In the TLS, just read a review of Adam Kuper's Incest and Influence, a study of family relationships in Victorian middle class England. His contention is that many, many families - think Darwins, Wedgwoods, Rothschilds, Barclays - kept their wealth and influence "in the family" by encouraging marriage between cousins. At the same time, marrying your deceased wife's sister was for long illegal, on the grounds that the man and wife were one, so your wife's sister was your sister - and that's incest, even though the blood tie is non-existent. Kuper argues that effectively, many Victorian marriages were incestuous, through cousinly marriage oft repeated - very much to the alarm of public health experts and eugenicists later in the century.
It's a fascinating, if slightly disturbing thesis - and family trees become complex to the point of mania, with, for example, brothers-in-law also being fathers-in-law; Timothy Bevan married a Barclay, then a Gurney widow (the Gurneys and Barclays married much between themselves and with each other), and was known as "his wife's husband's wife's sister's widower"!
If you're interested, you can read the full review by Norma Clarke.
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