The Marriage Plot

Abstract

If the social and temporal dimensions of the long narrative poem made it a fitting vessel for the apparent chaos and banality of contemporary life, the content appropriate to this form — according to the unanimous evidence of the poems themselves — seems to have been the personal and social processes of courtship and marriage in all their mid-Victorian complexity. Of course, in the age of Caroline Norton and of Mrs Beeton, of the twin pariahs of the prostitute and the old maid, marriage was a national preoccupation; as Matthew Reynolds points out, ‘[t]his focus on wedlock is one of the defining characteristics of the generation of Browning and Tennyson’.¹ The significance of marriage for the period — whether as an integrative social mechanism, a marker of national unity, or a locus of morality as well as personal happiness — would alone qualify it for the attention of poets concerned with modern, everyday life; its utility, however, as a means of coming to grips with an ‘unpoetical’ age in verse goes well beyond its topicality. Marriage, in its permanence and respectability, and as the medium of domesticity, may be conceived of simply as everydayness in one of its forms, the quotidian codified in both human relationship and social institution.

‘And you are actually going to get married! you! Already! And you expect me to congratulate you! […] congratulation on such occasions seems to me a tempting of Providence! The Triumphal-Procession air which, in our Manners and Customs, is given to marriage at the outset — that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun — has, since ever I could reflect, struck me as somewhat senseless and somewhat impious! If ever one is to pray, if ever one is to feel grave and anxious, if ever one is to shrink from vain show and vain babble — surely it is just on the occasion of two human beings binding themselves to one another for better and for worse till death part them; just on that occasion which it is customary to celebrate only with rejoicings, and congratulations, and trousseaux, and — white ribbon! Good God!’

Letter from Jane Carlyle, 1859