29, Jul, 2010

The Media Reaction

Although woman was emerging from her seclusion, widening her social round, playing croquet and tennis unchaperoned, and even working in offices (screened from the concupiscent gaze of office boys), her mentors in the women's magazines were slow to grant her liberties. The Girl's Own Paper, which in its early years was far from funking the subject of romance, issued many a stern admonition to young women who supposed tlat they could go for walks by themselves in the evenings (a younger brother, it was stressed, was not an adequate safeguard). Consequently, readers who admitted having sanctioned direct approaches by men were warned that they were playing with fire. In 1887 (to take a volume at random) a girl writes to say that a man dropped a letter in her lap as he left the railway carriage; she is told on no account to have anything to do with a would-be suitor who adopts such an irregular approach. Another girl who is receiving direct overtures from a man in a higher station of life is told that, if he does not set about the business in the orthodox manner, she should write to inform his family what is going on. One of the more engaging requests for advice in this volume is from a girl who wants to know whether she should tell her fiance that she has false teeth. The editress thinks she should, and adds encouragingly that he may have false teeth himself. She then tells a cautionary story about a girl who told her fiance she had cork legs. When he said that he would still be willing to marry her, she laughingly explained that she had been born in Cork. The editress thought the young man would have been justified in breaking off the engagement. Many readers of Girl's Own Paper were worried about their complexions. The editress expressed horror on hearing that one girl did not use soap. If the result of using it was to make her face shiny, she should wear a veil. It is a pity that the Boy's Own Paper avoided the subject of romance. The editor's prescription to a boy in love would assuredly have been the one he regularly recommended to readers vexed with unfamiliar impulses-cold baths and plenty of wood chopping.

The easing of the relationship between the sexes was reflected in the emergence of new slang words for love-making, like spooning and mashing. The dictionary says that to spoon is 'to lie close together, to fit into each other, in the manner of spoons', and 'to make love, especially in a sentimental or silly fashion'. Writers made their own nouns from the verb to spoon, such as spooniness and spooneyism. In the annals of Jack Harkaway, that bloodthirsty boyhood idol of the 'seventies, a moneylender's daughter is recommended to the hero as being 'as fine a spoon as there is in Oxford'. It has been suggested that spooning was only another name for what is now called petting, but it was nothing of the sort. It involved a more than a mildly voluptuous nestling together, with heads laid on shoulders, and occasional kissing behind parasols. Petting, if Dr Kinsey is to be believed, involves a great deal more.

'Mashing', according to the same dictionary, means 'to fascinate or excite sentimental admiration (in one of the opposite sex)'. If mashing was courtship, it was not always courtship with a view to marriage. The traditional masher was a stage-door Johnny who specialized in the ogling and entertainment of chorus girls.

The 'new woman' was easy meat for cartoonists. So she was educated, was she? A Punch cartoon showed a group of elders watching covertly a pair of lovers, of whom the male was stated in the caption to be a senior wrangler and the girl to have taken a mathematical scholarship at Girton. 'How different their conversation must be from the insipid twaddle 6f ordinary lovers!' exclaims Mrs Jones. Their conversation is revealed as follows:

He: And what would Dovey do if Lovey were to die?
She: Oh, Dovey would die too!

The outwitting of chaperons is a popular subject for humorous artists in this period. Two young men and two women debate which elderly lady to take with them on a yachting cruise; unanimously they vote for the one who is the worst sailor. A mother is seen shadowing her three daughters, each of whom is arm in arm with a young man; at the cross-roads each couple takes a different direction-what is mother to do? Edwin and Angelina are strolling dreamily on Hampstead Heath, the chaperon this time being the girl's young sister, who is growing restive at the prospect of 'walking in heavenly hills and dales for ever'. By 1876 a rinking mania has sprung up. A Punch drawing entitled 'Rink To Me Only With Thine Eyes' shows sentimental couples rollerskating hand in hand down a narrow twisting path between trees, under one of which a couple are sitting. Not a chaperone is in sight. The whole scene looks perilously romantic. No doubt much of the attraction of rinking was that physical pressures could be legitimately established away from the eye of the chaperon, or for that matter under it. George Du Maurier has a further vision of freedom: he sees young men on penny-farthing bicycles with girls perched precariously, pillion fashion, on the rear.

In the late 'seventies the amorous possibilities of the telephone are being humorously touched upon. A mistress asks the maid whether it is true that she heard a man's voice in the kitchen. The maid's reply is: 'Me and my young man have started a tallyphone, mum-but he never comes nearer than round the corner of the next street, mum.' That was in 1878; three years later a Punch drawing shows a Frenchman and an English miss speaking to each other across the Channel. Not only are they hearing each other's voices, they are looking at each other's likenesses, flashed on to screens. The notion of a 'photophone' was widely current in jest and popular fancy for many years to come.