ABSTRACT
Fundamental economic changes which, in the form of proletarianization, were giving rise to new forms of family structure amongst the lower orders, were also altering the nature of marriage amongst the ruling classes. In particular, with the emergence of national markets, merchant and industrial capital was beginning to challenge real property as the major form of wealth so that by 1760 durable assets (other than land) already amounted to slightly less than a third of the national capital of Great Britain (Feins tein, 1981: 128). This growth of commercial capital had profound effects on the marriage practices of the wealthy. Marriage was starting to become a crucial alliance in a new sense; an alliance of different types of capital. As Porter graphically says (Porter, 1982: 66): 'The alliance of a gentleman's son with a merchant's daughter, the landed embracing the loaded, was marriage a la mode.* The effect of this was that each child, through his or her marriage potential, was more strategically useful than had previously been the case. Younger sons could attract merchant's daughters who were valuable because primogeniture was not strictly applicable to the new form of wealth. If few daughters of top businessmen married into the aristocracy, many married into gentry families (Clark, 1985: 71). In consequence, wealthy parents felt a greater need to police all their children to ensure wise marriages accompanied by the appropriate settlements. Contradictory forces were, however, at work to make this policing more difficult. The fiction-reading young were becoming intoxicated with the idea of marriage based on romantic love and personal compatibility. So, at the time when parents wished to have greater control over their children, those children had a greater wish to be free of it. There was, therefore, inter-generational conflict amongst the propertied classes, as well as the propertyless. This conflict was played out through a moral panic over clandestine marriage and led to the enactment of Lord Hardwicke's Act. But before we can turn to this drama we must look at the pre-existing methods of marriage contraction.
