Eighteenth/nineteenth century attitudes to illegitimacy/marriage

[greyingrey]

I don't know if you can talk about a "general attitude", so this is probably useless, but if anyone has any comments I'd be very interested.

Suppose a man in quite a high social position married someone in a lower social position (& of a different religion) & they had a child. I don't know if the child was born before the marriage or not.....but would the "shame" to his family lie in the pregnancy or the marriage or both ?....ie if the mother lived nearby & named the child after the father would that be tolerated by the wealthier family as being part of "the ways of the world", whereas they would seek to cover up the formal union represented by a marriage ?

[Olde Crone Holden]

I think the social shame would lie in the marriage - you can't deny a marriage but you can certainly deny the parentage of an illegitimate child.

OC

[dicole]

I agree with OC, the shame would be in the marriage, not the illegitmate child.

I remember reading about legitimacy in Sussex in the early 19th century some years ago which stayed in my mind. I am sure that the author claimed around 50% of first born children were born within 9 months of the marriage, that is, before or after. A betrothal, apparently, was considered almost as binding as a marriage amongst the "lower" classes, but if what you read about the "upper" classes is true, it was perfectly okay to have a few illegitimate children, especially sons, around to prove your fertility.

[Macbev]

My Thomas Gould, eldest son of a well-pedigreed Dorset family with links to the Churchills and other members of the aristocracy, a captain in the Dorset militia, married a farmer's daughter. He was 66 years, she was 25. Their first born son arrived three days after the ceremony.

I'm not sure if the 'shame' lay in the social disparity, the age disparity, or the sudden arrival of the child.Since he served time in prison for debt and his father's estates passed out of the family seven years after his father's death, I suspect the inequities could all be claimed by the bride.

[Olde Crone Holden]

Janet

Oh yes, I totally agree that women had ways of naming and shaming the father BUT the question asked here was which would be seen as the greatest social sin by the family with the higher social standing and that would definitely be the sin of marrying beneath one, not the sin of begetting an illegitimate child or two in the neighbourhood.

Well-bred people would ignore (officially) any gossip about a milkmaid's illegitimate child, lol, but they could hardly ignore a marriage.

OC

[Olde Crone Holden]

I have a few examples in my own tree which I find interesting as a snapshot of the attitudes of the times.

I have one marriage between two social equals, shall we say, both from very humble backgrounds. The husband prospered and shot up the social ladder, as it was very possible to do in victorian times. The wife however, appears not to have been equal to the challenge and by 1891 is being described as Housekeeper to her "widowed" husband, lol. One of their sons went on to become a highly-decorated military man but all biographical detail completely ignores his mother (and invents a past for his father!).

Another couple are resolutely described on three census as "living as man and wife" - you can HEAR the enumerator's sniff! They eventually married, some 48 years after their first child was born, no doubt because a previous spouse was still alive and making it known in the neighbourhood!

However, my Yeoman farmer families produce great quantities of illegitimate children with apparently no shame attached - what does it matter to a wealthy Yeoman farmer what people think of him? Someone will always be willing to marry his naughty daughters in order to get a foot into a prosperous farm. In fact, the boot is really on the other foot...the farmer must carefully vet any prospective son in law to make sure he is worthy of the daughter, her illegitimate children and his farm! What's a few extra mouths to feed on a farm, and how useful are all those extra children, who have proved the fertility of the parent - who wants a barren farmer's wife? The church may have frowned on the farmer's illegitimate grandchildren but the farmer had no need to care about that - in my case, the farmer paid the vicar's living!


OC