Plans for a Match-Making Service or Sophisticated Parody? A Serious Proposal for Promoting Lawful and Honourable Marriage (1750, 1751)

While examples of historical ‘personal’ classifieds might be useful as bellwethers of sexual mores of a particular place and time, instructions or systems for the exchange of such advertisements are less common, though equally useful. A Serious Proposal for Promoting Lawful and Honourable Marriage (1750) presents a plan for a matchmaking service consisting of scaffolded ‘classifieds’.¹ The treatise describes a system in which epistolary interlocutors might be selected (for a fee) from a list of eligible women, allowing ‘gentlemen’ contact with and access to unmarried women otherwise external to their social circle. The pitch is primarily aimed at women, particularly otherwise eligible single women who ‘have not been so properly introduced into the World as they ought’ and are thus deprived opportunities to find an appropriate husband (1–2). The Proposal suggests that men who may ‘be supposed to lie under certain Difficulties or Discouragements’ in conversing with women, owing to their ‘Manner of life, Dispositions of Mind, or Turn of Temper’ might likewise be served by the proposed system (6). Throughout the plan, a self-conscious turn to novels as an inspiration, and guide to the conduct of a courtship, is clear: presenting suggested assumed names for the initial correspondence as ‘Gratiano’ and ‘Clarinda’ respectively, for instance, the Proposal utilizes traditions of epistolary mock-classical names, inherited in part from the genre’s frequent emulations of and invocations of Ovid’s Heroides (39–40). The level of literary sophistication evident in the Proposal should mean it is of interest to historians of literature and reading in understanding how popular fiction forms were integrated into their readers everyday social lives, perhaps more than as an object through which to understand courtship practices.

Existing copies of the work survive in an edition of 1750 (ESTC: T78651) and a subsequent edition of 1751 (ESTC: T119906), with copies of each held at the British Library, and another copy of the second edition held at the Beinecke. Both British Library editions have been digitized and are accessible through Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and are there attributed to a ‘Dr E. Cother’, though the works are themselves anonymous. The first edition is printed for W. Owen, a prolific mid-century printer with a highly versatile print catalogue. The second edition does not attribute a specific printer, but significant alterations to printer’s marks, black-letters, and the type more broadly, collectively suggest it is a thorough (and expensive) revision of the work as a whole. Neither print editions offer significant clues as to the authorship or intent of the Proposal. Similarly, much of the textual evidence is ambiguous. The phrase ‘A Serious Proposal’ and similar stock expressions had currency in titling of both straightforward and satirical treatises, yet in both editions the earnest and repeated insistence that the Proposal is genuine does not come across as a parody—at least, not an obvious one.

The first edition lays out the plan for the matchmaking service, while the second provides some commentary on its ostensible successes and adjustments, including such prosaic details as the relocation of one of the two letter drop-off locations to a new address (vii). However, the move of address is itself a moment for a broader comment on a censorious culture: the landlord ‘threaten’d Mr Bell to seize for Rent, if he fulfilled his engagements with the Proprietors, declaring in the open Court, in the hearing of all the Neighbourhood, O Lepidum Caput!’ (vii). The landlord, a ‘Doctor of Divinity’ who declares the proposal’s plans for hosting meetings between parties at Mr Bell’s property to be creating ‘a Lewd and scandalous Bawdy-house’, is lampooned as a brainless fool in a verse quotation from Macbeth, III.iv: ‘That where the Brains were out, the Man would die, And there an End—-‘ (vii). Further citations to Shakespeare and Milton, in the first edition, suggest the author’s familiarity with appropriate sources of citation that register with their reader as entirely standard and unobtrusive, perhaps deliberately so (12, 25).

