Much of the action of my latest Austen vagary (available on preorder today, with a February 10 release date) lies on Fitzwilliam Darcy being an “honorable” man. In this tale, he proposes to Jane Bennet and then realizes she accepted him for her family requires saving after Lydia’s elopement with Mr. Wickham, while he has own reasons to marry quickly in order to save his beloved Pemberley.
Neither he nor Jane realize that it is Elizabeth who has secretly loved Mr. Darcy for some five years, after a brief meeting in London when Elizabeth was but fifteen.
So what did it mean to be “honorable” in the early 1800s England? Below are some of my thoughts:
Sometimes it is hard for us to separate what we read in novels from what one might find in nonfiction books. It is difficult to discover a nonfiction book that discusses a gentleman’s sense of honor. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters is often quoted, but much of his advice to his natural son is far from what I would consider honorable behaviour. I have not found much, perhaps I just have not looked in the right places, about the gentlemen’s sense of honor. There is some discussion of it in books on dueling.
Not originally intended for publication, the celebrated and controversial correspondences between Lord Chesterfield and his son Philip, dating from 1737, were praised in their day as a complete manual of education, and despised by Samuel Johnson for teaching “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master.” Reflecting the political craft of a leading statesman and the urbane wit of a man who associated with Pope, Addison, and Swift, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters reveal the author’s political cynicism, his views on good breeding, and instruction to his son in etiquette and the worldly arts.
Points of Honor: Most often one reads that a man would pay his gambling debts, debts “of honor,” before he would pay his tailor with the result the tailor went bankrupt.
Another aspect of “honor” was that a man’s word was his bond. This meant that he could give his word instead of taking an oath, except for when admitted to parliament.
One comment on honor I read was that a man’s honor was involved when the law could not be. Gambling debts of the plain IOU (vows) type could not be enforced by law, so they had to be enforced by a concept of a gentleman’s honor.
Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1754: It was during 1753 that Lord Hardwicke addressed the Houses of Parliament, proclaiming the necessity to make ‘irregular’ marriages illegal and to bring marriage under the regulation of the church.
The result of this was the 1754 Marriage Act – the wedding ceremony now had to take place in Church and couples had to be 21 years of age to marry without the consent of their parents, previously no consent was required if you were above the age of 16.
Hardwicke’s Act was introduced in order to try to bring control into the many irregular marriages that were taking place all over Britain, often involving seduction, bigamy and fraud.
One of the most notorious of those places was the Fleet Prison in London. On the day before this new law came into force, 26th March 1754, there was a rush to beat the deadline and it is recorded that 217 weddings took place at Fleet Prison and its surrounds!
Once the Hardwicke Marriage Act made marriage contracts of the old type unenforceable, it became a matter of honor that a gentleman marry where he promised. This is a key point in my tale. There was a breach of promise suit, but ladies and gentlemen of quality did not usually avail themselves of that legal process. Both Lord Byron and Wellington married women who appeared to feel they had a claim on their respective gentleman. Wellington was told that a Catherine Parkenham had waited for many years because she felt they had a greed to marry. Wellesley (as he was known then) did not recall it in the same manner, but felt bound by honor to marry the lady. Many reports say it was an unhappy marriage but I have no real information on that.
Byron did propose to Miss Milbanke with whom he had been corresponding. She had initiated the correspondence. She hinted that she was expecting an offer from another and the subject and the correspondence was dropped. I am not confident whether or not Miss Milbanke was being honest when she hinted at someone else making an offer. Perhaps it was a means to force Byron’s hand.
Months later when she again began corresponding with Byron, she let it be known she had not accepted another offer. He then felt obligated to make her an offer which she did not refuse. The whole world must know that that was a very unhappy marriage.
A man’s word was his bond.
The question of honor and the best outcome for all also comes in if a man is betrothed to a lady in a marriage of more convenience than love, and then he meets the lady who he knew was the lady of his heart. WhooHoo! This is the basis of my tale. It becomes doubly complicated that Mr. Darcy is strongly attracted to Elizabeth Bennet, but he finds Jane Bennet, his betrothed, quite boring!
