this fragmentary and enigmatic evidence we must tease out what insights we can into the norms and sensibility of a lost culture, and into the interior crises of the poor.
II
The quantitative evidence as to wife sales and their frequency is, in most respects, the least satisfactory to be offered in this chapter, so we will commence with this. I have collected some three hundred cases, of which I have disallowed fifty as dubious. Menefee lists 387 cases, but this includes many vague and dubious cases, frequent double-counting of the same case, and cases which are not “true” ritual sales. Let us say that I have two hundred and fifty authentic cases and Menefee has three hundred. But about one hundred and fifty cases appear in both lists — cases collected from such obvious sources as Notes and Queries, the indexes to The Times, folklore collections, etc. Thus together we have collected some four hundred examples.
Even so, I have felt it necessary to prune this material, especially in the earlier (pre-1760) years and those later than 1880. The sale or exchange of a wife, for sexual or domestic services, appears to have taken place, on occasion, in most places and at most times. It may be only an aberrant transaction, with or without a pretended contractual basis — it is recorded sometimes today. Unfortunately, some of the earlier examples afford almost no evidence as to the nature of the practice recorded. Thus a local historian’s record “from an old document relating to Bilston” — “November, 1692. John, ye son of Nathan Whitehouse, of Tipton, sold his wife to Mr. Bracegirdle”, cannot arise, without further evidence to the dignity of being counted as a ritual wife sale.1 But some of the later examples, although better documented, also present difficulties. Thus a young married woman gave evidence in a Leeds police court in 1913 (in a maintenance case) that she had been sold for £1 by her husband to a workmate who lived in the next street. Her child was fathered by the second man: he acknowledged it for six weeks and then told her to drown it. But this man was already married, and he subsequently returned to his wife.2 If this was a wife sale then the custom was in an advanced stage of decomposition and the practice departs from previously-accepted usage.
F. W. Hackwood, Staffordshire Customs, Superstititions and Folklore (1924), p. 70.
Leeds Weekly Citizen, 6 June 1913.
There are some cases before 1760 and after 1880 which provide better evidence. But for the purpose of counting I decided to leave pre-1760 cases to historians better qualified to read the evidence, and to ignore those after 1880. This reduced me to 218 cases which I can accept as authentic between 1760 and 1880:1
The quantities reported here are based upon my study as it stood in 1977. I have not attempted the difficult task of checking and conflating with the examples in the Appendix of S. P. Menefee, Wives for Sale (Oxford, 1981), (cited hereafter as Menefee), nor have I added cases which have come to hand since its publication.
Cases have come to hand from every region of England, but I have only one case in this period from Scotland and very few cases from Wales. Counties with ten or more examples are: Derbyshire (10), Devon (12), Kent (10), Lancashire (12), Lincolnshire (14), Middlesex and London (19), Nottinghamshire (13), Staffordshire (16), Warwickshire (10), and (high at the top of the table) Yorkshire (44).
These figures show little, except that the practice certainly occurred, and in most parts of England. The numbers are of visible cases, and visibility must be taken in at least three senses. First, these are events whose trace happens to have become visible to me. While Menefee and I offer the same general profile, we have both been dependent in some degree on what caught the notice of folklorists or was copied by metropolitan newspapers. There are no sources from which one could extract a systematic sample, and only a scanning of provincial newspapers in every region could pretend to such a sample.2 Second, these were events which had to acquire a certain notoriety to leave any traces in the records at all. A ritual sale in the market-place of a large town might do this, but a private sale in a public house might not, unless some unusual circumstance attended it. Since the second form was favoured in some districts, and displaced the first form generally after 1830 or 1840, we can never hope to recover any accurate quantities.
My collection probably gives too much weight to Yorkshire (where I used to live and where A. J. Peacock kindly collected samples) and to Lincolnshire (where Rex Russell kindly did the same), and it may give too little weight to the West of England.
But it is visibility in a third sense which is of most importance, which offers the largest qualification to any quantities, and which illustrates the slippery nature of the evidence which we must handle. For when did a wife sale become visible to a genteel or middle-class public and hence become worthy of a note in public print? The answer must relate to indistinct changes in social awareness, in moral standards, and in news values. The practice became a matter for more frequent report and comment early in the nineteenth century. But through much of the eighteenth century newspapers were not vehicles for social or domestic comment of this kind. There is good reason to suppose that wife sales were widely practised well before 1790. The custom was little reported because it was not considered worthy of report, unless some additional circumstance (humorous, dramatic, tragic, scandalous) gave it interest. This silence might have been for several reasons: polite ignorance (the distance between the cultures of the newspaper public and of the poor), indifference to a custom so commonplace that it required no comment, or distaste. Wife sales became newsworthy contemporaneously with the evangelical revival, which, by raising the threshold of middle-class tolerance, redefined a matter of popular “ignorance” into one of public scandal.
This has unfortunate consequences. For although the practice is reported after 1790 on occasion as comedy or human interest, it is more often reported in a tone of moral disapproval so strong as to obliterate that evidence which only objectivity could have brought. Wife sales showed that a “system of trading in human flesh” was “not confined to the shores of Africa”; the rope in which the wife was haltered might be better employed in hanging or whipping the parties to the transaction; and (commonly) it was “a most disgusting and disgraceful scene” (Smithfield, 1832), “one of those disgusting scenes which are a disgrace to civilized society” (Norwich, 1823), “an indecent and degrading transaction” (York, 1820). The husband who sold his wife was “a brute in human shape” (Nottingham, 1844), and the wife herself was either an “impudent hussy” or an object of maudlin pity.
