1. Introduction
The securing of pin-money, or “separate estate” was a part of the marriage settlement in the eighteenth century, but by no means unique to this time. Chancery reports have been used to indicate that this term to denote a wife’s separate estate through capital, real or personal property has roots in the seventeenth century (Erikson, 102). This part of the marriage settlement was the only form of ongoing maintenance provided for the wife other than inherited personal property such as jewels termed "paraphernalia" that could be disposed of separately to a husband's rule. Maintenance of this kind was far inferior to settlements such as dower and jointure that could only be claimed after the death of a spouse. Nevertheless, this minor section of the marriage agreement is perhaps more pertinent to the eighteenth century as it reveals a disjuncture in society’s vision of marriage and how marriage was regulated by law.
Pin-money is initially detailed in the Oxford English Dictionary as:
"A (usually annual) sum allotted to a woman for clothing and other personal expenses; esp. such an allowance provided for a wife's private expenditure"
1712 J. Addison Spectator No. 295. ¶2 The Doctrine of Pin-money is of a very late Date, unknown to our Great Grand-mothers, and not yet received by many of our Modern Ladies.
1766 W. Blackstone Comm. Laws Eng. II. xxxii. 498 If she has any pinmoney or separate maintenance, it is said she may dispose of her savings thereout by testament, without the control of her husband.
The two example uses of the term portray a tension between the ways in which pin-money was implemented and what this implementation could enable for married women in the eighteenth century.
This project seeks to investigate if separate estate in marriage really led to separateness between husband and wife, in an age when ecclesiastical and manorial protections were being dissolved and the Chancery courts were the only means to regulate this practice.
2. Contract: In contention with coverture
With the practice of pin-money established, the institution of marriage in the eighteenth century now contracted the husband to maintain his wife by greater means than “rudimentary” agreements of dower or jointure (Staves 131). New literature such as The Lady’s Law (1732) and Precedents in Conveyancing (1744) emerged as a means of enforcing this settlement (Erikson 105). However, this method of contracting a husband to maintain his wife was ultimately lacking in validity and damaged the presentation of marriage. The marriage settlement signalled the weakening of ecclesiastical influence; despite efforts to reintegrate the role of the Church such as in Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753) – spoken about in more detail here – agreements such as pin-money served to degrade the belief of husband and wife as “unity of person” in coverture (Prest 112).
A wife’s pin-money was now a component in developing this unity of person to occur. A husband allowed his wife pin-money to maintain her appearance through the purchase of clothing and various other dispensable items in order to maintain his social status. The system of coverture removed the emotional or religious motivations for marriage and replaced it with a focus on private expenditure.
Fig 1. The Soldier's Return;-or-rare-news for Old England, 1791
For example, the Duchess of York walks alongside and embraces the Duke of York, but this is not truly an image of marital bliss in the romantic sense. The image foregrounds the joint financial steadfastness, “Pin Money £5000" for the Duchess and “£300000” for the Duke. Nevertheless, this image is heavily satirical considering the financial instability of the Duke who was known to have significant debts, believed to be in excess of £401,169.
Ultimately, the main issue surrounding the pin-money settlement was the fact that it effectively blurred legal enforcement of maintenance with a husband’s duty to ensure maintenance for his wife. This echoes Samuel Johnson’s image of weddings as mere “sealing and signing” in the Issue No.54 of Tatler (1759), despite efforts made to mandate the religious ceremony in the aforementioned Marriage Act six years prior to the publication. Johnson ridicules pin-money through the words of disgruntled wife Sukey Savecharges who must rely on the law and “the learned gentlemen of that profession” to certify her claims for unfair treatment. Placing a husband’s common decency in contract makes the agreement of pin-money easier to manipulate as it is contractual and not emotional. Mr Savecharges justifies the case, “Madam, I can now tell you your coach is ready; and, since you are so passionately fond of one, I intend you the honour of keeping a pair of horses – You insisted upon having an article of pin-money, and horses are no part of my agreement”. Even in contract, pin-money highlights the subjectivity of marriage settlements and this problem can be concluded in Tim Stretton’s analysis of coverture as a "rag bag of different rules and conflicting court decisions" (Prest 120).
