ABSTRACT
Few men before the beginning of the last century would have been willing or able to marry a woman solely because he found her sexually attractive. That they began to do so came about as the result of the great changes in economic life that had begun about a century before, and whose main guidelines were now set. The British Isles had changed from being primarily an agricultural to primarily an industrial nation. By the 1850s the inventions of the preceding century in steampower, in steelmaking and textiles were fully developed and fully employed.
