The Globe-Trotting Matchmaker: Victorian Marriage, Travel Writing, and British Exceptionalism

This paper examines representations of foreign matchmaking in British popular writing from the mid-nineteenth century. Across the century, the institution of British marriage underwent a contradictory shift. As decades of legislative reform substituted state sanction for ecclesiastical authority and local ritual in determining marital validity, the cultural narrative of romantic marriage simultaneously came to privilege the private and sacred bond of husband and wife above all other ties. Increasing state control of marriage ceremony and ritual would seem to counter the widespread assurance in Victorian society of the spousal tie’s sacrosanct purity. Yet both realities—that of marriage as an ever more bureaucratically codified category and as the prime indication and guarantee of individual liberty—coexisted in a society that positioned marriage as a cornerstone of British superiority in a wider European and global context.

The resilient figure of the matchmaker proves crucial to Victorian authors seeking to resolve the tensions inherent to cultural conceptions of British marriage. Figures of an abandoned, pre-Modern British past, matchmakers persevere in visions of the foreign present. In travel memoirs, magazine sketches, and popular novels, British authors present matchmaking both as a dismissible foreign practice, antithetical to the freedom offered the participants in a modern British marriage, and as a fascinating display of social power and narrative potential. Both a tool to denigrating the foreign and a source of fascination to the local, matchmakers point to the ongoing struggle in Victorian culture to reconcile the irreconcilable differences of state-sanctioned union and privately sacred bond.