Book Review: Sally Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture (New York: Oxford, 2019)

/in , , , , /by

In this article Samantha Armstrong reviews The Game of Love in Georgian England by Sally Holloway, recently published in January 2019. This book is a welcome exploration of the emotions of romance within the conceptualization of love in material and popular culture. The Game of Love in Georgian England investigates facets of the material culture of love through various objects including love letters, and gifts like love spoons. Sally Holloway studies courtship, and its breakdown as testified through the interconnection of these tangible objects and ideologies in popular culture.

 

Samantha Armstrong

Author biography

Samantha Armstrong is a second-year doctoral student in the history department at the University of Birmingham. Samantha’s research focuses on eighteenth-century women’s usages of kindness in their everyday lives.

 

Book Review: Sally Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture (New York: Oxford, 2019)

Sally Holloway’s The Game of Love in Georgian England provides an important addition to the scholarship of emotions as expressed through material culture. She reveals Georgian love as an emotional practice observed through tangible objects.[1] Holloway considers Georgian courtship and the emotional range of love through two overarching questions: ‘How did couples contextualize and convey their emotions in words and objects?’ and, ‘How did they negotiate this potentially fraught period in their life cycle?’[2] Through exploring these questions, Holloway argues that from c. 1714 to 1840 courtship and breakdown were navigated through words and objects which constituted performative and ritualised acts.

 

Holloway’s work is a macro-study. She develops an argument about a cultural phenomenon that can be found amongst numerous people and objects. Holloway analysed men and women from a wide spectrum of society through their love letters: Anglicans, Unitarians, Quakers, genteel, elite, and middle class. For Holloway’s material component, she investigated objects from twenty-three different sources varying from museums to private collections. She studied a large spectrum of objects including common items like hair to the more esoteric exotic goods from the colonies or Far East. As a macro-history, Holloway builds a wider understanding of romantic love and objects which can serve as a starting point for the work of future scholars. However, Holloway’s macro-study does not account for the aberrations or smaller trends in romantic objects.  Thus, future scholars have an opportunity for micro-studies allowing development in the interconnection of emotions and objects. Holloway’s methodological process is well explained allowing for its use in follow-up macro-studies of other emotional objects, for example, affection and objects.

 

In order to analyze the love letters and objects, Holloway uses a number of approaches including anthropology and literary theory. These approaches are united by Clifford Geertz’s concept of ‘thick description.’ Geertz’s theory allows her to contextualize, situate, and unpick, to consider symbols, rituals, and meanings of romantic love held by individual couples.[3] These analytical tools allow Holloway to demonstrate that romantic love objects are situated in the marketplace and wider context of popular culture; the romantic objects are considered in various ways for their symbols, rituals and meanings. In sum, Holloway by using Geertz’s and other approaches presents the objects and words’ symbols, rituals, and, meanings in the performative and ritualised acts of love in Georgian England.

 

Holloway’s accessible writing style makes the potentially complex subject matter approachable to a non-academic audience. The book is organized into six chapters: ‘Language of Love’, ‘Love Letters’, ‘Love Tokens’, ‘The Marketplace of Love’, ‘Romantic Suffering’ and ‘Breach of Promise.’ Holloway starts by contextualizing the language of love for both genders to examine men and women’s love letters and tokens, and their marketplace of love. Once she examines the situation and contextualises romantic life, Holloway moves onto the breakdown of love by examining men and women’s romantic suffering and collapse of engagements. Holloway regularly considers gender and differences in presentation, understanding, and, completion of love. For example, Holloway argues that women were more reticent in their letters in expressing romantic sentiments because of their fear of repercussions should the relationship fail.[4] By doing this, Holloway is able to conceptualize her argument of ritualization of courtship and breakups expressed by words and objects; by first examining the objects and words for courtship and then for breakups.

