The Game of Love in Georgian England

Abstract

Courtship in Georgian England was a decisive moment in the life cycle, imagined as a tactical game, an invigorating sport, and perilous journey across a turbulent sea. This book brings to life the emotional experience of courtship using the words and objects selected by men and women to navigate this potentially fraught process. It provides new insights into the making and breaking of relationships, beginning with the formation of courtships using the language of love, the development of intimacy through the exchange of love letters, and sensory engagement with love tokens such as flowers, portrait miniatures, and locks of hair. It also charts the increasing modernization of romantic customs over the Georgian era—most notably with the arrival of the printed valentine card—revealing how love developed into a commercial industry. The book concludes with the rituals of disintegration when engagements went awry, and pursuit of damages for breach of promise in the civil courts. The Game of Love in Georgian England brings together love letters, diaries, valentines, and proposals of marriage from sixty courtships sourced from thirty archives and museum collections, alongside an extensive range of sources including ballads, conduct literature, court cases, material objects, newspaper reports, novels, periodicals, philosophical discourses, plays, poems, and prints, in order to create a vivid social and cultural history of romantic emotions. The book demonstrates the importance of courtship to studies of marriage, relationships, and emotions in history, and how we write histories of emotions using objects. Love emerges from this study as something that we do in practice, enacted by couples through particular socially and historically determined rituals.

"Tu peux compter sur moi": The Formation of the Young Couple in Early Eighteenth-Century France

“…The letters were material signs designed to evoke intense emotion in the recipients. 56 Perhaps because of this power, love letters were often highlighted by witnesses, including by many who themselves could not sign their own names. In courting a girl six full years younger than him, twenty-one-year-old Sebastien Gambu reiterated his love in letters amid a relationship that had gone on for three months.…”

Buying Patience: Ordering and Purchasing Wedding Jewellery and Furniture through Intimate Networks during Eighteenth-Century Mercantile Marriage Initiation and Preparation

“…She requested specific pieces of valuable jewellery, including a ring and diamond earrings, as well as kitchenware and valuable mahogany and walnut furniture, "gifts typically selected by courting men." 60 These requests can be seen as conspicuous hints to her future husband that her upcoming marriage and new house were to be "key sites for luxury consumption." 61 They were also items with an emotional value, since several were specifically fancied by Ilsabe, such as a table for a card game she liked.…”