The plan itself is presented in deliberately prosaic terms: individuals submit a ‘letter of Description’ to one of two Offices corresponding to the letter-writer’s sex, resulting in an ‘Interview’ between matched prospective couples, at reputable houses ‘of good Credit’ (44–47). Fastidious details seem intended to convince readers of the Proposal’s moral suitability, making reference to the efforts taken to prevent misuse of the service for rape or seduction, though not in such explicit terms: for instance, describing the locations for the interview, the Proposal adds that ‘the Room, where such Interviews is had, shall have neither Latch, Lock, Bolt, nor Bar, on the door; but a Draw-pulley only’ (48). The coupling of fairly standard and non-controversial literary references to these efforts might suggest that the proposal was, in fact, serious: alternatively, the effective simulation of a prudish mid-century moralist detailing a plan for an easily exploitable and morally questionable service heightens the satiric effect. In either case, such elements are altogether deliberate, and returning to Shakespeare in the rebuttal offered in the second edition reinforces the Proposal’s relationship to literature as part of its principal claim to merit.

While the Proposal offers a series of proofs for the marriageability, and necessity of marriage for such men and women otherwise supposedly excluded from the marital marketplace, more space is given to a justification through narrative. The Proposal reports in retrospective account the marriage of a couple, from the vantage of its present as a domestic idyll: perpetual newlyweds still dressed from their wedding day despite the presence, now, of multiple children (14). The narrative presented recycles common narrative tropes of epistolary romances, particularly mistaken identities and disguises. It is in this sense overtly fictional, aligning the Proposal with familiar narratives of amorous relationships rather than producing a factual account of its origins. While specific details are given which might purport to its reality, those that are offered are vague or generic enough as to confirm the plausibility of the account, rather than provide external substantiation. At the narrative’s outset, for example, the prospective husband ‘sent the following Advertisement to the Daily Advertiser’, which is related to the narrator, yet as explained in a footnote, the reader is deprived of it: ‘he repeated to us the Advertisement, which for certain Reasons we shall not insert’ (17). On receiving a reply, the man finds himself in a convoluted trial organized by a wealthy widower on behalf of her niece. His recollections are interrupted by the present context of their retelling, his now wife defending the purchase of some ‘Silver Ribband’ as he sought information about her, through their much more recent gifting to the pair’s new daughter (18). Moreover, it is a narrative taking place in a London peopled by stock characters, a ‘Gypsy’ milliner, a profligate rake returning from the West Indies, and a tyrannical (though now deceased) father (18, 27–29). Both the domestic idyll of country life and the far more duplicitous London echo norms of the novel form. The aunt directly cites Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple in Search of a true Friend (1744), suggesting to the narrator that ‘however extravagant the Author’s Plan might appear to some people, she herself was convinc’d, there was nothing so very Absurd in the Supposition’ (23). Yet again, the Proposal emphasizes the mirroring of life and fiction, encouraging a bleed between the two.

The second edition of 1751 adds material to the preface claiming to have received ‘many Letters of Approbation’ from a range of readers, ‘The whole Proposal and Project thoroughly approved by the soberest and most judicious of their own private Acquaintance of both Sexes’ (iv). The pamphlet claims that their proposal is now in action, since the March of 1750: ‘WE CAN NOW INFORM THE Public, has had its due Experience—the Offices settled—Registrars appointed—Entries registered—The Lists inspected—Letters and Correspondencies forwarded—Interviews had—and the End of all seriously, lawfully, and honourably answered’ (ix–x). There does not seem to be any available corroboration of these claims. This is by no means definitive: if these two publications serve as its principal advertisement, it is not certain that further notices would be found elsewhere. On the other hand, it seems plausible that given the intensity of the supposed public debate the second edition recounts some trace record should persist, though it may be in a marginal form. Whether the Proposal is genuine, a parody, or even an attempt to scam lovelorn Londoners, its display of the close interrelationships between print forms and invitation to readers to perform their own epistolary romance suggests this is a work worthy of closer examination by literary scholars, historians of reading, and those interested in the histories of eighteenth-century sexual culture.

Footnotes