Courtship in Georgian England was a decisive moment in the life cycle, imagined as a tactical game, an invigorating sport, and a perilous journey across a turbulent sea. This volume brings to life the emotional experience of courtship using the words and objects selected by men and women to navigate this potentially fraught process. It provides new insights into the making and breaking of relationships, beginning with the formation of courtships using the language of love, the development of intimacy through the exchange of love letters, and sensory engagement with love tokens such as flowers, portrait miniatures, and locks of hair. It also charts the increasing modernization of romantic customs over the Georgian era - most notably with the arrival of the printed valentine's card - revealing how love developed into a commercial industry. The book concludes with the rituals of disintegration when engagements went awry, and pursuit of damages for breach of promise in the civil courts. The Game of Love in Georgian England brings together love letters, diaries, valentines, and proposals of marriage from sixty courtships sourced from thirty archives and museum collections, alongside an extensive range of sources including ballads, conduct literature, court cases, material objects, newspaper reports, novels, periodicals, philosophical discourses, plays, poems, and prints, to create a vivid social and cultural history of romantic emotions. The book demonstrates the importance of courtship to studies of marriage, relationships, and emotions in history, and how we write histories of emotions using objects. Love emerges as something that we do in practice, enacted by couples through particular socially and historically determined rituals.

About the Author
Sally Holloway is the Vice Chancellor's Research Fellow in History and History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. Holloway is an historian of emotions, gender, material culture, and romantic relationships in Georgian England. After completing her AHRC-funded PhD at Royal Holloway in 2013, she worked on the Georgians season at Historic Royal Palaces, and taught at Queen Mary University of London, Oxford Brookes University, and Richmond, The American International University in London. With Stephanie Downes and Sarah Randles, she is co-editor of Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History (OUP, 2018).

Reviews
Holloway's work is important for historians interested in gender, marriage and the law, but it also serves as a broader study in how to use material culture to understand the history of emotions. Her close attention to the ways in which courting couples used objects in a conscious attempt to create emotional experiences presents a model for thinking about how objects might function in other cultural situations. The breadth of her research, drawing from dozens of archives along with museums and private collections, is impressive ... Holloway has presented a welcome new way of thinking about early modern love and courtship, and this book should serve as a reference and model for scholars for years to come. * Ingrid Tague, English Historical Review *
Holloway excels at showing the relationship between culture and practice, providing detailed and precise evidence for the replication of cultural 'scripts' in individual relationships...a fascinating addition to the histories of marriage and courtship, and a significant work within a growing scholarship on emotions and material culture. * Kate Gibson, University of Manchester, History *
Eighteenth-century emotions have never been so keenly felt as in Sally Holloway's engaging and wide-ranging study The Game of Love in Georgian England. Holloway provides a thoroughly researched and lively account of the rituals, material culture and lexicon of love and courtship...The study is underpinned by an impressive range of contemporary source material, extending well beyond life-writings to include novels, plays and poetry, ballads and prints, medical treatises, newspaper reports and court cases, paintings, philosophical discourses, periodicals and conduct literature. * Helen Metcalfe, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies *
a landmark study...builds on work in the history of the family and the history of emotions to examine romantic courtship from the inside out. The power of objects as conduits for emotion is palpable in Holloway's excellent account of the sensory uses of love tokens - gazing at, touching and smelling them - 'to achieve the feeling of being in love' (83). This is a model account of the affective work performed by objects. * Karen Harvey, Social History *
Holloway adroitly couples details with theory, and enhances her "object-driven approach" with illuminating reproductions of period pictures, cartoons and artefacts. * Jane O'Grady, Telegraph *
As well as a vivid account of eighteenth-century courtship, Holloway offers much food for thought regarding the impact of social conventions and consumer culture on emotional experience and its expression. The language of romantic love was remarkably consistent across social classes in the eighteenth century while at the same time flexible in response to changing ideas and fashions. As she points out in her conclusion, it continues to evolve. * Marilyn L. Morris, Eighteenth-Century Studies *
an impressive book which offers new insights into how Georgian men and women negotiated the processes of courtship, and provides an exemplar of how to 'do' emotions history with objects. * Elizabeth Spencer, Women's History Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192870995
Author Sally Holloway
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 368g
Dimensions(mm) 233mm * 155mm * 15mm