ABSTRACT
When John Shaw and Elizabeth Wilkinson met, perhaps across the counter of her mother and father's shop in Colne in late 1810, they found a love match that was sustain them in their lives together, public and domestic, for nearly fifty years. In this chapter, Elizabeth herself explains to John how she thought marriage 'of so great importance that it requires the utmost circumspection and deliberation imaginable it seems to me as if, both my present, and eternal happiness depended upon it'. If this was to be a love match then it was also one that was hard won. The evident transparency, compatibility and equality of John and Elizabeth's marriage gave it great and enduring strengths. It was a meaning and a purpose that Elizabeth and John found through the courtship, love, and marriage explored in this chapter. The marriage of John and Elizabeth Shaw exemplified virtues and values as they flowered in the final decades of the Georgian period.
