Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin

Author:Emma Griffin [Griffin, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Modern, 19th Century, Business & Economics, Industries, General, Europe, Great Britain, Social History
ISBN: 9780300151800
Google: cnhq2PLVpQIC
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2013-06-11T20:47:52+00:00

With a heavy heart, Benjamin put up the banns and within weeks the couple duly wed. Betty gave birth six weeks later. Without a penny to set about housekeeping – ‘we had neither furniture, or monney, nor friends’ – Betty at first continued living with her father and then moved into Benjamin’s lodgings, where they ‘found their own vituals, & were poor enough’.77

Benjamin and Betty fall into the category of improvident marriers – those forging ahead with marriage despite lacking the wherewithal to furnish a home – whom we looked at in the previous chapter. But Benjamin’s detailed writing also enables us to unpack the sexual misadventures that played a critical role in his and Betty’s fate. Theirs was a shotgun wedding. When faced with the reality of her condition, Benjamin ended up doing what many others before him had done: quickly tying the knot with his heavily pregnant sweetheart to avoid the shame of an illegitimate child. But how had they ever found themselves in this situation?

As Benjamin lamented in his autobiography, everything could be traced back to the night of 11 February 1793.78 Benjamin had seen Betty just once in the previous four months. Rumours that Betty had been unfaithful had been circulating, so Benjamin travelled to Preston to hear her side of the story. Once there, he almost decided to leave without seeing her, but after a last-minute change of heart, he did go. He ended up spending the night. As he noted decades later, he had ‘cause to remember’ the date as she wrote to him shortly after to tell him that she was pregnant.

This was an insecure relationship with an uncertain future, and it is very unlikely that Benjamin and Betty had started to discuss their wedding. Even during the pregnancy, Benjamin remained uncommitted: ‘I sometimes thought I would not have her.’ In a moment of unusual candour, Benjamin admitted that he had found Betty’s labour almost as hard as she, wishing, as he heard her groans, ‘that she might die I think that if she had died, I should have greatly rejoiced, for we were so poor, & such a dark prospect before us, that it was quite discourageing, however it was not so to be …’.79 It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Benjamin and Betty had fast-forwarded to sexual intercourse far more quickly than they should have. But they had plenty of time to live with the consequences. They remained married for thirty-five years.

The experiences of Benjamin and Betty hint at a change in the speed with which couples progressed to penetrative sex. The personal histories of their seven children illustrate the change with far greater clarity. All of Benjamin’s children were put to work in one of Preston’s many factories at a young age and reached adulthood in the first third of the nineteenth century. Illegitimacy was part and parcel of the world in which they lived. His eldest daughter, Isabella, gave birth to her first child when she was twenty.

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