Description:
American Victorian culture is generally characterized by its domestic tranquility, religious piety, and social conformity. No wonder, then, that a love triangle between a seemingly devoted husband and wife and their trusted minister caused a scandal at the time and continues to intrigue scholars today. In 1876, Theodore Tilton, a well known editor and lecturer, claimed that his wife, Elizabeth, to all appearances the model Christian matron, had confessed to adultery with Henry Ward Beecher, the leading American preacher of the day. Although a jury sided with Elizabeth Tilton, she later undermined efforts to determine what really happened. Frequently compared to the narrative of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the Beecher-Tilton scandal confronted the American public with new dilemmas about religion and intimacy, privacy and publicity, reputation and celebrity. In his examination of the scandal, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal, Richard Wightman Fox does not attempt to reach a retrospective verdict. Instead, he uses the stories that surround the scandal to examine larger truths about morals and passion in one segment of late-19th-century middle-class America. Presenting his narrative in reverse chronological order foregrounds the process of story creation and revision that Wightman Fox considers central to the event. Period illustrations and photographs as well as reproductions of some of the most relevant correspondence presented as evidence in the Beecher-Tilton trial bring the scandal back to life and allow the reader to examine the information first-hand. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack
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