Honor would demand the man follow through on the marriage with the one to whom he is betrothed, but is it really more honorable to marry one person when you really love another? The thinking of many is that love is a fleeting emotion and one can get by on a shared life and children, even with tepid emotions involved.
I wonder though whether it would not be better to have the man break the engagement, leaving one person unhappy rather than marrying where he had promised and, essentially, making 3 people unhappy. In my tale, it is four people because Bingley is also involved.
The thing to remember about honor was that it only applied to your peers. (That is one reason a man had to pay his gambling debts, but not the tailor’s bill, as mentioned above.) If one was insulted by another gentleman, one might challenge the fellow to a duel. If a servant insulted someone, the man could have the servant thrashed or could thrash him himself. The gentlemanly code of honor was inseparable from the class system.
Honor was a person’s reputation. It had more to do the person and his family receiving the ‘proper respect’ due his station, ‘being honored’ for who they were and not whether they followed a particular morale code. That is why Regency men ‘defended their honor.’ Of course, men fought for ‘honor and glory’, that is to uphold their reputations and with ‘glory’ add to it. It is what gentlemen strove for in society instead of wealth, though the trapping of wealth could add to one’s honor. It seems to make more sense on a society-wide basis if honor is seen as the score card, determining who they were and how respected. The drive for ‘glory’ in monarchs and princes during the 1700s was rampant, either by spending money on monuments and/or on wars. Louis XIV stated that he fought wars and built palaces to ‘uphold his honor and that of France’. [Of course, he WAS the state as far as he was concerned].
Acceptable/expected behaviors such as paying one’s debts to another gentleman was important because the aristocracy and good families were the only ones who recognized or valued ‘honor’ as far as the class was concerned. It was very much a class issue. To say a poor man was without honor was more of a comment on his reputation and standing in society than commenting on his morals. Assuredly, individuals would have personal moral codes they would feel ‘honor-bound’ to follow, but ‘Honor’ as a code of conduct or some statement of what a moral person should be like was simply one of many minor trappings surrounding the notion of honor.
A man ‘without honor’ was someone who did not conform to society’s norms for a honorable gentleman and had a bad reputation. The two often being seen as inseparable, regardless of the man’s actual behavior or morality.
That’s why ‘Honorable’ was a ‘honorific’ title during the Regency, as is referring to a Judge today as ‘your honor.’ It is the recognition of one’s position, not his character or morals. During the Regency, saying someone was “a man of honor” was not the same as saying he was a “man of character” even though the implication was that the man of honor had ‘breeding’ or an aristocratic character, with all the expected norms in behavior that implied.
It is a complicated subject because we are looking at it from two hundred years and lots of definitions of ‘honor’ since then.
Book Blurb:
Leave Her Wild: A Pride and Prejudice Vagary
A Mandate from His Uncle
The only reason Fitzwilliam Darcy has come to London for the Short Season is to save his beloved Pemberley. He requires a bride fast. Unfortunately, only a man’s of Darcy’s prideful nature would laggardly think one female is the same as another. Quickly, he realizes he is in love with his betrothed’s hazel-eyed and highly-opinionated sister, and he has proposed to the wrong sister, but propriety demands he must not abandon Miss Jane Bennet.
Sitting on the Shelf
After Lydia’s elopement with Mr. Wickham and the family’s ruin, Elizabeth Bennet understands the need for her sister Jane to marry well, but why must Jane bring home the one man Elizabeth both despises and loves? Elizabeth’s one ball…one dance…had been ruined by the man her sister means to marry. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy’s opinion remains the marker by which she looks upon all others. Can she deny the tender feelings she carries for the gentleman and silence her traitorous heart?
Note: The title comes from a quote from the poet Atticus on Instagram.
Kindle – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQL8CJ2R
Leave a Reply to cindie snyderCancel reply