Clarissa and the Marriage Act
Mary Vermillion, Mount Mercy College
Volume 9, no. 4, July 1997
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ABSTRACT
Richardson published Clarissa five years before the passage of a law that altered the history of marriage. In 1753 Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act prompted one of the most heated debates of the eighteenth century in the House of Commons before passing there by a vote of 125 to 56. Near the century’s end Horace Walpole observed that it was an Act “of such notoriety … on which so very much was said at the time, and on which so much has been written since, that it would be … very unnecessary to enter much into the state of the question.” Lord Chancellor Hardwicke brought in this notorious Act in response to the rising number of clandestine marriages, some of them by daughters of wealthy aristocrats to “fortune-hunters,” and others by their sons to penniless maid-servants. In order to prevent such marriages and to render proof of marriage and succession of property more certain, the Act stipulated that (with the exception of the Royal Family, Jews, and Quakers) marriages were valid only if they were performed by clergymen of the Church of England between the canonical hours of eight a.m. and noon in a place of public worship after the publication of banns or with a licence. The Act’s most controversial stipulation — one that Richardson held dear — was that everyone under the age of twenty-one obtain parental consent before marrying.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Law” include:
Manley’s “Feigned Scene”: The Fictions of Law at Westminster Hall
by KATHRYN TEMPLE (ECF 22.4, Summer 2010)
“Extraordinary and dangerous powers”: Prisons, Police, and Literature in Godwin’s Caleb Williams
by QUENTIN BAILEY (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
“A Living Law to Himself and Others”: Daniel Defoe, Algernon Sidney, and the Politics of Self-Interest in Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures
by COBY DOWDELL (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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