Up at the Athenaeum, one of the novels I catalogued last Friday was The deceased wife’s sister, an 1874 novel by William Clark Russell.

When first published to novel was contraversial and published anonymously.

In Victorian times, marrying the sister of your dead wife was illegal, and forbidden by the Church of England and the Anglican Church of Ireland, and similarly illegal in Scotland. To have sex with your wife’s sister was not only adulterous if she was still alive, but considered incest, even if your wife had died.

And resulting children would automatically be considered illegitimate.

And women did die, from diseases treatable today, and from complications in childbirth, meaning that widowers were more common than they are today.

Not that it didn’t happen. No less a person than Charles Austen, Jane Austen’s brother and a senior naval officer did so marrying his wife Frances’s sister Harriet a few years after Frances died.

Society seems to have operated on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ basis. Legal changes in the 1850’s gave the middle classes a route to semi respectability, when marriages between widowers and their dead spouse’s sister contracted overseas were grudgingly recognised.

By the 1860’s it was a hot topic, but successive attempts to legalise such marriages failed, only becoming legal in 1907.

Numerous novels were written on the subject, including Hannah by Dinah Craik, and others. It even gets a mention in Gilbert and Sullivans operetta Iolanthe, where the Queen of the Fairies sings

He shall prick that annual blister, marriage with deceased wife’s sister

referring to the successive attempts to get a bill legalising such marriages through parliament

But why was it such a hot topic?

The number of cases was quite small, people were prepared to look the other way, and anyway you could get married overseas.

And the reason is that Victorian middle class concern, property and inheritance. The children born from such a marriage were illegitimate and could not inherit, and any children from a previous legal union would be able to challenge any inheritance. It could also be argued that the husband had no legal right to his deceased wife’s sister’s property, which would make a legal mess worthy of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, especially if there were children concerned.

But why marry one’s dead wife’s sister? Well, the ways of the heart are of course mysterious, but equally if one lived in a small country town, the middle class social circle would have been quite small, and of course you would already be acquainted with your spouse’s sister, in much the same way as one sees marriages between colleagues who work closely together.

And I don’t think we can get precious about this. Society isn’t that different today, with supermarket magazines with headlines like ‘I slept with my best friends ex...’ Social proximity has always been the basis of relationships.

However, despite the 1907 act legalising marriage to a deceased wife’s sister, it remained illegal for a woman to marry her deceased husband’s brother.

That is, until 1921, when, in a highly cynical move, marriage between a widow and her deceased husband’s brother became legal.

The move was highly cynical in the wake of the first world war, where a large number of young men had died, including disproportionately those from the middle and upper classes, as officers were supposed to lead from the front leading to higher death rate among junior officers.

Encouraging widows to marry their dead husband’s brother reduced the amount of money going to fund war widow’s pensions and hopefully would lead to an increase in the middle class birth rate…