ABSTRACT
In 1851 the Registrar General noted with some concern that 42 per cent of women aged between twenty and forty were unmarried and that two-thirds of all women were self-supporting. 1 These figures, 'quite disproportionate and quite abnormal', according to William Greg, particularly amongst the middle class, drew attention not only to the 'spinster problem' but also to the large number of widows in Victorian society, many of whom had few prospects of remarriage.2 The 'redundancy of women', it was argued, was responsible for perverting women's roles in the private sphere of the home and for impelling them into the public world of work. In tum, this posed questions about the domestic role of women as wives and mothers and raised issues about middleclass female education and the incompatibility of genteel status with the necessity of having to work. 3
Just as contemporaries recognised the growing numbers of single women at one end of the age spectrum so, too, should we recognise their significance at the other. In 1851 spinsters and widows comprised over 42 per cent of women aged above forty-five years, rising to over 67 per cent of those above sixty-five years of age. At one end of the social spectrum, workhouses and outdoor relief lists were filled with working-class widows and elderly women no longer able to cope on their own. In 1841, for example, nearly half the recipients of outdoor relief in England and Wales were widows, rising to 55 per cent in 1846.4 Even middle-class widows were often left in fmancial difficulties as a
result of the death of their husband, particularly when the household income was dependent mainly on wages as opposed to rental or other sources of investment. 5 Charities, such as the Society for the Relief of Distressed Widows, founded in 1823, sprang up to provide for these distressed gentlewomen. Literary narratives of bourgeois life also made frequent mention of spinsters and widows in a variety of circumstances: as devoted single daughters caring for ageing mothers, as rich maiden aunts or as vindictive and cold-hearted spinsters forever cursing their misfortune at remaining unmarried. In Emma, for example, the kind but unexciting Miss Bates, who 'had never boasted either beauty or cleverness', spent her middle life 'devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible'.6 Dickens's view of spinsters was frequently less charitable: the narrow-minded Miss Murdstone, for example, made the young David Copperfield's life a misery, whilst Miss Havisham in Great Expectations plotted revenge on male society and despised her relatives who surrounded her in the expectation of receiving a legacy. Widows also appeared frequently in contemporary novels. In Middlemarch, Dorothea was in some ways fortunate at the early death of her husband, both in the sense of being released from having to endure a loveless marriage but also by the fact that with her financial position secure she was subsequently able to remarry according to her own desires. Her situation, however, was perhaps untypical: low rates of remarriage meant that after the death of their husband, most women remained single for the rest of their lives.7