 

In the chapter entitled ‘Language of Love’, Holloway pays attention to how couples experienced, conceived, and navigated love by asking ‘how did eighteenth century couples compose their love stories?’[5] Holloway argues that these various romantic lexicons provided the overarching frame for couples to navigate their courtship within the shared and gendered language of idioms of love.[6] This chapter is an important development in the field of romantic love because of Holloway’s three-prong analysis (religious, physical, and literary tropes). Other historians like Ingrid Tague argue about the dual nature of elite women’s romantic love. By convention women were supposed to be submissive, obedient, and dutiful, but through their practical navigation of expectations on them during their everyday lives women gained agency and power.[7] Unlike Tague, Holloway focusses on how the understanding of romantic love from popular culture was enacted by various men and women in their everyday lives in letters. The limitation of this chapter, however, is that popular culture does not mean a culture adhered to by everybody. Holloway does not address outliers or counter-culture movements. Consequently, in addressing popular culture, Holloway engages only with a broad and commonly held understanding of romantic love.

 

Considering the importance that Holloway gives to material objects, the following paragraphs will examine her material object methodology, usage, and findings.  Few historians have studied the material culture of courtship in the eighteenth century unlike in the scholarship of the sixteenth century. Amanda Vickery has examined the importance of objects in intimate everyday practices; however, Vickery’s work is based in the home and family.[8] Maxine Berg surveyed commercialization and consumption of objects by people but did not focus on romantic objects and instead focused on household items, clothing, and luxury.[9]  Holloway, unlike Berg and Vickery, studies objects in the practice of men and women’s love and courtship. The chapters entitled ‘Love Tokens’ and ‘Marketplace of Love’ are a solid addition to the field of romantic love because Holloway expands and underscores the importance of objects in the conceptualization and ritualization of romantic love for couples. First in ‘Love Tokens’, Holloway examines the highly ritualized ways couples engaged with gifted items that created or expedited experiences of love. All these objects are united with Holloway arguing that romantic gifts provided a key means for courting couples to negotiate the path to matrimony because these gifts gave a way to conceptualize and process their emotions. These emotions played a vital role in preserving the identity of the giver in memory, but also of creating symbolic objects of the couple’s emotional intimacy.[10] Second in ‘Marketplace of Love’ explores the newly commercialized range of romantic gifts and celebration of Valentine’s Day. Holloway argues that observance of romanticism coincided with the explosion in luxury goods and rise of leisure shopping activities resulting in love being packaged and sold to men and women through a new range of objects.[11] Thus, adding a new dimension to the study of material objects and ritualization of gift giving.

 

Previous work on courtrooms have focused on language, representation, and, social class without considering material objects. Holloway rectifies this oversight to a degree by examining what happened during a romantic breakdown, particularly those that played out in the courtroom.  For example, a court case where one defendant sued the other for breaking a promise of intention to marry. Holloway argues that by the 1790s romantic hurt characterized by fragility, beauty, nervous disposition, and, mental instability was presented uniquely as a female grievance. Conversely, men were presented as amorous, impetuous, and passionate. These discourses surrounding the genders were reflections of the changing discourse on love, and, breakups that occurred since the 1750s in popular culture.[12] Holloway discusses in depth the popular discourse about gendered romantic suffering in an earlier chapter. Further these discourses surrounding the genders was purposefully done in order to achieve the aim of compensating women for trauma and excusing men’s behaviour. Therefore, objects were of vital importance as proof of a relationship before the courts and society.[13] Holloway demonstrates that everyday objects had emotional and cultural significance to the judges and participants in understanding the relationships brought into the courtroom, thus, a solid addition to the field of material culture. Further work can be done on objects in other courtroom cases outside of breach of promise—not fulfilling the promise of marriage.

