HUSBANDS AND WIVES.
filHE Daily Telegraph has been sinking a shaft after its fashion
into the social strata, and this time it has certainly "struck ile." We remember nothing more curious in newspaper literature than the twenty or thirty feet of closely printed correspondence which have appeared in its columns under the heading "Thought- less Husbands and Neglected Wives," and nothing, we may add, which men interested in English social life, its oddities, its ways, and its present wants, would do better to study. Somebody on the Telegraph, mindful perhaps of the extraordinary success of Jerrold's " Curtain Lectures,"—lectures which attracted more attention than the wisest or wittiest things he ever wrote, and yet are intelligible only when read in a certain social atmosphere— either wrote, or caused to be written, or selected out of the daily correspondence, a letter setting forth the wrongs of a neglected wife. A neglected husband retorted, or was made to retort, then followed a moral lecture in the leading column,—which strikes us, we confess, as a wonderful example in the art of literary gold-beating, but which evidently impressed whole classes like a successful sermon, and impressed them, too, for good,—and then came the deluge. Londoners of a certain class, most of them apparently clerks or the like, found they might write letters to their favourite newspaper upon their domestic grievances, and scores upon scores of husbands and wives availed themselves of the unex-
pected privilege to describe the ills and the pleasures they have experienced in their married lives, to reveal their own miseries or revel publicly in their own happiness, and above all, to teach their neighbours how they ought as " married persons" to behave. There is scarcely a letter which does not contain some bit of advi ce, usually in the form of a truism, such as the value of politeness as a preventive of quarrelling, or some sentence which reads as if it came out of a copy-book, such as, "All homes might be made more attractive if husbands and wives would rid themselves of the foolish idea that education ceases when one leaves school." There is a kind of passion of didacticism in almost all of them, a real belief that if the writer could but get at the other correspondents and give them a few words of advice, advice usually almost ludicrous in its inapplicability, every domestic trouble might be removed.
There is no harm in that kind of conceit that we know of, but its diffusion through a whole class is remarkable, accounts for the English rage for sermons, and suggests an unsuspected amount of intellectual vanity, (or is it moral vanity ?) among people whose temptation would seem to be anything rather than that. This vanity is accompanied, as usual, by an extra- ordinary want of reticence, rising not unfrequently to a kind of mental immodesty. A few of the correspondents try to write from the observer's point of view, telling of their grievances and their bliss as incidents they have observed in friends' houses ; but the majority see no necessity for concealment, and groan over their husbands' flirtations, or absences, or habits of billiard play- ing, or their wives' tempers, or the worries caused by their children, or the conduct of their wives' relatives, or the husbands' want of vital religion, or the wives' itching for new ribbons in the most outspoken way. Many of the writers favour the public with little biographies, which apparently excite no ridicule in other corre- spondents, who quote them as illustrations to their own lectures, while a great number frankly confess to the pettiest and least amiable forms of jealousy, and a few parade their happiness in a style which inspires in the reader the sense of bashfulness the writers seem to lack. Here is one from a curate's wife, in which the first two peculiarities are felicitously united :—
"Sir,—I have been a wife now more than two years, and the first twelve months were, I may truly say, the happiest of my life. My husband, a curate in a small country parish, seemed never so happy as when, with me by his side, we visited the poor and afflicted under his charge. Our evenings were spent pleasantly —ho reading from some interesting book, while I made clothes for the poor, or occasionally in the scciety of our few friends. But, alas ! those bright pictures have for ever (I fear) passed away, and are only left on my memory, as I sit 'in silent solitude' until one or two in the morning, waiting for my lord and toaster, who is spending his evenings with some deliciously-fresh, sparkling, innocent-minded girls'—as one of your male correspondents so rapturously calls them—who have lately come to live in tho village, to one of whom, ho heartlessly informed me, he was once engaged to be married. Not content with treating me with coldness and neglect, be is constantly finding fault with me before our domestics. He cannot with truth complain that his home is uncomfortable, for it is my constant endeavour in every way to promote his happiness. I am in every respect a most dutiful wife. He seems to forgot what I gave up when I left my home to grace his.—I remain yours, &c., "A DISAPPOINTED Was."
A curate's wife is presumably educated, but just imagine the kind of woman to whom it was a relief to write that letter to the Telegraph. Temper, however, is intelligible in all classes, and may have taken the odd form of this letter to a newspaper ; but how are we to explain a gushing confidence of this kind, which the writer evidently believes will do everybody good?— "Sir,—I am a husband of nearly thirty years' experience, and I thought this morning that the face of my old woman' was as soft and as fair as it was some twenty-nine seasons back. I think I can tell why. I do not play at any game of chance, I never got drunk, nor stop out o' nights: indeed, I am only too glad to rest at home, and, above all, I court my wife as much now as I did when she was 'sweet eighteen.' If I an manage it, I remember her birth and wedding days
by a new dress, a jewel, or even a simple flower ; and should she be sick, I try all I know to smooth her pillow, and, above ail, I never allow either children or servants to rebel against her authority as mistress of the house. I need hardly add that the house is a happy home. I said to a would-be husband the other day, 'Look out for a loving, affec- tionate daughter and sister, and if you use her well you will get a loving wife and mother for yourself and little ones.'
