Speed Dating Events

Yonder a maid and her wight

Go whispering by,

War’s annals will fade into night

Ere their story die.

It is LOVELY WHEN DUKES FIND their Duchesses. Or any kind of lord or lordling, baron or baronet. But making a magic proposal is not the monopoly of a titled or educated man. The wonders of falling in love and wanting to marry are available to all comers, high and low alike. It’s a real- life drama of dreams come true for every new couple.

The proposals of un-literary men have a vigour and directness that make you want to jump up and accept them, straight off. As Miss Matty says in Cranford:

I have known people with very good hearts and clever minds too, who were not what some people reckoned refined, but who were both true and tender.

True and tender is the very phrase for the unknown suitor who composed his proposal in verse some time in the seventeenth century.

Jan’s lady is obviously a woman of spirit. Notice how often he keeps promising her that she can wear the trousers if she likes. He’s also keen to assure her that she will be treated with all the respect that a husband owes his wife. But the amorous undertone on his reference to her ‘fair bum’ suggests that he won’t neglect his other matrimonial responsibilities either:

I am by fate slave to your will,

And I will be obedient still.

To show my love 1 will compose ye

For your fair finger’s ring, a posie,

In which shall be expressed my duty And how I’ll be forever true t’ye;

With low-made bows and sugared speeches, Yielding to your fair bum the breeches, And show myself in all I can

Your very humble servant

Jan might have been an ordinary man, but he’d got hold of one very important truth — that a female does like to have her . . . understanding admired. In the famous case that rocked British racing, was it disqualifiable conduct when a gentleman jockey rode up behind a lady jockey and sang out ‘WHAT-A-LOVELY-BOTTOM!’, thus causing her to lose her concentration (and the race)?

Sometimes men who are not inclined to flowery verbiage find that actions speak louder than words. Shelley Winters records that her first husband was a flying enthusiast, who used to take her up in small open-cockpit aeroplanes. When she proved that she wasn’t frightened, but loved flying as much as he did, he knew what to do. He whizzed her off one Sunday somewhere over Cleveland, and presumably having switched over to the automatic pilot, he slipped a beautiful 3-carat diamond ring on her finger. ‘I still wear it,’ she says with satisfaction. Now that’s the kind of gesture most girls would appreciate!

But of all the speaking actions in the history of marriage proposals, surely the most endearing is that of ‘Major Jones‘. Major Jones flourished in the old South West of America in the 184os and was the creation of a refugee Northerner, William Tappan Thompson. As the hard- pressed editor of a failing periodical, Thompson invented this character of a lovable innocent in a last-ditch effort to save his paper. The paper folded anyway, but the Major lived on.

The story of ‘Major Jones’s Courtship’ is told in a series of letters which have lost none of their appeal today. Part of their charm lies in the Major’s unique style of writing. With a sublime unselfconsciousness, he makes up all his own spelling and grammar as he goes along. It’s not that he’s ignorant or stupid. Born into the Southern gentry, with his own plantation and the future set fair, he just has had no call to be overloaded with book-larnin’.

But with or without benefit of Webster’s Dictionary, young Joseph Jones is a simply gorgeous catch. He is straight, sweet, and honest as the day is long. He knows how to love a girl, and how to show her what he can’t put into words. This is how he does it. One Christmas Eve he pays a call on the beautiful Miss Mary, to tell her about the Christmas present that he wants to give her:

‘I got a gift for you, what I want you to keep all your life, but it would take a two-bushel bag to hold it,’ ses I.

‘Oh, that’s the kind,’ ses she.

`But will you keep it as long as you live?’ ses I. `Certinly I will, Majer,’ ses Miss Mary, ‘but what is it?’

`Never mind,’ ses I. ‘You hang up a bag big enuff to hold it, and you’ll find out what it is, when you see it in the mornin.’

I sot up till mid night, and when they was all gone to bed I went softly into the back gate, and went up to the porch, and thar, shore enuff, was a grate big meal bag hangin to the jice. It was monstrous unhandy to git into it, but I was tarmined not to back out. 1 sot down in bag, and here cum Missis’ grate big cur dog rippin and tarin through the yard like rath. I didn’t breathe louder nor a kitten, for fear he’d find me out.

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