A wood fire, a heap of congratulatory letters, and the smiles of her who every day ncreases [sic] my dependence on her love, made our breakfast table delightful – Charles Sneyd Edgeworth, 5 Sept 1813
The post-wedding holiday that we now call a ‘honeymoon’ emerged in the late eighteenth century, when couples from the European upper and upper-middle classes began to mark the start of their married lives with tours of western European cities.
In the course of my research on travel writing and life writing, I’ve come across some diaries and letters where newlyweds recorded their ‘wedding tour’ or honeymoon.
In September 1813, Charles Sneyd Edgeworth married Henrica (‘Harriet’) Broadhurst. In the following weeks, he wrote a series of letters to his sister Honora and to Maria Edgeworth in which he described his mood and how they spent their time in Suffolk, walking, reading and picnicking. His blissful happiness is almost irritating – he wrote of how they ‘walked like a star’d old couple’ to church one Sunday. He wished that his unmarried sister would one day know the same sort of happiness:
Monday was a most terribly stormy day & I felt the natural gratitude to heaven for having given my bosom an inmate with whom I could defy the elements & with whom conversing & could forget all seasons –
May my dear sister know the delight of having a friend in whose arms you may repose in blissful peace –
One of the more complete nineteenth-century Irish accounts of a ‘wedding tour’ that I’ve come across is a diary by law graduate William Hartigan Barrington (1815–72). He married Elizabeth Olivia Darley (c. 1829–1907) in St Peter’s Church, Dublin on 14 March 1859. That evening, the pair crossed the Irish Sea to Holyhead and travelled onwards from there to London, Paris, Marseilles, Nice, Geneva, Milan, Venice, Trent, Stuttgart, Baden and Strasbourg. Like Charles Sneyd, William Barrington recorded some of the ‘firsts’ of their married life, such as their first time at church together. There is no reference to physical intimacy, except a note that they reserved all three places in the coach from Venice to Trent so that they could have it to themselves.
The Barringtons’ genteel ‘wedding tour’ emulated the classic ‘grand tour’ of Europe. Theirs was a safe, well-established itinerary that was appropriate to people of their social position.
Sources:
Women, Education and Literature: the Papers of Maria Edgeworth, Part 2: The Edgeworth Papers from the National Library of Ireland. Reel 7. MS 10166/7 (933–1128). National Library of Ireland, pos 9032.
W.H. Barrington. Journal (1859). National Library of Ireland, MS 34,390/5.
Angela Byrne, ‘Lizzie and William’s Continental Honeymoon, 1859’ in Marriage and the Irish: A Miscellany, ed. Salvador Ryan (Wordwell, 2019), pp. 160–2.