CW: suicide
I went to an interesting exhibition last weekend, in the rather lovely Bristol Central Library, showing off some of the books and records from the library and Bristol Archives relating to crime and punishment. As you can imagine, there was plenty on executions and jails, and also a special guest appearance from a book of Tolzey Court records (more debt than crime, but even so, nice to look at).
One (undated) item that got me thinking was a broadside/handbill (from B22689/BL8F1) – printed text on flimsy paper – about the death of two young people at some point in the early nineteenth century, headed ‘LAMENTABLE EFFECTS OF THE NEW MARRIAGE ACT EXHIBITED IN THE MELANCHOLY DEATH OF JOHN BARTER AND MARY LEVETT, WHO TERMINATED THEIR EXISTENCE ON SUNDAY LAST BY SWALLOWING POISON’ (or perhaps more accurately in terms of emphasis, LAMENTABLE EFFECTS of the new MARRIAGE ACT exhibited in the MELANCHOLY DEATH of John Barter and Mary Levett, who terminated their existence on Sunday last by swallowing
POISON’
Apparently poison got potential readers’ attention.
The story related is one of suicide – until 1961, of course, a felony/criminal offence in England and Wales – but what especially grabbed me about this was its linking of desperate deaths to a piece of legislation on marriage, ‘the New Marriage Act’. This seemed to be worth a bit of thought.
The tale, if I may summarise, was that two young people, John Barter (19) and Mary Levett (17), of ‘Maiden Keignton, Glos.’ [?], were rendered desperate to the point of suicide by the impact of ‘the New Marriage Act’, which meant that they were not able to marry each other. The stumbling block was disparity of wealth – John had ‘some property’ while Mary did not have anything but ‘her personal attractions and qualifications’, and John’s father, not, apparently, swayed by attractions or qualifications, withheld consent to the match. This led to the teenagers buying and taking laudanum, and so dying, in a thicket, ‘in each other’s embraces’.
The account really does all it can to portray the dead couple as as little to blame as possible. The headline does this graphically, suggesting that causation is to be attributed to: 1.POISON and 2 the New Marriage Act. In the text, there is the death in each other’s arms, the use of ‘melancholy’ and ‘romantic’, and, perhaps most tellingly, ‘ill-fated’. I think we get the message – John and Mary were not at fault really.
Was there any truth in the story? This is the sort of thing a non-specialist must approach with both humility and caution. I have to say that it seemed rather unlikely to me, first the attribution of causation to the new legislation, and secondly the idea that ‘the unfortunate young man’ broke off from his despair long enough to write some bad verse, blaming the statute for their demise. In addition, it didn’t seem to me impossible that a determined young couple might find some way to get married, despite one parent’s objection.
Looking at the story in the exhibition, I had assumed that it was talking about the famous ‘Hardwicke Marriage Act’ of 1753, which went some way to imposing ‘state’ control over the process of getting married, and, amongst other things, included requirements for parental consent for those who wanted to marry under the age of 21. As Rebecca Probert, whose research dominates in this area, has pointed out, there were ways around this, of entering into an effective marriage without parents knowing and thus being in a position to object (even if it would mean losing some property rights, once the family found out about an undesirable match).[i] A quick investigation of the printer, however, suggests that we should be thinking not about Hardwicke’s Act, but about the Marriage Act 1823, or, perhaps more plausibly, its stricter 1822 ‘dry run’.[ii] At the foot of the broadside is ‘Shepherd, Printer, Broad Weir, Bristol’, and this would seem to be a printer active in the trade in the 1820s,[iii]
I will confess that I have never given the 1823 Act (nor its 1822 precursor, come to that) a great deal of thought. It is all treated extremely briefly in every legal historian’s go-to text, J.H. Baker’s Introduction to English Legal History 5th edition, p. 521, with half a sentence, to the effect that the 1823 Act ensured that marriages were not struck down for minor breaches. The relevance to the marriage of minors, and parental control thereof, has to be sought elsewhere. As ever with the history of marriage law, Probert’s work is helpful. This story turns on the fact that the new marriage legislation[iv] made things more difficult for minors wanting to marry without parental (i.e. its anagram, paternal), and that the position had been less strict before the passage of the act.
