In this work, Rebecca Probert traces the adjudication of cohabitation over five centuries of British history. The changes followed her subtitle, as condemnation yielded to acceptance. The early modern cohabitant faced stiff ecclesiastical penalties and tight regulations. As the Industrial Revolution transformed Britain, the common law took over, discouraging cohabitation until the 1970s, except for periods of national emergency in war and depression. Tolerance only came in the most recent decades with the rise of mass cohabitation. As of 2010, cohabitants still lacked some of the benefits of married couples, but they were nevertheless accepted as families. Probert traces the changes chronologically, with much emphasis on the twentieth century. She uses demographic studies and law journals, but also popular sources such as magazines, television shows, and novels.

One of Probert's major purposes in this book is to prove how few people lived together until the 1970s. To do this, she defines cohabitation narrowly, excluding both those who went through an illegal ceremony and those who never intended marriage. Thus, she does not find many cohabitants in her demographic studies of parishes in 1787 and 1851. Using digitized records, she locates marriages for all but a handful of couples, refuting John Gillis's account of the period. Oddly, though, she does not do a parish analysis for the period 1790–1840; her argument would have been stronger by including the years with the largest rise in illegitimacy. This use of digital sources offers welcome clarity, but her restrictive definition of cohabitation limits her analysis. The legal penalties for cohabitation were the same for couples whether they wished to marry or not, as the Poor Law and the law of illegitimacy showed.

Probert's work also exhibits weaknesses in argumentation. The most glaring is a persistent misreading of other historians, mostly by taking statements out of context. Because I know my own work best, I will give three examples to demonstrate this problem, taken from Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester, 2008). First, Probert quotes a sentence that working-class cohabitants believed themselves to be married and their neighbors accepted them as such. She takes this to mean that they believed they had contracted legal marriages (9). But, of course, they did not see themselves as legally married. They instead redefined marriage as a relationship or a spiritual union. Second, she claims that I argued that Victorian judges treated cohabiting couples as married, quoting a line from a chapter on domestic violence (85). That sentence, too, is in the context of a more complex argument. Judges sometimes treated cohabitants the same as married couples in criminal cases. At other times, they did not, as when they harshly sentenced men for their violence. And sections on civil law and the Poor Law also show judges treating cohabitants differently. Third, Probert also quotes my assertion that the change in the law on cohabitation contracts from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century was to the advantage of women (93–95). She takes this to mean that the entire civil law favored women cohabitants over men in the Victorian era. Again, context is key; my meaning was that compared to the eighteenth century, when a woman's “fall” could bar her case, the nineteenth century gave women advantages only in this particular suit.

These misunderstandings are compounded by Probert's lack of reference to many historians when she agrees with them. For example, in her discussion of cohabitation contracts (47–48), she uses two of the same cases, quotes the same passages, and comes to the same conclusions that I did (Frost, 19–20). Nevertheless, my book is nowhere to be found in her references on those pages. Similarly, she mentions John Gillis only when she disagrees with him (15). His argument that the period between 1850 and 1960 was the age of “mandatory marriage” is ignored, though it strongly agrees with her interpretation.

Some of these problems result from Probert's present-minded approach; the number of past cohabitants has become a political issue in Britain. But most of these difficulties originate from the different approaches of legal and social historians. Legal historians, trained in adversarial technique, are often unnecessarily contentious. Probert's style of argumentation requires taking a posture toward some adversary, but this approach often sheds more heat than light in historical works. In addition, social and legal historians genuinely disagree about the extent to which social changes influenced judges. Probert argues against my view of cohabitation contracts in the nineteenth century because she claims judges do not make law; they simply follow precedent. But Probert herself traced the change in the approach to cohabitation contracts between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Victorian judges needed only to follow precedent to strike down the contracts, and they chose not to do this. Her insistence that they could not have changed precedents makes little sense in this context, but her view is typical of legal historians' reaction to claims of outside influence on the law. In addition, legal and social historians look at different sources. Probert is more comprehensive than most legal historians, but she, too, relies on printed case reports in crucial passages (e.g., in divorce cases). The Poor Law is almost entirely absent in her book, and criminal justice gets only a brief discussion. To social historians, understanding the law requires seeing it at the local level (as in police court cases) and not solely through casebooks or appeals. Finally, social historians tend to use all sources available, given the limitations of information about the working classes, in particular. Probert criticizes all who quote social reformers like Andrew Mearns, but no social historian uses these sources uncritically. Such sources are useful for what they reveal about the attitudes of the times and should not be ignored entirely.

Thus, what is most disappointing to a social historian is this book's missed opportunities. By excluding those who married illegally, Probert misses the chance to explore changes in views of the law of marriage, divorce, bigamy, and cohabitation. I completely agree with her that most people remained touchingly loyal to marriage, but many people were resentful of the marriage law. Probert could have analyzed these issues over a long period of time, especially the definition of marriage. In addition, she also has almost nothing on the different legal regimes of England, Scotland, and Ireland, or, indeed, the empire. The different laws in the dominions influenced the debates in Parliament and out; I would have welcomed a legal analysis of such cases. Instead, unfortunately, this book reveals a continued gap between legal and social history. Better understanding will require more attention to the similarities between us, rather than overstating the differences.