The system of coverture also removed a wife’s claim to partake in common law, so nominated trustees were asked to represent the wife where dower or jointure was concerned. However, separate estate was not subjected to the rules of common law and did not rely on referral to trustees. The other form of separate estate was paraphernalia, a bride’s inheritance of jewels or similar personal property. The exchange of paraphernalia from wife to husband was an action that could be motivated entirely by the wife, this is pictured below in another print of the Duke and Duchess of York.
Fig 2. A scene in the gamester, 1792
This image, within the confines of the home, is able to depict the reality of contractual marriage with a far from frugal husband. In this case the wife is using her independent wealth in order to sustain the husband and therefore the unity. The Duchess declares, "My Jewels? trifles! not worth the speaking of, if weigh'd against a husband's peace; but let 'em purchase that, and the world's wealth is of less value". By comparing the role of paraphernalia to that of pin-money, it can be inferred that a deviation from predetermined contract through the actions of the wife is needed to ensure unity of person.
3. Class: privacy to accountability
As can be imagined, a form of money handling was not free from class division within the eighteenth century and much of the surviving settlement material confirms that separate estate was a practice confined to upper class society. A major reason for this class divide was due to the inevitable contractual basis that adjoined pin-money which mandated the involvement and payment of legal representatives before passing to a matter between wife and husband. However, there were certain pitfalls in this private arrangement of pin-money which can be identified through a report on a state of arrears between Henry Howard and Frances Fitzroy-Scudamore, the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk who married in 1771. This in-depth account of this case reveals that there was no “dictum” or general treaty on the practice of pin-money (Bligh, 265). Despite a contractual basis for the implementation of pin-money, there was still a lack of structure to its regulation and this may be due to the fact that settlements were private in each case (Staves, 139).
A review of the Duke and Duchess’s case by Vice-Chancellor Shadwell provides a far more through definition of pin-money in the eighteenth century.
“Now the purpose is not the purpose of the wife alone; it is for the establishment; it is for the joint concern; it is for the maintenance of common dignity; it is for the support of that family whose support and strength is the husband, but whose ornament is the wife. It is to support the dignity and splendour of the joint establishment, consisting of husband and wife, that part of the whole expenditure is for the support of the wife herself. Then does it not follow from thence that the husband has a direct interest in the expenditure of the pin-money? He has a right to have the pleasure of it, to have the credit of it, to be spared the eyesore of a wife appearing as misbecomes his station – that is the destination and the object of pin-money.”
In this particular case, the arrears of pin-money were as a result of the marriage contract being breached through the Duchess’s diagnosed lunacy in 1782. This state of mind barred the Duchess from legally consenting to the payment of pin-money and consequentially no pin-money was paid from this point onward. Therefore it can be inferred that the practice of pin-money could be easily manipulated. Other cases investigated by Susan Staves support this assumption; for example, elopement was not necessarily a barrier to the payment of pin-money (141) and a husband could still be made accountable for a wife’s separate estate provided the said wife resided in the marriage home. There are no requests for any separate contribution from the wife to the husband in favour for pin-money. In fact, even politeness or courtesy could be overlooked as Staves confirms that "agreements to pay pin money almost never stipulated for good behaviour" (140). In fact, the only agreed regulation of pin-money was one that restricted a wife or their representative to claim pin-money in arrears of more than a year.
A class-conscious presentation of pin-money could be endorsed by Hogarth’s depiction of “The Marriage Settlement” (1745), the first of six engravings depicting the sequence of “Marriage a-la-Mode”.
Fig 3. "The Marriage Settlement", 1745
The future bride and groom are not party to their settlement and their wealth has dictated the nature of the settlement. Most notable is the father of the bride, who was central to providing the money to be portioned into dower or jointure and separate estate, is too overcome with self-absorption to partake in this settlement.
