The Company She Keeps

A HISTORY OF COURTING (290 pp.)--E. S. Turner--Dutton ($3.75).

Why does not lovely Miss Somersdown give her hand to Mr. Bluster? Is it because Bluster, who is inclined to booze, resembles "a walking lump of drink-produced excrescences?" No, no, it is not that at all. It is because Bluster's courting technique is so blistering--"a cold methodical intriguing piece of secularity, without sympathy or sentiment, talent or tenderness." It cannot be compared to the courting methods of manly Nat, who cries from the bottom of his honest heart: "O speak unreservedly to me, Miss Somersdown; if your heart be free and unfettered ... if there be any means by which my unmitigable devotion can receive as devoted a return . . . speak, speak, my dear Miss Somersdown!"

Britain's E. S. Turner (The Shocking History of Advertising) doubts that all Victorian couples courted with the fluency of Nat and Miss Somersdown, who are taken from a book on courting etiquette of the year 1877. But he believes that their language illustrates one extreme of the art of courting. The Prince Regent (later George IV) showed the opposite extreme when, on being introduced to his bride-to-be, Caroline of Brunswick, he tottered backwards, crying to one of his courtiers: "Harris, I am not well. Pray get me a glass of brandy."

Troubadours & Puritans. Courting is not always immediately recognizable as such, but there is no doubt that the art has had its ups and downs. In ancient Greece, wives were mere childbearers, purchased from their fathers; only courtesans and homosexuals knew the joys of courtship. In the later Roman Empire, courting seems to have been simply the "pursuit of the other man's wife, conducted as a sport." Though St. Jerome complains that the 4th-century minx had some shockers up her sleeve ("Her upper garment sometimes falls ... to show her naked shoulders, and as if she would not be seen, she covers that in all haste which voluntarily she showed"), he has no light to shed on what was up the gentleman's. Courting, "in the modern sense," did not exist until the 12th century, when the troubadours discovered the art of "rewriting ancient tales in a new romantic idiom, with as little conscience as a team of film scriptwriters falsifying the Old Testament." Since then, courting has passed-tfirough many phases.

P: Twelfth-century Dorothy Diggs advised businessmen not to court ladies by boasting of "military prowess." If they did, the ladies would "point out that soldiers' calves are slender and their feet of modest dimensions, whereas [the businessman's] calves are fat." The courting gentleman was also faced with courtly dilemmas. Asked, for example, which half of his lady he would prefer to have if she were divided in two at the waist, it is fruitless to plump piously for the top half (in hope of being rewarded with the lower) because the lady would only point out coldly "that the foundations of a building are more important than the upper storeys"--and leave him with no comeback but to mumble that "trees are praised for their upper parts."

P: In Tudor days, the nicest people courted in a way that would have offended Nat and Miss Somersdown. When Sir William Roper called on Sir Thomas More with a proposal to marry one of his daughters, Sir Thomas led him to the daughters', bed and whipped off the covers. "The two girls lay on their backs 'and their smocks up as high as their armpits' . . . they at once rolled over on their bellies. Sir William Roper said: 'I have seen both sides.' He then patted one of the girls on the buttock, and said, 'Thou art mine.' "

P: The iyth century brought the Puritan to take the bawdy fun out of Cavalier courting. Diarist Samuel Pepys, having bought his friend Mrs. Lane a lobster in a tavern, "toused" her all over, and had just discovered the extent of her charms ("a^very white thigh ... but monstrous fat") when he was spotted through the window, and Sam took flight. Across the water, in New England, Puritan divines were struggling to stop "bundling." Many students think that this was an innocent form of courting which greatly reduced fuel bills, but Washington Irving, for one, believed that it brought New England "a rawboned hardy race of whoreson whalers, woodcutters, fishermen and pedlars, and strapping corn-fed wenches"--fine specimens who little deserved the curse of one antibundling poet:

Deep down in hell there let them dwell

And bundle on that bed,

Then turn and roll without control

Till all their lusts are fed.

Errors & Definitions. The problem that confronts the historian of courting is similar to that facing the student of bundling, i.e., who can say just what it is and at what point it turns into something rather different? Is, for example, petting (on which Author Turner has a highly tactile chapter) a form of courting, or is it usually just the opposite? If courting is a prelude to marriage, is it fair to make it cover seduction and abduction, or to describe the striking rise in British illegitimacy rates as "errors of courtship?''

Author Turner has not kept a bolster of definition between himself and his subject matter, with the result that instead of a history of courting he has produced a strapping, whoreson history of wenching.

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