Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal

The Beecher-Tilton adultery trial of 1874 held the nation in titillating thrall as Theodore Tilton, one of New York's most eminent editors and writers, sued Henry Ward Beecher, perhaps the era's most prominent U.S. clergyman, for ""criminal conversation"" with Tilton's notedly devout wife, Elizabeth. Broad outlines of the Beecher-Tilton scandal have appeared in several recent biographies of Victoria Woodhull, who first published the details of the adulterous affair in her Weekly. But Fox's book is a detailed history that, with enormous narrative skill and convincing analysis, not only delineates the motives and actions of the protagonists but also illuminates the religious, social and political world in which they lived. Fox argues that the scandal gripped the late 19th-century imagination because it resonated with immediate cultural concerns, including the sentimentalizing of a once more vigorous concept of Christianity and the perceived threat posed by ""free love"" and the movement for women's suffrage and personal freedom. He is particularly good at examining the role of popular fiction in the scandal: news reports referred constantly to The Scarlet Letter to ""explain"" the muddled situation, and Tilton even wrote a 600-page novel as a public relations gambit to save Elizabeth's reputation. Cogently argued and deftly written, Fox's analysis is likely to stand as the definitive account of this fascinating chapter in 19th-century American social history. (Nov.)