Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: the social context of illegitimacy in rural Kent

Abstract

More bad history has been written about sex than any other subject. Our ignorance about the sexual attitudes and behaviour of people in the past is compounded by a desire to rush to rash generalisation. This is unfortunate, for (consciously or not) our perceptions of the present are shaped by our assumptions about the past. Britain's current preoccupation with ‘Victorian values’ is but a politically visible example of a more general phenomenon. And, more specifically, we do not know a great deal about lower-class sexuality in nineteenth-century England. There are studies of bourgeois desires and sensibilities, but little on the mores of the vast bulk of the population.As Jean Robin has demonstrated recently, one of the most fruitful approaches to the subject is the detailed local study – the micro-study. It may not appeal to those with a penchant for the broad sweep, but such an approach can provide a useful entry into the sexual habits of the people of the past. This article is intended as a follow-up to Robin's work. It deals with a part of rural Kent and, like Robin's work, it covers an aspect of nineteenth-century sexuality – in this case, the social context of illegitimacy. More particularly, this study (and here I differ from Robin) will question the usefulness of the concept of a ‘bastardy-prone sub-society’ (more of which later), a term still favoured by many historical sociologists. The experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.

Bastardy in Butleigh: Illegitimacy, Genealogies and the Old Poor Law in Somerset, 1762–1834

“…A further 20 percent of baptisms were probably the result of sexual activity after marriage, but not certainly. This figure matches those given in Reay's micro-study of Dunkirk and Hernhill in Kent (Reay 1990). The remaining 40 percent of baptisms occurred outside this time-frame, assuming that there were not long delays between birth and baptism.…”

“…Only 10 percent of the group married the child's father. A further 20 percent married another man, but almost two-thirds of unmarried mothers in the village never married, which was within the range identified by Adair, but a lower proportion than in Reay's study later in the nineteenth century (Adair 1996;Reay 1990). In fact, these women were more likely to have another illegitimate child than they were to marry anyone in Butleigh.…”

“…The other familial characteristic was that between 10 and 20 percent of the sample were either illegitimate themselves, or connected within their immediate parental family or sibling group to someone who was also the parent of an illegitimate child, although this was a lower proportion than in Dunkirk or Hernhill, Kent (Adair 1996;Reay 1990). In one respect, these connections are not surprising given the prevailing levels of pre-nuptial pregnancy in Butleigh, however, as we will see in some instances illegitimate children were the sole off-spring of women who were themselves illegitimate.…”

“…Laslett termed this group, 'the bastardy-prone sub-society', and other studies (notably Smith's and Adair's) referred to them by the short-hand 'repeaters' (Laslett 1980;Levine 1977;Oosterveen et al 1980). While these demographic studies tended to treat such a group as a puzzling statistical anomaly, the language used to describe it implied that such people were aware of their identity, or had even made consciously 'non-conformist' choices (Reay 1990). When viewed in the context of the now-superseded research of Edward Shorter and Gerald Quaife, the identification of this 'sub-society' carried connotations of a bucolic 'permissive society' in early modern England (Shorter 1971;Quaife 1979).…”

“…While these ideas quickly collapsed under the weight of evidence to the contrary, demographic approaches failed to produce clear explanations, and tended instead to infer motives about 'conformity' or 'non-conformity' from the trends alone (Levine 1977;Oosterveen et al 1980). The most notable exception was Reay's detailed analysis of the Kentish settlements of Dunkirk and Hernhill, which placed the mothers and fathers of illegitimate children in the context of familial groupings (and some very illuminating mid-late nineteenth-century Petty Sessions evidence), and dismissed the notion of a 'sub-society' by identifying concealed long-term non-marital relationships, as well as exploitative (and repetitive) sexual behaviour among some men (Reay 1990).…”