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Social Anxiety: Courtship across Religious Divides, 1788-1802
Karen Willis, PhD in History, Keele University
Abstract Cross-religious marriages that were not uncommon in the middle-class society of the late eighteenth century but could be fraught with anxiety. Examination of the letters of Joseph Strutt to Isabella Douglas highlights the problems caused by inter-cultural courtships. They illuminate both the coercion to change Isabella’ s behaviour by Joseph, and her counteraction to manipulate his ideas of a lengthy courtship. Closer exploration of the language and style of these letters shows that both were the product of the culture around them and that many of their own actions were the result of this.
Introduction
The twenty-five years between 1783 and 1807 marks a dynamic period in British economics, politics and society, with burgeoning markets after the end of the American Revolution, affected by the 1789 French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic wars. Economics became west-facing with a growth in industrial cotton spinning fed by plantations where enslaved Africans provided sufficient labour force to service the boom. Away from major tensions within society where economics was tested for its record of morality, a microcosm of ordinary life explores courtship and marriage around the common law of coverture. Wives were bound to their husbands without their own legal rights of property, and it was not an unusual expectation for them to adopt their husband’ s religious faith probably more out of expediency than legal principal. 1
As a methodology, Penny Summerfield argues that letters can be read to‘ question consciousness and emotion’ and contribute to‘ the creation of an imagined‘ public sphere’. 2 An examination of a series of thirty-four letters from Joseph Strutt
1
Hannah Barker, The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England 1760-1830( Oxford University Press 2011), 165.
2
Penny Summerfield,‘ Historians’ uses of letters’, in Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice( Routledge, 2019), 22-49. A debate on the continued existence or emergence of