‘The Surest Way of Wooing’: Marriage, Courtship and Sexuality

Abstract

John Cannon, a financially improvident excise officer and charity school master, had this dream at the age of fifty-four. He had been married for twenty-five years, and was the father of five children. Yet even he could not dream of a sexual encounter without unconsciously linking it to courtship and marriage. In a series of erotic dreams he records in his voluminous memoirs, Cannon consistently links sex and marriage, and is frequently stricken down by uncertainty about his ability to contract a valid dream marriage.

This night I had another dream but much more fantastical methought on a sudden I am wth one of the daughters of one Grace Hole at Lidford at the backdoore of her house who tells me she had gotten at her own charge a Licence to be married to me and so by her allure ments the ceremony was performed…. My supposed Bride & her sisters insisted … [I] go to bed wth my bride the bed being pre pared in one corner of a chamber but not withstanding I thought I was yet unmarried & single, being conscious to my self I was engaged to another I grew into a perplexity & requested to be excused that night, but promised to come the next following having thought to go home to consult my parents … however she persisted on my stay[ing] & so in veighed me & told me she expected carnality wth me as the duty of a new married couple to wch I seemingly consented by grasping her about, methought I felt her privities and at the same time I demanded of her the Licence To which she answered she had none but only a trick of hers to make me believe she had one to obtain her ends …²