Chapter 9

THE REAL MISS HAVISHAMS THE MYTHS AND REALITIES OF BREACH OF PROMISE

The woman wished to enter into a solemn engagement with as little precaution as she would use in taking a week’s lodgings.

(Mr Justice Bramwell, The Times, 20 April 1875)

Perhaps the most famous jilted bride is a work of fiction. In Great Expectations, Miss Havisham, an embittered, middle-aged spinster, haunts her family home for over 20 years as a spectre in faded bridal finery, presiding over a mouldering wedding feast and teaching her adopted daughter, Estella, to hurt and despise any man foolish enough to offer her his heart. To a contemporary audience, receiving a note from the bridegroom on the morning of the wedding, as was the young Miss Havisham’s fate, was a credible way of accounting for her bitter hatred of the male sex and a dramatic device for drawing the reader into the fictional world created by Charles Dickens.

Breach of promise of marriage was always a theatrical piece of law, because damages were based as much on a jury’s subjective judgements about both plaintiff and defendant as on any legal rules. This created an inherent uncertainty between a warring couple, which translated well to the stage and into fiction, helping to blur the distinction between real life and make-believe. Television drama has regularly featured either a bride or groom failing to turn up at the altar as one of its staple plots, to heighten the tension in a story.

In real life, less than one per cent of breach of promise plaintiffs had their hopes dashed on the wedding morning, or waited at the church or registry office for a man or woman who never arrived. A last-minute change of heart is one of the many misconceptions surrounding breach of promise. The reality of being jilted was very different, but equally sensational.

The earliest myth to attach itself to breach of promise originated in the eighteenth century. A key part of a middle-class female plaintiff’s claim for damages was that she had been condemned to perpetual spinsterhood. Respectable men were said to refuse to consider proposing to a jilted woman, in case she was in some way responsible for her broken engagement. From the scant detail available about middle-class plaintiffs in the eighteenth century it is impossible to discover whether they did go on to marry, but it seems likely that the arguments made on this point were created by barristers, without any supporting evidence, to maximise the damages.

A woman’s blighted hopes of matrimony were regularly spoken of in the court room from the 1790s until 1891, but by 1804 it was usually the judge who raised this when summing up for the jury. Judges generally stated that a woman’s chances were appreciably diminished by a broken engagement, but they never clearly explained why, suggesting that this was just received wisdom rather than a proven disadvantage.

From the first decade of the nineteenth century to the last, there is strong evidence that some breach of promise plaintiffs did marry after the court case. For many of them too little personal information is known to be sure of identifying the correct woman in public records, but marriage indexes regularly contain brides with the same name as a plaintiff, in the area where she was living, a few years, or sometimes months after the breach of promise hearing. It is likely that some of these entries refer to women who had taken claims to court.

It was not necessary for a jilted woman to have an exemplary character for her to find a husband. Despite giving birth to an illegitimate son after her fiancé of two years decided not to honour his offer of marriage, it seems that Elizabeth Forster married in 1808, three years after winning her claim for damages. Five years after suing her former employer, virtuous governess Anne Lancey probably married Joseph Truelove in 1821. Mary Alice Orford, appears to have become Mrs Wilson in Liverpool, six years after receiving her record damages and unmarried teenage mother, Charlotte Daniel, may have wed Matthias Butler in 1828, two years after her scandalous elopement with Captain Bowles.

Actress Maria Foote captivated the Earl of Harrington with her beauty, and in 1831, became his Countess, despite her tainted past. She had borne Colonel William Berkeley two illegitimate children before receiving a proposal from a young landowner, Joseph Hayne, who later cited her bad character as the reason for breaking his word. Maria won her breach of promise case against him in 1824 and £3,000, arguing that Hayne had known about the birth status of her children when he proposed.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the likelihood of a woman receiving another offer began to be raised by the defence in an attempt to keep a woman’s damages to a low level. The first recorded instance of this may be the claim made by Jemima Wright, which was heard at Stroud in 1827. The suggestion raised no eyebrows in court, nor comment in the press, indicating that the marriage of a previously jilted woman was neither novel nor newsworthy. In 1844, The Observer reported that Mrs Georgiana Dorey, who had recently been arrested for conspiracy to defraud the government, had as Miss Georgiana Richards, obtained £250 damages from Reverend Taylor in 1834. Even a failed plaintiff whose reputation was damaged by her claim could marry well. Mary Smith became the wife of a gentleman, despite incurring public odium in 1846 when she fabricated letters to make it seem that Earl Ferrers had proposed to her.