The 1822 Act brought in a new procedure with regard to the matter of minors, including a swearing that the parties were of age (1822 Act c.8-12), This might cause disquiet to those minors unable to make themselves tell lies under oath), quite apart from the difficulty of getting away with telling them, if an objecting parent took the matter in hand. If a licence was beyond the ‘ill-fated’ couple in this story, and they needed to be married via the banns procedure with full publicity, their names and residence, and intention to marry being published in a church, giving the chance for objection, including by the intended groom’s father. (Note that the 1822 Act s. 16 required affidavits, including as to majority, and also greater publicity).
The broadside expressed the view that the new legislation had led to ‘depravity’ and had been bad for young people, susceptible as they were to ‘the sweet passion of love’.
There was, in fact, at least one more reported suicide connected with the new legislation. In 1822, newspapers reported that a certain ‘young woman’, Mary Robson, of Darlington, had taken an overdose of laudanum, because she ‘had been on the point of being married for some time past, but the strictures of the New Marriage Act (1822) had prevented her, and made a serious impression on her mind’. We don’t know that this was a minor marriage case like the first one discussed here, but still, it does suggest that it was a plausible tale for newspaper readers of the day.[vi]
Not all responses to the 1820s legislation were quite so tragic: there are signs of satire and humour. A Mr Mallinson, apparently a big London star, was advertised as singing a comic song ‘The Death of the New Marriage Act’, at a Gala Fete (‘unsurpassed for variety and grandeur’, so it was insisted) in Bath, on 14th June, 1824.[vii] Apparently not the only side-splitting musical tribute to this legislative endeavour. As well as making some relatively serious points on disquiet about the process of going along and swearing that one is qualified to marry (including the fact that one is of age) – seen as humiliating, and as likely to lead to perjury – the Examiner noted a verse sung in 1822 by ‘wandering melodists’. The grievance here is publicity – the requirement of putting names up on the church door (1822 Act c. 17; for the thinking behind it, see this parliamentary debate).
“For to go for to stick up our names on the door
In this here sort of vay, vy ve cannot endure;
Gee ho dobbin, heighho dobbin!
Oh vat a rum go is this new Marriage Act!’[viii]
Undoubtedly an absolute banger.
GS
20/10/2024
[i] On this, see, e.g. R. Probert, ‘Control over Marriage in England and Wales, 1753–1823: The Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 in Context’, Law and History Review (2009), 413. See also these works by Probert: The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation : From Fornicators to Family, 1600-2010 (Cambridge, 2012); Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century : A Reassessment (Cambridge, 2009); (with L. D’Arcy Brown), ‘The impact of the Clandestine Marriages Act: three case-studies in conformity’, Continuity and Change 23 (2008), 309–330; Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century : A Reassessment (Leiden, 2009)
[ii] On this, see, e.g. Probert, ‘Control’.
[iii] See A.P. Woolrich, Printing in Bristol, Bristol HA, 1986; and see the list here.
[iv] Probert, ‘Control’, 445 notes the multiple Acts: 3 Geo. IV c. 75; 4 Geo. IV c. 17; 4 Geo. IV c. 76, and Probert Marriage Law c.8 discusses the 1822 (c 75) Act. May I just say how maddeningly (and, actually, worryingly) difficult it is to get hold of legislation from this period – no longer on the shelves in my university library, as I discovered this afternoon.
[v] See Probert, ‘Control;, 446=8, and 1823 Act.
[vi] Berrow’s Worcester Journal 5th December 1822, p.2 (and elsewhere).
[vii] Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 3rd June, 1824, p.3.
[viii] Examiner, 22nd September, 1822.
Addition, 23/10/2024
We might note, too, on the lighter or more creative response to the 1822 Act, the story told by ‘An ipso facto witness’, in a letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian – spoteed outside a chapel-of-ease in Oldham, #a paper which I supposed contained the banns of marriage’ but ‘written in an almost unintelligible hand, and moreover turned wrong side up, and posted at the very top of the door.’! [Manchester Guardian, 14th September 1822, p.4]
And another Marriage Act-1822-linked report of suicidal behaviour is related in the Manchester Guardian, 23rd September 1822 p.3, – a young couple were thwarted by the new bureaucracy and failed to get married. The woman went off with somebody else the same day. The man attempted suicide (though one might think that the red tape did its work of preventing a marriage unlikely to be terribly successful). This same page carries another evasive dodge – putting up the list of names of those to wed to the back of the door. Creative once more.