Cousin Marriage in Victorian England

Abstract

Cousin marriage, a common practice among preindustrial propertied classes and usually arranged by the families for economic reasons, continued as a marriage pattern among middle-class Victorians, for whom individual choice based on romantic love was the appropriate criterion for the selection of a marriage partner. This article argues that many Victorians married cousins as surrogates for beloved nuclear family members, toward whom strong attachments, accompanied by power ful unconscious incestuous feelings, were engendered in the privatized, emotionally intense, nineteenth-century home. This argument is supported by an analysis of specific Victorian cousin marriages. This article examines the late nineteenth-century controversy over the dangers of cousin marriage, and attributes its decline in the twentieth century to medical opposition and the changing psychodynamics of English family life.