The Secret Honeymoon: 1898

FADS DON’T GO WITH HIM.

He Had a Taste of Latest and He is Cured.

Fell Info a Trap Which a Revengeful Rival Had Planned for Him.

Cost Groom Something to Change His Route, but He Paid Cheerfully.

“I don’t go very much on these new fads in the line of weddings,” said the bridegroom, cocking his feet on the desk of the insurance man and lighting a fresh cigarette. “I’ve just been up against the game, and I’ll stake any body to my part of it next time.”

“What are you talking about?” asked the insurance man. “What do you mean by new fads in weddings?”

“Well, I’ll tell you my troubles and you can figure It out for yourself,” said the benedict. “You see, some daffy guy framed up a game some place or other where the fads come from for what is known as a ‘secret honeymoon.’ The bride and groom are not to be wise to where they are going until they are on the train after the ceremony. The best man is the whole works and does everything for them. He selects a route, buys the tickets, checks the baggage, frames it up with the hotels and gets everything ready for one round of pleasure. Then the tickets and a letter of instructions are put in a sealed envelope and dealt out to Mr Sucker, the bridegroom, and he opens it on the train and goes wherever the best man has things arranged. Now what do you think of that tor a nutty scheme?”

“That is certainly very much foolish house,” admitted the insurance man. “If the best man wanted to gently josh you along the line he couldn’t do a thing under that scheme.”

“Well maybe you think he didn’t, said the bridegroom. “Wait till I tell you. They kept on shooting a bunch of hot air into me about this game and what a good thing it was and how novel it was, that they finally got me to stand for it. I don’t know what kind of hop I was against when I said all right but this fellow Haskins, who was framed to pull off the deal certainly had me conned. I was a little bit daffy anyhow, you know, as a man is likely to be just when he is going to be married, and I thought it would be a grand little plan and it was me to it.

“But it’s no more for me, not if I get married eight times more. It’s me for the little details and all the plans next time. Old Mr Haskins is a good thing and this was the only chance he had to jolly me. As a matter of fact he used to be pretty well stuck on this girl I married and I guess he thought he was there until I got in the running and then he wasn’t 1, 2, 46. But any how, he pretended to be the real glad-hand friend when he heard I had things settled, and it was nobody but him for the best man at the doin’s, and then he springs his funny game on me about the secret honeymoon.

“I let him go ahead and frame every thing up, and I congratulated myself that I wouldn’t have to worry about train time and hotels and Niagara falls and other things, as the average bridegroom does. He got me the tickets and everything, and I got his little old sealed envelope and the wife, and I tore for the rattlers all in good shape after the ceremony. When I got her nicely seated in the parlor car I went into the smoker, a little bit nervous, to see what Haskins had framed up for me.

“O, but he was there with the goods strong! ‘Get off at Albion and go to the Pararzoom house,’ says Mr Sealed Instructions. And I spent the next three hours wondering what Albion was like and whether the Pararzoom house had money enough to buy fly screens. Of course Edith and I were not especially anxious to tip off to the mob that we had just been married. Every couple feels that way, I suppose, and I know I was willing to keep dark for a while and make a bluff that we were celebrating our golden wedding.

“Well, about 7 o’clock In the evening we pulled in at a little old bum wooden station with a big sign ‘Albion’ all across the front of It. I didn’t get wise on the jump that we were on a lobster, but I piled out with Edith on my arm and the porter carrying a wagonload of grips. A coachman steps up to me as soon as I got off and says:

“‘Mr Amschasm?’

“I says ‘Yes.'”

“’This is your rig, sir,’ he says. Well, I thought that was pretty fair for a starter, and we got in, me handing Haskins a little mental compliment for his thoughtfulness about the rig. Just then I heard a band playing the ‘Wedding March’ from ‘Lohengrin.’ I thought I was dopey first, and that it was only a memory, but around the corner of the station came the Albion silver cornet band, and it fell in right ahead of our carriage. I was wise in a minute.

“Edith was ready to jump out and take to the woods, but I managed to make the driver stop while about 200 rubbernecks gathered around us. I helped Edith out of the carriage, and we hustled for another one, while the crowd sent up three cheers for the bride. I was sore enough to have shot Haskins if he was there, and I told the driver to take us to the best hotel in town. He whipped up and in a few minutes we walked into a hotel.

“As soon as I registered the clerk turned around and handed me the key to the bridal chamber. It was decorated with white ribbon, and he smiled a knowing smile as he laid it before he. I wanted to strangle him, but I took the key and went upstairs. The room was about 10 feet square, low ceilinged and hot. There was no screen in the window, and I could see my finish in there. I went back to the clerk and made a large roar, but he said it was the best room in the house and had been especially ordered for me.