This sort of accountability was paramount to the husband who, through the implementation of pin-money, was now accountable for debts run-up by his wife and his own creditors. Despite this control of the husband, a wife was entitled to sue her husband if her pin-money was not paid to her. However, this would leave a woman without means to maintain herself without any access to dower or jointure, the more substantial portions of money controlled by her husband.
In general, the practice of pin-money foregrounds the willingness of the wife to invest in the image of her husband and adorning herself appropriately.
4. Fashionable society: an illusion of autonomy
As previously noted, the function of pin-money was in some way to “avoid the necessity of perpetual recurrence” (Bligh 265) of money exchange between husband and wife. By preventing this dialogue between pin-money giver and receiver, other forms of literature began to emerge as a mediator to the wife and other women partaking in fashionable society. Pocket books such as The Ladies Compleat Pocket Book and publications such as Common Sense started to fill this void of communication; tailoring consumer culture toward “domestic virtues of notable economy, good nature and neatness or cleanliness” (Guest 82). Jennifer Batchelor goes so far as suggesting that the widespread female readership may label them “disseminators of ideals of femininity” and this claim will be investigated further in the next section on literary representation of femininity.
Fig 4. Pocket book,1778 Fig 5. Same pocket book, 1778
Despite the rise of pocket book culture signalling a booming trade industry, some writers expressed a need to abandon the practice of pin-money altogether. The opening to John Breval’s poem The Art of Dress calls for a return to the time in which nature governed actions. Perhaps to a time when guardianship was reason enough for a wife to act in the way she did. Guardianship was the nature of a husband-wife relationship in the seventeenth century, the husband perceived as having a "God-given power” (Prest 120) over his wife as there was heavy ecclesiastical influence in marriage of this time.
In Antient Times, before this Isle was known,
While Rome subdu'd the Continent alone;
E're Foreign Lords the British Kings control'd,
Or the wild Native knew the Use of Gold,
Our simple Mothers (as old Authors write)
Guiltless of Pride, in Dress took no Delight.
Skins round their Middles negligently ty'd,
Conceal'd what Nature prompted them to hide:
Uncouthly daub'd with Paint, the rest was bare,
And to their Feet reach'd down their length of Hair:
They ask'd no Pin-Money , and us'd no Paste,
Nor suffer'd Torture for a slender Waist,
But learn'd betimes in Forests to pursue
The flying Deer, and twang their Bows of Yew :
Intent on Rural Sports, defy'd the Spleen,
Made homely Meals, and took no Drams between.
Pin-money appears to be the origin of other unwelcome acts of masquerading for society through make-up or style of clothing as a wife could quite easily afford these goods without any added endorsement from her husband.
Alternatively, Richard Brinsley Sheridan uses his play A School for Scandal (1777) to depict the outcome of a marriage without pin-money yet within a society that demanded a woman’s ownership of it. The ongoing argument between Lady Teazle and Sir Peter capitalises on the dialogue that is lost with the implementation of pin-money.
SIR PETER: This, madam, was your situation; and what have I done for
you? I have made you a woman of fashion, of fortune, of rank –
in short, I have made you my wife.
LADY TEAZLE: Well, then – and there is but one thing more you can
make me to add to the obligation, and that is –
SIR PETER: My widow, I suppose?
(Act II Sc I, 208)
The language of Sir Peter endeavours to embellish the restrictions of coverture that William Blackstone defended in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, “even the disabilities…are for the most part intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favourite is the female sex of the laws of England”. However, fashionable society presented a craving for this immediate possession of money to partake in consumer culture. Pin-money was a means to access a form of autonomy that was not possible within common law that excluded the wife. Although the character of Lady Teazle portrays how fashionable society merely distracted from the reality of coverture.
LADY TEAZLE: Sir Peter, Sir Peter, you may bear it or not as you
please; but I ought to have my own way in everything – and what’s
more I will too. What, though I was educated in the country, I know
very well that women of fashion in London are accountable to
nobody after they are married.
