Friday essay: jilted lovers could once sue for breach of promise – did we lose something in abolishing this law?
- Written by Alecia Simmonds, Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney
Just a few lines to my ever dear Beattie.My dear love. I am nearly mad. Dear love, I love the ground you walk upon. My dear love. I pity you from the bottom of my heart. You are my love for life.I think it is a yarn about my wife being alive … I think it is spite …Dear, I would like to see you …
On a squally autumn day in Sydney in March 1914, Beatrice Storey, a barmaid, sued Frederick Chapman, a farmer, for abandoning her on the day of their wedding. To be precise, she claimed £1,000 damages in the New South Wales Supreme Court for breach of promise of marriage, a suit that could be used to claim compensation for injuries arising from a broken engagement.
Beatrice had first glimpsed Frederick a year earlier, from behind the bar at the Captain Cook Hotel. Cavalier, stocky and a “spinner of yarns”, he breezed into the pub “smelling of horses and flashing his winnings”. He told her he had been at the Moore Park races down the road. He also said he was 40, wealthy and a widower. After a month of giddy infatuation, he presented her with a wedding ring and vowed he would marry her.
Almost none of what he told her was true.
Beatrice explained from the witness box to the judge and a jury of four that she was 30 years old when she quit her employment, on Frederick’s insistence, and moved back home with her mother a few doors down on Flinders Street. Yes, she and Frederick had made wedding arrangements at St Barnabas’ church on George Street: 40 invitations were sent out; the wedding cake and carriage were ordered.
She had selected furniture for their new home in Kensington, and he had promised to settle the property upon her as well as gifting her £2,000 to furnish the house. “He said he had plenty of money,” she informed the court; “in fact, ‘money to burn’.” The day before the wedding, Frederick kissed Beatrice goodbye on the porch of her brother’s house and told her not to be late for church.
Frederick never showed up for his wedding. He phoned Beatrice and apologised, asking her to cancel the ceremony as he had just received news his wife was alive. The marriage would make him a bigamist.
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Beatrice was livid. Frederick rushed to her house and tried to console her, begging her to take the wedding ring, fumbling his way into an embrace, chaotically trying to kiss her. She pushed him away. In the following weeks Frederick turned to ink and paper, bewailing the maddening effects of passion, confessing that the reports of his wife were “a yarn” and exhorting that it was his “greatest wish to marry”.
Beatrice converted Frederick’s love letters into legal evidence and his passion into proof, in one of the most lucrative breach of promise actions of her decade: £350 compensation for her “lacerated feelings”.
The next time Beatrice and Frederick appear on the historical record is on January 23 1915, at St Martin’s Anglican Church in Kensington. This time, Frederick showed up for his wedding.
A little under 60 years later, in the early 1970s, a grandson of Beatrice and Frederick was also sued for breach of promise of marriage, just before the action was abolished. No newspaper bothered to report it, and we only know of the action because in 1986 a Liberal politician, Wilson Tuckey, raised it in federal parliament.
“Paul had a girl called Christine,” he hissed, directing his comments at a Labor MP named Paul, also implying (incorrectly) that an illegitimate child had been born.
“Madame Speaker,” the Labor MP interjected. He demanded Tuckey be censured. He railed against him, calling him a criminal. Later that day, the Labor MP held a press conference outside Parliament House to address the remarks and asked that they be erased from the Hansard minutes. This Labor MP, the grandson of Beatrice and Frederick, was the future prime minister Paul Keating.
National Archives of Australia/AAPServants, seamstresses, nurses
Why would Keating care so much about a past breach of promise suit – an action that by the 1970s was seen as a quirky relic from the Victorian era? Why should we care about his breach of promise suit, or any action over a thwarted romance in the past? What can the minor tragedies we see in breach of promise cases tell us about the history of love in Australia over the course of two centuries? And what might they suggest about how humans have sought to govern love – the most ungovernable of emotions, across time?
