Book Review: Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans
Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans. By Karen Lystra. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 360 pp. $34.95.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
There is nothing quite like reading the letters written by people of the past to get a true sense of how they viewed the world they lived in and thought about the things that were important to them. In Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans, historian Karen Lystra digs deep into the archive to show us what the world of love, pairing, courtship, and marriage was like for those lower class citizens who made up much of the nation’s population.
Descending socioeconomically from her earlier book, Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth Century America, which looked at love during the era among those of the middle class, Lystra’s recent work exemplifies her claim in the book’s introduction that “everyone has a story worth telling.” In addition, she states “that understanding the lives of ordinary people is essential to capturing the big picture of American culture and behavior.” (1)
As one might imagine this is all well and good on the surface, but finding enough extant evidence from people who were typically not part of the social classes represented in archives seems like an enormous challenge. However, as Lystra shows, with enough research that reaches both broad and deep, there is certainly enough surviving material to draw from to make sound interpretations. To help, she expanded her search outside of couples’ letters and also sought included those of family members and friends of her subjects, as those folks often were involved in matching pairs and either encouraging or discouraging relationships. Lystra also focused her searching on certain periods in the 19th century that often created separations for many people of the working class, and thus the need for writing and sending letters. The Civil War, the California Gold Rush, and other periods of westward expansion proved especially fruitful.
Lystra’s deep archival dive not only allowed her to get a strong sense of gendered love practices, but those of different races, which helped her fulfill her goal “to understand the shared conceptions and practices of intimacy within a geographically and racially diverse population of free people below the middle class.” (4)
Divided into eight chapters that are bookended by an intriguing introduction and thought-provoking epilogue, Love and the Working Class explores an array of subjects centered on the theme of love. Lystra covers topics like the challenges of letter writing for a population that was largely illiterate or transitionally-literate; how men and women paired off and chose mates; romantic vs. non-romantic courtship; friendships and community in relationships; challenges of unhappy marriages; and love expressions through simple poetry, among several others.
In addition to the chapters, Lystra includes two appendices; one covering “Writing, Education, and Literacy,” and the other discussing “Literacy and Oral Culture.” The book is illustrated with many images highlighting various subjects covered in the book’s text. Occupational and Civil War soldiers’ photographs, photos of letter styles, Valentine’s Day cards, and an embroidered sampler are all included.
Alluded to above, and perhaps most impressive of all, is the book’s notes section. Covering over 80 pages and showing her far-reaching research, the vast majority of the evidence that Lystra incorporates are previously unpublished primary sources. Students of the Civil War will be especially interested in the many soldier accounts that she references; which only makes sense because no event in the 19th century produced more letter writers among the working class than did the Civil War.
Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans makes a valuable contribution to the historiography and is a well-crafted piece of social history. It not only makes for fascinating reading, it reveals a much different era than our own of speed dating and online matchmaking. Although, on the other hand, in some respects, we’re perhaps not as far removed from some 19th-century relationship practices as we might think we are.
