Lawrence Stone on Desertion and Bigamy

Hi everyone,

Further to our discussion about laws surrounding desertion and bigamy in the 19th century, I thought I'd share a few quotations from Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800.

First, on laws regarding spousal desertion:

"A man or woman whose spouse had left home and had not been heard of for a period of seven years was also free to remarry, on the assumption that the missing spouse was dead. If he or she returned, however, either the first marriage took priority over the second or the woman was permitted to choose which husband she preferred." (37-38; given Stone's notoriously iffy use of evidence, I feel I should add that his source here is R. H. Helmholz's Marriage Litigation in Medieval England)

Second, regarding the practice of bigamy:

"In the eighteenth century, more or less permanent desertion was also regarded as morally dissolving the marriage. Thus when in the 1790s the husband of Francis Place's sister was transported for life for a robbery, she soon remarried an old suitor, apparently without any qualms or objections on the grounds that she already had a husband who was presumably still alive. In 1807 a Somerset rector agreed to put up the banns for a second marriage of a woman whose husband had gone off as a soldier to the East Indies seven years before and had not been heard of since. But the man unexpectedly turned up and reclaimed his wife, only to desert her again when he found her consorting with her second husband. He was said soon after to have remarried, despite the existence of this first wife." (40; Stone cites memoirs by Francis Place and the aforementioned Somerset rector)

As far as the first quotation goes, I think it may allow us to assume that the 7-years-absent=legally dead rule has been pretty longstanding, and was probably in effect when Lady Audley's Secret is set. I don't know how widely-known this rule would have been, though, so while legally she may have jumped the gun, we probably can't conclude that she knowingly did so. The second quotation I thought was interesting in light of what Prof. Reitz was saying about transportation to the colonies being tantamount to early death.

Stone also observes that the 19th century probably saw the longest marriages on average throughout human history, because improved medical treatment and sanitary conditions lengthened the average lifespan but divorce remained nearly impossible to obtain. I realize that this is a serious stretch, but I'm wondering if we can read that as influencing the development of detective fiction, or at least as playing into anxieties about families that we see playing out in detective fiction: if we accept Stone's conclusion here, people in unhappy marriages were trapped for much longer than they would have been historically - can we read the frequent spousal murders in early detective novels responding to the increased longevity of a potentially disastrous bond?

Update: also, if anyone is interested, the woman doing work on the bigamy plot in the Victorian novel is Maia McAleavey - she has a few articles already out on the subject, I think, although not one about Lady Audley.