I have spent the past ten years looking for love in the canons of law; digging up around 1,000 breach of promise cases in search of answers to these questions. In the process, I have encountered a different kind of protagonist to those I have been accustomed to meeting in histories of romantic love. Here there are no lofty philosophers, sensitive poets or delicate letter-writers penning epistles in the hush of a lady’s drawing room.
The feckless Lotharios are shearers, train drivers, bankrupt shopkeepers, farmers and commercial travellers. Their scorned brides are people like Beatrice Storey: barmaids, domestic servants, seamstresses, nurses, piano teachers and, later in the century, chorus girls and migrants. They are mostly ordinary people of the lower-middle orders who could not afford the luxury of privacy, nor the indulgence of marrying for love alone.
Some went to court seeking compensation for lost wages or diminished social and economic status, others for wounded affections or missed romantic opportunities, and many more, like Beatrice, were using the action to pressure their partner to marry them.
Women who had been “seduced” litigated to defend their sexual reputations. Most plaintiffs were refreshingly oblivious or indifferent to the social scorn that the legal action cast upon them: the indignity of having your most private feelings filleted before a public audience; the perceived vulgarity of seeking financial recompense for the unquantifiable pain of a broken heart.
Contemporary fantasies of romantic plenitude
If Beatrice Storey had been left at the altar today, Frederick Chapman would not have been forced by the state to compensate her for her hurt feelings, nor for any financial losses she incurred. The fact Fred was an intimate partner, rather than a commercial one, would likely have denied her a legal remedy.
The law tends to assume that intimates don’t intend to create legal relations. Women are not economically and socially dependent on marriage as they once were, and a failed relationship does not relegate women to the status of damaged goods. Courtship is now defined by love, choice, physical desire and mutual negotiation, rather than by contractual legal obligation.
Fuelled by dating apps that promise a new partner by simply swiping right on your phone, fantasies of romantic plenitude have replaced legal regimes of punishment.
Yet people continue to experience injury, be it financial, emotional or bodily, when intimate promises are broken, and the discovery of deceit in relationships can be life-altering.
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Rather than seeing the unmooring of love from law as a tale of liberation, by which love was set free from the paternalistic bonds of the state, I question what we have lost in this process, and how we might imagine, legally and socially, an ethics of intimacy.
Pexels: Rdne stock project, CC BYInstead of turning to law, the Beatrice Storey of today would likely try to overcome her pain by reading self-help books or talking to friends, family and experts, all educated to varying degrees in psychology. The advice she would receive would no doubt revolve around the virtues of resilience, the balm of commodity culture (go out and buy yourself a new dress!), and interrogation of her own psyche (why had she been attracted to such a duplicitous cad in the first place?).
Where law would have ascribed fault and demanded a tallying-up of emotional, bodily and financial harm that could be compensated (however awkwardly) by money, therapeutic discourse is uninterested in material loss or ethical responsibility.
What was once a public debate about the rules of romance, including its gendered financial costs and the seriousness of its injuries, is now sequestered in the therapist’s clinic.
Like scholars before me, I argue that the “coming of the counsellors” by the mid-20th century was not a victory but a loss, particularly for women. Responsibility for romantic injury has been individualised and feminised, and its pain trivialised, drained of economic meaning.
High stakes
There is something fundamentally human about falling in love that allows us to feel the amorous tremors of love poetry such as Sappho or Byron although centuries may yawn between us and the poet. But love is also not just love. When we see doctors giving testimony about the medical effects of heartbreak, or read of Beatrice Storey turning around after her court case and marrying Frederick Chapman, or applaud women at the start of the 20th century for claiming damages for the dinners they had cooked their lovers, we know we are dealing with an emotion that is profoundly shaped by culture. Love is a creature of its time. And it is in the space between strangeness and familiarity that the history of love can be found.
When I tell my students they could once have sued a lover for breaking an engagement, they are always astonished and a bit indignant; romance is not a fit subject for law, they say. Their response exposes a cultural assumption that love and law are opposites, conceptual antipodes, each untranslatable and hostile to the other. We think of romance as frolicsome, rebellious, impetuous and wilful, impervious to the monolithic sobriety of law.