Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England

Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England, by Jennifer Phegley; pp. xviii + 196. Santa Barbara: Praeger Press, 2012, $41.00.

This latest volume in the Victorian Life and Times series, edited by Sally Mitchell, focuses on courtship rituals and weddings. As the series is aimed at the general reader, Jennifer Phegley does not break new analytical ground. Instead, her book describes rituals and expectations for marriages and weddings, as well as those who dissented from supposedly normal practices. Her source base is mostly secondary, but she also has in-depth chapters on prescriptive literature (both on courtship and wedding etiquette) and on matrimonial advertisements and bureaus.

After a chapter describing marriage law, Phegley delves into courtship practices and expectations for men and women. Courtship was a time for couples to assess each other's characters before making life-long commitments. Though men were the aggressors, women, in Phegley's phrase, "rule[d] courtship rituals" (47). Despite the strictures in prescriptive literature about behavior at all stages of courtship, few couples observed these expectations exactly. Phegley sets out these ideas clearly, but she could have included more in this section on letters or descriptions of actual courtships, the main sources of the historians she cites. The book's dependence on prescriptive literature- which she admits many couples did not follow-means she cannot argue as effectively about where reality diverged from the ideal. Another problem is that the section on working-class courtship is much shorter and relies on secondary works that primarily discuss courtship before 1850. This difficulty, in particular, reappears in later segments.

One of the longest chapters,...