Marriage Quote by Samuel Richardson

A prim, almost parental “absolutely” is doing the dirty work here, smuggling a radical claim into the language of moral instruction. In early- to mid-18th-century Britain, marriage was less a romantic culmination than a legal and economic consolidation: property, lineage, reputation. Richardson, the great architect of interiority in the English novel, insists that the private life of feeling has to precede the public contract. The sentence sounds like etiquette. It’s actually a power move on behalf of individual consent.

The intent is double. On the surface, it endorses propriety: love as a prerequisite that sanctifies marriage rather than disrupts it. Underneath, it challenges the idea that families, guardians, or class logic get to decide a woman’s future. Richardson’s fiction (Pamela, Clarissa) is obsessed with the moral stakes of courtship because courtship is where coercion masquerades as custom. “Love before marriage” becomes a safeguard: not lust, not mere flirtation, but a tested attachment that can resist pressure, seduction, and the social panic around female virtue.

The subtext also flatters the rising middle-class reader. Love is framed as a kind of rational credential, a moral proof that two people are fit to enter a household together. That’s modern in its own way: feeling as evidence, emotion as due diligence. The line works because it wears the mask of conservatism while quietly rewriting the hierarchy. It doesn’t reject marriage; it redefines what counts as a legitimate reason to enter it, relocating authority from inheritance and arrangement to the interior, newly narratable self.