The craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality

It hardly seems sporting to take another poke at Maggie Gallagher, the best-refuted woman in the blogosphere. So I won’t. Still, her Volokh posts reminded of something I read recently …

Roads To Ruin, The Shocking History of Social Reform, by E.S. Turner. (Published in 1950. You could google up a used copy for yourself somewhere. Amazon hasn’t so much as heard of it, although other curious titles tempt. Past the age of 90, the man’s most recent publication was … four days ago.)

The book’s theme:

It is a salutary thing to look back at some of the reforms which have long been an accepted part of our life, and to examine the opposition, usually bitter and often bizarre, sometimes dishonest but all too often honest, which had to be countered by the restless advocates of ‘grandmotherly’ legislation.

There is some good observation on, and advice for, reformers. "It has been said that a wise reformer will first ask himself: ‘Am I the sort of person the country will listen to? Am I a bigot? Am I a crank?"

At any early age reformers become immune against cliches. They are constantly reminded that ‘to innovate is not to reform’. They are told by prelates and Press that it is idle to try to enforce morality by an Act of Parliament. They are assured that the conscience and innate decency of the British people form a better shield against abuses than legislation. They are prepared (as Dickens was) for the argument that the number of victims of some enormity is small in comparison with the number of victims of some greater enormity. (A Northern millowner could not understand why a Government which had destroyed an army by neglect in the Crimea should worry about a few careless workers being whirled round the shafting by their hair in the factories at home.)

Many of the chapters are quite good (some less so.) Child chimney sweeps. Spring guns. Daylight savings. Let’s skip skip to chapter 5, "Two Wives, One Mother-In-Law".

The drama begins in 1835 – before which year marriages with deceased wive’s sisters were not void, but voidable by legal action. Henceforth they were illegal in Great Britain. From 1841 to 1909 there were 35 failed attempts to fire through Parliament successive shafts from a whole quiver of deceased wife’s sister marriage bills. You can read about it here. (Lyrics to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe: "He shall prick that annual blister/ Marriage with deceased wife’s sister".)

From the Saturday Review, in 1876: an example of the "diseased craving for abnormal enlargements of personal liberty which is the seamy side of Liberalism."

From the Tory Quarterly Review, from 1849: “Even popular discussion of the subject … is an almost incalculable mischief. Thoughts which never would have occurred to the pure have been forced on the purest.”

Writes Turner:

It would take a man more than a year, reading the equivalent of a book a day, to toil through the vast morass of literature inspired by the theme of marrying a deceased wife’s sister. Among the more engaging titles are those of the earlier treatises; for instance, Charles Blount’s To HisFriend Torismond, to Justifie the Marrying of Two Sisters the One After the Other (1695), or John Quick’s A Serious Inquiry into the Weighty Case of Conscience Whether a Man May Lawfully Marry His Deceased Wife’s Sister (1703) …

But it was not until the nineteenth century that the books and pamphlets, the tracts and articles and ‘expostulatory letters’ really began to stream from the vicarages. In 1887, when Alfred Huth decided to compile his Bibliography of Books and Papers upon the Impediments to Marriage, he was able to list 300 publications on the deceased wife’s sister controversy and dozens of others on the personal problems of Henry VIII. In the succeeding twenty years pamphlets on the deceased wife’s sister continued to multiply. Many of them were by theologians and Hebrew scholars ; a number came from anonymous, apprehensive wives; and one or two came (allegedly) from deceased wife’s sister herself. Most of the titles were long and cumbrous, but now and again there was a ‘popular’ tract like: Her Sister – Shall I Marry Her? Swelling the output were facetious poems, ‘marriage law dialogues’ and occasional works of fiction.

The controversy swirls around Leviticus –  with eddies of yet more strained readings of Ephesians. It seethes, with letters of inquiry sent to all universities of Europe.

