Exhibitions
Exhibitions > Victorian Popular Culture 2011
Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Popular Culture
This exhibition explores the themes of sex, courtship and marriage in Victorian popular culture, drawing on Senate House Library’s extensive collections of fiction by writers such as M.E. Braddon, Frances and Anthony Trollope, Mrs Humphry Ward, Rhoda Broughton, and Margaret Oliphant. It was produced to support the Victorian Popular Fiction Association’s third annual conference at the Institute of English Studies, 18-19 July 2011.
Lady Audley's Secret
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
8th edn
London: Tinsley Bros, 1862
*(XIX) Bc [Braddon]
Lady Audley’s Secret was the first of two ‘bigamy novels’ that made Braddon’s name. The racy and sensational plot made it a bestseller: it went through nine editions in its first year and was adapted for the stage. The heroine re-invents herself as governess Lucy Graham after her husband departs for Australia to seek his fortune, entering into a bigamous marriage with wealthy Sir Michael Audley. The return of her first husband sees Lucy resorting to ever more scheming, devious and violent means in her attempts to avoid exposure and disgrace at the hands of Robert Audley, Sir Michael’s nephew. In the end, Lucy is confined to an asylum while Robert reigns over his ‘perfect’ Victorian family. Books such as this brought Braddon fortune and notoriety (the Quarterly Review accused her of supplying ‘the cravings of a diseased appetite’) and forced her own unconventional private life into the public sphere.
Dame Madge Kendal by Herself
Madge Kendal
London: J. Murray, 1933
[M.M.C.] 519
Madge Kendal was one of the most admired actresses of her day. Married to the actor and theatre manager William Hunter Kendal, her role as wife appears to have attracted as much approbation as her stage roles. In 1885 T.H.S. Escott wrote in Society in London that ‘Mrs Kendal, one of the best artists of her sex on the London stage, is in private life the epitome of all domestic virtues and graces’. Though they were a devoted couple, the Kendals’ family life was deeply troubled. They became estranged from all four of their children and were particularly hurt by the divorce of their youngest daughter. In these her memoirs, Kendal often refers to herself as ‘mater afflicta’, and the isolation of her closing years adds a twist to the ‘by herself’ of the book’s title.
The Progress of Crime, or, the Authentic Memoirs of Maria Manning
Robert Huish
London: M’Gowan & Co., 1849
H.P.L. [Huish]
This is a contemporary account of a notorious Victorian murder perpetrated by a married couple. In August 1849 Marie and Frederick George Manning invited Patrick O’Connor, a wealthy moneylender with £4000 of railway shares, to their London home. Here they murdered him with a pistol and crowbar and buried his body under the kitchen floor. Marie then broke into his lodgings to steal the shares and £300 in cash. The murderous couple fled but were soon discovered and brought to trial at the Old Bailey. Mr Manning tried to put all the blame on his wife but both were found guilty. They were executed together on the roof of Horsemonger Lane Gaol in November 1849, watched by a large unruly crowd. Marie inspired the character of Hortense in Dickens’ Bleak House.
The Widow Married
Frances Trollope
London: H. Colburn, 1840
YN T77G
Frances Trollope’s comical and subversive treatment of Victorian marriage stands in contrast to some of the more conventional fiction of the time. The Widow Barnaby, published in 1839 when Trollope was a widow herself, is one of her best novels. The heroine is a vulgar but wholly credible figure, struggling to get on in spite of her age and modest means. The work’s popularity prompted Trollope to turn it into a fictional series (then an innovation in the English novel) with two three-volume sequels, The Widow Married and The Barnabys in America, published in 1840 and 1843 respectively.
Marcella
Mary Augusta Ward
13th edn
London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1895
YO W21G
Many of Mrs Ward’s heroines are independent and lively characters who tend to be tamed by ‘suitable’ marriage. Marcella, first published in 1894, is a good example. The title character returns to the family estate from art school full of ideas and bent on social reform. She becomes engaged to a rich gentleman, Aldous Raeburn, but breaks the engagement over a disagreement and goes to London to become a nurse. Marcella and Raeburn are eventually reunited, and her ideas and independence are placed in their ‘proper context’ – as Mrs Ward would have argued – through marriage to a man who represents the ideal husband, landlord and government figure.
Second Edition of a Discovery Concerning Ghosts
George Cruikshank
London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1864
H.P.L. [Cruikshank]
This satirical work, written and illustrated by the artist George Cruikshank, contains several stories of contact between married couples after one or both had died. The passage at the top of page 8 relates the story of a titled husband and wife who had become estranged in life but who, with the help of a descendant, are happily reconciled as ghosts.
Red as a Rose is She
Rhoda Broughton
11th edn
London: R. Bentley & Son, 1887
YO B84G
The bestselling novelist Rhoda Broughton had a reputation for ‘fast’ heroines and – by Victorian standards – sexually daring plots. Her heroines are independent-minded, very open in voicing their feelings, and deplore Victorian stuffiness. Anthony Trollope remarked that Broughton ‘made her ladies do and say things which ladies would not do and say’. The tension between love and duty, the economic pressures upon women, and the ways in which marriage can be a tyranny are issues that Broughton raises in a number of three-volume novels, such as Red as a Rose is She, first published in 1870.
Can you Forgive Her?
Anthony Trollope
London: Chapman & Hall, 1864-5
[S.L.] I [Trollope – 1864]
Can you Forgive Her? is the first in Trollope’s six-novel Palliser series. Lady Glencora, Trollope’s quick-witted and rebellious creation, is forced by her relatives to marry Plantagenet Palliser, ‘a very noble gentleman’, in spite of her love for the handsome, impoverished rogue Burgo Fitzgerald. Trollope never shies from the harsh reality of Glencora’s life: all romance is gone with Burgo, and her marriage is a difficult one. While Trollope often ended his stories with wedding bells and bright prospects, Glencora and Palliser’s story begins with their marriage, one of the least romantic in English fiction.
The Curate in Charge
Margaret Oliphant
London: Macmillan, 1876
YN O44G
Oliphant was a prolific novelist and reviewer who produced over a hundred novels, much of her output being serialised in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Her novels frequently featured weak, feckless men and questioned the view that faith and domestic felicity were all to which contemporary women should aspire. The Curate in Charge is a tale of unhappy domesticity and one of Oliphant’s bitterest fictional airings of ‘women’s grievances’. Oliphant herself accepted her family responsibilities with grace: her prolific literary output helped support numerous parasitic male relatives, including her husband, brother, sons and nephews.
