Bigamy: The Rise and Fall of a Convention

Abstract

IN THE EARLY 1860s, the Victorian public flocked to Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn at the New Adelphi Theatre, and thrilled to the heroine's rescue from drowning and the hero's salvation from committing bigamy, in the nick of time.' They also bought a record 60,000 copies of Tennyson's Enoch Arden in the first few months after its publication in 1864 and wept over Annie Lee who promised her childhood playmates she would be little wife to both and became so in fact.2 And finally they sent to Mudie's or Westerton's for scores of novels with plots fashioned around bigamy. Thus in the midst of their devoted family circles, the Victorian husband and wife of the 1860s fantasized on the delights and penalties of having another spouse. The bigamy in particular is usually seen as a subcategory of the popular genre of the 1860s. The novel, according to Kathleen Tillotson, is a with a secret and a contemporary, familiar setting.3 The Victorian reviewers who used the term, usually as a label of opprobrium, might have added that a sensation novel had one or more striking scenes or inci-