Why Men Don’t Marry30
An Eighteenth-Century Answer
(By Alice Pollard)
The title of this article is not of my own choosing. It was fore-ordained for me some time back by the rather excited correspondents of a daily newspaper, which opened its columns to as many solutions of the riddle as ingenuity could devise. It may fairly be objected that the riddle is no riddle at all, but rather belongs to the class of question-begging queries of which ‘How long have you ceased beating your mother?’ is the most famous example. As a matter of fact, most men do marry, and it seems, therefore, unreasonable to be asked to explain why they don’t. But on this one point my sex is perhaps a little unreasonable. Women have never acquiesced wholeheartedly in Mr. Stevenson’s assertion that though the ideal woman is a wife the ideal man is a bachelor, and so long as even a small minority of men of presentable appearance and some visible means of subsistence persist in denying themselves a man’s highest privilege, the problem will doubtless continue to be stated in the sweeping form which I here adopt.
The most hardened offenders are undoubtedly the members of a single class: pleasant young fellows, with an income of three or four hundred a year and no prospect of increasing it. A bachelor with £400 a year, if he live within it, persists in regarding himself as a miracle of economy, but with even the smallest gift of husbandry is probably as rich as any man in the kingdom. To marry on the same £400 means a terrible falling-off in the standard of comfort, and the one luxury which these pleasant fellows religiously deny themselves is that of a wife.
The story is not a new one, and the other day, in looking over some pamphlets in a great library, I came across a thin quarto, entitled, ‘The Batchelor’s Estimate of the Expences of a Married Life In a Letter to a Friend. Being an Answer to a Proposal of Marrying a Lady with 2000l. Fortune.’ The date of the pamphlet is 1729, and in it the situation is set forth with so much circumstance, and in so engaging a manner, that I thought there might be some readers who would care to spend a few minutes in looking at it with me.
A gentleman, himself a married man, having a relation a spinster of a marriageable age, and possessing also the, for those days, by no means despicable fortune of £2000, has proposed to a bachelor friend to negotiate a marriage between them.
The bachelor has no innate objection to marriage as such—on the contrary, he looks upon it as ’an agreeable state’; but he cannot ‘at present accept the proposal’ because ‘the following necessary expenses arise so frequently and so openly to his view’ that they deter him from considering marriage as possible.
Up to the present time he has lived in chambers at the moderate rent of £12, 10s. per annum. But so impressed is he with the probable requirements of a lady with the ‘handsome Fortune’ of £2000, that he sees himself at once obliged to secure a house with a rental of £50.
As a bachelor in chambers he has been lucky enough to escape all ‘Church, Window and Poor’s Taxes, Payments to Rector, Reader and Lecturer, Water Rates, Trophy Money,31 Militia, Lamp, Scavengers, Watch, Constable, etc.’ As a married man he calculates that for these things alone he will be mulcted to the extent of ‘at least’ £9 per annum.
Our friend was, we presume, in the habit of taking his morning cup of coffee at a coffee-house. Now he sees in imagination not only his own and his wife’s daily supply of coffee to be provided, but he pictures the innumerable ‘dishes of tea’ which will be consumed by her and her maids, not to mention the additional quantity for gossips and card parties. Thus, ‘Tea, Coffee, Chocolate, Sugar, Spirits and Fresh Supply of China will cost 12l. per annum.’ We are tempted to inquire what proportion of this sum must be set aside for ‘spirits’ and broken crockery, and why, indeed, there should be any connection between them, unless tea-drinkings in the early part of the eighteenth century were too often modelled on the style of a certain famous one known to readers of Dickens.
The consideration of tea, this being essentially a domestic article, leads our bachelor to the question of servants. For his own use he has been content with the services of a bedmaker, to whom he gave 50s. a year. He forgets to add an unknown sum to pay for the waste, impositions, and perquisites inseparable from a bedmaker’s existence. In the future the dignity of a citizen, a householder, and a married man has to be supported, and the weight of this can only be sustained by a staff of ‘two Maid-servants and a Man’—the man to be in livery. Yet even these luxuries will not cost him such a very large sum, since he reckons to procure them all, livery included, for an additional £17, 10s. per annum—i.e. £20 in all.
