#james bryce

Wife selling (English custom)

Wife selling in England was a way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage by mutual agreement that probably began in the late 17th century, when divorce was a practical impossibility for all but the very wealthiest. 

After parading his wife with a halter around her neck, arm, or waist, a husband would publicly auction her to the highest bidder. Wife selling provides the backdrop for Thomas Hardy's 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the central character sells his wife at the beginning of the story, an act that haunts him for the rest of his life, and ultimately destroys him.

Although the custom had no basis in law and frequently resulted in prosecution, particularly from the mid-19th century onwards, the attitude of the authorities was equivocal. 

At least one early 19th-century magistrate is on record as stating that he did not believe he had the right to prevent wife sales, and there were cases of local Poor Law Commissioners forcing husbands to sell their wives, rather than having to maintain the family in workhouses.

Wife selling persisted in England in some form until the early 20th century; according to the jurist and historian James Bryce, writing in 1901, wife sales were still occasionally taking place during his time. In one of the last reported instances of a wife sale in England, a woman giving evidence in a Leeds police court in 1913 claimed that she had been sold to one of her husband's workmates for £1.

In describing Americans as hopeful, Bryce meant that they exhibited a youthful optimism about their future and the destiny of their country. This has been remarked on by many over the years and is certainly true. One finds this optimism about the future, indeed that America is the land of the future, in everything from presidential addresses since Washington’s time to the unreflective confidence that most Americans have that the future is a fight of stairs running upward. This optimism has experienced occasional setbacks, as occurred during the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, and the economic recession of 1990-2 (in the 1992 presidential election, independent presidential candidate Ross Perot was able to make much of the idea that more and more Americans were doubtful that their children would have a standard of living as high as their own). Moreover, there have always been dissenters from the optimistic orthodoxy. Intellectuals, in particular, have often been gloomier about their country’s future than is the general public. But on the whole, the optimistic note has drowned out whatever minor choruses of dissent have existed. Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign provided a classic illustration of how the optimism and future-orientation of Americans can be mined for popular support. This was the candidate whose 1992 campaign slogan was ‘don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,’ words taken from a song by the rock band Fleetwood Mac. His 1996 campaign theme was ‘Building bridges to tomorrow,’ a message constructed around the promise of reaching new and higher levels of achievement in America. His opponent, Republican Bob Dole, seemed to have forgotten that Americans are fundamentally an optimistic, forward-looking people, because his message of recapturing values and achievements that, he argued, had existed in the past was easily turned against him as overly negative and backward-looking. It is fine to venerate and mythologize the past in American politics, but it must be done in a way that connects this past to the future and taps the fundamental optimism of Americans.

“The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. ” —James Bryce