ABSTRACT
Too many in the middle ranks of society in the Age of Reason before and after the French Revolution the gilded cage of bourgeois marriage was a relic of the dark ages. From around 1813 Robert Owen’s writings and utopian views provided the bedrock for changed attitudes towards all the institutions of society. He addressed his views primarily to the working class, and linked the emancipation of women with that of workers. In the late 1820s the Radical Richard Carlile and some of his ‘Zetetic’ followers began to reassess orthodox sexuality both in theory and in practice. The outcome was more libertarian than libertine. Anti-marriage sentiments continued to reach England from other parts of the Continent, and were being discussed in the 1840s. Swedenborg was another Continental thinker whose influence permeated English free thought in the early nineteenth century.