“’When does the next train leave here?’ I asked.

“’Quarter after 1 tomorrow morning,” he said, with a bow and a rub of the hands which drove me frantic.

“‘Well I’ll take it,’ I said. ‘I don’t want your clothes closet up there.’

“We gathered up our baggage and were driven back to the station, and there I fixed it up with the station agent to wire to the division headquarters and hire me a special car and engine to take me Cincinnati. It came all right and It cost me $125, but we got out of Albion. The next morning I carefully tore up Mr Haskins’ letter of instructions, got a lot of time tables and framed up a little wedding tour of our own, and I’ve been looking for him ever since. I understand he has enlisted.”

The Boston [MA] Globe 2 October 1898: p. 37

Mrs Daffodil’s Aide-memoire:  The embarrassing ordeal of the honeymoon for both bride and groom was well recognised. If they went directly to their own home, they were apt to be serenaded in the night by neighbours with horns, banging pots, and celebratory gunfire. If they went on a wedding tour, every porter, hotel clerk, and waiter easily identified them as newlyweds and grinned a knowing grin.

The ideal was to pass for an old married couple on a little holiday jaunt–it was axiomatic that “no one tries to look so experienced as a brand-new bride”—but this did not always work:

And when a honeymoon couple are trying to pass themselves off as married folk of long standing, and a shower of tell-tale rice, descending from a pocket or a suddenly-opened umbrella, gives the whole show away, the result is embarrassing.

Taranaki [NZ] Daily News 23 October 1909: p. 4

The reality was more often like this gentleman’s experience:

Will not the postboy, the fly-driver, the landlord, and the chambermaids pursue him with commiseration?…Brisk, cheery, bald-headed old gentlemen, utter strangers to you, shake you by the hand; elderly and excellent dowagers, with no claims on your friendship, take a warm interest in you — perhaps one will utterly confound you with a smacking kiss — and away you are jostled out of the passage, across the pavement, bundled into the carriage, slippers shied at your head, and amid the cheers of the company, the jeers and hurrahs of all the butcher boys, costermongers, and little urchins of the neighborhood, hey! presto! you’re on your honeymoon, minus one glove, and your hat backside foremost….As to Fred [the bridegroom]…he wishes all this parade over. Of course every one is smiling, and can see he is a foo — bridegroom….. Draw up with a very sudden halt at first-class entrance Paddington Station, porters twig in a moment, require no whistling now — bran’ new boxes, and “Both of ’em rigged out in new clothes; I say, Bill, here’s a wedding….”

And thus after a month’s bliss, a sweet honeymoon and the consciousness that they have been stared at and detected throughout the length and breadth of the land, the “happy couple” return to the quietness of their new little — their own home, to receive the congratulations of their friends, and the calls of their acquaintances. Bella is contented and happy, Fred himself again, thoroughly glad that the ordeal of the honeymoon has been passed, and that the world can now recognise his new position without staring at him, and without thinking him a — well, without thinking him a bridegroom.

North Otago Times 15 March 1872: p. 4

 

Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdote

You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales.

Saturday Snippets: 7 June 2013 A parson’s perplexity; love found in a pair of men’s drawers; wedding gown box fad

Bride and very dapper groom.

More snippets today about weddings, courtship, and the relations between the sexes.

The Wedding Gown Box

The wedding gown box is a recent fad for the well-to-do bride to adopt, and it bids fair to have quite a vogue. That every bride possessed of any sentiment wishes to keep her wedding gown in a state of preservation is a foregone conclusion, and this elegant receptacle is admirably suited to the purpose of which it was designed, says the Philadelphia Telegraph. It is made of light wood, enamelled white, and having the bride’s initials in silver letters on the outside. A lining of tufted white satin is revealed on opening the box and locks of silver and white leather straps fasten it. A photograph of the wedding gown is often taken by the modiste before sending it home, and making a collection of the photographs of wedding gowns or any other distinctive costumes is one of the present fads, the idea being to preserve the pictures as mementoes for future generations and also as illustrations of present day fashions. Boston [MA] Herald 1 June 1902: p. 32