We are next let into his confidence with regard to the proper amount of entertainment he will think it fit and necessary to allow his wife. She must certainly go to the play, but a lady of independent fortune, the mistress of a grand house and a servant in livery, cannot be expected to walk out in evening-dress, so a coach or chair must be provided for her conveyance, and for the hire of these he makes a yearly computation of £3, 10s. ‘Her expenses at these Diversions’ (which included, doubtless, entrance fees and refreshments) would amount to another £3, 10s. As a staid and steady bachelor not given (as he tells us later on) to ‘sauntering at Coffee-Houses’ or playing at hazard, he has been content with going to the play about once a year, but now, as ‘it would not be proper she should go alone,’ this exemplary husband will even sacrifice his own inclinations, and, obeying the call of duty, attend his wife at a cost of £1, 10s. a year! Not only is he considerate in the matter of providing for his wife’s pleasures, but he seems to us decidedly liberal in the matter of pin-money, as he sets aside £30 for her personal expenses.
Coals and candles weigh heavily on his mind. His landlady has hitherto kept him sufficiently warm for an annual 40s. (coals must have been much cheaper, landladies less of harpies, or the winters much milder in those days!), but in his new establishment coals and candles will run up to the large sum of £15.
His bachelor dinners have cost him an average of 10s. per week; when married he must still dine, and even divert himself with ‘evening expenses’ common both to married men and bachelors, so that instead of a modest £25 for dinners he will now have to pay the following yearly bills:
| £ | s. | d. | |
| The Butcher | 35 | 00 | 00 |
| “Poulterer | 06 | 00 | 00 |
| “Fishmonger | 07 | 00 | 00 |
| “Herb-Woman | 05 | 00 | 00 |
| “Oylman | 05 | 00 | 00 |
| “Baker | 08 | 00 | 00 |
| “Brewer | 10 | 00 | 00 |
| “Grocer | 06 | 00 | 00 |
| “Confectioner | 02 | 00 | 00 |
| “Cheesemonger | 04 | 00 | 00 |
| Wine, Cyder, etc., at a moderate computation | 30 | 00 | 00 |
| The Fruiterer | 01 | 10 | 00 |
| The Milk-Woman | 01 | 00 | 00 |
| Salt, Small-coal, Rotten-stone, Brick-dust, Sand, Oat-meal, Whiteing and many other little Ingredients in House-Keeping I am ignorant of | 02 | 00 | 00 |
This detailed calculation over, we again catch a glimpse of the man’s personality and his conception of what is due from him towards a wife. ‘If my Wife pleases me, as I do not doubt but your Relation will, (I know my own Temper so well in that Respect that) I shall be often making her Presents of either Rings, Jewels, Snuff-Boxes, Watch, Tweezers, some Knick-Knacks, and Things of that Nature, in which, one Year with another, I am sure I shall spend 5l.’ After this it occurs to him that he has left out one important source of expense which he ‘least wishes for,’ but which ‘happens in most Families’—that is, the fees of doctor and apothecary, which will, he fears, average £5 per annum.
‘As for Children, we may reasonably expect one in every two Years, if not oftener.’ Reckoning the ‘Expence of Lying-Inne, Child-Linen, Midwife, Nurses, Caudles, Possets, Cradle, Christenings, etc.,’ the annual expense consequent on being a family man will be £15. But the initial expense is not all: ‘Nursing, Maintaining, Education, Cloathes, Schooling,’ and—here, surely, we have found the prototype of Mr. Walter Besant’s ideal father—providing an endowment or fortune for each child will require a sum of £30 per annum; and he is ‘satisfied’ that he has stated a sum ‘vastly less’ than is likely to prove needful in the end—a foreboding in which he was certainly justified, for of payments for school and ‘cloathing,’ now as then, there is no end!
