Scenes from Historical Sources

The historical documents of love and seduction in the nineteenth century make it very clear that nineteenth-century people had active sexual lives, knew about sexual behavior, talked about sex scandals, and viewed romance as the prime subject for entertainment. While almost no country in Europe or America was untouched by war in the nineteenth century, and while great changes occurred in the political and social structures, stories of love and seduction flourished through the century. However, they often reflected, if obliquely, the changing historical world. The role of print media made local scandals into national entertainments. The Beecher scandal was so widely known in the United States and England that his name became a nominer for upstanding men who debauched women. Accounts of small town scandals of ministers who seduced a member of their church—an event that apparently happened with some frequency—referred to these men as a "British Beecher" or a "Badgered Beecher."

Documenting the intimate lives of people of centuries past is especially difficult because so little related to sex and romance produced documents that were preserved. This is especially true of the working class, but historical research in the "underlife" of societies has increasingly turned up new evidence of how ordinary people lived. The National Police Gazette and other popular press organs tell us many things about people's behavior in love and seduction, and about the community responses to these matters. Likewise, newspaper accounts of breach-of-promise cases and popular editions of court transcripts provide a view into the scandalous side of love in the nineteenth century.