LOVE
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. (Genesis, 2:24)
AS I HAD become a Man and what must I do now been about twenty four years of age, what did I do but followed the advice that is given to us in the Second Chapter of Genesis Verse twenty four Therefore shall a Man Leave his Father and Mother and Cleave unto His Wife and they shall be one flesh and now I Began to Make known Myself to this person and in Corse of time She became my Lawfull wife. (James Bowd, p. 296)
My first love … deserted me, but another soon after offered me his heart – without the form of legal protection – and in a thoughtless moment I accepted him as my friend and protector, but, to use the words of a departed poet –
When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What can sooth her melancholy,
What can wash her guilt away?
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To wring repentance from her lover,
And sting his bosom, is to die.
I did not, however, feel inclined to die when I could no longer conceal what the world falsely calls a woman’s shame. No, on the other hand, I never loved life more dearly and longed for the hour when I would have something to love me – and my wish was realised by becoming the mother of a lovely daughter on the 14th September 1852. (Ellen Johnston)
LOVE AND SEXUAL desire are intrinsic to the human condition. Be it the adolescent Samuel Bamford, swept off his feet by ‘heart-gushings of romantic feeling’.1 Or Robert Anderson, unable to concentrate at church because of that girl with rosy cheeks sitting across the aisle.2 Or Elizabeth Oakley, whose heart quickened when she first spotted the new man on her employer’s farm: ‘he was the nicest looking young man I had ever seen … he had dark eyes and his hair was black and hanging in shining ringlets around his head’.3 In different ways, the autobiographers captured the possibilities of meeting and falling in love. We might be separated by two centuries or more, but each of these writers described something that is instantly recognisable to any modern reader.
Nor is there anything too difficult to fathom in the sexual desires bound up in their stories. Along with these heart-gushings, and minds distracted by rosy cheeks, dark eyes and curly hair came powerful physical urges. You know the kind I mean. Samuel Bamford’s expression of ‘romantic feeling’ with one unnamed girlfriend had him paying maintenance for an illegitimate son for several years. Strong desires, weak wills. You do not need to turn to history to read stories such as these.
But if love and sex are timeless constants, the space within which these drives and emotions are allowed to operate is not. Our autobiographers lived in a time when very different values on such matters as courtship, marriage, illegitimacy, extramarital affairs and homosexuality prevailed, values diligently upheld by parents, neighbours, employers, and even the young themselves. And it is this, the clash between desire and culture, which we shall look at here. First love; then sex. In the following two chapters we shall explore how a society in flux maintained control over the most intimate parts of other people’s lives.