Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-fv566 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-21T14:25:32.676Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Helena Michie
Affiliation:
Rice University, Houston
Get access

Summary

I have been working on Victorian Honeymoons long enough to have had conversations about the project with many different kinds of people in many different kinds of places: on airplanes, from facedown on a massage table, in grocery stores, at museums and record offices, and at academic conferences. It is the academics who joke that there can be nothing to say on the topic. What they mean, of course, is that they think “nothing happened” on the typical Victorian honeymoon, and what they mean by “nothing” is that there was probably no sex, or somehow that there was no sex that counted (it was not good enough, expert enough, fun enough, talked or written about enough). This book, as it turns out, does involve a certain amount of counting – of how many people in my sample of sixty-one couples who took their honeymoon in the period from 1830 to 1898 went to Europe, for example, or, more bewilderingly, of how many women likely got pregnant – but the project is in many ways an attempt to get beyond what I think of as honeymoon accounting, especially the binary kind that positions sex against no sex, consummation against the failure to consummate, successful against unsuccessful honeymoons.

Type
Chapter
Information
Victorian Honeymoons
Journeys to the Conjugal
, pp. xi - xxii
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Preface
  • Helena Michie, Rice University, Houston
  • Book: Victorian Honeymoons
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511484889.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Preface
  • Helena Michie, Rice University, Houston
  • Book: Victorian Honeymoons
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511484889.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Preface
  • Helena Michie, Rice University, Houston
  • Book: Victorian Honeymoons
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511484889.001
Available formats
×