In the middle of the century, there were several successful breach of promise cases brought by ‘artful and abandoned hussies’ who falsely claimed to have received a proposal from a man of means, or had enticed them into making one, so that they could use the damages to set up home with a different man. Between 1851 and 1862, Amelia Harrison, Anne Hedge and Catherine Knights all married within a few months of winning their claim. In 1869, defence lawyers pointed out that accountant’s daughter, Kate Fleming, might expect a husband as worthy and well-off as James Thompson, as her attractions were unimpaired.

John Marsh’s lawyer observed that if Mary Lamb was as attractive as her two sisters who had given evidence, then she would have no difficulty in finding another, more worthy suitor. In 1873, the judge remarked that the £500 that Annie Hammond had accepted to settle her case might enable her to find a lover more faithful than Joseph Belton, who had jilted her for Eliza Williamson.

Clara Pilbeam was 21 when John Clemence broke their engagement in 1881. She married William Stevens, a solicitor’s clerk, five years later. In their marriage licence and in censuses taken during Stevens’s lifetime, three years have been subtracted from Clara’s age, so that she only appeared to be two years older than her husband rather than five. The missing years reappear in the 1911 census when Clara was a widow. This may indicate that when Clara met her future husband, she was worried about her age. Unmarried women were considered to be on the shelf by the time they turned 25, and Stevens might also have thought the age-gap between them too great, as it was conventional for a man to be a little older than his wife.

In 1891, the marriage of Gladys Knowles was widely noted in the press. Her nuptials took place less than three months after the Appeal Court had confirmed how much Leslie Duncan should pay for refusing to honour their engagement. Gladys’s wedding seems to have formed a landmark moment in breach of promise claims, particularly as the judges had stated that she would struggle to find a husband. After this point any argument about compensation for reduced prospects of marriage dissolves. Claims later in the decade began to refer to the fact that a plaintiff had already been courted by someone else. In the twentieth century there is ample evidence in marriage records that breach of promise plaintiffs found husbands.

Despite eighteenth century emphasis on a woman needing an unsullied reputation to secure a husband, all but the wealthiest men would have considered a bride with a few hundred pounds of her own more desirable than a poor one of unimpeachable character. A couple of hundred pounds was an excellent contribution towards setting up a respectable home with a working man, whilst women with a thousand pounds or more were very attractive to middle-class bachelors. Half the women who brought a claim for breach of promise sued a man of a higher social standing. The damages that they received would have maintained governesses and farmer’s daughters in the marriage market, probably with men of their own social class.

An illegitimate child was not an insuperable barrier to finding a husband, if a woman had some money of her own. Amongst the working-classes, being seduced under a promise of marriage was not regarded as the same heinous crime it was to the middle-class. A self-employed working man might be happy to accept a child able to help in his shop or trade if it saved him the expense of having to employ an assistant.

Marrying a widow was not a social taboo and before the compulsory registration of births, marriages and deaths it was easy to adopt a different marital status. After receiving £300 from her first fiancé, Matilda Ubsdell arbitrarily changed her name to Matilda Black in 1845 and posed as a widow to disguise her son’s illegitimacy. She received a proposal from a young railway clerk, who later discovered the deception and declined to marry her. Despite winning just one farthing from him, within two years Matilda had convinced John Symes to make an honest woman of her.

For a number of women who brought a claim for breach of promise, damages were not about being compensated for a broken heart and diminished chances of marriage. Some spinsters and widows already had an income from a business or a settlement and had not actively been seeking a husband when they received an offer of marriage. When proposals were regarded as business arrangements by both parties from the outset, pursuing a claim for compensation was just good business sense if the deal went wrong.

High mortality, especially in childbirth, produced an ever-replenishing supply of widowers, some of whom offered marriage as an alternative to employing a housekeeper to run the home or a nursemaid to look after the children. Elizabeth Tyndall’s request for compensation was likened by Henry Short’s barrister to a dispute about the wrongful dismissal of a housekeeper, rather than breach of promise of marriage, because of the businesslike tone both parties had adopted in their correspondence. When Annie Allan sued Walter Chivers in 1900, the judge commented that the engagement was so clearly a business arrangement that he wondered whether he ought to ask the commercial court to decide the damages.

