It’s Sunday morning and I’ve been woken up early by my 4-year-old’s loud singing in the next room. So naturally, I’m on the couch reading about the stigma against Victorian men marrying their brothers’ widows.

At this point, you may be thinking “that’s an odd life choice” — about the Victorian men, or about me choosing this way to spend the precious twenty minutes before my parenting day begins. But as a reader of 19th-century fiction and a professor who teaches about marriage history, I’m fascinated by the changing norms around what are called “degrees of consanguinity and affinity.”

For example, cousin marriage. I started researching this after students in my Jane Austen seminar had trouble getting over all the first-cousin marriages in her fiction. (Why yes, there are a lot.) Without taking a pro-cousin-marriage stance, I did want to get students past the “ick” into a more nuanced understanding of how ideas of who counts as “closely related” change over time and differ across cultures. More than you might think!

In most known human societies, incest has been taboo and often illegal. But what is incest? How would you define it, precisely? In the modern world we are generally agreed that sex or marriage between siblings or between parent and child are morally reprehensible and rightly illegal. In many cultures, this view extends to grandparent-grandchild and aunt/uncle-niece/nephew relationships.* But when you look beyond those immediate kin relationships, there are pretty big differences in what counts as incestuous across various places today** and across recent history as well. Take for example this idea of marrying your former sibling-in-law.

Based on message boards and advice columns, people today tend toward one of two reactions to the idea of a person marrying the widow(er) of their deceased sibling. Some commentators are horrified. They find it disrespectful of the dead or sexually disgusting. On the other hand, many commentators are sympathetic. They find it morally blameless and emotionally understandable. The question I am looking at, though, is not one of suitability or respectfulness, but one of legality. For those on the anti- side, I would ask: even if you think they are weird, do you think such marriages are literally incestuous? And that they should be illegal?

This prompts the question: what is government’s goal in preventing some marriages? Especially between consenting adults? That’s what I’m curious about in the Victorian era.

It seems to have come down to the idea of what marriage is, or does. In the traditional Christian viewpoint, marriage makes a couple “one flesh.” In the laws and mores of many Christian nations, this was for a long time taken literally. For centuries in England, the legal concept of “coverture” set forth that when a man and woman married they became, for all legal purposes, a single person: the husband. If the two are one, the one’s siblings are the other’s flesh-and-blood siblings. By this reckoning, a marriage between such persons would be an act of incest the law ought to prevent.

Genetics as a concept was still in its nascency in the latter 19th century. Laws develop, it should always be remembered, as reflection of the ruling class’s values. The laws of Victorian England had not developed around the terror of birth defects that now produces that instant disgust response my students had to Austen’s cousin-couples. This fear, though perhaps valid, is a legacy of the Eugenics movement. So for Victorians, a close degree of affinity (social relationship) might be just as distressing as consanguinity (blood relationship), or even more so.

If you’re interested in British social and legal history, you might be thinking, I thought the stigma was against marrying your dead wife’s sister, not your dead husband’s brother. After all, the bill contested in Parliament for decades, finally passed in 1907, was called “the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act.” The equivalent “Deceased Brother’s Widow’s Marriage Act” — notice the wording violates parallelism to remain male-centric — didn’t pass until in 1921. As far as I’ve learned, there was a lot of debate in Victorian times about men marrying a dead wife’s sister, pro and con, while there was no equivalent push for the gender-swapped version.

This disparity may seem odd. It is, of course, mostly down to patriarchy.

In a society where men make the living and support women financially, women without a husband or father might often live with a married sibling. Adult single men rarely lived with a married brother, since they could support themselves. (I want to make it clear here that huge numbers of Victorian women worked for pay. However, it was legal to pay them less than men; most higher education was closed to women; and there were legal barriers to women entering many professions. So, while often working, women were not even close to financially equal to men.)

The single sister living upstairs was common enough that she got a fun nickname: the “spinster aunt.” Charles Dickens’s household is one of many examples where the wife’s sister lived as a part of the family. If the married sister died young (also relatively common — thanks, childbirth) the unmarried sister might feel like a logical person to step into her role: raise the kids, marry the widower. But this was illegal in England.

And this was contentious stuff. For centuries before 1835, it was implicitly against the law but not something people always paid a lot of attention to. Reminder here that people aren’t always super aware of what is or isn’t legal, especially technical statutes rather than punishable crimes. It wasn’t common, but it happened. For example, Jane Austen’s younger brother Charles married a woman named Frances and, six years after her death, married her sister Harriet. (I mention the names merely to point out that Austen was really not creative in naming her characters.)

The Marriage Act of 1835, AKA Lord Lyndhurst’s Act — while grandfathering in previous deceased-spouse’s-partner marriages like Charles and Harriet Austen’s, so no one would find themselves suddenly disinherited — made it clear and explicit that going forward any such marriages would be legally invalid. Not really marriages at all.