(Act II Sc I, 206)
Perhaps the most direct attack on the practice of separate estate is in Catherine Gore’s novel Pin-Money (1831) that portrays the danger of true autonomy and reasserts that the husband should remain in control of all forms of estate. The wife's assumption of autonomy would merely perpetuate “the indolence, frivolity, and dissipation to which commercial industry is opposed” (Guest, 23).
5. Literature: Challenging the femininity of the wife
The implementation of ongoing maintenance could be considered as a protection for the wife and children against the husband’s financial difficulty (Erickson, 107). Despite this potentially domesticated view of pin-money, presentations of wives in pursuit of separate estate often stray from this feminine ideal.
Turning to “Pin-money condemned” Issue No.295 of Joseph Addison’s Spectator, it becomes apparent that wives were not only demanding, but even tyrannical. The wife's control and domination through the use of pin-money, in spite of the system of coverture, may be likened to the unexpected inverted gender roles exposed in the investigation of flagellation within the household. Indeed, the account of one Josiah Fribble indicates a husband thoroughly brow-beaten from the implementation of pin-money. The response from Addison goes to great lengths to separate pin-money from its domesticated counterpart “Needle money” and chastises the wife for insistence on this sum to be paid. Pin money, whether it represents paranoia of being neglected by the husband or a means of participating outside the home, is seen to damage the institution of marriage as a unity: “Separate purses between man and wife are, in my opinion, as unnatural as separate beds.”
Fig. 6 Spectator, Thursday, February 7, 1712; Issue CCXCV
Harriet Guest’s work on eighteenth-century perceptions of private and public space in Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 presents an argument against the practice of pin-money. The popular male belief was that the wife and husband could relate better to one another and share a “liberal comprehensiveness of view” (317) if the wife remained domesticated and only the husband participated in the masculine, trade-driven world outside.
Pin-money ultimately disrupts this marriage ideal as it allows the wife to lay claim to a portion of the money accumulated from the success of male specialisms with the intention to partake in the world outside the home. This theory of specialisms is paramount in Issue No.299 of the Spectator, in which the tradesman Sir John Anvil, a man of notable worth (approximately £321,698.10 in today’s terms), is in contention with his wife who has attained pin-money. As a result, “she thinks herself my superior in sense, as she is in quality, and therefore treats me like a plain well-meaning man, who does not know the world”, evidencing the disharmony in marriage through a rejection of mere domesticity. In Issue No.326 of the Spectator, Addison calls for a reformation of the contract of separate estate in order for the husband to initiate his own influence over his children upon witnessing his daughter eating a horse carcass already left to the mercy of crows. The chaos of the scene “exceeds the Grievance of Pin-Money; and I think in every Settlement, there ought to be a Clause inserted, that the Father should be should be answerable for the Longings of his Daughter”.
This decline in the depiction of wives in possession of separate estate seems to suggest that the typically feminine belief in romantic marriage was also being deceived in reality. Erikson remarks “Male resentment of women who insisted upon separate property in marriage was fanned in the eighteenth century by the literary representation of marriage in sentimental terms of romantic love and surrender, rather than in terms of economic partnership” (232). Hence Cruikshank’s satirical depiction of two wives (third couple in the top row) who centre their socialisation on complaining about amounts of pin-money, ". . . I am surprised I can dress at all he allows me but eight Hundred a year pin money." This satire, being produced in 1797, may be in answer to the long boom of sentimental novels beginning with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740); this affirms that idylls of romantic marriage and the domesticated wife were undercut by pin-money.
Fig 7. The Days We Live In!!, 1797
Annotated Bibliography
Primary sources
Addison, Joseph. Spectator (1711) (London, England), Thursday, February 7, 1712; Issue CCXCV. Print.
---. Spectator(1711) (London, England), Thursday, February 12, 1712; Issue CCXCIX. Print.