The extent to which breach of promise plaintiffs subsequently married is unknown because it is difficult to identify many of them afterwards in records. Just as some marriages can be found, sometimes death records confirm that the woman died unwed. It is clear that a broken engagement did not automatically condemn a woman to eternal spinsterhood and if her damages made her a little richer this could attract other suitors. Money, combined with matters such as looks, personality and opportunity for meeting other men, was the very practical factor determining whether she would receive a second offer, if she still wished to become a wife.

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By the mid-nineteenth century, many women believed that breach of promise protected loyal fiancées from long, and ultimately unproductive engagements by ensuring that the man who deserted them had to provide financial security for the solitary years ahead. This thought may have comforted a woman as she waited anxiously for her fiancé to reply to her unanswered letters, but it was a myth. The majority of failed engagements where a woman received substantial compensation had existed for months rather than years. Protection from long engagements was important to women because their marriageable years were few. A woman who had not secured a husband by her mid-twenties would struggle against the younger women who left the schoolroom each year. Compounding the problem of a socially-imposed window of opportunity to wed, was a more practical anxiety. Men were in short supply in the mid and late nineteenth century, and women knew that some of their number would never receive an offer of marriage. In a society that saw a woman’s role as running a home rather than working outside it, the need to attract a husband was a constant concern for young women and their parents.

Amongst the prosperous middle-classes, the anxiety to be married meant that engagements were formed after very short periods of acquaintance, often when the couple had only met for a few hours at parties and balls. In such an artificial atmosphere it was easy to gain a mistaken impression of the other person and their values. It was not unusual for engagements to take place within a month of the first meeting and a number of breach of promise cases feature a man who had proposed too quickly, perhaps whilst away on holiday, and then realised that he had mistaken his feelings, or underestimated the expense of providing for a wife.

Judges were divided about whether making a mistake during a short courtship was acceptable mitigation for breaking an engagement. In 1878, the Lord Chief Justice commented that ‘ten days is a long time to be exposed to the attractions of a charming young girl, especially when dancing with her.’ In 1883, Mr Justice Grove took the opposite view about a fortnight’s acquaintance between plaintiff and defendant, suggesting that ‘it would be better for people sometimes, perhaps, if they were to “keep company” a little while before they became engaged, as the commoner people did’.

Despite Mr Justice Grove’s approval of their courtships, poorer people were also liable to form ill-considered engagements. Although lower-middle-class and working-class people had more privacy to get to know each other, quick decisions were sometimes required. If a couple walked out together half a dozen times, a man might find himself being asked by the woman’s relatives to declare his intentions. This was a useful means of preventing a woman from spending too much time on a man who had no serious interest in her, but it may also have scared off someone who wanted to take longer to decide. Pressure for a hasty commitment from a man sometimes led to a conditional promise, but the short-term advantage of being ‘spoken for’ was not necessarily a benefit to a woman if the pair had no idea when they would be able to afford marriage.

If the couple drifted apart or the man changed his mind, the prospect of a breach of promise claim gave him no incentive to be honest and set his fiancée free. Instead he would let the engagement drag on, hoping that the woman would find someone else and jilt him, or tire of waiting and ask for her freedom. A few men who had decided against marriage even tried to provoke their fiancée into ending the engagement. In 1899, Plaistow boilermaker, Henry Halkett, wrote to his intended, Emma Male, explaining that after a wild night out with the boys he had contracted venereal disease. Emma realised she was being tricked and sued for breach of promise, receiving £120 after a shame-faced Halkett admitted to the court that he did not have any infection and must have penned his letter whilst drunk.

In 50 per cent of cases the failed engagement was between a couple from different classes. When the romance involved a poor woman and a lower-middle class groom, the man was often criticised for his mercenary behaviour if he had married a richer bride and ample damages were usually claimed because of his selfish behaviour towards the woman he had jilted. In reality, not all men who married a richer woman were the cads they were made to appear in court. It is perfectly feasible that a man could afford to marry a woman with assets of her own but was not in a position to support a wife who could not bring money into the marriage.

A contribution from the bride’s family towards setting up a home, and the prospect of income from the investments in her marriage settlement to balance the household budget might be needed before a bachelor dared to change his marital status. In a number of claims where a man had married a richer woman, the damages that the plaintiff received appear more like a slap on the wrist for the defendant, rather than substantial compensation for the woman he had jilted. The reason damages were not generous in these circumstances was that juries could only take into account the man’s own resources, not those brought into the marriage by his new wife.