Matthew Arnold refused to be ‘manacles and hoodwinked’ on such foreign soil. It is absurd that ‘the delicate and apprehensive genius of the Indo-European race, the race which invented the Muses, and chivalry and the Madonna, is to find its last word on this question in the institutions of a Semitic people, whose wisest kind had 700 wives and 300 concubines.’ [I think that’s a quote from an Arnold biographer, not the man himself. Not sure.] Arnold himself:

But when once we have begun to recount the practical operations by which our Liberal friends work for the removal of definite evils, and in which if we do not join them they are apt to grow impatient with us, how can we pass over that very interesting operation of this kind, – the attempt to enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister?  This operation, too, like that for abating the feudal customs of succession in land, I have had the advantage of myself seeing and hearing my Liberal friends labour at.  I was lucky enough to be present when Mr. Chambers, I think, brought forward in the House of Commons his bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister, and I heard the speech which Mr. Chambers then made in support of his bill.  His first point was that God’s law, – the name he always gave to the Book of Leviticus, – did not really forbid a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister.  God’s law not forbidding it, the Liberal maxim that a man’s prime right and happiness is to do as he likes ought at once to come into force, and to annul any such check upon the assertion of personal liberty as the prohibition to marry one’s deceased wife’s sister.  A distinguished Liberal supporter of Mr. Chambers, in the debate which followed the introduction of the bill, produced a formula of much beauty and neatness for conveying in brief the Liberal notions on this head: "Liberty," said he, "is the law of human life."  And, therefore, the moment it is ascertained that God’s law, the Book of Leviticus, does not stop the way, man’s law, the law of liberty, asserts its right, and makes us free to marry our deceased wife’s sister.

And this exactly falls in with what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, who may almost be called the Colenso of love and marriage, – such a revolution does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does in our ideas on religion, – tells us of the notions and proceedings of our kinsmen in America.  With that affinity of genius to the Hebrew genius which we have already noticed, and with the strong belief of our race that liberty is the law of human life, so far as a fixed, perfect, and paramount rule of conscience, the Bible, does not expressly control it, our American kinsmen go again, Mr. Hepworth Dixon tells us, to their Bible, the Mormons to the patriarchs and the Old Testament, Brother Noyes to St. Paul and the New, and having never before read anything else but their Bible, they now read their Bible over again, and make all manner of great discoveries there.  All these discoveries are favourable to liberty, and in this way is satisfied that double craving so characteristic of the Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth, – the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality.  Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s eloquent writings give currency, over here, to these important discoveries; so that now, as regards love and marriage, we seem to be entering, with all our sails spread, upon what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, its apostle and evangelist, calls a Gothic Revival, but what one of the many newspapers that so greatly admire Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s lithe and sinewy style and form their own style upon it, calls, by a yet bolder and more striking figure, "a great sexual insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race."  For this end we have to avert our eyes from everything Hellenic and fanciful, and to keep them steadily fixed upon the two cardinal points of the Bible and liberty.  And one of those practical operations in which the Liberal party engage, and in which we are summoned to join them, directs itself entirely, as we have seen, to these cardinal points,and may almost be regarded, perhaps, as a kind of first instalment or public and parliamentary pledge of the great sexual insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race.

Almost be called the Colenso of love and marriage? Who’s Colenso?

Some more from Quarterly Review, 1849:

Change the sister of a wife into a young marriagable stranger and the attentions which are now offered by the husband and received by the sister and witnessed by the wife with purity, with delicacy and with confidence, become insults alike to both females. The union which is daily seen in families will, where it now exists, be broken and will never hereafter be formed; the relation of brother-in-law and sister-in-law will cease to exist; the parties now described by those terms will henceforth be strangers to each other; and the reflected tenderness which now binds them to each other must be abandoned by both as a snare and a danger; while the wife will be deprived of the support and the comfort which she now derives from the presence of the sister of her youth as a companion in her own house.

On and on and on and on. "It was always possible to taunt the sponsors of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill with not daring, or not wanting, to try to legalize marriage with a deceased husband’s brother." This was felt to be a devastating slippery slope argument.

Studies are done. The Prince of Wales intervenes. The century turns. Last ditch defense by a thin white line of die-hard bishops. It is not until 1949 when the Marriage Act allows in the whole lot: marriage to deceased brother’s widow; husband’s brother; wife’s father’s sister; sister’s deceased son’s widow. "These liberties, which are not to be despised even though they may affect only one couple in a million, are among the more recent successes in the long, uphill campaign to lift harsh restraints on marriage; a campaign in which the first and most important bastion, the key to the entire defenses, was the right to marry a deceased wife’s sister."

I leave you to draw any improving morals with respect to Maggie Gallagher on SSM and – for good measure – Leon Kass on just about anything. (I think we should submit a ‘proof that P‘ on his behalf. If -P then ick; therefore P.) Last but not least, here’s a very moving tribute to the glories of progressivism and liberty.