Fractured Courtships in Britain in the Long Nineteenth-Century

Abstract

In this article I use a dataset which spans three broad source types – poor law records, coronial records, and forms of life-writing including memoirs – to understand the scale of fractured courtships in the long nineteenth century. Having established that ordinary people experienced failed courtships more often than we have supposed, I look (using whole corpus approaches and individual case studies) at the causative variables standing behind failed courtships, at the way that writers linguistically construct their relationships and at the character of courtship in this period. Ultimately, I show that courtship was a messy and fragile business, but that failure was for nineteenth century young people not as life defining as it might have been before this. Emotional containment, resilience and reinvention had become key motifs in this period.