Love, Consent, and the Sexual Script of a Victorian Affair in Dublin

Abstract

I n J a n u a r y 1841 a p a I r o f y o u n g l o v e r s spent the night in the Downshire Hotel in Blessington, about twenty miles southwest of Dublin, Ireland. They slept in separate beds in separate rooms; nevertheless, their behavior flouted conventions. Snow trapped Mary at the hotel because the horse caravan that brought her there could not make the return journey. James, however, had his own horse and could have returned to Dublin. When he suggested that he stay with Mary, “she said no but I insisted & she yielded.”1 James recorded the details of their meeting in his diary, where he also transcribed copies of the letters the pair wrote to one another. They parted ways in the morning, and, as the diary reveals, each had a different understanding of what had happened that night and what it meant. James, bolstered by gossip and a memory of Mary’s consent to intimacy in the hotel, would later accuse her of sexual impropriety. Mary’s letters reveal her to be shocked and hurt by his rereading of the evening’s events and suggest she may have regretted her decision to meet. The fallout surrounding this one night in 1841 may seem familiar to anyone who has been following the #MeToo movement and the concurrent rise of sexual consent training for teens and adults across schools and university campuses globally. The negotiation of consent was as central to the relationship of Mary and James as it is to many contemporary couples. Yet historians have generally ignored such intimate negotiations, preferring to look at sexuality through the lens of laws and norms on a larger scale. By contrast, sociologists, activists, writers, and even lawmakers have taken individual cases seriously; they have tried to understand the lived experience of