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.
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