The Pleasures of a Single Life: Envisioning Bachelorhood in Early Eighteenth-Century England.

An anonymous poem, The Pleasures of a Single Life and the Miseries of Matrimony, published and republished in the first decade of the eighteenth century, presents a familiar attack on marriage but an unusual representation of bachelorhood. The latter is depicted as a life of specific aesthetic, emotional and intellectual pleasures, satisfactions that often disappeared with marriage and included male companionship, private study, contemplation and domestic tranquility. Appearing at a time when concepts of manhood, the institution of marriage, and sexuality were in flux, and when a spate of parliamentary divorces, a widowed king, and a ‘bachelor’s tax’ featured prominently in public life, the poem drew substantial response, portraying as it did a possible unmarried life that ran unsettlingly against the grain of normative expectations. The resonance of The Pleasures, as much or more for its depiction of gratifying singleness as for its attack on matrimony, highlights the importance of the domesticity of unmarried women and men in the history of eighteenth-century society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]