print;
satirical print
- Museum number
- 1989,1104.51
- Title
- Object: Coutume Anglaise. Femme à vendre ou à 15 schellings ma femme
- Description
-
Satire: on an English custom with a man, his head framed by a cow's horns, offers his wife for sale; she stands on a trestle table in a cattle market, being sized up by buyers. May 1818
Hand-coloured etching
- Production date
- 1818
- Dimensions
-
Height: 315 millimetres (cut)
-
Width: 240 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- This print is listed in the 'Bibliographie de France' on 9 May 1818 by Martinet. See Tim Clayton in 'Caricatures of the Peoples of the British Isles', 2007, p.86. The folk tradition of selling an unsatisfactory wife is best-known from Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge', but Clayton documents contemporary records of the custom in 1790 and 1801 in Birmingham and Stafford in the form of highly disapproving notices in the press.
See also the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, London 1869, I p.160: he was surprised at the common belief on the Continent that the English could sell their wives by law by taking them to the market with a rope around their necks.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1989
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1989,1104.51
