Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America

Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America. By Barbara Penner. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2009. xiv, 290 pp. $55.00, isbn 978-1-58465773-6.)

In Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (1984), Ellen Rothman noted rhar midway through the nineteenth century, the American bridal journey ceased to "integrate a new pair into the community" and "instead . . . self-consciously isolated the couple." In this excellent new monograph, Barbara Penner peers inside the couple's isolation and finds a crowd. For even as the wedding journey cut couples off from their families and communities, it thrust them into an imagined - and very public - community of new husbands and wives, giving them countless peers among their fellow vacationers and fashioning them into representatives of the married...