Preface

Summary

I have been working on Victorian Honeymoons long enough to have had conversations about the project with many different kinds of people in many different kinds of places: on airplanes, from facedown on a massage table, in grocery stores, at museums and record offices, and at academic conferences. It is the academics who joke that there can be nothing to say on the topic. What they mean, of course, is that they think “nothing happened” on the typical Victorian honeymoon, and what they mean by “nothing” is that there was probably no sex, or somehow that there was no sex that counted (it was not good enough, expert enough, fun enough, talked or written about enough). This book, as it turns out, does involve a certain amount of counting – of how many people in my sample of sixty-one couples who took their honeymoon in the period from 1830 to 1898 went to Europe, for example, or, more bewilderingly, of how many women likely got pregnant – but the project is in many ways an attempt to get beyond what I think of as honeymoon accounting, especially the binary kind that positions sex against no sex, consummation against the failure to consummate, successful against unsuccessful honeymoons.