Marriage is a thing. I take it, Much what the couple please to make it.'
—Yours, "FACT." There are oddities of all kinds in the letters, of course; wives who assert that men marry to secure housekeepers, and think them right in so doing; husbands who rate their wives at length for giving them too many children; and writers by the dozen, usually women, who suggest that the root of all domestic unhappiness is want of religious principle, and two or three women who wish publicly that women "who make themselves agreeable to other people's husbands" should be "punished." The burden of complaint, however, is very much more definite than we should have expected to find it. Allowing for a few crotchety people, all the letters from men, and a great many of those from women, reveal the self-same grievance, which the writers cannot explain, but which is really a want of camaraderie between the sexes. The wives apparently have been trained to look upon a cigar, a glass of liquor, a game of billiards as things which, if not absolutely vicious, are superfluities in which men indulge because they are essentially selfish, while the husbands evidently think that serving them, "bringing them their slippers," and making their breakfasts, is not only a duty, but also an amusement. The idea which would dominate a similar class upon the Continent, that husband and wife should in the matter of amusement behave to each other as friends or comrades, that recreation of some sort is as necessary as food, seems entirely absent,—a fact due, we imagine, to a very curious cause. About fifty years ago the lower middle-class of English townspeople adopted what was then called Methodism, that is, the Calvinist creed accompanied by Puritan manners. The creed and the manners have both died out among the men; but the women retain the tradition of both, and cannot avoid a secret feeling that amusement is at once a little sinful and a little disreputable. Not even to keep their husbands at home would they allow cards. At least one-half of this cor- respondence is taken up with this topic, the wife lamenting her husband's backslidiugs, the husband admitting that she has a right to lament, but angrily declaring that his wife has no sympathy with his personal tastes, and does not understand the crave for evening amusement produced by desk-work, while a few lay the blame upon their wives' incapacity for conversation. They are always being bored, as in Jerrold's time, with servants and babies. The amount of bitterness manifested upon this subject of amusement is quite startling, and certainly tends to show, like a good many other incidents of to-day, that the extreme dullness of life among this class, a dullness which is decidedly approved by their religious teachers, is not calculated to improve the minor morals. Islington life, if we may judge from these revelations, is a raspy kind of ex- istence, productive of much strenuous work, but of exceedingly little content. The grievances, one case excepted, are not very serious, the anger displayed is not of the murderous kind, but there is a tone of domestic unrest, dullness, disappointment rising almost to misery, in the majority of the letters, which does not say much for the happiness of such homes. In one instance only this unhappiness rises to the tragic height, and as it is unique, we quote it, though -with a kind of shame, as if we were publishing correspondence intended to be sacred :— " Sni,—The letter of A Neglected Wife' has awakened a very sad echo in my own heart. I, too, love my husband very dearly, and have the bitter sorrow of knowing that he cares nothing for me. We have met with a reverse of circumstances, and I hare done with the barest necessaries, that he might have at least some of those comforts to which he has been accustomed. I keep his books, and I try to be to him all that a good and loving wife can be, and yet he has not scrupled in his moments of passion to raise his hand against me. I, too, have known what it was for my husband to pay that attention to others which should have been devoted to his wife, and I have also known the bitter agony of being told by my husband that he never loved me, but that his whole affection was and is given to this day to a lady to whom he was engaged years ago. Lot it comfort A Neglected Wife ' to know that there are fur more miserable beings in the world than herself. —Tenn, Ize.,
"ANOTHER NEGLECTED WIFE."
There is a deep, restrained pathos in that letter, inexplicable as it may appear that a woman capable of such feeling should de- scribe her sorrows in a daily paper for the benefit of the world which reads the Daily Telegraph. As a rule, however, the sor- rows are of a lighter kind, complaints mainly of that greyness and monotonousness of life against which Englishmen so seldom revolt, but which, nevertheless, if we may judge by these letters, they inwardly resent with a bitterness too apt to expend itself upon the home. We doubt if this evil is curable now, though the Germans have cured it ; but its existence accounts in a great degree for the phenomenon which so puzzles and annoys the clergy,—the excessive increase in places of evening amusement, none of them, we fear, very beneficial. The old restraining force has disappeared from the minds of the men; the wife, who still reverences it, repudiates amusement at home; and out of doors in London the alterna- tives are the theatre, the music-hall, or the billiard-table. Except the first, which is too expensive, there is literally nothing which the non-musical clerk and his wife can enjoy together.
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