The Victorian Era

What Was a Victorian Wedding Like

Article · Society & Daily Life · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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A Victorian wedding was a public ritual that combined religious ceremony, family alliance, social display, and (in the later period) the new art of the photograph. The wedding inherited its broad shape from the eighteenth century, but the period between 1840 and 1900 transformed it into something more elaborate, more expensive, more ritualised, and more photographed than anything that had come before. The decisive moment was the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on 10 February 1840 in the Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace, London. The Queen wore a white silk gown with Honiton lace designed by William Dyce, made by Mrs Bettans of Regent Street, and chosen, in defiance of court convention, by the Queen herself. The white wedding, the orange-blossom wreath, the long veil, the white favours for the bridesmaids, the bride’s trousseau of clothing and household linen — all became standard in Britain and, in due course, in the wider English-speaking world, and the white wedding of the modern world is one of the few truly Victorian inventions that has survived to this day.

The Engagement

The Victorian engagement was a long, formal, and highly ritualised process. The proposal was made by the man, was accepted by the woman, and was marked by the giving of an engagement ring, a relatively new institution of the period. Until the 1860s the engagement ring was usually a plain gold hoop, sometimes set with a single stone; the diamond solitaire became fashionable after the discovery of the South African diamond mines in 1867 and the rapid expansion of the supply of cut stones through the 1870s and 1880s, and the engagement ring as a piece of conspicuous consumption was a feature of the late Victorian period.

The engagement was the beginning of a long process of negotiation. The settlement — the document by which the bride’s father provided a dowry, the groom’s family provided a jointure for the widow, and the trustees held the family property in trust for the children — was drawn up by the family solicitors; the marriage licence was obtained from the Faculty Office or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office; the banns were published in the parish church on the three Sundays preceding the wedding; and the trousseau, the wedding presents, the wedding cake, the bridesmaids’ dresses, and the wedding breakfast were the subject of months of planning. The engagement was announced in The Times, in the Morning Post (the journal of the aristocracy), in the London Gazette, and in the parish magazine; the Gazette carried the formal notice of the “approaching marriage” of the upper-class bride, and the Morning Post carried the formal notice of the engagement party.

The couple was chaperoned in public, visited each other only in the presence of a third party, wrote to each other frequently (the publication of the engagement letters of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840 was a particular sensation), and observed a long list of formalities at the engagement party, the wedding present inspection, the trousseau tea, and the rehearsal dinner. The gentleman of the period could expect to spend a year’s income on the engagement ring and the wedding; the lady of the period could expect to spend a year’s housekeeping on the trousseau and the wedding cake. The wedding was a major social event, and the social calendar of the neighbourhood, the parish, and the family was rearranged around it.

The Wedding Ceremony

The wedding ceremony was, in the great majority of cases, a religious service in the parish church of the bride, performed by the parish clergyman according to the rite of the Book of Common Prayer. The principal elements of the ceremony were the processional, the greeting, the declaration of intent, the hymn, the prayer, the lesson, the address, the vows, the ring, the register, the blessing, and the recession; the wedding sermon, which was a feature of the wedding service of the period, was a long and elaborate address on the duties of Christian marriage. The bride was given away by her father (or, in his absence, by a male relative or friend of the family), and the ring was a plain gold band, usually inscribed with a motto or a set of initials; “my heart is thine” and “love and obedience” were the most common inscriptions, and the wedding ring was worn on the third finger of the left hand.

For the upper-class bride, the ceremony took place in a fashionable London church — St George’s, Hanover Square; the church of the parish in which the bride’s family had a town house; or the church of the country house, the great parish church, the college chapel, or the cathedral. For the middle-class bride, the service was held in the parish church of the bride’s family, in a Nonconformist chapel (Congregational, Baptist, Unitarian, Methodist), or, for the Catholic, in a Catholic church. The working-class bride was married in the parish church, in a Nonconformist chapel, or, after the Marriage Act of 1836, in the new register office. The Marriage Act of 1836 allowed non-Anglicans to be married in their own chapels or in the register office, and the new system of civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths, also established in 1836, brought the formal record of the wedding into the new General Register Office.

The bridesmaids were a feature of the wedding of every class. In the upper-class wedding the bride had six to twelve bridesmaids, all unmarried friends and sisters; the bridesmaids were dressed in white, in a uniform style of dress chosen by the bride, and they were the subject of a particular etiquette of the period. In the middle-class wedding the bride had four to six bridesmaids, dressed in a style chosen by the bride; in the working-class wedding the bride had one or two bridesmaids, dressed in their best clothes. The ushers, in the upper-class wedding, were the married friends of the groom; the best man was the closest friend of the groom, and his duties were to look after the wedding ring, to give it to the bridegroom at the moment of exchange, and to propose the toast of the bride and bridegroom at the wedding breakfast.

The Wedding Breakfast and the Honeymoon

The wedding breakfast was held at the bride’s family home — in the dining room of the suburban villa, in the great hall of the country house, or in the banqueting room of the grand hotel. The wedding breakfast was a substantial meal of cold meat, hot dishes, salads, sweets, cakes, ices, fruits, wines, and liqueurs; the wedding cake was the central feature of the wedding breakfast, a multi-tiered, fruit-filled, brandy-soaked cake covered with white icing and decorated with sugar flowers, sugar doves, sugar bells, and a small porcelain figure of the bride and bridegroom on the top. The cutting of the cake was a ceremony in itself, and the cake was sent in boxes to the relations and friends of the bride and bridegroom who were not at the wedding. The speeches — the bride’s father, the groom, the best man, and sometimes the bride herself — were a feature of the upper-class wedding of the period, and they were reported in the Morning Post and the local press.

The honeymoon was a relatively new institution. The word, which derives from the mead drunk in the Anglo-Saxon month after marriage, had been used in the eighteenth century, but the practice of taking a trip of some weeks to a fashionable resort was a feature of the 1820s and 1830s, and the period from the 1840s onwards saw the honeymoon become a standard feature of the upper-class and middle-class wedding. The fashionable destinations were the new seaside resorts of the south coast — Brighton, Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Folkestone — the Lake District, Scotland, the Channel Islands, and (for the very rich) the Continent, Italy, Switzerland, and France. The honeymoon was a private event, and the social etiquette of the period was silent on the details; the upper-class honeymoon, however, was the subject of considerable public interest, and the Morning Post and the Illustrated London News of the period carried detailed reports of the honeymoon of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra in 1863, and of the honeymoon of the Duke of Clarence and Princess Victoria Mary in 1892.

The marriage itself was, of course, the principal institution of the Victorian Family and the Home, the central social event of the Who were the Victorian upper class?, the central celebration of the How did the middle class grow in the Victorian era?, and the central rite of the Victorian Society, Class, and Daily Life of the period. The wedding was the subject of a long line of conduct books, etiquette manuals, and wedding planners, and of the conduct books of Mrs Beeton and the etiquette books of the period.