历史 | 在维多利亚时代的英国,未婚同居


来源:www.historyextra.com


There is a surprisingly widespread assumption, shared by popular and academic historians alike, that cohabitation (living together in a relationship without being married) was common among the Victorian poor. The journalist Matthew Sweet suggests in Inventing the Victorians that working-class men and women chose to cohabit out of economic convenience.

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有一种说法,同居(住在一起但不结婚)在维多利亚时代的穷人中很普遍,这种说法在历史学家当中极其流行。记者马修·斯威特在《创造维多利亚时代》一书中指出,工人阶级男女选择同居是出于经济上的便利。


Others refer to ‘unknown’ numbers of people living in ‘irregular unions’ – the implication being that those numbers, though unknown, must nevertheless have been large. Moving from the belief that the poor did not marry to the observation that the working classes made up the largest section of the population, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that marriage was a minority practice in Victorian England.

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另一些人则提到生活在“非正常结合”中的人数“未知”——暗示同居数据虽然不明,但肯定很大。从认为穷人不结婚到观察到工人阶级占人口的最大部分,人们很容易陷入这样的思维陷阱:在维多利亚时期的英格兰,结婚是少数人的做法。


Of course, individual examples of cohabiting couples can be found in all classes of Victorian society. George Eliot is a regularly cited example, and her fellow authors Mary Elizabeth Bradden and Wilkie Collins, along with the political activist Eleanor Marx, often feature alongside her on lists of Victorian cohabitants.

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当然,在维多利亚社会的各个阶层都可以找到同居伴侣的例子。乔治·艾略特是一个经常被引用的例子,与她情况类似的作家玛丽·伊丽莎白·布莱登和威尔基·柯林斯,以及政治活动家埃莉诺·马克思,经常与她一起出现在维多利亚时代的同居者名单上。


And yes, alternatives to marriage were seriously discussed by radical thinkers such as the socialist Robert Owen in the 1830s and the early feminists of the late 19th century. But one should never confuse big names with big numbers. Newly available historical data, using recently digitised sources, clearly establishes that all but a tiny fraction of Victorian couples sharing a home had gone through a ceremony of marriage.

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是的,19世纪30年代的社会主义者罗伯特·欧文和19世纪晚期的早期女权主义者等激进思想家,都曾认真讨论过婚姻的替代方案。但我们不应该把大名人和大数字混为一谈。利用最近的数字化资源,最新的历史数据清楚地表明,除了极少数维多利亚时代同住一户的伴侣外,其余所有夫妇都举行过结婚仪式。


Earlier generations of researchers who have looked at the extent of cohabitation were hampered by the need to wade through thousands of pages of registers when searching for evidence that a marriage had taken place. Understandably, they often failed to trace weddings that had been held more than a few miles from a couple’s home church, and from this failure deduced high rates of cohabitation.

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前几代研究同居程度的研究者在寻找婚姻发生的证据时,需要费力地翻阅数千页的登记簿,这阻碍了他们的研究。可以理解的是,他们往往无法追踪到那些在离夫妻家教堂几英里远的地方举行的婚礼,由此推断出同居率很高。


But as any family historian is well aware, finding a marriage depends on searching in the right place. To take an example of how digitisation has revolutionised this task, marriages could only be traced for some two-thirds of couples listed in the 1851 census for the Northamptonshire village of Kilsby when using the laborious old method of looking through the church registers of the most likely locations. With the assistance of modern databases, though, the proportion traced rose to 100 per cent. In short, Victorian couples were both more mobile and more likely to marry than previously thought.

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但正如任何家庭历史学家都清楚的那样,要想找到一段婚姻,就得找对地方。举一个数字化如何彻底改变这项任务的例子,在1851年北安普敦郡Kilsby村的人口普查数据中,使用费力的旧方法查看最有可能地点的教堂登记册,只有大约三分之二的夫妇婚姻能追踪到。不过,在现代数据库的帮助下,追踪到的比例上升到100%。简而言之,维多利亚时代的夫妇都比之前认为的流动性更大,也更有可能结婚。




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