TLS on Incest

on Loving Cousins

Quakers, bankers, Bloomsbury and even Benjamin Bunny went in for marriage with a cousin
by Norma Clarke


When Charles Darwin returned to England after his five-year voyage on the Beagle, he thought it was probably time to marry. He made notes under the headings "Marry" and "Not Marry". There were things to be said for and against, and important questions such as where to live and when to do the deed, but whom to marry (he was not in love) required less thought. One of his Wedgwood cousins, Emma, was still available.
Far from being frowned on, cousin marriage – along with other versions of intermarriage among kin – was commonplace in the nineteenth century. Adam Kuper brings an anthropologist’s understanding to what he calls "one of the great neglected themes" of social and literary history: the preference of the English bourgeoisie for marriage with relatives. Emma’s brother Joe had already married Charles’s sister Caroline. Wedgwoods and Darwins were to go on marrying each other for more than a century, producing a network of kin that offered "enormous collateral benefits": patronage, information, vocational assistance, capital. Kuper explores several of these kin networks, making a point of distinguishing them from the arranged marriages of the aristocracy (though noting in passing the importance of example, beginning with Queen Victoria, who was married to her cousin). He traces clans of bankers and merchants, dynasties of barristers, judges, clergymen, bishops, top civil servants, writers, scientists and thinkers – an urban elite. His thesis is that kin networks provided the basis for the consolidation of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, and that marriage within the family was a strategy.
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What he offers in this entertaining study is less an argument than an important aperçu. The thesis can be demonstrated but not proved, except in the case of the Rothschilds. The House of Rothschild was the largest bank in the world, a multinational family business with five branches across Europe. Between 1824 and 1877, thirty male Rothschilds married cousins. Many of these marriages were systematically arranged to maintain the links between the branches, as James Rothschild explained in 1839: "I and the rest of our family . . . have always brought our offspring up from their early childhood with the sense that their love is to be confined to members of the family, that their attachment for one another would prevent them from getting any ideas of marrying anyone other than one of the family so that the fortune would stay inside the family".
Keeping the money inside the family was important to Quaker bankers too. Barclays and Gurneys married, while the Gurneys themselves strongly favoured endogamy: children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren married their cousins. Complicated relationships ensued: brothers-in-law became also fathers-in-law, sisters became stepmothers-in-law. Timothy Bevan, having first married a Barclay, next married a Gurney widow, and was described as his "wife’s husband’s wife’s sister’s widower". Kuper provides diagrams which lend an appropriately manic quality as the lines linking triangles (male) and circles (female) go round and down and up and over.
Religious belief, campaigns and causes might also produce tightly knit coteries and a preference for marrying within the circle. The Evangelicals of the Clapham Sect, inspired by William Wilberforce, lived almost as a commune. They mimicked kinship bonds, called each other brother, and bequeathed the idea of intermarriage to succeeding generations. In this book, the information that in 1809 Wilberforce took his six children on holiday "to the same house in which were now contained \[Henry Thornton’s\] own wife and eight" is charged with expectation. Competition for pious daughters was intense. Sisters were in demand too, although this raised problems. When a wife died, her sister was often the preferred replacement, except that canon law forbade marriage with a deceased wife’s sister on the grounds that man and wife were one, so a sister-in-law was a sister, hence marriage would constitute incest. This logic gave rise to one of the great Victorian public debates. To begin with, nobody was quite sure what incest was. In 1847, a Royal Commission was set up to investigate "prohibited degrees of affinity", and for the next six decades the argument raged. The radical John Bright appealed to common sense: on every "natural" ground, he urged, the marriage of first cousins was more objectionable than marriage to a sister-in-law. (On the evidence here there was a good chance the deceased wife’s sister was a first or second cousin anyway.) The Bible gave contradictory guidance. Leviticus seemed to ban sisters-in-law, but then there was Jacob, married to two sisters, Rachel and Leah, who were also his cousins. It was not until 1907 that a Bill was passed permitting a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister (although not until 1949 his divorced wife’s sister). Meanwhile, natural scientists and medical men raised questions about inbreeding, and by the 1920s eugenicists routinely condemned cousin marriage. By then, families had shrunk and the First World War had wiped out a generation of male cousins.
The last gasp of large bourgeois families and their strategic manoeuvrings comes in the final section under the heading "The Intellectuals". Through James Stephen, an early Claphamite, Kuper traces a path from Christian earnestness and activism (most notably and successfully against the slave trade) to the secular bed-hopping of Bloomsbury. This is well-trodden ground, and will be familiar to many readers, but Kuper’s perspective casts it in a fresh light.
Unexpectedly, the Bloomsbury Group’s casualness about sexual intimacy can be seen as part of its Clapham inheritance, along with exclusivity and the conviction of superiority. When Angelica, Vanessa Bell’s daughter by Duncan Grant, was born, Grant’s lover David Garnett announced, "I think of marrying it", and duly did; it was not so very different from Edward White Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, putting his twelve-year-old cousin Minny on his knee and informing her that he had decided they would marry when she was old enough.
The manipulation of the young is the dark underside of the story, though mostly we know little about it. Angelica later understood her husband’s motive to be revenge (see the review of Angelica Garnett on p20), while Minny’s children (none of whom married) believed her to have been bullied and unhappy. Uncles married nieces; brothers were attracted to sisters and vice versa; Lytton Strachey tried to kiss his nephew in a dark corner. Writers who fell in love with their cousins were numerous (suggesting that unquantifiable numbers of non-writers had comparable feelings). Swinburne’s great love Mary was his cousin many times over: their mothers were sisters, their fathers were first cousins and so were their grandfathers.
Novelists addressed the potent brew: the first sign of Mrs Norris’s talent for being wrong in Mansfield Park is when she assures the Bertram family that there would be no danger to their sons in bringing cousin Fanny to live with them. Not only Austen, but also the Brontës, Dickens, Trollope, Mrs Oliphant, Elizabeth Gaskell, Meredith and Thackeray all dramatized cousin love, as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh. Even Beatrix Potter’s Benjamin Bunny married his cousin Flopsy.

Adam Kuper
INCEST AND INFLUENCE
The private life of bourgeois England
304pp. Harvard University Press. £20.95 (US $27.95).
978 0 674 03589 8

Norma Clarke is Professor of English Literature at the University of Kingston. Her books include The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, 2004, and Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington (2008).