Having provided himself in imagination with wife, house, servants, and children, our far-seeing friend suddenly remembers that his dignity and respectability will require to be supported by a seat in church, so we find an entry, ‘Pew in Church,’ £2. This is followed, although we cannot trace the connection, by an estimate of £8 per annum for ‘Washing his wife’s and the Family Linen,’ and we wonder how laundresses managed to live in those days. But so far the house is not furnished, and an initial £350 must be found for that. Fifty pounds is to go for plate alone, ‘without which, being so moderate a Quantity, I daresay my wife, nor indeed should I myself be satisfied.’ This £350 he calmly proposes to deduct from his wife’s fortune, reducing it, therefore, to £1650.
This £1650, placed out at 5 per cent. interest, will bring in an income of £82, but the cautious bachelor says 5 per cent. is not likely to continue, therefore he will reckon interest at 4 per cent. only, and at this rate the wife’s fortune will produce an income of only £56. He then proceeds to show that, adding together the foregoing items, he will have to spend on his wife £215, or even £231, 10s., ‘above the Income of the Fortune she brings, besides the Hazard and want of certainty for the Money, which ought to be considered.’
And now the pamphlet draws to an end, with a conclusion we will give in the writer’s own words:
‘These Things considered (and he that marries without previous Consideration acts very indiscreetly), I do not see how I can marry a Woman with the Fortune you propose, or that I should better myself at all by it, and in Prudence, People should do so or let it alone; (not that I propose or think to have more) I must therefore live single, though with some regret that I cannot do otherwise, and increase my own Fortune, which happens to be sufficient for my own Maintenance till (if I may so call it) I can afford Matrimony.
‘I wish the Lady all Happiness and a better Husband, and if it be for her Satisfaction, one who has thought less of the Matter; not but that I have a very good Opinion of Matrimony, and think of it with Pleasure, as hoping one time or other to enter into its Lists, but I now wait with Patience till my Circumstances or Thought vary. One Thing I would not have you mistaken in, is, that I do not mean, that your Relation will be thus expensive to me, more than any other, only that whenever I marry, let her be who she will, I must necessarily (if She has no more Fortune than you propose) expend considerably more than 200l. a year on her, above the Income of her Fortune, and at present I cannot persuade myself to be at so great an Expense, for the value of trying a dangerous Experiment, whether the Pleasures of Matrimony are yearly worth that Sum.’
And all this is submitted to the proposer by his ‘Obliged and Humble Servant.’
The whole question of marriage, with its arguments for and against, seems to have been as engrossing a topic amongst English men and women in the early part of the eighteenth century as it certainly is with us now, and the bachelor’s pamphlet brought forward at least two replies, which we found bound up with the original. One of these, purporting to be by the lady herself, and signed ‘Philogamia,’ may be dismissed in a few words; its arguments are neither serious nor to the point, and such wit as there is is of a low order, and too much in the tu quoque style to be amusing. The second rejoinder is by the ‘Woman’s Advocate,’ and is probably not, as it pretends, written by a man on behalf of women in general, but rather by an irritated member of the weaker sex, who finds herself and her fellows insulted en masse by the bachelor’s refusal to marry one of them.
The ‘Advocate’ takes the various items of the ‘Batchelor’s Estimate’ one by one, and proceeds to demolish them to the best of her ability, sometimes with a certain degree of success, due, we fancy, to the more intimate knowledge of housekeeping details naturally possessed by a woman. She at once attacks him on the subject of house-rent, and with truly feminine malice reminds him how she has often heard him praise a friend’s house rented at £24, and declare that he ‘could wish for nothing better.’ This rather reminds us of a young lady who advocated the claims of a somewhat uninteresting young man by saying he would make ‘such a delightful brother-in-law.’
Has not our sex, too, been accused, with some degree of justice, of practising little meannesses, and does not the ‘Woman’s Advocate’s’ confession that she ‘has lived 10 years in one Parish and never paid a penny to the Church’ smack slightly of this feminine vice?
