Ginger S. Frost. Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008. ISBN 978 7190 7736 4. Price: US$89.00/£55.00. ISBN 978 07190 8569 7. Price: US$30.95/£15.99

Ginger Frost begins her arresting study with perhaps the most famous Victorian couple to “live in sin,” George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. Eliot’s brother Isaac broke all communication with the author until she married John Cross, following Lewes’s death, a quarter of a century later. In the light of Frost’s research, we can no longer take Isaac’s disapproval of his sister’s non-consecrated union as typifying contemporary responses to cohabitation. Many Victorians were remarkably tolerant about such relationships. No less than Queen Victoria, exemplar of respectable family values, let the novelist know how she enjoyed her work and solicited her autograph. The Queen of Holland was unabashed to be seen with Lewes and praised his writings, while adding, “as to your wife’s – all the world admires them” (1). Apparently, she saw the couple as husband and wife, as did most of the other cohabitees Frost describes, all of whom believed themselves married in all but name. Even then, they took a shared name, as did Mrs. Lewes. We tend to regard the nineteenth century as a period of marital conformity, following Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753) which sought to regularize marriage by abolishing the binding power of betrothals and the authority of the church courts. Except for Quakers and Jews, all weddings had to take place in Anglican churches, though opposition from Dissenters led to civil registration after 1836. Both partners must be over twenty-one or have their guardian’s consent, while the banns should be declared three times before the ceremony. And yet, finds Frost, “the century brought not so much a new definition of marriage as a destabilising of it” (233). In part, this was because many contemporaries struggled to understand the niceties of the law. The Justices of the Peace brimmed with queries from magistrates revealing their confusion over the status of marriages performed outside the country or between different faiths, and the ignorance of parishioners over marriages of affinity or the maintenance of illegitimate children. Non-compliance could be deliberate too. When Church and State stood between a marriage of “true minds”, many went ahead regardless, as did a Manchester publican: “My wife was dead, and I could not be so well suited in my house as to marry her sister; therefore, I do not recognize any law that says I shall not” (54). Though “the Hardwicke Act restricted the definition of marriage,” concludes Frost, “in the resulting century, the English slowly widened it again, first by practice and later by law” (233). Frost’s analysis of how the English chipped away at the codes of marriage is based on nearly one thousand cohabiting couples. She divides these into three main groups. First were those who could not marry because of the prohibition on marriages of affinity or because they were unhappily wed but unable divorce. These cohabitees tended to receive the most sympathy, especially when they appeared loving and committed. As one businessman testified of his affinal union: “I have never found any possible inconvenience arising from it. . . I have rather had commendation” (64). Support came even from upholders of the law. Dismissing a vicar’s complaint about an elderly man who married his sister-in-law outside his parish, the Home Secretary refused to back legal action: “I am afraid we shall be laughed at if we prosecute this old couple. . . What harm have they done?” (57). The book is full of such heart-warming instances of acceptance which challenge stereotypical views of Victorian priggishness over gender and morality. More likely to raise a disapproving eyebrow were those in Frost’s second group who maintained adulterous unions for …