HUSBANDS AND WIVES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 688, 6 August 1870, Page 3

HUSBANDS AND WIVES.

«. {From the Spectator.') The Daily Telegraph has been sinking a shaft after its fashion into the social strata, and this time it has certainly " struck ile." "We remember nothiDg more curious in newspaper literature than the twenty or thirty feet of closely printed correspondence which hare appeared in its columns under the heading " Thoughtless husbands and neglected wires," and nothing, we may add, which men interested in English social life, its oddities, its ways, and its present wants, would do better to study. Londoners of a certain class, most of them apparently clerks or the like, found they might write letters to their favourite newspaper upon their domestic grievances, and scores upon scores of husbandß and wives availed themselves of the unexpected privilege to describe the ills and the pleasures they have experienced in their married lives, to reveal their own miseries or revel publicly in their own happiness, and above all, to teach their neighbours how they ought as " married persons " to behave. There is scarcely a letter which does not contain some bit of advice, usually in the form of a truism, such as the value of politeness as a preventive of quarrelling, or some sentence which reads as if it came out of a copy-book, such as, " All homes might be made more attractive if husbands and wives would rid themselves of the foolish idea that education ceases when one leaves school." There is a kind of passion of | didacticism in almost all of them, a real belief that if the writer could but get at the other correspondents and give them a few words of advice, advice usually almost ludicrous in its inapplicability, every domestic trouble might be removed. There is no harm in that kind of conceit that we know of, but its diffusion through a whole class is remarkable, accounts for the English rage for sermons, and suggests an unexpected amount of intellectual vanity (or is it moral vanity ?) among people whose temptation would seem to be anything rather than that. This vanity is accompanied, as usual, by an extraordinary want of reticence, rising not unfrequently to a kind of mental immodesty. A few of the correspondents try to write from the observer's point of view, telling of their grievances and their bliss as incidents they have observed in friends' houses; but the majority see no necessity for concealment, and groan over their husbands' flirtations, or absences, or habits of billiard playing, or their wives' tempers, or the worries caused by their children, or the conduct of their wives' relatives, or the husbands' want of vital religion, or the wives' itching for new ribbons, in the most outspoken way. Many of the writers favour the public with little biographies, which apparently excite no ridicule in other correspondents, who quote them as illustrations to their own lectures, while a great number frankly confess to the pettiest and least Jamiable forms of jealousy, and a few parade their happiness in a style which inspires in the reader the sense of bashfulness, the writers seem to lack. How are we to explain a gushing confidence'of this kind, which the writer evidently believes will do everybody good ?— " Sir, — I am a husband of nearly thirty years' experience, and I thought this morning that the face of my ' old woman ' was as soft and as fair as it was some twenty-nine seasons back. I think I can tell why. I do not play at any game of chance, I never

get drank, nor stop oat o' nights; indeed, I am only too glad to rest at home, and, above all, I court my wife as much now as I did when she was, ' sweet eighteen.' If I can manage it, I remember her birth and wedding days by a new dress, a jewel, or even a simple flower; and should she be sick, I try all I know to smooth her pillow, and above all, I never allow either children or servants to rebel against her authority as mistress of the house. I need hardly add that the house is a happy home. I said to a would-be husband the other day, ' Look out for a loving, affectionate daughter and sister, and if you uso her well you will get a loving wife and mother for yourself and little ones. • Marriage is a thing, I take it, Much what the couple please to make it.' " fact." There are oddities of all kinds in the letters, of course; wives who assert that men marry to secure housekeepers, and think them right in so doing; husbands who rate their wives at length for giving them too many children; and writers by the dozen, usually women, ! who suggest that the root of all domestic unhappiness is want of religious principle, and two or three women who wish publicly that women " who make themselves agreeable to other people's husbands" should be " punished." The burden of complaint, however, is very much more definite than we should have expected to find it. Allowing for a few crotchety people, all the letters from men, and a great many of those from women, reveal the self-same grievance, which the writers cannot explain, but which is really a want of camaraderie between the sexes. The wives apparently have been trained to look upon a cigar, a glass of liquor, a game of billiards, as things which, if not absolutely vicious, are superfluities in which men indulge because they are essentially selfish, while the husbands evidently think that serving them, " bringing them their slippers," and making their breakfast, is not only a duty, but also an amusement. At least one-half of this correspondence is taken up with this topic, the wife lamenting her husband's backslidings, the husband admitting that ahe has a right to lament, bat angrily declaring that his wife has no sympathy with his personal tastes, and does not understand the crave for evening amusement produced by desk-work, while a few lay the blame upon their wives' incapacity for conversation. They are always being bored, as in Jerrold's time, with servants and babies. Tha amount of bitterness manifested upon this subject of amusement is quite startling, and certainly tends to show, like a good many other incidents of to-day, that the extreme dulness of life among this class, a dulness which is decidedly approved by their religious teachers, is not calculated to improve the minor morals. As a rule, however, the sorrows are of a lighter kind, complaints mainly of that greyness and monotonousness of life against which Englishmen so seldom revolt, but which, nevertheless, if we may judge by these letters, they inwardly reseLt with bitterness too apt to expend itself on the home. We doubt if this evil is curable now, though the Germans have cured it; but its existence accounts in a great degree for the phenomenon which so puzzles and annoys the clergy — the excessive increase in places of evening amusement, none of them, we fear, very beneficial. The old restraining force has disappeared from the minds of the men ; the wife, who still reverences it, repudiates amusement at home; and out of doors in London the alternatives are the theatre, the music-hall, or tho billiard-table. Except the first, which is too expensive, there is literally nothing which the nonmusical clerk and his wife can enjoy together.