She goes on to say: ‘To the Rector you will give 6d. as an Easter offering—to the Lecturer what you please. Trophy-money is but 6d. per annum. You need not join the Militia. Lamp, Scavenger, and Watch seldom amount to thirty shillings, and as for the Constable’s Tax, I never heard of such a thing in my Life.’ So the £9 is reduced to £2.
On the estimate for servants, especially for the footman in livery, the ‘Woman’s Advocate’ pours great scorn. ‘A man in livery forsooth! Have the two maids so little to do that you must e’en employ a man to play with ‘em?’
But it is perhaps in her attack on the actual house-keeping estimates that the ‘Woman’s Advocate’ is at her best. She does not always assign her reasons, but boldly makes such statements as the following: ‘Your Butcher’s Bill is over-rated at least one Third. Your Poulterer’s and Fishmonger’s more than two Thirds. As for the Herb-Woman you have overtopt her with a Vengeance; Twelve pence a week is more than enough for greens etc., and besides’ (does not this bear some resemblance to the traditional postscript?) ‘half the year but few sorts are in Season.’ There is more banter about greenstuff and salads, during which the bachelor is taunted with being ‘a meer Frenchman to eat seven Pounds per annum in Salads,’ and with ‘outdoing the Italians in oiling it,’ and is, moreover, advised to buy his oil direct from the ship instead of from the tavern, thereby effecting a saving of 10s. per quart!—a hint we should imagine well worth carrying out.
Words fail the ‘Advocate’ in which to pour sufficient contempt on the estimates for grocer and confectioner: ‘If you are sweet-Tooth’d,’ she says, ‘I will allow you now and then a Pennyworth of Sugar-Plumbs, but think 40s. per annum in that kind of Trash too much for a Person of your Years and Frugality; and I could really wish, for your own Sake, you had omitted that Article in your Estimate.’
The mention of the doctor’s and apothecary’s fees, which he ‘least desired,’ gives the ‘Advocate’ a final opportunity for crushing her victim, and will serve as a very fair example of her style of rejoinder throughout the whole answer when she is not dealing with concrete materials: ‘I believe you wish for no one Article of Expence; could you have a Wife that would wear no Cloathes, eat no Victuals, bear no Children, never be sick, and bring you 2 or 3,000l., the more the better, I suppose your self-conceited Worship would marry, who imagine, no doubt, you merit a Fortune of 50, nay, 100,000l. To conclude I pronounce Bachelors the Vermin of a State. They enjoy the Benefits of Society but contribute not to its charge, and sponge upon the Publick, without making the least return. Had I any Power in the Legislature, you should not only be punished for Mischievous Libel, but all Batchelors above the age of Thirty should be double Tax’d.’
Edinburgh: Printed by T. and A. Constable
Footnotes have been moved to end of document.
Images interrupting paragraphs have been slightly moved.
Footnotes
Notes
1 Reprinted, by leave of the editor, from ‘The Pageant.’
2 Reprinted, by leave of the editor, from ‘The Library,’ 1902.
3 Reprinted from ‘The Newberry House Magazine’ by leave of Messrs. Griffith, Farren, Okeden and Welsh.
4 Partially reproduced in photographic facsimile by Mr. Henry Littlehales. (Rivingtons, 1890.)
5 Reprinted by leave of Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., from ‘Bibliographica,’ vol. ii. (1895).
6 One of those on the recto has a common original with that of an elephant with a howdah in Doesborgh’s ‘Van Pape Jans landendes.’
7 e.g. The cut of a preacher preceded by his little crucifer in the ‘Doctrina delle Vita Monastica’ of Lorenzo Quistiniano (Venice, c. 1495) to a picture by Gentile Bellini in the church of S. Maria del Orto; the cut of S. Thomas in the ‘Epistole et Evangeli’ of 1495 to the picture by Verrocchio in Or S. Michele, and that of the beheading of S. John from a Pollaiuolo in the Baptistery at Florence. The case of the illustrations to the 1467 ‘Meditationes’ of Turrecremata, which are professedly copied from the frescoes in the church of S. Maria di Minerva at Rome, is an interesting example of this copying, the excellence of the original designs sometimes triumphing over the rudeness of the engraving. Unluckily the frescoes themselves have perished.
