1 - Courtship, Marriage, and Affection

Summary

Contemporaries Generally Saw The Courtship, marriage, and family life of army couples in largely negative terms. As noted in the Introduction, courtship was thought to be a rushed and ramshackle affair in which soldiers impulsively united themselves with very poor and disreputable women whom they encountered at the various stations where they served. Soldiers’ marriages were seen as unions in which excessive alcohol, quarrels and brawling regularly featured, familial love and good housekeeping skills were largely absent, and parental affection and ties to the partners’ natal families were minimal and fleeting. These were damning judgements, and the discussions which follow will explore their veracity as far as can be determined from the surviving sources. It will be argued that in forging affective bonds, soldiers and their wives and families demonstrated attitudes and behaviour typical of the working class from which most of them came. From the outset in their dealings with soldiers and the army – that is, during courtship – the majority of the women who became soldiers’ wives demonstrated practicality and a due regard for reputation and respectability. Indeed, many of the conventional assumptions and beliefs of affluent commentators seem to have had little basis in fact, but were, and sometimes have been since, accepted at face value.

Courtship between soldiers and the women who chose to encourage them, had various motivations in the nineteenth century, and took a variety of forms. Young single women, soldiers’ widows, and their orphaned daughters all experienced sharply different courtship patterns. An engagement to marry in the military, while often an abbreviated experience, nevertheless rehearsed a number of the priorities and practices of working-class courtships generally. This was not widely recognised at the time; indeed, middle- and upper-class commentators articulated a rather different narrative with respect to young single women who married soldiers, and often suspected their motives when soldiers’ widows and orphaned daughters married.

Among the affluent classes, there was a common perception in the nineteenth century that young women – especially servants – were very susceptible to the lure of a red uniform, to ‘scarlet fever’ as Henry Mayhew put it in the early 1860s. An army chaplain stated the situation succinctly: ‘Mary's military admirer is so spruce, so smart, so neat, so different from all her other admirers, that the red-coat is always sure to carry the day.’