---. Spectator (1711) (London, England) Friday, March 14th, 1712 Issue CCCXXVI. Print.
Very useful in determining the early condemnation of pin-money in the public; each issue had a slightly different emphasis on why these feelings arose.
Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. (Oxford 1765-69; facsimile edition Chicago IL, 1979). Print.
An essential text, I used sections of this to study the altering presentation of marriage from the seventeenth to eighteenth century.
Breval, John. The Art of Dress. London : Printed for E. Curll, in Fleet-Street. 1717. Print.
This poem relies heavily upon epic as a contrast to the norms of eighteenth century literature.
Johnson, Samuel. The Idler, Issues 1-103. London:1796. Print.
A very entertaining article. This was useful in considering pin-money from the wife’s perspective whilst speaking of pin-money in a negative light.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The School for Scandal, The School for Scandal and Other Plays,ed. Eric Rump (London: Penguin, 1988). Print.
A text I was able to read more closely. I used it to contrast a marriage without pin-money as opposed to a marriage that involved pin-money.
Secondary sources
Batchelor, Jennie. "Fashion and Frugality: Eighteenth-Century Pocket Books for Women," Studies in Eighteenth Century Literature 32 (2003): 1-18. Web 13 December 2014.
A very accessible article that aided in viewing pin-money as item; also clearly referenced to some authors central to commodity culture of this century.
Bligh, Richard; Great Britain, Parliament, House of Lords. New reports of cases heard in the House of Lords, on appeals and writs of error; and decided during the session 1827-1837: Volume 8. London: Saunders and Benning. 1829. Print.
In reading the report on the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk’s case, I was able to use this text to expose the problems inherent to pin-money. To gain an interpretation of pin-money from the nineteenth century was able to ground some of my future references.
Erickson, Amy Louise. Women and Property in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.
This text has allowed me to properly historicize the practice of pin-money. The division of the book was useful in determining property in relation to a living wife as opposed to a widow. Due to its great number of references it has proved pivotal in researching pin-money more widely.
Guest, Harriet. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2000. Print.
This text led me to reinterpret the role of pin-money in terms of education and industry; a keen focus on both key and lesser female figures in the eighteenth century.
Ingrassia, Catherine. Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-century England: A Culture of Paper Credit. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.
This reading of the era allowed me to consider women as empowered by their use of pin-money. I could easily access the relevant information due to its clear division in subject matter.
Stretton, Tim. “Coverture and Unity in Blackstone’s Commentaries,” Blackstone and His Commentaries: Biography, Law, History. Ed. Wifrid Prest. Oxford: Hart Pub., 2009. Print.
This text was essential to my understanding of marriage in when Blackstone was writing. The compilation of different authors offered a very thorough investigation into more niche topics.
Staves, Susan. Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. Print.
A source that I relied upon heavily, particularly as it deals with the item and practice of pin-money directly whereas most other texts mention it in passing
Pictures
Fig 1. Gillray, James. The Soldier's Return;-or-rare-news for Old England. 1791. The British Museum, London. The British Museum. Web. 16 Mar. 2015.
Fig 2. Cruikshank, Isaac. A scene in the gamester. 1792. The British Museum, London. The British Museum. Web. 15 Mar. 2015.
Fig 3. Hogarth, William. Marriage A-la-Mode, Plate I. 1745. The British Museum, London. The British Museum. Web. 2 Feb. 2015.
Fig 4. Jwakefield. "An 18th Century Lady's Pocket Book, Part One." Austenonly. N.p., 17 May 2012. Web. 10 Jan. 2015.
Fig 5. ---. "An 18th Century Lady's Pocket Book, Part Two." Austenonly. N.p., 17 May 2012. Web. 10 Jan. 2015.
Fig 6. Addison, Joseph. Spectator (1711) (London, England), Thursday, February 7, 1712; Issue CCXCV. Print.
Fig 7. Cruikshank, Isaac. The Days We Live In!! 1797. The British Museum, London. The British Museum. Web. 16 Mar. 2015.
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