Cousin marriage, a common practice among preindustrial propertied
classes and usually arranged by the families for economic reasons, continued as a
marriage pattern among middle-class Victorians, for whom individual choice based
on romantic love was the appropriate criterion for the selection of a marriage partner.
This article argues that many Victorians married cousins as surrogates for beloved
nuclear family members, toward whom strong attachments, accompanied by power
ful unconscious incestuous feelings, were engendered in the privatized, emotionally
intense, nineteenth-century home. This argument is supported by an analysis of
specific Victorian cousin marriages. This article examines the late nineteenth-century
controversy over the dangers of cousin marriage, and attributes its decline in the
twentieth century to medical opposition and the changing psychodynamics of English
family life.
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