Category Archives: Marriage

1909: Mrs Homer Simpson deserts husband, gets jail time

In October 1909, an Oklahoma newspaper reported an Ohio woman, Mrs M. Simpson, had been handed four months’ in the county jail after pleading guilty to a statutory offence. Also given jail time was Mrs Simpson’s nephew, Edward.

While the report did not name Mrs Simpson’s offence, the details case suggest it may have been kidnapping or marital desertion:

“Homer Simpson, a prosperous real estate man of Cleveland, Ohio, husband of Mrs Simpson, appeared against the pair. He has been tracking his wife since she deserted him last month, taking with her their eight-year-old son.”

Source: The Daily Ardmoreite, Oklahoma, October 5th 1909. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1620: Somerset man shows wife, a penny a peek

In 1620, a farmer named Cutte from the village of Halse, near Taunton, appeared before a Somerset magistrate. Cutte was charged with gross indecency towards his unnamed wife. The alleged offence was committed at a village gathering where several people, including the defendant, were drunk.

According to witnesses, Cutte:

“..made an offer to diverse [people] then present, that for a penny a piece they should see his wife’s privities… and there withal he did take her and throw her upon a board and did take up her clothes and showed her nakedness in [the] most beastly and uncivil manner.”

Cutte’s behaviour apparently shocked those present, who called a halt to his enterprise by blowing out the candles and casting the room into darkness. The court found Cutte guilty and admonished him but no punishment was recorded.

Source: Session Rolls of the Somerset Quarter Sessions, 1620, f.36. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1870: Army officer’s wife unimpressed by Illinois flasher

Frank D. Baldwin served in the United States Army for more than 40 years, enlisting as a teenaged private in 1862 and retiring as a major-general in 1906. During his service, Baldwin fought with distinction in the US Civil War, several campaigns against Native American leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and the Spanish-American War. He was one of only 19 Americans to win the prestigious Medal of Honor twice.

Michigan-born Baldwin married Alice Blackwood in January 1867. For the next few years, husband and wife were separated by Frank’s military postings so corresponded regularly by mail. Alice’s letters suggest she was a devoted wife who adored her husband, as well as being a person of good humour.

Writing in October 1870, Alice informed Frank of an incident during a train trip through Illinois:

“There was a man showed his conflumux [penis] to me at one station where we stopped… while I was looking out the window. I thought he might have saved himself the trouble because I had seen one before.”

Alice’s letters occasionally contained sexual commentary or titillation. In one note from June 1873, she playfully chastises Frank for “casting sly glances at Mrs Sowter’s bubbies. You ought to be ashamed.” She also teases him by writing:

“How are you this hot day? I am most roasted and my chemise sticks to me and the sweat runs down my legs and I suppose I smell very sweet, don’t you wish you could be around just now?”

In another letter from December 1870, Alice taunts her husband about his prior intentions to marry another woman, Nellie Smith. According to Alice, Frank’s alternative wife might have suffered from his generous endowment:

“I felt real queer and strange when I heard you had half a mind to marry another girl. I thought I held undivided your love. Well, it’s too late now. Nellie Smith don’t know what she escaped. She would have been killed at one nab of your old Long Tom.”

Frank Baldwin died in 1923, aged 80. Alice died in 1930 after securing the publication of her late husband’s memoirs.

Source: Letters from Alice Baldwin to Frank Baldwin dated September 5th 1869; October 1st 1870; June 22nd 1873. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1909: James Joyce can’t make it to the post office

In 1909, the Irish author James Joyce was living in Trieste with his lover, Nora Barnacle. Then both in their mid-20s, Joyce and Barnacle’s relationship was intense but sometimes variable and tempestuous.

In October, Joyce returned to Dublin on business, leaving Nora alone in Italy for three months. During this separation they agreed to send each other erotic letters. Some of these letters survive today and their contents range from passionate and erotic, to smutty and fetishistic.

Topics explored in Joyce’s letters to Nora include oral sex, self pleasuring, buggery, flatulence and defecation. He referred to her as “my little f-ckbird”, “little c-ntie” and “my sweet dirty little farter”. Joyce also confessed to masturbating, either while writing to Nora or immediately thereafter.

On December 15th, a week before starting his return journey to Trieste, Joyce wrote to Nora:

“I am sure my girlie is offended at my filthy words. Are you offended, dear, as what I said about your drawers? That is all nonsense, darling. I know they are spotless as your hearth. I know I could lick them all over, frills, legs and bottom. Only I love, in my dirty way, to think that in a certain part they are soiled. It is all nonsense too about buggering you. It is only the dirty sound of the word I like, the idea if a shy beautiful young girl like Nora pulling up her clothes behind and revealing her sweet white girlish drawers in order to excite the dirty fellow she is so fond of; and then letting him stick his dirty red lumpy pole in through the split of her drawers and up, up, up, in the darling little hole between her plump fresh buttocks.

