Dr Sally Holloway
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr Sally Holloway’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I thought the letters were like casual. It was like the opposite. It was serious. And women in these letters, they described how hesitant they were to start this correspondence because they knew the degree of commitment that it entailed. So a lot of it is women saying, oh, I'm not sure about this.
So letter writing is becoming this really, really important way of forming a person's identity and formulating their feelings. And the letters could be sent much, much more quickly because of the professionalisation of the postal system and improvement of the country's road networks. So it's becoming more immediate and more intimate.
The letter itself was a really important sort of gift, just like the tokens we've been talking about. So It had to be written on really good quality paper, so it might be gilded with a little gold leaf around the edges, be several pages in length. With loads of postscripts at the end. So at the end of them, it often says, you know, PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5.
Because you want to give this impression that you just can't tear yourself away from the page. You hang up. No, you hang up. No, you hang up.
Oh my God, that's so interesting. The time you're putting into this letter is the time that you're putting into your lover. It's a material device, you know, through which you're building this relationship.
I mean, to some extent it comes from literature. So, I mean, if you were very devout, people made a lot of references to the Bible, Book of Common Prayer, things like Paradise Lost. That was a way to show their piety and perhaps, you know, have a few theological debates with your lover, you know. LAUGHTER
It's showing you're clever, you know, it's showing your wit and your skill and your education. You're having these debates in writing. It's showing are you literally on the same page with this person or not? You know, are you compatible with them or not?
That's why you're going more in code through the gifts. You can't spell it out in writing because everyone's reading your letters. Right, yeah. As a woman, your friends would read a man's letters, your mum might read them, your aunties might read them, and then they might help you write the response as well. Wow. And then often you'd send it unsealed. So this was before people used envelopes.
You'd send it not sealed. So then again, everyone could open it and read it all through.
People said things in their letters like, oh, I've got so much to say to you, but, you know, perhaps I'll save it for when we're in person because they didn't want to write it down because everyone's going to, you know, don't want everyone else to read it.
I just realised after I said that, he's from Derby. Sorry. LAUGHTER
It's a key vehicle for wooing. You know, it's men are showing off their literary skill, their education, their verbal agility. But it's all really underpinned by the cult of sensibility, which sort of emerged around the 1720s or 30s and peaked around 1770s, 80s. He's showing that he's romantic. He's in touch. He's a person of feeling.
Yeah, I mean, of course there were. You know, we do have evidence of really enormously intense romantic relationships between same-sex couples in this period. So one example is the American schoolteacher Charity Bryant. She was a tailor as well, and she exchanged all sorts of poems and acrostics with women that she was interested in.
And they also exchanged accessories, things like jewellery, like hairpins and And they used rings to signify a lifelong commitment as well. And we have, you know, examples in England too. So the Yorkshire heiress Anne Lister is the most famous one. You know, she's often described as the first modern lesbian. In 1821, she gave her partner Marianne Lawton a gold ring. Wow. This is my favourite bit.
She turned Marianne's wedding ring from her husband on her finger. So it was already on there, but Anne turned it round. In order to make this new promise of marriage over the top of the one that she'd already made. Wow.
So it's interesting because you can see that in some cases they're appropriating these rituals used by straight couples like the exchange of a ring to form a marriage, even if it didn't have the same sort of legal backing.
But I mean, the evidence is much more difficult to find because, you know, so often the letters were destroyed and they're obviously not going to be shared around family and friends in the same way as the ones that we've been talking about. And often we do have to rely on evidence in a legal context. So things like trials for assault or indecency between men.
But yeah, couples did exchange letters and they did exchange tokens and they did use these in similar ways to build really intense relationships.
Yeah, I mean, one recourse that she would have had, Lydia, say she became pregnant and then she thought they were about to get married and then he deserted her. She could sue him for breach of promise, for financial damages for her hurt. And it was aggravated by factors like pregnancy. He still wouldn't have to marry her, though. So she'd still be... Well, sometimes juries could order...
enormous damages in the hope that that would make them conduce him to offer his hand because he'd think oh my god i'm about to be utterly utterly ruined unless we get married which is a great way to start any union absolutely brilliant forced by a jury of your peers uh it was that or bankruptcy so i thought my darling my dearest darling p.s i will marry you
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