In February 1841 at the Henry Street office of the Dublin police, a girl named Mary Anne Quirk, aged 17, was charged with theft by her father Michael Quirk. It was her second appearance in front of Dr Kelly, the magistrate, her first occurred a couple of months before. Her father remarked to the magistrate that he did not want her charged, but wondered if she could be put away somewhere until he could do something for her. Mary Anne replied that she was forced to leave home as her father gave her no support and he cohabited with a woman, not her mother. Her mother was in the north working as a nurse and she would join her, but her father gave her no money and she had no income. She had been out on the street since Dec 29th. Dr Kelly, the magistrate asks if it is ‘possible she is on the town?’ – her father replied yes. Dr Kelly then addressed Mary Anne: ‘Poor young creature, you were virtuous and innocent when I saw you; but you are changed; God help you, poor innocent – my heart bleeds for your misfortune (the excellent and humane magistrate actually shed tears, and all persons in the office seem greatly affected, with the single exception of the father.) He continued (to the father)- Will you now send her to her mother, and rescue her from infamy and destruction? Oh! Poor girl, I pity you; so young and artless, to be destroyed.’ The magistrate made Michael send the girl to her mother and the police inspector offered to make sure he did it.
From the seventeenth century, English law, which extended to Ireland but not Scotland, allowed a civil suit for seduction. Beginning as an act of trespass, by the nineteenth century, seduction suits were usually framed in terms of loss of service. A parent, guardian or employer could sue the man who had debauched his daughter or servant for compensation for losing her services during pregnancy, for any expenses caused by pregnancy and childbirth and even for the loss of the daughter if she was later excluded from the parental or employer’s home due to her conduct. To win a seduction suit, the law required that the seduced woman was virtuous (and so could be seduced) and that there was a ‘loss of service’. Yet, in practice, the concept of ‘loss of service’ was a legal fiction, very little effort was ever made to prove the nature of the service. In early nineteenth century suits, it was often enough for witnesses to briefly note that a daughter helped around the home; by the later nineteenth century, this legal formality was barely even mentioned. The value of awards in seduction cases, although determined by the social class of the parties, bore little relationship to any assessed value of loss of services. In practice, what was on trial during a seduction case was the virtue of the woman and by extension her family who helped determine her reputation, and the behaviour of her seducer and particularly whether he behaved with honour. The amount of damages awarded were a recompense for the damage to the woman and her household’s reputation, or more cynically, it was a payment for virginity.
Unlike a breach of promise of marriage case, where a marital engagement was broken off, seduction did not require any promise of marriage, although promises featured in a large number of seduction cases, particularly those where the plaintiff and defendant were of the same class. Seduction cases, however, could also involve servants and masters, powerful men exploiting their social position, rape cases that could not proceed in the criminal courts for a variety of reasons, and courtships between couples where disparity of social background made it difficult for a jury to imagine that a promise of marriage could ever have been taken seriously by either party. The result was that seduction involved not just people of a wide range of social classes, but often brought different social groups together in the same case. Similarly, to a breach of promise case, if a courtship was alleged, trying to determine the relative social class of both parties, and thus the social validity of the courtship, was often a central factor in seduction trials. At the same time, social class impacted on ideas about what it meant to be virtuous- so juries had to determine not just what behaviour was virtuous, but whether it was virtuous for that particular social group.
The development and increasing popularity of seduction trials across the eighteenth century was also mirrored by the development of a wide-ranging literature of seduction narratives, beginning with Samuel Richardson’s famous novels Pamela and Clarrissa. In these tales, virtuous women were seduced from the path of morality by dishonourable men, which then lead them down a path of destruction that often headed towards prostitution and death (or in Pamela’s case, the woman resists seduction, remains chaste and is rewarded through marriage and upward social mobility). In the later-eighteenth century, seduction novels become a flourishing genre, but they also reflect changing norms. Increasingly, virtue was located as a mental state, rather than being directly related to virginity, so that the woman who was raped or seduced once, but whose mind remained chaste could be rehabilitated and sent back home and even married (if not quite ever regaining the same social standing as previously). This led to considerable social commentary over how people can tell when a woman’s virtue remains intact- or whether it existed in the first place. What does the virtuous women look like and how is virtue performed? Even in fiction, this was no straightforward matter. In real life, it was even more problematic. Yet, as the example at the beginning suggests, the magistrate Dr Kelly was confident that he could not only recognise virtue, but also its loss. And, it was exactly this that the juries of seduction trials were asked to assess.
Futher reading
Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747-1800, (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2009).
Anna Clark, ‘Rape or seduction? A controversy over sexual violence in the nineteenth century’, in London Feminist History Group, eds., The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance, (London, Pluto Press, 1983), pp. 13-27.
Spring is in the air; lambs frollick in the fields, and Katie Barclay considers the consequences of sex in past ages. She is a historian at Queen’s University, Belfast.