 

By interlinking each chapter, Holloway is emphasizing the ritualized nature of understanding, creating, and performing love. For example, after explicitly describing the language of love in the first chapter, Holloway repeats and strengthens those idioms by mentioning them in context of love letters, inscriptions on love tokens, crafting of Valentine’s cards, the gendered notions of romantic suffering, and, the gendered discourses of love in court cases. Several questions and omissions need to be addressed. While Holloway frames her work through ritualization, is ritualization of objects necessary to understand emotions and material culture? Can historians understand love through objects without ritualization? Furthermore, there is one glaring omission: LGBTQ love. Holloway writes that ‘romantic relationships between same-sex couples are beyond the scope of this book,’ with no further explanation or consideration.[14] Holloway does not explore same-sex couples, and, even overlooked alternative forms of love, because it was not topical to the question.[15] However, can historians understand the complex nature of ritualization of love in eighteenth century England without understanding all forms of love? LGBTQ considerations fall outside of what could be termed as popular culture in this period, therefore do heterosexual rituals of love reflect on queer rituals or does adding LGBTQ love destroy the understanding Holloway argued about heterosexual ritualized love? A future study on LGBTQ love and ritualization of love would greatly further the understanding of eighteenth century love.

 

The Game of Love is an impressive tome of scholarly accomplishment that brings together an impressive variety of sources, and, methodologies. Her scholarship adds significantly to the work on material culture by placing objects within the emotional practices of romantic love. In sum, Holloway’s work on Georgian love is a valuable source for historians of eighteenth century material culture, and of emotion

Bibliography

Berg, M. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005).

Holloway, S. The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture. (New York, 2019).

Milka, A., and Lemmings, D. ‘Narratives of Feeling and Majesty: Mediated Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Courtroom.’The Journal of Legal History, 38 (2017), 155–78.

Shepard, A. ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description in Early Modern England.’ Past and Present, 201 (2008), 51–95.

Tague, I.H. ‘Love, Honor, and Obedience: Fashionable Women and the Discourse of Marriage in the Early Eighteenth Century.’ Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001), 76–106.

Vickery, A. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. (New Haven, 2009).

———. The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. (New Haven, 1999).

Walker, G. Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England. (Cambridge, 2003).

[1] S. Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Materia Culture (New York, 2019), p. 15–16.

[2] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p. 14.

[3] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p. 5.

[4] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p. 67–68.

[5] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p. 22.

[6] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p. 7.

[7] I. H. Tague, ‘Love, Honor, and Obedience: Fashionable Women and the Discourse of Marriage in the Early Eighteenth Century,’ Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001), p. 76–106.

[8] A. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, 1999); A. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven, 2009).

[9] M. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005).

[10] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p, 69–70.

[11] Holloway,The Game of Love in Georgian England,  p.93.

[12] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p. 164–65.

[13] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p. 164–65.

[14] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p. 12.

[15] Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England, p. 12.

‘Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism’?: An Examination of the Relationship between Evangelical Revivalism, Madness and the Age of Reform

/in , , , , /by
Read more

Capitol, Capital, and the Ancient City: The Influence of Roman Urban and Architectural Models of the Design of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.

/in , , , , , , /by

Capitol, Capital, and the Ancient City In his 1992 landmark text Architecture, Power, and National Identity Lawrence Vale demonstrated the extent to which government buildings ‘serve as symbols of the state’ and how one can ‘learn much about a political regime by observing closely what it builds’.[1] The Residence Act of 1790 gave the American […]

Read more

Book Review: Johnson & Burling’s, The Colonial American Stage, 1665 – 1774: A Documentary Calendar

/in , , /by

Book Review: Johnson & Burling’s, The Colonial American Stage, 1665 – 1774: A Documentary Calendar

In this article Gary Fisher reviews William Burling and Odai Johnson’s, The Colonial American Stage, 1665 – 1774: A Documentary Calendar (Madison, NJ., 2002). 

Gary Fisher

Author Biography 

Gary Fisher is a second-year, AHRC-M3C-funded PhD student co-supervised by the Departments of Classics & Archaeology and American & Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Gary’s current research focuses on the reception of the ancient world in eighteenth and nineteenth century American theatre. He is particularly interested in how depictions of the ancient world on stage served to disseminate classical political philosophy to American audiences.

The Colonial American Stage

There are perhaps fewer pleasanter discoveries in scholarship than when one finds that a particularly arduous task that is fundamental to one’s own research has already been completed. Especially when said task has been completed with a greater degree of meticulousness and proficiency than would have been possible under one’s own efforts. This is exactly the breed of revelation that Johnson and Burling offer in the form of The Colonial American Stage, 1665 – 1774: A Documentary Calendar.

