This publication is presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services
Harvard University Press
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed
Requires Authentication
Incest and Influence
The Private Life of Bourgeois England
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2009
About this book
Like many gentlemen of his time, Darwin married his first cousin. In fact, marriages between close relatives were commonplace in 19th-century England, and Kuper argues that they played a crucial role in the rise of the bourgeoisie. This study brings out the connection between private lives, public fortunes, and the history of imperial Britain.
Reviews
Adam Kuper, perhaps the most original of anthropologists working in the present day, has turned from the study of African tribes to scrutinize cousin marriages and other consanguineous unions from Jane Austen's characters to the Darwin family and on throughout the great families of the Victorian era--and has come up with a startling and irresistible contribution to nineteenth-century social history.
-- Horace Freeland Judson
-- Horace Freeland Judson
[A] thoughtful, revealing [book] about the kind of networking that existed long before the Internet, flourishing in the 19th century... [Kuper's] anthropological analysis results in sociological conclusions that are very revealing about culture--scientific, political, economic, social-scientific--in the Victorian age. Here is one scholar who is fearlessly far-ranging in his scope.
-- Martin Rubin Washington Times
-- Martin Rubin Washington Times
Incest and Influence presents a richly detailed and fascinating picture of the distinctive family life of the Victorian bourgeoisie.
-- Gowan Dawson American Scientist
-- Gowan Dawson American Scientist
Adam Kuper brings an anthropologist's understanding to what he calls "one of the great neglected themes" of social and literary history: the preference of the English bourgeoisie for marriage with relatives...He traces clans of bankers and merchants, dynasties of barristers, judges, clergymen, bishops, top civil servants, writers, scientists and thinkers--an urban elite. His thesis is that kin networks provided the basis for the consolidation of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, and that marriage within the family was a strategy.
-- Norma Clarke Times Literary Supplement
-- Norma Clarke Times Literary Supplement
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Acknowledgments
vi -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Contents
vii -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Prologue: Darwin’s Marriage
1 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Introduction
5 - PART I. A question of incest
-
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
1. The Romance of Incest and the Love of Cousins
31 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
2. The Law of Incest
52 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
3. The Science of Incest and Heredity
83 - PART II. Family concerns
-
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
4. The Family Business
107 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
5. Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect
135 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
6. Difficulties with Siblings
159 - PART III. The intellectuals
-
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
7. The Bourgeois Intellectuals
181 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
8. The Bloomsbury Version
199 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Coda: The End of the Line
243 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Notes
257 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
288
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 28, 2010
eBook ISBN:
9780674054141
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
304
eBook ISBN:
9780674054141
Audience(s) for this book
Professional and scholarly;