Yet, what would happen to this type of couple if they married in another country but lived in England? Their marriage would be treated as legal unless challenged in court, when it would be deemed void. So you might get away with it if you kept your heads down. Socially — that was another matter. I was intrigued when this morning’s research rabbit hole took me to the fact that painter William Holman Hunt, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, married the sister of his late wife (9 years after her death) in Switzerland. The couple was disowned by both families!

I knew most of this about the deceased wife’s sister question. What I realized I didn’t know was the other half of the story. After all, some might say there was a stronger argument to be made for a man marrying his brother’s widow. Men were the providers. Shouldn’t providing for a dead brother’s family fit in with Victorian values?

Moreover, it’s Biblical. Well… arguably so. Deuteronomy 25 says it is the “duty” of a man to marry his brother’s childless widow and she should complain to a magistrate if he refuses. However, as I just learned, Leviticus 20 says “If a man takes his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing” (KJV). So Victorian morality’s favorite primary source document is hard to interpret on this question.

The research questions I am left with, then, are these:

1. Is it true, as one /r/AskHistorians Redditer avers, that compared to the marriage of a widower and his sister-in-law, “marrying the wife of your deceased brother was … incredibly taboo, so taboo that it did not need to be included in the 1835 act or debated in the halls of government”? Why would the one prohibition feel tenuous and debatable while the gender-reversed version felt outré and unacceptable? This puzzles me.
   
2. How did regular Victorians feel about other affinity marriages that crop up in their literature, like ward-to-guardian or step/foster sibling-to-step/foster sibling? Were these legally challenged?
   
3. If the Redditer’s claim is true, when did that taboo change in England — or has it changed? 1921 is not that long ago in some ways. Would the average English person react to a man marrying his brother’s widow like the average American, or have a stronger negative reaction?

Of course, as stated above, some Americans do have a strong negative reaction. Still, imagine the story of a soldier fighting overseas. His brother meets a girl in a whirlwind romance and marries her. Then the brother dies in an accident. Our soldier comes home from duty and meets his widowed sister-in-law for the first time. They bond over their shared grief. They fall in love and eventually marry. To my mind, that’s a Nicholas Sparks novel, not a source of shame that’s going to turn them into social outcasts.***

I haven’t gone deeper yet. Predictively, I theorize that the impact of Eugenics would have been strong on England as well, heightening the stigma against consanguinity marriages over the stigma against affinity marriages. That’s my guess, though it’s worth noting that the UK has a strong history of cousin-marriage among their peerage and royalty into the 20th century; would that leave an impact? Will I go further down this rabbit hole and find out? Perhaps some of my dear readers will tell me!

But my short poke around the internet did yield something of interest. Something wholly unexpected. My aforementioned small child used to love a Youtube compilation of songs from The Muppet Show, which included an all-muppet performance of “I’m My Own Grandpaw.”

I did not assume this song was original to the Muppets. But I also did not expect to find it in the text of an 1870 UK Parliamentary debate.

The subject under debate on Thursday, 19 May 1870, was a proposed bill: “Marriage With A Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill—(No 76).” This certainly shows how perennial the issue — the bill was already being debated when it wouldn’t pass for another 37 years!

The peer speaking, the Duke of Marlborough, raises the specter of “that remarkable country on the other side of the Atlantic, which Members of the other House were so fond of quoting when they desired any radical change to be made in our home institutions.” In the States, he observed “a strange state of things had grown up there in consequence of the prevalent lax notions of marriage.” He read what he claimed was an excerpt from an American newspaper, showing the dire state of marriage in the U.S.:

“I married a widow, who had a grown-up daughter; my father visited our house very often, fell in love with my stepdaughter, and married her. So my father became my son-in-law, and my stepdaughter my mother, because she was my father’s wife. Some time afterwards my wife had a son; he was my father’s brother-in-law and my uncle, for he was the brother of my stepmother. My father’s wife—i. e., my stepdaughter—had also a son; he was of course my brother, and in the meantime my grandson, for he was the son of my daughter. My wife was my grandmother, because she was my mother’s mother. I was my wife’s husband and grandchild at the same time. And, as the husband of a person’s grandmother is his grandfather, I was my own grandfather.”

It was added that the man destroyed himself, and the verdict was justifiable suicide. 

Take away the grim yet ridiculous footnote, countrify the language, and you have the lyrics of the song practically verbatim.

The history of the song is summarized (I can’t say with what degree of rigor) here at Genealogy Magazine. They trace similar newspaper anecdotes back at least to 1822. I’m going to personally decline to believe most if not all of these, and assume that some gullible listeners have repeated tall tales. After all — people may not agree about who it’s okay to marry, people may not agree on what’s romantic vs. what’s icky, but every culture loves a little risqué gossip.

*Though scholars are weirdly cool with this if it’s queer? Personally, I feel like the consent problem is still very much there.
**It’s interesting to note that only about half of American states outlaw first-cousin marriage, though it is taboo in all.
***For all I know, this is a real Nicholas Sparks novel. No, I’m not going to look it up.