One measure of a long and ultimately unproductive engagement for a woman was when her fiancé married someone else. In the nineteenth century, this occurred in 26 per cent of breach of promise claims. The average damages awarded to women who had been abandoned for a different bride were £349, compared with £380 for those where another marriage was not involved. Ignoring awards of more than £1,000 gives a more realistic picture of what a lower-class woman might obtain and reveals that deserted women received on average 16 per cent less in damages.

Whatever the Victorians believed, the statistics show that women who had been engaged for several years did not receive substantial compensation for their loyalty, unless they had been in common-law marriages. A 60-year-old grocer, Margaret Blundell, received £35 when Peter Cropper deserted her after ten years to marry another woman, and Kate Fisher, aged 25, obtained only £50 from a surgeon after an engagement of five years. In the cases where a woman received good compensation for being jilted after a long engagement, jurors made a distinction between women who still had a realistic expectation of marriage at the point when the man changed his mind and those where it had long been obvious that the defendant had no intention of honouring his word.

Middle-class intellectuals launched a concerted attack on breach of promise in the 1870s, basing some of their criticisms on myth and presumption. One argument was that the damages women received were disproportionate to the injury suffered, with jurors being foolishly generous to undeserving plaintiffs. Critics of the action considered that any woman who was prepared to parade her feelings in a courtroom in order to obtain money deserved very little. The primary source of information for anyone who did not work in the legal profession was newspapers. By this time, the press had become very critical of women thought to have behaved badly and devoted column inches to denigrating supposed villainesses, whether they won or lost. In 1881, shortly after 39-year-old Kate Lamb, a solicitor’s daughter won £1,000 from Arthur Fryer, a curate who was ten years her junior, The Observer drew attention to what it considered was a very weak claim ironically suggesting that:

action for breach of promise of marriage against a Dean or Archdeacon might possibly be permitted, but to curates a statutory protection should be granted similar to that which is accorded to undersized lobsters.

A couple of years earlier, the paper had vented its wrath against Elizabeth Hall, who had unsuccessfully attempted to extort money from Demetrius Schillizzi with a breach of promise claim, pointing out that:

she was no guileless girl, but rather a very astute and experienced woman, able to reckon up the pecuniary value of a lover of the type of Mr Schillizzi, to recount every detail in her relationship with him, and, in the end, to put upon him a pressure which can hardly be described as gentle.

Unusually the paper was also scathing of Schillizzi for his folly in not realising that a rich gentleman who accosted a comely widow in Regent Street, took her to the theatre and made her valuable presents might be running the risk of having some claim made against him. Men were often portrayed as victims, whilst their bad behaviour towards a plaintiff passed without public censure, even when the defendant had treated a woman disgracefully.

Newspaper readers were more likely to recall that the family of 19-year-old feather worker, Florence Joseph, were remorseless in their demands for compensation from a London bookmaker, and obtained £1,500, than that 19-year-old Hannah Wood, a poor farmer’s daughter had been seduced by a rich manufacturer under a promise of marriage and received £350, after he cast her off, pregnant, saying that ‘he’d had all he wanted from her’.

Sixty-four per cent of all women received no more than £200 in damages and the sum most usually awarded was £100. For working-class women who had been engaged for a couple of years or more and wasted money on wedding preparations, this level of compensation was not undeserved, so long as it was realistic for the man to pay it. The money, used wisely, would have brought them a little security, and was a reasonable outcome for those whose finances had been damaged by the man’s inconsiderate behaviour. Mary Lamb had given up the prospect of an annual salary of £50 when she resigned her teaching post to please John Marsh. Commercial clerk, Arthur Pemberton, asked Violet Brice to give up her work as a waitress whilst he prepared their marital home, knowing that Violet’s impoverished parents could ill afford to support her. When the home was ready he married Frances Gardner, offering Violet £10 compensation. The court awarded her £250.

What seems to have been at the root of the criticisms about overgenerous juries was social class. Decent awards made to working-class women against middle-class men could create annoyance, unless the man had behaved exceptionally badly. Polly Frost was considered not to deserve the £200 Josiah Knight was told to pay her, because she was a servant and this represented over 20 times her annual salary. Knight tried unsuccessfully to appeal against damages that he considered excessive.