Darling, I came off just now in my trousers so that I am utterly played out. I cannot go to the Post Office now, though I have three letters to post. [So] to bed, to bed! Goodnight, Nora mia!”

Nora responded with her own erotic letters, however, none of these survive.

Source: Letter from James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, December 15th 1909. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1730: Somerset pig-gelder tries neutering wife

In August 1730, a London newspaper report claimed a Somerset man was under arrest for cruelty to his wife. The article did not name the man but identified him as the local pig-gelder in Bridgwater in the county’s north.

According to the report, the accused man was:

“..in the company of several other married men [and] over a pot of ale they all joined in complaint of the fruitfulness of their wives… [and asked the gelder] whether he could not do by their wives as by other animals; he said he could and they all agreed their good women should undergo the operation.”

The man returned home, probably drunk, and proceeded to gag and bind his wife. He laid her on their table and made an incision in her belly but became reluctant to proceed after finding:

“..there was some difference between the situation of the parts in the rational and irrational animals… he [sewed] up the wound and was forced to give up the experiment.”

Source: London Journal, August 22nd 1730. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1893: A Christmas wedding for Wigg and Balls

It’s December 1893 and the village of Leiston, Suffolk turns out for the wedding of the unfortunately named local couple: Eliza Wigg and Dick Balls:

Source: Ipswich Journal, December 30th 1893. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1796: Napoleon dreams of Josephine’s “little black forest”

In March 1796, the French military leader and dictator Napoleon Bonaparte married Josephine de Beauharnais, a Creole widow six years his senior. Three days after their wedding, Napoleon left to command the French army in the Italian states. His new bride remained in Paris and started an affair with a 22-year-old cavalry officer.

Unaware of her infidelity, Napoleon penned a series of passionate, sometimes erotic letters to Josephine. In the most graphic of these, he wrote:

“How happy I would be if I could assist you at your undressing, the little white breast, springy and firm; the adorable face; the hair tied up in a scarf a la creole – good enough to eat. You know well that I have not forgotten the small visits [to your] little black forest. I give it a thousand visits and impatiently await the moment to be there… To live inside a Josephine is to live in paradise. To kiss the mouth, eyes, shoulder, breast, everywhere, everywhere.”

The general arranged a liaison with Josephine in Milan, however by the time he arrived she had absconded to Genoa with her lover. Napoleon discovered her infidelity shortly after; he became physically ill as a consequence and was temporarily unable to lead the army. He even wrote to Josephine threatening suicide.

Source: Letter from Napoleon to Josephine, dated November 21st 1796. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1825: James Bond jailed after falling into bad company

In the summer of 1825, James Bond appeared before the Mansion House court in London, charged with deserting his family. The hearing was also attended by his wife – described by the press as “a young person of very interesting appearance” – and Bond’s two young children.

The court heard that Bond once had a profitable job earning 400 pounds a year, until he:

“…became unfortunately connected with some abandoned women, who seduced him from his home.”

Bond then lost his employment and became destitute. He returned to his marital home but later moved in one of his mistresses and attempted to foment a menage a trois with Mrs Bond. He absconded again, leaving his wife and children to starve. The bailiffs later discovered Bond living in a brothel.

The judge condemned Bond’s conduct and sentenced him “as a rogue and a vagabond” to three month’s prison.

Source: London Morning Chronicle, July 20th 1825. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1802: Southern gent, 97, marries “amiable” 14-year-old

In March 1802, a Virginian newspaper reported on a marriage in the county of New Kent, just east of Richmond. The details of this union speak for themselves. The capitalisation is the newspaper’s own:

“Lately married in New Kent, county, Michael Sherman, aged NINETY-SEVEN YEARS and FOUR DAYS, to the amiable and accomplished Miss Eliza Poindexter, aged FOURTEEN.”

In other reports, the bride was described as “the amiable and accomplished Miss Eliza Poindexter”. Nothing is recorded of either the length or success of their marriage.

Source: The Richmond Recorder, March 27th 1802. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1827: Man sells “willing” wife for a fiver; “bells rang”.

The Brighton Gazette records two early 19th century cases of wife-selling, one in Brighton itself, the other in Buckland, near Taunton. One or both of these cases is believed to have inspired the sale of Henchard’s wife in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge:

May 1826:
“Man at Brighton led a tidy looking woman up to one of the stalls in the market, with a halter round her neck, and offered her for sale. A purchaser was soon found, who bought her for 30 shillings, which he paid, and went off with his bargain amid the sneers and laughter of the mob, but not before the transaction was regularly entered by the clerk of the market book and the toll of one shilling paid. He also paid one shilling for the halter, and another shilling to the man who performed the office of auctioneer. We understand they were country people, and that the woman has had two children by her husband, one of whom he consents to keep, and the other he throws in… to the bargain.”

December 1827:
“At Buckland, a labouring man named Charles Pearce sold his wife to shoemaker Elton for five pounds, and delivered her in a halter in the public street. She seemed very willing. Bells rang.”

Source: Brighton Gazette, 25th May 1826 and December 6th 1827. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.