Ladder of love
This is another find from the Maitland Dougall trunk. It’s a paper ladder, carefully cut out, with a heart at the top. One side is labelled ‘Ascent’ and each step on the ladder records the stages of falling in love.
So it starts with:
Admiration
Flirtation
Approbation
Hesitation
Declaration
Agitation
Acceptation (not really a word but acceptance wouldn’t work)
How romantic!
But turn it over and the ladder tells us the sorry story of ‘Descent’, how we can also fall out of love.
Consideration
Alteration
Irritation
Disputation
Detestation
Desperation
Separation
Today of course we would end this in Divorce but the writing looks like either Caroline or Georgiana King, and dates probably from the 1830s, when each divorce required an expensive private Act of Parliament to be passed, until the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 reformed the process.
Oh what lengths our ancestors went to for entertainment before there was TV!