A Deadly Dowry

Or, were dowries really that important?

Dear Reader,

On Saturday night, I bit the bullet and emailed the manuscript of my latest book to my publisher, the wonderful Jo Mackay at HQ Publishing. Jo has published my Poppy McGowan mysteries (writing as Pamela Hart) and a couple of Regency novellas, but this will be my first Elizabeth Leydin mystery novel.

I’m rather nervous about it! I’ll tell you more as we come closer to publication day, which isn’t until Feburary 2027, but the tag line is ‘Bridgerton meets Agatha Christie’ - it’s a country house murder mystery set in 1814.

The title hasn’t been finalised, but my working title is A Deadly Dowry - and I’d love to know what you think of it!

Dowries come up a lot in Regency fiction, but how important were they, really?

Let’s be clear about what a dowry was and still is in some cultures.

A dowry is money or goods given to the groom or the groom’s family when the bride marries him.

The premise behind the monetary dowry (although it’s wrapped up in lots of nice sentiments in many cultures) is that women are burdens and you need to be compensated for taking one on. The family is essentially giving the groom’s family the money they would have spent on the support of an unmarried woman. Charming, eh?

This is in stark contrast with other cultures where the groom might have to pay a bride-price, because women were assets.

As the old saying goes, there’s more to marriage than four legs in a bed.

In Regency Britain, dowries were of two kinds: material and financial. In the lower classes, a girl was expected to bring with her much of the material goods the couple would need. She would usually make most of these things: bedlinen, tablecloths, tea towels, towels, pot holders, quilts or coverlets or blankets, etc, as well as new clothes for herself. Once she was engaged, she would often be given (as birthday or Christmas presents) useful items for her new household: pots, pans, crockery, cutlery. The groom and his family would provide the actual house (mostly rented) and usually some furniture. All these things were often put together in a chest for safe-keeping (the ‘glory box’).

This is one of the reasons that, at this point in history, the average age for marriage was in the mid-twenties (around 24). People needed time to make or acquire the goods and chattels needed to set up a household. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people were even older than that - in their late twenties! The mechanisation of production made pots and pans and textile goods, for example, much cheaper, so couples didn’t take as long to acquire them.

The financial dowry was mostly a custom of the upper classes, and this is where, in Pride and Prejudice, the Bennet girls’ lack of dowries is such a hindrance to their marriages.

The bigger your dowry, the better the match you could expect, assuming you yourself weren’t ugly or otherwise problematic (eg illegitimate). Without one, unless you were astonishingly beautiful and charming, you had little chance. Mrs Bennet was the only one in that family who faced up to reality.

Did no girls without dowries ever marry? Well, of course they did. Love did promote some matches, but marrying into the aristocracy or the top ranks of society (the ton) was unlikely - which is why stories were still told generations later about the Gunning sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, poor Irish beauties who married a duke and an earl respectively.

Elizabeth Gunning, who became the Duchess of Argyll by Francis Cotes, 1751.

So the dowry was a fixture in polite Society. However, the groom didn’t always use the dowry. A common custom was for the dowry to be ‘settled’ on the wife. That is, it was held for her in trust. It was often what paid her ‘pin-money’ and, after her husband’s death, was often hers, her ‘widow’s jointure’, especially if the estate itself was entailed and was bound to go to the next male heir—who might or might not (as in Sense and Sensibility) look after the widow and any daughters. So making sure your daughter had a decent dowry was one of the ways loving families ensured their daughters would always be looked after—and they also made sure that what happened to the dowry was enshrined in the marriage contract so that no spendthrift husband could touch it.

Of course, the groom did sometimes use the dowry - when we read about an impoverished nobleman marrying a wealthy ‘Cit’ heiress whose father is in trade (as in Georgette Heyer’s A Civil Contract), it was understood that the dowry was there to ‘pull him out of the River Tick’. (To buy ‘on tick’ was to buy on credit.)

What does all this have to do with A Deadly Dowry? Well, what if you had a beautiful, beloved daughter, but she only had a ‘respectable’ dowry? What would you be prepared to do, to ensure that she was safe and not humiliated in the Marriage Mart?

One of my characters is prepared to go to extreme lengths for her daughter…

I can’t wait to share this book with you!

your humble servant

Elizabeth