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'Vice and wretchedness exist in their most appalling and hideous
forms, stalking about with bold front, unblushingly, as though vice
were virtue.' For the middle-class moralists and reformers of
Victorian London, poverty was synonymous with depravity: their
descriptions of the urban working classes portray a swarming,
undifferentiated mass, impoverished and immoral. In the absence of
written accounts by the poor themselves, these nineteenth-century
prejudices still cloud our understanding of popular attitudes to
sensuality and courtship, marriage and pregnancy. Love in the Time
of Victoria overturns these prejudices by presenting and analyzing
an extraordinary range of hitherto unpublished first-hand
documents: love letters and testimonies from working-class women
who faced pregnancy alone, and from their suitors, relatives and
employers. These unique and moving writings provide the fullest and
most accurate picture to date of love and sex among the poor in
Victorian London. Francoise Barret-Ducrocq has painstakingly
uncovered autobiographical fragments which show women and men who
are neither depraved nor unusually virtuous. They meet in the
course of their work, in the streets or through family and friends;
they seek romance in parks and pubs, servants' attics or rented
rooms. The women's own records of their relationships resonate with
all the singularities of desire, passion and regret, and they
reveal a wide range of responses to separation or abandonment. For,
despite their limited options, these women continued to exercise
real choice. Their words vividly bring to life the material and
emotional conflicts of the poor in nineteenth-century London. This
remarkable book restores dignity and individuality to its subjects,
but never idealizes them. The stories here contain cynicism and
tenderness, cruelty and generosity. As the author says, this is
history amazingly like real life.
This book overturns the prejudices of Victorian London's middle class moralists and reformers, who equated poverty with depravity, by presenting and analyzing an extraordinary range of hitherto unpublished firsthand documents: love letters and testimonies from working class women who faced pregnancy alone, and from their suitors, relatives and employers. These unique and moving writings provide the fullest and most accurate picture to date of love and sex among the poor in Victorian London.
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