In The Game of Love in Georgian England, Sally Holloway announces an ambitious goal: “to explore the full range of emotions experienced by ordinary men and women engaging in courtship [between c. 1714 and 1830], as expressed in text and object” (14). Although she can hardly fulfill such aims in only 174 pages of text, her attempt to do so generates rich data and provocative questions.
Holloway interests herself in rituals of courtship across social classes, especially love letters and exchanges of objects. She also goes farther afield, with a chapter on the nature of romantic suffering in the Georgian era and examination of some legal consequences of frustrated love: breach of promise suits and actions for “crim. con.”—criminal conversation, or adultery.
“The language of love” provides the investigation's starting point. Holloway understands it as a “learned style” (43) and looks into various forces helping to shape it, including religious doctrine, medical theory (undergirding the idea of “lovesickness”), and literary tradition. In a culture that emphasized the importance of letter writing, she maintains, men and women alike used love letters to display their learning and wit, their range of knowledge, and their devoutness. They not only revealed their feelings; they also tested their compatibility and solidified their emotional connections. They acted, in short, as lovers have long acted, using resources specific to their time and place. Given that time and place, men assumed the lead in relationships, positioning themselves as gallant lovers, while women customarily adopted demure verbal postures.
Nothing surprising here, but the chapter on love's written languages provides a foundation for its successor, which examines specific love letters, quoting extensively from records of eight correspondences. They range geographically across England; socially from wheelwright and brewer to surgeon, cotton trader, and even Member of Parliament; and chronologically from a couple married in 1723 to one married in 1814. Although Holloway emphasizes motifs that recur in many instances, the flavor of the individual letters differs dramatically from one to another, offering sometimes provocative glimpses of personality. Such glimpses, though, do not appear to interest Holloway, who always prefers to generalize in terms that support her thesis. Thus, after quoting a charming apology from a lover who has inadvertently left a blot of ink on his missive, she observes that although such occurrences as a blot “may have departed from the recommended style, these features made love letters more visceral by providing a picture of a writer's identity and mood at the moment of writing” (52). “Visceral” and “identity” are both peculiar words in the context. It is difficult to see what is visceral about an inkblot, and it is even harder to understand how such a blot—unless it is a Rorschach test—reveals identity. When Holloway cites a Welshman, who writes, “none but you can give Plasture to cure the Wound that you made in my Hart,” she explains that he is trying in vain to adopt the language of heroic love, when chivalric language had in fact fallen out of fashion (56). She says nothing about the word “Plasture” (meaning, presumably, sticking plaster), the most vivid bit of the sentence, which has nothing to do with chivalric tradition.
I linger over these words because they exemplify the imprecise vocabulary that, along with careless reading and often dubious grammar, weakens the study's authority and undercuts the impressive research that the book reflects. The two chapters that draw on material culture hold considerable interest because of their wealth of specific detail. Who would have guessed that garters and stay busks (thick strips of wood inserted into the front of a stay, or corset, to keep a woman's stomach flat) made not only acceptable, but traditional lovers’ gifts? One chapter concerns common lovers’ tokens; the next examines the effect on romantic exchanges of increasing commercial development, with emphasis on the evolution of the Valentine. Abundant illustrations reinforce the text and help to make it persuasive. Even here, though, vague language and flaccid sentences weaken the force of the argument.
The penultimate chapter, on breach of promise suits (the book's strongest section, in my view), maintains a tighter focus on its argument than any of its predecessors achieves. It clearly lays out the procedures and the concerns of such suits, demonstrating the involvement of families, and exploring implicit assumptions about gender. The chapter's argument is coherent and energetic. It concerns a limited, although large, body of material instead of the vast, amorphous possibilities of such categories as “love tokens” or “love letters.” Here Holloway seems firmly in control.
The book as a whole, however, leaves a different impression. Clearly, Holloway has taken on too massive a task. The “full range of emotions” enjoyed or endured by even a single man or woman might create the substance of a large library. Holloway's commitment to analyze the feelings of British men and women engaged in courtship during a period more than a century long presents an impossible challenge. Her efforts to answer it produce much interest along the way, but they leave much to be done by future scholars.
