ABSTRACT
"Kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy or the nude is to art," Robin Fox famously remarked. Kinship and Marriage introduced generations of students into the study of this intricate field, to which Robin himself has made a series of major contributions, perhaps, on the questions of incest avoidance and cousin marriage, and always from a Darwinian perspective. Cousin marriage was a recurrent theme in novels published from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. So fathers generally paid close attention to financial considerations when their children married, but this was not a necessary reason for cousin marriage, certainly not in the Darwin-Wedgwood clan. In the course of the long nineteenth century, Britain became an increasingly prosperous, secular and democratic land. The marriage pattern of the English bourgeoisie therefore played a significant part in making the nineteenth-century world.