Johnson and Burling frame their work as a response to the failings of contemporary scholarship on the subject of the colonial American stage, which they criticise as relying too heavily on individual anecdotes for evidence and allowing ‘the assumptions of one historian [to become] the facts of another.’[1] Their text seeks to produce a single sourcebook of all extant materials relating to theatrical culture in the American colonies, re-examine previously published evidence and claims, and provide information from sources that were previously unavailable or unknown to researchers.[2] A set of objectives which, in this author’s judgement, they complete with distinction. This is a text to which those writing henceforth on the subject of colonial American theatre will be indebted and those writing heretofore will be covetous.

The text is divided into two main sections. After a brief preface explaining the purpose and academic context of this work and a series of maps that ensure the reader is familiar with the geography of the American colonies, the first seventy pages are composed of a discussion of what the sources compiled within their calendar reveal about the theatrical culture of the American colonies. The remaining four hundred or so pages contain the actual documentary calendar of theatrical activity.

The first section begins by outlining the theatrical companies that were active in North America during this period and the professional training and lifestyles that travelling actors of differing degrees of professionalism might possess. Secondly, the nature of the presentation of plays is discussed. Johnson and Burling use the advertisements, reviews, and private records of companies to deduce what form the scenery, costumes, and music that were used in productions regularly took. They also examine the size of the lots upon which theatres were placed, financial records concerning the number of tickets sold, and the varieties of seating that were advertised in order to calculate the size and seating structure of various theatres concerning which no other evidence survives. Finally, they present the repertoires of plays different companies performed.

Following this discussion Johnson and Burling examine the opposition that early theatrical troupes faced whilst attempting to ply their trade in the Americas. They dissect this resistance into three broad categories: moral (religious opposition to the perceived immorality of the theatre), legislative (legal sanctions taken to prevent or limit theatrical activity), and economic (to prevent financial capital being removed from local communities). After which they discuss the steps that theatre companies took to either placate or avoid this opposition. Throughout this section examples from printed sermons, colonial legislation, and newspaper articles are presented to illustrate the precise nature of this opposition. They also closely examine the advertising materials of theatre troupes to show how companies were inventively adapting how they presented their shows (such as emphasising the noble moral sentiments espoused in the plays being performed or advertising that a portion of their profits will be donated to local charities) so as to attempt to assuage these fears.

Following this the economics of colonial theatre are discussed. Johnson and Burling use what few financial records that survive to demonstrate the costs and profitability of professional colonial theatre. They also discuss the alternative methods by which theatre companies attempted to supplement their income, such as offering musical or dance classes. Finally, the authors examine the nature of the audiences who attended such theatrical performances and the cross-section of society that they constituted. After briefly explaining the socio-economic composition of American audiences that attended these performances they move on to discuss the frequency with which violent disturbances broke out amongst American audiences. They argue that, despite a few examples of outbreaks of violence during performances over the course of this period, American audiences were less violent than their contemporary British counterparts and ‘were generally docile and predictable.’[3] Johnson and Burling illustrate their discussion with quotations from contemporary newspaper articles reporting on such violent outbreaks and discuss the extent to which the propensity for audience violence varied according to region and audience makeup. This topic serves as a colourful and engaging conclusion to Johnson and Burling’s discussion of the findings of their calendar.

Throughout the entirety of this first section the authors largely manage to avoid the temptation to enter into a potentially partisan discussion of this calendar’s implications for broader questions concerning colonial theatrical culture. Instead they, for the most part, present a clinical discussion of the practices and trends revealed by their calendar.

There are however some exceptions to this. For example, in their discussion of the opposition that theatre troupes faced they claim that the economic criticisms that were voiced throughout this period were ‘moral objections masquerading as financial objections’ and that economic objection was simply ‘a new approach for old enemies; having failed in their appeal on moral grounds, they resorted to economic objections.’[4] While this claim is not necessarily incorrect, it risks straying into the potential minefield of debate concerning the motivations of colonial opponents of the theatre within which figures such as Peter Davis ply their trade and would no doubt take serious umbrage with such assertions.[5] This subject is one which would perhaps require an entire monograph in of itself to adequately examine and, by writing off as they do the sincerity of economic objections to theatre within just over half a page, Johnson and Burling gloss over a topic that has been the subject of fierce academic debate.

