Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (review)

The laws of consanguinity and affinity in Victorian England were notably peculiar. English law prohibited marriages between close kin both by blood and marriage, yet first-cousin marriage was not only legal but positively encouraged. In other words, one could marry one’s first cousin but not one’s deceased wife’s niece. A book-length exploration of this anomaly has long been needed, and Adam Kuper, an anthropologist, has taken on this task. Kuper limits his study to the “upper bourgeoisie,” a group that emerged from the Industrial Revolution. (His definition of this group is largely the same as “upper middle class,” except he excludes landed gentry.) Kuper argues that “marriage within the family—between cousins, or between in-laws—was a characteristic strategy of the new bourgeoisie, and that it had a great deal to do with the success of some of the most important Victorian clans” (27). Twenty years ago, in Family Fortunes (1987), Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall asserted that relationships between brothers- and sisters-in-law and between cousins were vital to the success of the family enterprise, but few subsequent studies have explored this connection in depth.

Incest and Influence, based entirely on secondary sources, unfortunately, does not focus exclusively on family marriage and business and is clearly geared toward a popular audience. The first part of the book is a good example of its impressionistic approach. Chapter 1 offers a brief survey of literary descriptions of cousin marriage from Jane Austen to Anthony Trollope; the summaries are well executed but include little analysis. The second is a discussion of the law of incest, which argues in part that the oddities of England’s marital law emerged both from its tortured history (Henry VIII’s marital troubles, for example), and the fact that England continued to have both ecclesiastical and secular control of moral issues for far longer than revolutionary states. Kuper then briefly surveys the arguments for and against marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, the major controversy of the Victorian period, and ends the chapter with the criminalization of incest in 1908. The “greatest hits” approach continues with the next chapter, which discusses the idea of intermarriage and heredity, primarily focusing on the efforts of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton to determine any ill effects from cousin marriages (both found very few). This chapter is the most disappointing of the book. The topic offers an opportunity to analyze the contradictory and overlapping ideas of Victorians on intermarriage, heredity, and degeneration, but Kuper simply describes their various studies superficially. The author does not give a satisfactory explanation of the change from incest as a category that included in-laws and stepfamily to one that was based solely on blood (as in the 1908 Incest Act). Why did this happen? And what does it say about Victorian and Edwardian ideas of family?

The rest of the book concentrates on intermarriage as a business strategy, the ostensible focus of the work. This part of the book begins with a chapter that describes the intermarriages of famous banking houses—both Quaker (the Barclays) and Jewish (the Rothschilds). This section clearly demonstrates the interconnection between cousin marriage and business success in the age before corporations and limited liability, though one must wonder how typical the author’s examples are. Both of these family groups had small minority religions as an additional tie, one that excluded them from a large number of possible marriage partners. It is not clear, however, if such strategies worked in Anglican families who did not have as many reasons for endogamy. Answering this would require a much broader research sample.

Kuper then turns to a number of case studies of famous groups of people who intermarried (or had sexual affairs) within a small cadre of like-minded individuals. The Clapham Sect had evangelicalism and reform to bind them together, and remained a strong group for several decades, in part...