Is a really miserable novel, but it's bringing into focus for me how excited the nineteenth-century British novel got about marriage. If the eighteenth century was about how patriarchal family authority will kill you, the nineteenth is about how legally proscribed heterosexuality will probably kill you. (The early nineteenth century, meanwhile—which I'm representing with Waverley and Persuasion—is about the individual negotiating between family and marriage.) There are a lot of economic facts, a lot of details about how to live and where and when, and a sort of grudging acknowledgment that, in the end, getting married and having babies is probably the better option (even though you'll end up hating your spouse and not having enough money for the babies), because single you'll die of loneliness or starvation or being manipulated by more powerful people. So David Copperfield has a terrible first marriage (his wife spends most of their time together dying), Cranford is about how difficult it is for single women to support themselves, Villette is about how Lucy Snowe only wants to marry so she can be a widow, Barchester Tower has a whole catalogue of henpecked husbands and wicked wives (although the Stanhope children might offer a more cheerful non-heteronormative model of adult sexuality, the novel doesn't like them at all), few of the couples in Middlemarch have anyone's idea of a happy marriage (except Will and Dorothea at the end, I guess, and Fred and Mary, except it takes them all a long time and a lot of pain to get there), and Jude—well, Jude is just about misery. By Jude, too, the novel has gotten much more explicit about how terrible the idea of marriage is, how it'll ruin everyone's life, how heterosexuality is dreadful, and how it's also necessary because single women are absolutely fucked. What Maisie Knew is very much anti-marriage, too—the only relationships that novel likes are the completely non-heteronormative ones (Masie's love for her step-parents, her governess's love for her, and for her step-father).
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is my only nineteenth-century British novel that isn't explicitly about marriage, unless Jekyll/Hyde were a sort of queered marriage—in which case it does work as a novel about marriage because, just like the century's other anti-marriage novels, the pair start by making each other miserable and end in a double murder/suicide. Which is essentially, says Hardy, what getting married is about in the first place.
(Helpfully for my theory, The House of the Seven Gables doesn't have much to say about marriage, making it distinctly un-British. Its sense of threat is located around 18th-century-style family-paranoia issues—although it gets over these in the end by making the last descendants of Maule and Pyncheon marry each other—which is nice, I guess? It's a very hopeful novel, anyway.)
