This book uses a wide range of primary sources - legal, literary and demographic - to provide a radical reassessment of eighteenth-century marriage. It disproves the widespread assumption that couples married simply by exchanging consent, demonstrating that such exchanges were regarded merely as contracts to marry and that marriage in church was almost universal outside London. It shows how the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 was primarily intended to prevent clergymen operating out of London's Fleet prison from conducting marriages, and that it was successful in so doing. It also refutes the idea that the 1753 Act was harsh or strictly interpreted, illustrating the courts' pragmatic approach. Finally, it establishes that only a few non-Anglicans married according to their own rites before the Act; while afterwards most - save the exempted Quakers and Jews - similarly married in church. In short, eighteenth-century couples complied with whatever the law required for a valid marriage.
Analyses marriage law's development since 1836-its complexity, failures to respond to societal change, and constraints on different beliefs.
Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent. She has published widely on ... She has just completed a book titled Sex and the Church in the Long Eighteenth Century with co-author Prof.
Bringing together leading historians, demographers and lawyers, this interdisciplinary collection draws on a wide range of sources to examine the changing context of non-marital child-bearing in England and Wales since 1600.
Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Hambledon and London, 2004). Hitchcock, Tim. 'Begging on the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London', Journal of British Studies 44 (July 2005), 478–98. Hochedlinger, Michael.
For the most recent discussion of the Enlightenment see W. Bulman and R. G. Ingram (eds) God in the Enlightenment, Oxford University Press, 2016. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, London, Penguin books, 3 vols, ...
Lady Anne, by marrying Sir George, acquired his domicile for all legal purposes. The parties in Lolley were all ... See e.g. Stephen Parker, Informal Marriage, Cohabitation and the Law, 1750–1989 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p.
Based on vivid court records and newspaper advertisements, this 2003 book is a pioneering account of the expectations and experiences of married life among the middle and labouring ranks in the long eighteenth century.
... eighteenth-century empire and Hilary M. Carey, God's Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801-1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) on how ... Marriage Law and Practice , ch. 180 Marriage, Law and Modernity.
14 An impulsive couple is united at the register office in Mrs Oliphantʼs Hester (1883), while Conan Doyle features an unsuitable wedding in ʻThe Boscombe Valley Mysteryʼ in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891) (ʻwhat does the idiot ...
... Marriages Act 1753, see R Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chs 4 and 9. 8. Probert, Marriage Law and Practice, ch 6. 9. Clandestine Marriages ...