Wife for Sale:
George Wray tied a halter around his wife’s waist and headed to the nearest market. He wasn’t there to buy anything—he was there to sell his wife. Onlookers shouted as he auctioned her off to the highest bidder, William Harwood. After Harwood turned over a single shilling to Wray, “Harwood walked off arm in arm with his smiling bargain,” reported an onlooker, “with as much coolness as if he had purchased a new coat or hat.” It was 1847, and Wray had just gotten the equivalent of a divorce.
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Joseph Thompson, who allegedly sold his wife in 1832, listed his wife’s bad qualities, calling her “a born serpent” and advising the buyers to “avoid frolicsome women as you would a mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera.” Then he listed her assets, which included the ability to milk cows, sing, and serve as a drinking companion. “I therefore offer here with all her perfections and imperfections, for the sum of fifty shillings,” he concluded, adding a fun flourish to the end of his marriage.
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The sales took on the form of cattle auctions of the time. After announcing the sale, the man would put a ribbon or a rope around his wife’s neck, arm or waist and lead her to “market”. Then, he’d auction her off, often after declaring her virtues to the onlookers. Usually, wife sales were merely symbolic—there was just one bidder, the woman’s new lover. Sometimes there wasn’t a designated buyer, though, and an actual bidding war broke out. Men could announce a wife sale without informing their wife, and she might be bid on by total strangers.
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The scene sounds like an elaborate joke. In reality, it was anything but. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, divorce was prohibitively expensive. So some lower-class British people didn’t get them—they sold their wives instead.
Wife sales were crude and funny, but they also served a very real purpose since it was so hard to get a divorce. If your marriage broke up in the 1750s, you had to obtain a private Act of Parliament—essentially, an exception to Britain’s draconian divorce law—to formally divorce. The process was expensive and time-consuming, so wife-selling arose as a form of faux divorce. It wasn’t technically legal, but the way it unfolded in public made it valid in the eyes of many
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