“A Poser” from an 1862 issue of “Fun”

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A Poser

John Gordon Thomson (1841-1911)

Wood Engraving

Fun (5 April 1862): 21

Young Politician. — “Grandpa, it says you cannot marry your deceased wife’s sister. Could you marry her if she wasn’t deceased?”

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I originally wrote that this law, enacted at a time when many unmarried women lived with their married sisters, intended to prevent either a husband or unmarried sister living in the household from murdering the wife and taking her place. Rose Sandick wrote in with what is probably the correct explanation: “Prior to the 20th century revision, the Book of Common Prayer included in-laws in the table of kindred and affinity because the Bible said that once a person married he and his spouse were "one flesh" which the Church took to mean that a wife's sister was the same as the husband's own sister, hence to wed the wife's sister would be incest. While marriages of this type had rarely occurred before the Act, they could be voided by either party subsequently leading to complications for inheritance, etc.” This sounds correct, but the doctrine of “one flesh” suggests that, technically, when men had sexual relations within marriage they were having it with themselves.

The Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt ran afoul of this law when, years after the death of his wife in Florence, Italy, he and his wife’s young sister wished to marry. To do so, they had to travel to the continent, chaperoned by the novelist Mrs. Craik (Dinah Mulock), and since their marriage wasn't recognized in England, the children of the marriage were illegitimate. Hunt therefore campaigned energetically over many years to repeal the law, but that did not happen until 1907. His marriage is one of several reasons that although Hunt was one of England's most popular, and perhaps most important, painter of religious subjects, he neither received a knighthood nor was elected to the Royal Academy. — George P. Landow

Last modified 14 December 2017