There was an item on Womans Hour yesterday about the John Rylands library in Manchester
Two points caused some surprise to Jenni Murray. The first is that Enriqueta Rylands, who founded the Library in memory of her husband, was born in Cuba. The second was that she married him in 1875, without scandal, only 8 months after the death of his second wife. She was 32 & he was 74. She had been employed for over 10 years as a companion to his wife
Neither of these points causes me any surprise, but only because I got over most of my assumptions about Victorian England, & in particular about Victorian Manchester some years ago when I was trying to get to the bottom of one particular event which took place in the 1860s. Few of the people involved in this story were prominent enough to have biographies, memoirs, Lives& Letters, published about them so I had to use the methods of family history to track down as much as I could
A high proportion of ‘my’ characters were born abroad. For example the Chief Constable was born in Bombay & his wife in Philadelphia
Empire & trade, rather than ethnic origins were the main explanations. The Chief Constable for example was the son of an Indian army officer, his wife the daughter of an Irish born merchant who eventually settled in Manchester
Enriqueta Rylands was the daughter of a Cuban mother but her father Stephen Tennant was a Liverpool-born merchant
I became very surprised at the number of elderly marriages undertaken by my cast of characters. Far from being old men marrying young women it was often widower marrying a widow of much the same age – for example Abel Heywood married Elizabeth Goadsby, the independently wealthy widow of a fellow alderman.
There was even one example of a marriage between a widower & the woman who had been first governess to his children then companion to his wife, also within months of the first wife’s death. Such comment as appeared in the press was totally approving
I tried to place such elderly marriages within a wider statistical context, but ran into the problem that age at marriage was not routinely recorded until 1862. Even then, for years afterwards, the Registrar General would complain in his annual report that too many of those who officiated at a marriage disregarded the instruction & merely put down Of full age for anyone over 21. Nevertheless, even the incomplete statistics showed that marriages of both men & women aged 70+ or 80+ were not at all rare
I have no information about the personal emotional, romantic or sexual motives for such marriages. There is no reason to assume that there were none. Nevertheless it is also clear that marriage offered considerable advantages over & above those of companionship. A husband gained a household manager – a role not to be underestimated.
Even today it can be hard for an older woman to live a life as socially full as she would like it to be without a husband, & that was so much more the case in the 19th century, when travelling about on ones own was not easy
And respectability was important. There is no way that a young woman governess or companion could continue to live in a household without wife or children. Her only option would be to look for a new position
Enriqueta Rylands was a lively & accomplished young woman, who proved by the way that she administered her husbands estate that she was more than equal to her role. Why should Victorian society see any cause for scandal in such a suitable arrangement for them both?
Link: William Neild
