Jenni Murray on Woman Sour rewrites the Mayor of Casterbridge :
“The Mayor of Casterbridge, written in 1886, opens in the market square in the town of Dorchester, where a drunk Michael Henchard is offering his wife for sale”
OK, who’s ignorant – Jenni, the scriptwriter, or the researcher? As any Hardy reader kno, Henchard sold his wife at Weydon-Priors fair, miles from Dorchester – and the book opens with the Henchards trudging towards that village. The news of Henchard’s wife-selling could hardly have come as a revelation to the citizens had he done the deed in the market-place.
The rewriting of history continues when presenter Fiona Clampin gets chatting to Sue Clarke and feminist English lecturer Dr Jane Thomas from the University of Hull.
“It’s worth remembering that labouring people in rural districts didn’t necessarily marry – they would ratify their engagement by having intercourse, and if the woman got pregnant than they would marry, and if she didn’t get pregnant then if they didn’t want to they wouldn’t marry … so I think that wife-selling was an early form of divorce in those days”
“Yes, I’ve heard that”
Three points here
a) labouring people DID marry, even in the distorted picture we’re given here. The authors of “An Economic History of Bastardy in England and Wales” give a figure of 6% for illegitimate births at the start of the 19th century (as compared to over 40% now). In fact pregnancy generally led to marriage – and the birth of an illegitimate child was usually followed by marriage unless the man defected. As the ne’er-do-well father in Hardy’s ‘A Tragedy of Two Ambitions’ describes it :
“She was my wife as lawful as the Constitution – a sight more lawful than your mother was until some time after you were born !”
b) AFAIK, the ‘proving’ of a relationship by pre-marital intercourse, with marriage the result of pregnancy, was ONLY a custom of the Isle of Portland, and notable because it was such an exception. In Hardy’s ‘The Well-Beloved’, Avice Caro’s “modern feelings” are quite against the tradition, which she feels Pierston’s father may insist on.
“If the woman does not prove with child, after a competent time of courtship, they conclude they are not destined by Providence for each other ; they therefore separate ; and as it is an established maxim, which the Portland women observe with great strictness, never to admit a plurality of lovers at one time, their honour is in no way tarnished. She just as soon gets another suitor (after the affair is declared to be broken off) as if she had been left a widow, or that nothing had ever happened, but that she had remained an immaculate virgin”
Hutchins, “History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset,” vol. ii., p. 820, 1868, quoted in Bloch.
“So faithfully was this “island custom” observed that, on the one hand, during a long period no single bastard was born on the “island,” and, on the other, every marriage was fertile. But when, for the further development of the Portland stone trade, workmen from London, with the habits of the large town, came to reside in Portland, these men took advantage of the “island custom” and then refused to marry the girls with whom they had cohabited. Thus, in consequence of freer intercourse with the “civilized” world, the “Portland custom” has gradually fallen into desuetude.” – (The sexual life of our time in its relations to modern civilization, Iwan Bloch, pub F.J. Rebman, London 1909)
c) the remark “so I think that wife-selling was an early form of divorce in those days” doesn’t follow from what goes before – and in any event, it was never considered as anything but a disgraceful proceeding.