When Henry Joy was ordered to pay Elinor Miller £2,500, after his vindictive conduct destroyed her carefully nurtured business and prevented her from earning her own living, some critics thought that the sum was outrageous, given Elinor’s murky past. In 1856, Eleanor Hewittson’s lawyer summed up the views of the middle-classes towards poor women bringing claims for breach of promise, when he criticised Isaac Rowson’s lawyer for arguing that Eleanor’s family occupied a place in society that did not entitle them to the consideration that would be shown towards those of wealth or position.

The damages given to middle-class plaintiffs often seem more generous than those awarded to poorer ones, even when the defendant was of the same financial standing and the woman had suffered a similar loss. The most undeserving plaintiffs may have been young, middle-class women rather than working-class ones. Edith Barber, aged 18, Elizabeth Webster, 20, and Mary Mathiason, 21, all obtained damages of £2,000 or more, in cases without aggravating factors, after very short engagements, but this was rarely noticed by the action’s middle-class critics. Perhaps the woman to profit most substantially from a short engagement was Sarah Miller, who received £350 after she had expected to become Abraham Moryjoseph’s wife for just eight days.

Alongside the allegation that damages were usually too high, was the rhetoric that fraud and extortion were rife amongst breach of promise plaintiffs. A small number of claims were fabricated, but most of these appear to have been detected by juries which found for the defendant. A few others succeeded, only to be overturned on appeal. Rather than telling a blatant lie, several women were accused of entrapping a gullible man into a proposal so that they could sue for damages when he sought to free himself. Old men and callow youths were thought to be regular victims, as women sought damages from men they could not possibly have wanted for a husband.

Men under 24 represent ten per cent of unsuccessful defendants, and a similar proportion applies to men over 60. If young men were being exploited by worldly women then it seems likely that the women would be a few years older, but this was not the case. Men under 24 were usually sued by a woman of a similar age or younger, suggesting that these were relationships between equals, though occasionally a young man may have been set-up by the conniving parents of a girl of his own age. Beyond this, there is no evidence to suggest that young men were frequently the gullible victims of fraudulent women.

There is some evidence that old men may have been targeted for their money, usually by a woman of a similar age. Mature widows were often the butt of jokes in breach of promise theatricals and older spinsters were sometimes treated harshly by a jury. Both groups did badly when it came to damages, even if they won their claim. On average, women in their sixties obtained only £111 in damages and those in their fifties fared even worse with £91. Damages for women under 45 were much more generous; until this age they could hope to receive around £200. The difference does not seem to reflect life-expectancy, but contempt of some of the claims that older women brought in an effort to secure money for their old age. A few women tried to take advantage of defendants who suffered from dementia, whilst others had mistakenly thought the defendant was a man of means, only to discover that he had proposed for the same reason, believing that she could ensure him a comfortable old age.

Victorian marriages were usually formed with a man who was up to five years older than his bride. Breach of promise claims reveal that many failed engagements were between couples whose ages fell outside these parameters. Almost a third of plaintiffs were at least ten years younger than the defendant and over half these couples had an age gap of more than 20 years. For a woman, the attraction of a much older man appears to have been his social and financial standing, which was almost always higher than her own. Had the marriage taken place, the woman could have expected to increase her economic security and improve her standard of living.

A number of breach of promise plaintiffs were in their twenties and from the respectable working-class or the lower middle-class. They appear upwardly mobile in their ambitions. Defendants would have been considered men of means, by the plaintiff. Many were farmers, tradesmen with their own shop or craftsmen running their own business. As the nineteenth century progressed they were joined by men in regular employment. The uniting factor was that these men were believed to have resources at their disposal to pay damages, though this assumption was sometimes erroneous. Only one per cent of defendants were poor men who would have been living hand to mouth and these claims may have been acts of vengeance by a woman they had scorned.

A few engagements involved a very big age difference between the couple. Successful older men sometimes sought out a younger woman and some women considered it ‘better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave’. Whether there was mutual affection in these relationships is unclear, but a woman marrying an older husband would have expected a generous settlement for her anticipated widowhood. The greatest age difference between couples in breach of promise cases was between Sophia Darbon, the 31-year-old daughter of a wine cooper, and retired solicitor, Robert Rosser, who was 85. Sophia received £1,600 in 1841, which reflected Rosser’s very substantial wealth.

