A new special issue of Family and Community History

Dr Rachel Pimm-Smith and Professor Rebecca Probert have both contributed to a new special issue of Family and Community History exploring the complexity and messiness of Victorian marriage.

Rachel Pimm-Smith’s article, ‘Train them in Habits of Morality’: Did Boarding out Deter Poor Law Children from Getting Married?’examines the prevalence of marriage among people who as children had been removed from their birth community by the poor law authorities in late-Victorian England. For Victorian social reformers, the marriage of such individuals would have been seen as one of the markers of success justifying such intervention. To test whether this worked, Pimm-Smith compares those who were admitted to the poor law authorities and subsequently boarded out with foster families with siblings who experienced the same family crisis that prompted poor law intervention but who were not removed. Her findings cast new light on both the impact of boarding out and marriage patterns among the poor.

Rebecca Probert’s article, ‘Avoiding Attention? Assessing the Reasons for Register Office Weddings in Victorian England and Wales’ focuses on a particular subset of those who married in the Victorian period: the minority who did so in a register office. Drawing on information about register office weddings that was shared with her by 150 family historians, she was able to build up a profile of the characteristics of those who married in a register office. The fact that those marrying in a register office were drawn from across the social scale and all age groups (albeit with an overrepresentation of older individuals) in turn suggests that the task is to explain why these particular individuals made different choices from their peers, or at different stages of their life, rather than there being a distinct type of person who married in a register office.