8 The Venetian origin of this cut is made almost certain by the character of its border. In style and touch (cleverly as the reproduction here given has been made from the thickly-painted original, the lines are necessarily thickened) the design is closely akin to the borders in the ‘Omelie et Sermones’ of S. Bernard (1491), and the ‘Dialogo de la Seraphica Virgine S. Caterina’ (1494), while in the border and woodcut initials of the ‘Supplementum Chronicarum’ of 1492 we get both the bull’s skull and the dolphin’s, and in the ‘Rudimenta Grammatices’ of Donatus 1493, a top border to the first page which resembles the lower border in our cut. There is no suggestion of copying here, but a series of designs probably all by the same artist which begin with this border to the ‘Arte’ in 1490 and can be traced for several years, always at Venice.
9 Reprinted from the King’s College School Magazine by leave of the editor.
10 In this very medieval Latin the master is always addressed as ‘vos,’ never as ‘tu,’ the use of the singular, except to inferiors or as a mark of affection, being regarded as an insult.
11 Read before the Bibliographical Society, April 1896.
12 An important extension to the subject, but one which I have not the knowledge to deal with, would treat of the Service-books prepared especially for the English market in Flanders and the north of France during the two centuries preceding the invention of printing. These are often claimed as of English origin, owing to their having English saints in their calendars, but their real provenance is indisputable.
13 Reprinted, by leave of Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. from ‘Bibliographica,’ vol. iii. (1896).
14 Hopyl’s initials are an inch and a half square on a dotted background. They were evidently designed specially for a Missal, the pictures being appropriate to the services to which the initials belong. They do not make up a complete alphabet, but of several letters there are two or three variants, e.g. for R there are pictures of Death, of the Annunciation, and of the Resurrection; for S, of SS. Cosmo and Damian, of S. Martin and the Beggar, and of the Blessed Virgin.
15 Since this paper was in type I have been shown an earlier example of this letter in a book printed by R. Wolfe in 1563.
16 From the introduction to the ‘English Bookman’s Library,’ by leave of Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co.
17 ‘English Illuminated Manuscripts.’ By Sir Edward Maunde Thompson K.C.B. (Kegan Paul, 1895), pp. 66, 67.
18 From ‘Longman’s Magazine,’ by leave of the publishers.
19 From ‘The Library,’ by leave of the editor.
20 From ‘The Library,’ by leave of the editor, and Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co.
21 From ‘Macmillan’s Magazine,’ by leave of the editor and publishers.
22 Since this article was written, a pleasant volume on the ‘Life and Letters of Mr. Endymion Porter’ has been brought out by Dorothea Townshend (Fisher Unwin, 1897).
23 From ‘The Guardian.’ By leave of the editor.
24 I am glad in reprinting this article to be allowed to give his name, the Rev. C. P. Phinn.
25 From the ‘Connoisseur,’ by leave of the editor.
26 Our illustration shows the cut in an interesting state, when the original I. of the first initial had been altered to an R. to suit John’s descendant Robert. The change is one of a kind with which collectors of book-plates are familiar.
27 From the ‘Library,’ by leave of the editor.
28 This copy, in the possession of Mr. Coningsby Sibthorp, of Sudbrooke Holme, Lincoln, to whose family it has belonged for more than a century, is fully described by Mr. Sidney Lee on p. 171 of his ‘Shakespeare’s Life and Work.’ By a curious coincidence the copy he describes on the previous page is one, now owned by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, which formerly belonged to Ralph Sheldon, who bought Vincent’s library. Presumably both copies at one time belonged to him.
29 From ‘Longman’s Magazine,’ by leave of the publishers.
30 From ‘Longman’s Magazine,’ by leave of the publishers.
31 Trophy money was a duty paid by householders for providing the militia with harness, drums, colours, etc.