Yet this example is an isolated one. For the most part the discussion of their calendar that is presented in this section avoids applying these results to broader partisan debates that surround colonial theatrical culture. Instead it is largely an objective discussion of theatrical trends and practices that are identifiable within the calendar. A fact that ensures its utility to all scholars of colonial theatre.

The discussion of their calendar that Johnson and Burling present in their first section is tremendously valuable in of itself. That they compound this discussion by presenting alongside it the documentary calendar from which this information was drawn substantially increases the value of this text as it allows other researchers of colonial theatre to use their findings as an evidential basis for their own research.

The calendar provides a year by year account of theatrical activity not just in the thirteen colonies but throughout all of the northern Americas, including Nova Scotia and the Caribbean Islands. In addition to recording performances of plays they also record information concerning legislation enacted against the theatre, newspaper articles and personal diaries discussing various aspects of the theatre, and reviews of performances, and is no doubt the product of dedicated and rigorous processing of the extant corpus of evidence.

When detailing performances Johnson and Burling record information concerning the date, location, and venue of the performance in addition to, where available, the play(s) being performed, the company that were performing, the cast list, the ticket prices, and the original source whence the information is derived. These fields are presented in a consistent structure that renders this potentially irregular and unwieldy information easy to understand and process. The calendar of activity for each year is preceded by a brief prose description of the activity that occurred in that year. These annual descriptors make the calendars of activity immediately more engaging and serve to effectively and understandably contextualise the following data.

The accessibility of the calendar is further augmented by the sophisticated system of indexes the Johnson and Burling provide. Rather than simply providing one possibly unwieldy index recording all possible topics relating to colonial theatre that one might wish to search they instead offer three: a Person index that allows one to identify information pertaining to individuals active in the colonial theatrical scene, a Subject and Place index that allows one to identify information pertaining to activity that occurred in a particular location or related to a particular subject, and a Title and Author index that allows one to identify activity relating to specific plays or playwrights. This is arguably the best way in which this information could have been presented within the format of a printed text to make this information as easily identifiable and accessible as possible.

Yet this leads on to what could possibly be considered the only significant criticism of the overall value of this work. Namely that a printed text is perhaps not the optimal format in which to present this information, especially for individuals hoping to use the information contained within the documentary calendar as part of their own research. The utility of this information would have been greatly enhanced had it been presented in some form of remotely accessible and searchable database. This would allow users to directly search for information relevant to their own investigations and compile their own data concerning performance frequencies and long term trends in theatrical culture.

It would be a mistake however to allow this criticism to draw attention away from the immense academic possibilities that this text provides. In spite of the limitations of their format Johnson and Burling have done an admirable job in compiling and presenting this information. As a direct result of their efforts future scholarship on the subject of colonial American theatre will no longer have to rely on using individual case studies to make assumptions about American theatrical culture at large but will instead be informed by a solid grounding in reliable evidence concerning theatrical activity. One can only hope that they take it upon themselves to produce further documentary calendars of a similar calibre that detail later periods of American theatrical history.

Notes

[1] O. Johnson & W.J. Burling, The Colonial American Stage, 1665 – 1774: A Documentary Calendar (Madison, NJ., 2002), p. 11.

[2] Johnson & Burling, The Colonial American Stage, p. 9.

[3] Johnson & Burling, The Colonial American Stage, p. 91.

[4] Johnson & Burling, The Colonial American Stage, p. 78.

[5] For further discussion of this subject see: P.A. Davis, ‘Puritan Mercantilism and the Politics of Anti-Theatrical Legislation in Colonial America’ in R. Engle & T.L. Miller, (Eds.) The American Stage (New York, 2006), pp. 18 – 29.