Incest and Influence - Hardcover

Kuper, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674035895 ISBN 13: 9780674035898

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Synopsis

Marriages between close relatives were commonplace in nineteenth-century England. This title shows us just how the political networks of the eighteenth-century aristocracy were succeeded by hundreds of in-married bourgeois clans - in finance and industry, in local and national politics, in the church, and in intellectual life.

About this title

Review

Adam Kuper, perhaps the most original of anthropologists working in the present day, has turned from the study of African tribes to scrutinize cousin marriages and other consanguineous unions from Jane Austen's characters to the Darwin family and on throughout the great families of the Victorian era--and has come up with a startling and irresistible contribution to nineteenth-century social history.--Horace Freeland Judson

Incest and Influence presents a richly detailed and fascinating picture of the distinctive family life of the Victorian bourgeoisie.--Gowan Dawson"American Scientist" (01/01/2010)

[A] thoughtful, revealing [book] about the kind of networking that existed long before the Internet, flourishing in the 19th century... [Kuper's] anthropological analysis results in sociological conclusions that are very revealing about culture--scientific, political, economic, social-scientific--in the Victorian age. Here is one scholar who is fearlessly far-ranging in his scope.-- (10/04/2009)

Adam Kuper brings an anthropologist's understanding to what he calls "one of the great neglected themes" of social and literary history: the preference of the English bourgeoisie for marriage with relatives...He traces clans of bankers and merchants, dynasties of barristers, judges, clergymen, bishops, top civil servants, writers, scientists and thinkers--an urban elite. His thesis is that kin networks provided the basis for the consolidation of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, and that marriage within the family was a strategy.-- (01/22/2010)

About the Author

Adam Kuper is Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• ISBN 10: 0674035895
• ISBN 13: 9780674035898
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268