A Singular Occurrence. An exchange paper says that a young lady moving in the upper circles at Chicago was betrothed at the beginning of the war to a lieutenant in the army. He was killed in battle, and his body taken home and buried by his nearest friend and comrade, who was with him when he fell. To this young man the lady’s affections were very naturally transferred in time, and she engaged to marry him. When the happy day arrived, and just as the clergyman was about to pronounce them man and wife, the lady fainted, and being revived forbade any further procedure, as she said she had seen the spirit of her former lover, and he was opposed to the match. She persisted in her decision, and has since retired to a convent. Cape Ann Advertiser [Gloucester, MA] 1 September 1865: p. 2  

There is a rich man in the Black Hill,s says the Bismarck Times, who dates the beginning of his fortune from the day when he sold his wife for $4,000. Osgood Ripley [IN] Journal 14 April 1887: p. 6 

 Not Her Husband After All. A young married woman has just lost her life at Lyons by a curious mistake. She was returning from Vaise, where she had been to spend the day with a young man, when, in passing the quay, she exclaimed, on seeing a person approach: “Heaven, here is my husband!” and running to the river, jumped in and was drowned. The man who had unintentionally caused her alarm was a stranger to her Cincinnati [OH] Enquirer 19 July 1885: p. 11. 

News comes from Vienna of a new idea at weddings—the wearing of a wreath of roses by the mother of the bride. Upon arriving home after the ceremony, the bride’s mother removes her hat and puts on a half circle of roses, composed of buds with silver petals and foliage. The Van Wert [OH] Daily Bulletin 5 November 1909: p. 7

GETTING AROUND A DIFFICULTY

Judge C., a well-known, highly respectable Knickerbocker, on the shady side of fifty, widower with five children full of fun and frolic, ever ready for a joke to give or take—was bantered the other evening by a miss of five and twenty for not taking a wife. She argued that he was hale and hearty and deserved a matrimonial mess-mate. The Judge acknowledged the fact, admitted that he was convinced by the eloquence of his fair friend that he had thus far been remiss, expressed contrition of the fault confessed, and ended with offering himself to the lady, telling her she could not certainly reject him after pointing out his heinous offense. The lady replied that she would be most happy to take the situation so uniquely advertised, and become bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, but there was one—to her—serious obstacle.

“Well,” said the Judge, “name it. My profession is to surmount such obstacles.” “Ah! Judge, this is beyond your powers. I have vowed if I ever married a widower, he must have ten children.”

“Ten children! Oh, that’s nothing,” says the Judge. “I’ll give you five now and my notes on demand in yearly installments for the balance.” Iowa State Reporter [Waterloo, IA] 18 September 1872: p. 7 

Hired altars for use at home weddings is one of the more recent fashionable fads of the upper ten-dom of New York society. Fashion has some queer freaks.Western Kansas World 23 July 1892: p. 5 

A Singular Death-bed Scene [Montreal Dispatch to New York Times]

At a late hour last night a man named Alphonse Mousset went to the Civic Hospital, rang the door-bell, and on being asked who was there answered that it was a new patient. As soon as the door was opened by a nun he rushed into the hospital and upstairs into the women’s ward. There he knelt by the bedside of his dying wife and implored her before leaving him forever to sign some sort of a contract by which after her death he should be recognized as the sole possessor of some $500 she owned in bank shares. The gardener was called in, and by his aid Mousset was very quickly shown outside the door. The woman died to-day. The couple had been married only six weeks. Cincinnati [OH] Enquirer 19 July 1885:  p. 11. 

Three years ago a young woman in Nashua wrote a few sensible words of devotion to the Union and put the paper with her name in a pair of soldiers’ drawers she was making for the Nashua Manufacturing Company. The soldier who drew the drawers wrote to her, and the correspondence was kept up. He was promoted to a Lieutenancy, and was lately discharged; and later still the couple were married. Cape Ann Advertiser [Gloucester, MA] 1 September 1865: p. 2  

ANECDOTE A certain Macaroni bien peudre et bien frize, with a feather hat under his arm, perfumed like an Egyptian mummy, and who had all the appearance of a modern puppy, went to church with his bride, to receive the nuptial blessing, when the Parson, struck with wonder at the strange apparition, for fear of a mistake, thought proper to ask before the ceremony, which of the two was the Lady? Spooner’s Vermont Journal [Windsor, VT]  7 April 1784: p. 3 

“Never write letters, young man, that you’ll regret in after life.” “You speak as from experience.” “I do. In early correspondence with her who is now my wife I signed myself, ‘Your obedient servant.’” The Day Book [Chicago, IL] 6 January 1913: p. 28

Mrs Daffodil’s Aide-memoire:  A previous post for this week contained18th-century suggestions for choosing an agreeable husband. You might also enjoy a post from last Valentine’s Day on vintage advice to select a worthy spouse.