The previous year, 30-year-old Eliza Hastings was awarded £100 when a sprightly doctor, Richard Ashley, aged 80, married someone else. In most cases involving age gaps of 20 years or more, the damages were not exceptional. Half the plaintiffs received no more than £200 and some reaped only the benefit of having their legal bills settled, as the damages were contemptuous. Jurors appear to have afforded some protection to old men if they thought that exploitation was involved, as they only awarded a substantial level of damages when it was clear that the man had been fully aware of the implications of his proposal and not pressured into making it.

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Some underlying aspects of the breach of promise claim were not noticed by contemporary commentators. Comparing the damages awarded during the nineteenth century to women who worked for a living and those who did not, reveals that women in employment obtained an average of £261, whilst those who remained at home received £417. It was unusual for a woman who worked for her living to receive £1,000 in damages unless there were aggravating features to her claim. Women who did not work were twice as likely as a working woman to obtain at least £1,000.

Excluding awards of £1,000 or more identifies the experience of a more typical plaintiff, as it removes the effect of aggravating aspects and also eliminates the claims made by gentlemen’s daughters against very wealthy men. The differential between the two groups still persists, with economically active women receiving £161, compared with £209 for those who did not work. The difference cannot be explained by the argument that working women were poor, and more likely to be suing men of limited resources. Working women were more likely to sue a man of better financial standing than their own than to sue a man without funds. Women who worked on a self-employed basis tended to obtain better damages than those who worked for wages, which may reflect approval of entrepreneurship, even by a woman, and willingness to compensate them for losses sustained in disposing of a business in preparation for marriage. Such women may also have had better opportunities to meet men outside their own class as a number sued men of a higher social standing.

Amongst the working women, one type of employment stands out as attracting higher damages: governesses, who received on average £439. This reflects the fact that most were respectable, middle-class ladies whose families could not afford to support them. Governesses were particularly susceptible to the effects of a tarnished reputation. The mere suspicion that a woman had behaved in a way that entitled a man to break his promise to marry her, could make it very difficult to find further employment in a society increasingly censorious of real or perceived impropriety. A similar sensibility to the effects of loss of reputation was shown in average damages of £376 awarded to nineteenth century teachers.

Although an irreproachable character was necessary for some women to be able to earn their living, critics of breach of promise sometimes mocked women who said they brought claims to establish their good character. They regarded this argument as a cover for more mercenary ambitions, querying why these women still accepted damages once their honour had been vindicated in public. The argument that the plaintiff wished to establish her character in public understandably featured more often in breach of promise claims after some women had used it successfully, but there is no indication that juries were more liberal with damages towards women who made this claim, unless it was necessary for a woman to vindicate her character before she could resume her occupation.

The effect of the awards to governesses and teachers means that the compensation won by other working women for broken engagements was worth just two thirds of what was awarded to women who did not work. On average, they received £142, with ten per cent of them receiving a derisory sum of £10 or less. Some of these claims were attorney’s actions which would have been better not brought, but a number indicate that women in some occupations were not highly regarded by the men who sat on juries. Women who ran boarding houses did very badly and those who worked in factories were rarely thought to merit substantial damages.

In contrast, the experiences of economically inactive women reveal that only five per cent received a derisory award, and many of them were the daughters of poor men. The Victorian middle-class ideal, to which most jurors would have subscribed, was that a woman’s proper role in life was to remain at home and tend to domestic matters. Women who demonstrated that this type of socially acceptable occupation, rather than paid work outside the home, was their choice, were rewarded with levels of damages that allowed them some discretion about whether to try and earn a living. Half of these women obtained £200 or more, with 11 per cent receiving at least £1,000. Amongst the larger awards, the aggravating factors of pregnancy or poor conduct by the defendant were infrequent and some teenagers became very wealthy young women.

During the Edwardian era, the difference between the working and unoccupied persisted, though it is difficult to draw firm conclusions because newspaper reports provided much less detail about plaintiffs and defendants. Nevertheless, the highest awards continued to be made to women from genteel backgrounds and women in poorly-paid occupations infrequently received much compensation from a faithless fiancé. It raises the intriguing possibility that the decline of breach of promise claims in the early twentieth century was linked to the increase in female employment, and recognition by working women that reasonable damages for a broken engagement were not available.

Breach of promise is perhaps the only law that developed to give women a clear advantage over men, whether they were suing or being sued. Those who booked a date before the judge to substitute for a date before the vicar demonstrated that they were not passive creatures to be trampled over, but assertive women who were capable of protecting their own interests.