A quarter of a century ago, in For Better or Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York, 1985), John Gillis revealed the multifarious ways in which English and Welsh marital practices evolved and departed from shifting norms over four centuries. His exploration of “the immense variety of ways ordinary women and men have sought to bring mutually satisfactory order to their heterosexuality” (5) marked a new understanding of ways in which actual practices departed from marital ideals, even after Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753 outlawed a range of anarchic marriage practices. “Sexual nonconformity” across classes gradually became more difficult and less popular throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in an “era of mandatory marriage” (229) from 1850, but even then, especially among working people, the myth of conjugal love was a long way from ruling their lives.

In this highly readable book on nineteeth-century cohabitation, Ginger Frost builds on and extends Gillis's work for the post-Hardwicke era. She explores a range of cohabitation or “irregular” practices outside legal marriage and across classes, encompassing affinal and consanguineous marriages, bigamy, adulterous and cross-class unions, and deliberate, sometimes ideologically motivated, cohabitation. Echoing Henry Mayhew's studies of the poor, she categorizes her subjects as those (like George Eliot and Henry Lewes) who could not marry, those who (out of indifference, lack of social pressure, etc.) did not marry, and those who (out of principled objection to the institution) would not marry. Alongside this deft typology Frost explores the profound diversity in experience dictated by class, where working-class communities were the most tolerant of noncompliance, and by gender, where the double standard ensured that men's advantage in extralegal marriage was writ large in every form of cohabitation. The resulting social history is original and engaging; equally powerful are Frost's insights into the operation and attitudes of the legal profession.

Frost's impressive sweep of sources provides a rich underpinning for her exploration. Like most scholars in her field, she makes intensive use of legal sources, especially those relating to violence and illegitimacy, in official and press law reports, parliamentary enquiries, and police records. She extends their use with fascinating material from the journal for magistrates, Justice of the Peace, which discussed the vexed cases they faced and the variable solutions applied, in the process betraying some woeful ignorance about marital law as well as deep concern for the victims of cohabitation, such as illegitimate children who were not entitled to maintenance from deserting fathers or from the parish. Such sources relate mainly to poorer classes, and they are supplemented for the better off by manuscript and autobiographical texts, which bring some of the more familiar names to sight, most thoroughly in two chapters on “radical couples,” one from 1790 to 1850 and the other from 1850 to 1914.

Several powerful themes knit this book together, and while not all of them are new, they are prosecuted in ways that give deeper insight into popular practice and feeling, as well as the interplay between law and behavior. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of cohabitants remained outside legal marriage unwillingly, particularly refugees from broken marriages without the resources or grounds to divorce and remarry. Affinal or “incestuous” unions, especially with in-laws and the famous “deceased wife's sister,” gave couples few options between cohabitation and an illegal ceremony, and it was the latter that brought so many of them to light in the courts. Motivations for avoiding marriage, particularly among the poor, were complex and likely to vary profoundly by gender, encapsulated by a man's exchange with Charles Booth: “If I married my woman I should never be sure of my tea” (125); conversely, women's frequent remarks about their men's readiness to leave them without incurring legal obligations underline their preference for their “marriage lines.” Even in professions notorious for cohabitation, such as the theater, the gender difference largely persisted. Only the wealthiest actresses were likely to be shielded from the economic penalties of a failed cohabitation.

The penalties for cohabitation extended beyond gender disadvantage since both partners risked their reputations and the disapproval of kin, neighbors, workplace colleagues, and the law. Yet what recurs throughout the book is the readiness of so many of these to understand, forgive, and support one or both parties. This was most evident where the law worked, with apparent lack of logic, to force couples into remedies outside marriage, particularly illegal ceremonies. Families and communities always preferred their kin and neighbors to marry, but they usually found ways to accept them when they knew that the law was the villain. And juries and magistrates could be remarkably understanding, favoring wronged women in particular and even acquitting bigamists when there was no other moral failing. Frost quite rightly sees at work here a fundamental process of marital law being reformed from below. Paradoxically, it was effected by those who had often left one marriage and aspired to another, so that cohabitation, far from signifying anarchic marriage rejection, as the alarmists insisted, underlined the wider commitment to stable marriage. Expectations of marriage could be high in all classes, so Frost is on firm ground in questioning the conventional wisdom that the best the poor expected was “dogged companionship.”

That same commitment to stability is evident in the last two chapters on radical couples, from the anarchism of Godwin to the Utopian socialists and late nineteenth-century anarchists such as Guy Aldred and Rose Witkop. While, again, it was women who were most vulnerable to the perils of these relationships, the urge to legitimate the union among colleagues through some form of secular ceremony was persistent. And the disdain for legal marriage, with rare, usually male, exceptions, went together with a desire for committed monogamy. The radicals were exceptions among the wider groups of cohabiting couples, and all of them were a minority among the wider population of the legally wed. But Frost succeeds in showing how ubiquitous they were and how crucial they were to the gradual reform of the law of marriage.