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Like many gentlemen of his time, Charles Darwin married his first cousin. In fact, marriages between close relatives were commonplace in nineteenth-century England, and Adam Kuper argues that they played a crucial role in the rise of the bourgeoisie. Incest and Influence shows us just how the political networks of the eighteenth-century aristocracy were succeeded by hundreds of in-married bourgeois clans—in finance and industry, in local and national politics, in the church, and in intellectual life. In a richly detailed narrative, Kuper deploys his expertise as an anthropologist to analyze kin marriages among the Darwins and Wedgwoods, in Quaker and Jewish banking families, and in the Clapham Sect and their descendants over four generations, ending with a revealing account of the Bloomsbury Group, the most eccentric product of English bourgeois endogamy. These marriage strategies were the staple of novels, and contemporaries were obsessed with them. But there were concerns. Ideas about incest were in flux as theological doctrines were challenged. For forty years Victorian parliaments debated whether a man could marry his deceased wife's sister. Cousin marriage troubled scientists, including Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton, provoking revolutionary ideas about breeding and heredity. This groundbreaking study brings out the connection between private lives, public fortunes, and the history of imperial Britain.

In Victorian England, the perception of girlhood arose not in isolation, but as one manifestation of the prevailing conception of femininity. Examining the assumptions that underlay the education and upbringing of middle-class girls, this book is also a study of the learning of gender roles in theory and reality. It was originally published in 1982. The first two sections examine the image of women in the Victorian family, and the advice offered in printed sources on the rearing of daughters during the Victorian period. To illustrate the effect and evolution of feminine ideals over the Victorian period, the book's final section presents the actual experiences of several middle-class Victorian women who represent three generations and range, socioeconomically, from lower-middle class through upper-middle class.

In 1852 Hannah Rebecca Crowell married sea captain William Burgess and set sail. Within three years, Rebecca Burgess had crossed the equator eleven times and learned to navigate a vessel. In 1856, 22-year-old Rebecca saved the ship Challenger as her husband lay dying from dysentery. The widow returned to her family's home in Sandwich, Massachusetts, where she refused all marriage proposals and died wealthy in 1917.This is the way Burgess recorded her story in her prodigious journals and registers, which she donated to the local historical society upon her death, but there is no other evidence that this dramatic event occurred exactly this way. In The Captain's Widow of Sandwich, Megan Taylor Shockley examines how Burgess constructed her own legend and how the town of Sandwich embraced that history as its own. Through careful analysis of myriad primary sources, Shockley also addresses how Burgess dealt with the conflicting gender roles of her life, reconciling her traditionally masculine adventures at sea and her independent lifestyle with the accepted ideals of the period's Victorian woman.

A key challenge to theories of long-run economic growth has been linking the onset of modern growth with the move to modern fertility limitation. A notable puzzle for these theories is that modern growth in England began around 1780, 100 years before there was seemingly any movement to limit fertility. Here we show that the aggregate data on fertility in England before 1880 conceals significant declines in the fertility of the middle and upper classes earlier. These declines coincide with the Industrial Revolution and are of the character predicted by some recent theories of long-run growth.

Including analyses of both canonical and lesser-known Victorian authors,Architectural Identitiesconnects the physical construction of the home with the symbolic construction of middle-class identities.

As the world marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens's birth, social workers may take note of the contributions Dickens made to 19th century social reform. Ever the advocate for people who were poor and oppressed, Dickens, in his timeless fictional narratives, continues to have relevance for contemporary social justice advocacy. This article draws on Dickens's biography and writing to highlight select lessons of relevance to social work. The focus is on developing a professional lens, changing social norms, and interpreting case studies across ecological systems.

This article examines the epistemology of cookery among the middle classes in nineteenth-century Britain. Quantification, schematization, and the scientific evaluation of food and its preparation were increasingly emphasized in prescriptive cookery books and housekeeping literature. These trends are evident to some extent in manuscript cookbooks, as well. Cookery was influenced by a rise in chemists' and physicians' professional authority, and science also suggested solutions to the period's ongoing problems of food adulteration. Science and expertise, moreover, offered women and their families access to higher social status and a sense of personal and national progress. However, the scientization of cookery was an uneven and often inconsistent process, and the individual habits and knowledge systems of families, mistresses, and servants continued to play a crucial role in culinary practice.

During the Civil War, Americans from homefront to battlefront played baseball as never before. While soldiers slaughtered each other over the country's fate, players and fans struggled over the form of the national pastime. George Kirsch gives us a color commentary of the growth and transformation of baseball during the Civil War. He shows that the game was a vital part of the lives of many a soldier and civilian--and that baseball's popularity had everything to do with surging American nationalism. By 1860, baseball was poised to emerge as the American sport. Clubs in northeastern and a few southern cities played various forms of the game. Newspapers published statistics, and governing bodies set rules. But the Civil War years proved crucial in securing the game's place in the American heart. Soldiers with bats in their rucksacks spread baseball to training camps, war prisons, and even front lines. As nationalist fervor heightened, baseball became patriotic. Fans honored it with the title of national pastime. War metaphors were commonplace in sports reporting, and charity games were scheduled. Decades later, Union general Abner Doubleday would be credited (wrongly) with baseball's invention. The Civil War period also saw key developments in the sport itself, including the spread of the New York-style of play, the advent of revised pitching rules, and the growth of commercialism. Kirsch recounts vivid stories of great players and describes soldiers playing ball to relieve boredom. He introduces entrepreneurs who preached the gospel of baseball, boosted female attendance, and found new ways to make money. We witness bitterly contested championships that enthralled whole cities. We watch African Americans embracing baseball despite official exclusion. And we see legends spring from the pens of early sportswriters. Rich with anecdotes and surprising facts, this narrative of baseball's coming-of-age reveals the remarkable extent to which America's national pastime is bound up with the country's defining event.

Although historians have identified violence against wives as a particular concern for late-nineteenth-century feminists, this article argues that class politics limited feminists' engagement with the problem of wife beating. English feminists used tales of working-class brutes who beat and maimed their wives to demand the vote for educated and propertied women; however, the class dynamics of such tales made them impolitic for Australian feminists fighting for the vote in a country with a proud tradition of universal manhood suffrage. Stories that revolved around passive victims and irredeemable brutes remained largely unconnected with feminist critiques of marriage. Leaders of the English women's movement used wife beating mainly to construct women's suffrage as a selfless duty middle-class women owed to their suffering sisters. In Australia, feminists infused these tales with their faith in progress and the possibilities of a new land and came to understand wife beating as predominantly a problem of the past and the Old World.