Well there it is again. All this talk of Pakistanis and cousin marriage and the cost to the health service forgetting of course that it was a commonplace phenomenon in Victorian times. Women were sheltered in the respectable upper classes and in the big families of that time brothers and sisters and their offspring mingled frequently considering it acceptable. After all Albert and Victoria were first cousins. To blend the fortunes of the clan was considered prudent consolidation.
In the novel by Lord Bulwer-Lytton Lucretia set in the beginning of the 19th.century there is an extraordinary amount of cousinage dangereux voisinage. Lytton spends chapter 1 unravelling it. Lucretia the presumptive heir is being suggested to Vernon by Sir Miles as a wife. They are first cousins.
“There is many an earl with a less fortune than the conjoined estates of Vernon Grange and Laughton Hall.”
Vernon the exhausted rake, with only a few years of life left in him at the age of 40 is keen on another, a Mary.
Lucretia the proud and imperious beauty, has set her cap at Mainwaring, a talented man of the merchant class whom Sir Miles would dismiss as a spouse for the noble family. He after all ejected his sister who married someone of a lower order after her first husband the father of Lucretia died. That union produced a daughter called Susan, the half sister. Staying with Susan in the house of a kindly parson is Ardworth the recently graduated with a plain degree from Oxford. He is the son of the sister of Susan’s father. Another first cousin.
Maiwaring likes Susan but without a fortune and a profession was unable to declare his love and therefore moved away from her neighbourhood. It was Lucretia who declared her readiness to be the bride of Mainwaring and she is suggesting that Sir Miles will in any case die soon having had several strokes already. There is a suggestion of the Borgias in this lassie.
That’s the first chapter and Lytton sets it out in a genial, rambling, easy, brachiating through the family tree sort of way as an expert creator of scenes and settings. Its not in the least painful to take in and the elements of enjoyable smooth melodrama which by degrees engage you in permutations of your own.
I am going to read this book a chapter at a time and if I ever finish it I’ll let you know.
